The human body cannot go without water for very long. Symptoms of dehydration include thirst, dry skin, dizziness, decreased appetite, low blood pressure, nausea, muscle cramps and spasms. If you lose more than 15% of your body’s fluid, you will usually die.

There are also symptoms of being spiritually dehydrated. Spiritual dryness threatens every one of us, and overtakes us if we don’t keep re-hydrating. Just like your body needs water regularly, so – if you neglect certain things, you will become spiritually dry. In the book of Malachi, we are given the symptoms and the cause of spiritual dryness. The nation Israel was spiritually dry. They were far from being a nation on fire for God. God speaks to them through the prophet Malachi describing the dryness in their souls, both in the people and in the priests.

The love has grown cold – Malachi 1:1-6

The root and most fundamental aspect of spiritual dryness is that love for God has cooled off. You stop believing that God loves you. The love of God for your soul is no longer at the centre of your thoughts, so your Christianity is not so much a relationship, as a ritual. It is not a delight; it is a duty. It is not about relating to a Person; it is about repeating certain principles.

And it starts when God’s love for us is no longer uppermost in our minds. You might agree with the statement “God loves you,’ but love is not how you would characterise your relationship with Christ.

Dryness comes to a point where you ask this question of God: “In what way do you love me?” (Malachi 1:2). If I asked you to list down the ways in which God has shown His love to you, and how He continues to love you and how you know He will love you in the future – you would not be able to say much, if you are spiritually dry. Because when you are spiritually dry, you do not think much on His love for you, and consequently you do not have much love in return.

When the relationship is healthy – uppermost in your mind is a sense of God’s love for you. You love to think of how God loves you. It humbles you, and delights you. But when we are spiritually drying out – we doubt His love. Our heart has far more questions about ‘why don’t I have this in my life?’ and ‘why is this happening to me?’ and ‘why isn’t this happening for me?’ Gratitude has almost entirely gone.

And we are blind to His love. It is everywhere around us, but spiritual dryness produces spiritual blindness.

How has He loved you, believer? He chose you. He gave you life. He came to earth and died in your place, taking the anger of God that should have been yours on Himself. He sent His Holy Spirit to convict you and persuade you to come to Him. He paid a price – the price of His own Son to buy you out of sin, and for Himself.

The day you yielded to Him and received Him, He regenerated you, He gave you new life, and caused His Holy Spirit to come and dwell within you. He adopted you into His family. He forgave all your sin. He justified you – made you righteous in His sight. He united you with Himself, made you a part of His Body. He removed all possibility of being separated from Him, He sealed you with His Spirit, guaranteeing that you will arrive in His presence one day. He seated you in heaven already, reserved a place for you, promised to finish the work in you.

Today, He continues to show you His love. He has given you His Word – all that you need to live life. He has given you access to Him at any time – to present your need before Him. He has given you His church – a place to grow and serve and love and be loved and praise together.

He meets your needs. He gives you food, clothing, shelter, transport. He gives you additional things like insurances, medical assistance. He gives you work to do. He protects you. He teaches you. He convicts you. He trains and disciplines you. He guides you. He controls what happens to you. He comforts you. He assures you. He uses you in His service. He moulds you to be like Christ. He gives you all the grace you need for every need.

He makes countless promises to you regarding the future – of how He will reserve a place for you, finish the work He has begun in you, He will guide you all through life and receive you to glory, and even there – He will reward you, and bless you, and it will be far, far superior to the best thing in this life. But we say, “In what way has God loved me?”

Love in any relationship, doesn’t turn cold overnight. It start with just becoming used to the love.

If we do not continue to think on it, the love becomes less amazing, less wonderful, less remarkable to us. And if we continue like this, our security turns into complacency. We take it for granted. Once you take it for granted, you don’t think about it anymore. I could ask you to list all the things you take for granted, and you wouldn’t be able to because you do take them for granted. They’re just permanent fixtures in your life – they’re supposed to be there, and so you don’t think about them.

And if we take God’s love for granted – soon, we may be so cold as to ask, “In what way have you loved me?’

Do you know what trips us up regarding loving God? It is thinking about ourselves too much. It is looking inwardly, measuring our own performance and trying to find a reason for God to love us or continue to love us. And most often this just ends in an almost continual feeling of guilt.

The thing to remember about God’s love is this: God does not love you because you have so much to attract Him to yourself. God loves you because He is so loving. If you try to understand why God loves you by looking at yourself – you will soon feel so guilty, and so unworthy, that you will disbelieve the whole idea – or you will become proud. When you are looking for why God loves you, do not look at yourself – look at God. Then as you look back at yourself, you will be lost in wonder, awe and amazement.

We are not supposed to rejoice in God’s love as an end in itself. We are to rejoice in God – who loves us!

You could think of this aspect of your Christian life as the motive. It is the why you do what you do. It is what is behind all your words, thoughts and deeds. And if it is no longer because you are delighting in God, then spiritual dryness is setting in.

The reverence has been lost – Malachi 1:6-8, 14, 3:8

Not only had the Israelites lost love for God, but with that, they lost reverence for God. They lost respect. They lost a sense of awe. They lost a sense of God’s greatness. There was no longer a healthy fear of God. They did not think – “God is great, and we must give Him our very best. God is awesome in power, in majesty, we must give what is excellent to Him.”

Instead, they were bringing the lame, the sick, the blemished, the blind. In other words – they had to offer a sacrifice, but they didn’t want to use the best animals – because those were the ones they wanted to eat, or sell, or keep. So, they gave God the rejects, the leftovers, the things they could dispense with. And God asks them a good question: would you offer that to the human authorities in your life? Would your human governor accept a blind or diseased sheep?

When you are spiritually dry, you lose a sense of God’s greatness, and He gets the leftovers.

• He gets the leftovers of your time. Who gets those first hours in the morning? What about those evening hours – do we serve ourselves and spend hours behind the TV, or is God great enough to devote time to Him?
• What about prayer? Is God great enough for you to block off time to pray to Him? Or must He hear again the excuse. ‘I’m too busy. I have too much to do. When I have some time left over – I will give it to God.’
• What of coming to His house? Yes, it takes time. It takes petrol money. It is inconvenient when you have small children, or a lot of things to do – but once again – does God always get just what we can spare – like these Israelites, or does He get more than that? You can spare an hour on a Sunday, but beyond that, you are too busy for God. Tell me – would your human boss accept that? If you said to him – I can come in once a week, for an hour?
• He gets the leftovers of your energy. We all need to work hard, and God is certainly pleased with hard work. But should God receive nothing from our hands? Can we not find a place of service in His church, and give it our best? Can we not look for avenues to serve God? Why must God always be told, ‘I’m too busy, and too tired.
• And what of our money? Does God receive leftover change? Or are we deliberate, purposeful, planned, cheerful in our giving – saying, ‘this is for You Lord, because you are a great God, my provider.’
• What of your attention and your concentration? Does God get the best of it? Or does the TV get it? I’m amazed how some can watch a TV program for hours on end, and they will only reluctantly get up to go to the bathroom or answer the phone. Try to get their attention while they are watching that programme – and they will not even take their eyes off the screen. But what does God get? A sermon goes longer than 25 minutes and restlessness sets in. The slightest noise and distraction and we’re craning our necks to see what it might be. Some even sleep. Is this God getting your best?

When we are spiritually dry – God is not an awesome God to us. Therefore we are not gripped by the thought – what I do, I do for Him. And for Him, I must give my best – always! It is a shame to think that, for some of God’s people, if they treated their earthly employers the way they treat their God, they’d be fired.

Zeal Has Turned to Boredom – Malachi 1:13

The spiritually dry person regards knowing and serving God as a weariness. It is a drag, it is a bore, it is a chore. His Word is a weariness, prayer is a weariness, church attendance is a weariness. The thought of opening His Word is a burdensome thought – so you put it off until it doesn’t happen. Prayer seems like an enormous burden – something you’d rather not even begin. Church has become so dull to you, you can barely make it to one service, and barely make it through that service. It is a weariness. Spiritually, your feet are dragging, your shoulders are drooping. The whole thing is dull, it is drab, it is dry. You do it just because you know you should, but it has no relish, no attraction.

This is the thing – the things that used to fill you, now drain you. The Word used to fill you, prayer used to fill you, church used to fill you – now it seems like those things will drain you. In fact, you even regard it as a waste of your time and effort: “You have said, ‘It is useless to serve God; what profit is it that we have kept His ordinance, and that we have walked as mourners before the Lord of hosts?” (Malachi 3:14).

What’s the point of doing that? What’s the point of singing songs to God? What’s the point of listening to another sermon? What’s the point of going to a prayer meeting? What’s the point of sharing the Gospel? What’s the point of attending more frequently? A lack of zeal is often a lack of expectancy. To the degree that you expect something fine and rewarding is the degree to which you will be enthusiastic and zealous.

When you approach the dentist, you are not typically zealous, because you are not expecting wonderful things. As you approach a holiday, you grow in enthusiasm and excitement because of the promise of what it holds for you. If you think something has a great reward, that it holds great joy, great fulfilment, great meaning and purpose – then you will be excited about it.

It doesn’t take long to find out a man’s real love – because it is the thing he is most enthusiastic about. He reads up on it, he loves to talk about it, he will go out of his way to see it, because for him – it is rewarding, it is pleasing, it is worthwhile, it is satisfying. But when you are spiritually dry, God does not seem to hold out any reward. There is no motive to know Him and love Him. What profit is there in it that we should serve the Lord?

You look at your quiet time not as a precious time of communing with God, but as a fruitless time of reading and praying. You look at singing the hymns not as a moment of supreme joy when your heart flies to see and savour God’s glory, but as song with four stanzas that we need to sing to move things ahead in the service. You look at going to church and you can think of about twenty other things you’d rather do.

So here are the symptoms of the spiritually dry – a lack of love, a lack of reverence, a lack of zeal. But this is the important thing to remember – these things are not only the symptoms of spiritual dryness; they are also the cause.

When you are spiritually dry, you do these things, but it is acting and thinking in these ways that dry you out spiritually. A lack of zeal is not only evidence that you are spiritually dry, it is also one of the reasons. A lack of love is not just proof you are dry, it is part of the cause. A lack of reverence not only reflects dryness, it perpetuates it.

When you do not behave affectionately – you become cold. Take a husband who used to write sweet notes and bring his wife presents and chocolates and cards and music – while he was pursuing her. Now after marriage, he gets used to her being there, and the love is not as affectionate. But if he lets that continue, he soon finds that his heart grows cold. His unaffectionate behaviour pretty soon creates an unaffectionate heart.

Or take how when you show little respect, you feel little respect. You watch how a child who speaks to her parents disrespectfully, and they allow it. When you show little enthusiasm, you experience boredom. If you come into a musical performance convinced of how boring it is going to be, guess how much enthusiasm you will feel for it?

And this leads us to believe that the way back from spiritual dryness is going to be to reverse these three things in our lives. Notice the simple call by God in Malachi 3:

“Yet from the days of your fathers you have gone away from My ordinances, and have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” says the Lord of hosts.
But you said, “In what way shall we return?”
Malachi 3:7

“Return to Me – and I will return to you.” That is a conditional promise. God binds Himself to do something, if we will do something. What does God promise He will do? Return to us. He will again refresh our souls with Himself. He will be real to us. He will open our eyes to Himself. He will cause us to enjoy Him and the fullness of walking with Him. He will allow Himself to be streams of living water in us, refreshing us. He will make us like a tree planted by the waters, always blooming, always having a full supply.

He promises to do this for us, if we meet a condition. What is that condition? If we return to Him. What does that mean? It simply means, from where you find yourself now, head back to where you departed. And key is that the return is not to a ritual. Not to being more disciplined. Not to a commitment – but to a Person. “Return to Me.”

And the Israelites ask, “In what way shall we return?” The answer is, by the way you came to be where you are now. You left your love; return to your love. You left off honouring and reverencing Him; return to giving God only your best. You left off your zeal; return to doing whatever you do with all your might.

Return to loving God – the motive

Return to doing what you do out of love for God. Make knowing and loving God the ever-present motive. Think about a love relationship – when delighting in that person dominates your thoughts. You like to just think about them. Just imagining them fills you with joy. You plan how to please them. You structure what you do around pleasing them. Their joy is your joy.

But here is the thing to remember: Though all this takes place in a dizzy atmosphere of emotion, the fact is, you are making choices – choices to think about them, choices to call them, choices to meet with them, choices to do things for them, choices to please them. And when a married couple want to rediscover the joy and the romance, they simply begin doing the first works again. They become deliberate in doing what they do to please each other, and find their joy in one another.

In other words, make a choice to return to loving God. Do the first works. Do again the fundamentals you used to enjoy – meeting with God in simplicity. Writing out prayers to God. Singing to Him. Just talking with Him while driving or walking, and thanking Him.

Jude gives us a basic command which we ought to come back to again and again: “Keep yourselves in the love of God” (Jude 1:21). Keep your Christian life, with Spirit-dependent effort, in a place of deliberate, personal love. Do what you do to seek Him and find Him. Do what you do to please Him. If God loves you – and He does – then it is not that we have to work on getting Him to love us. It is that we must believe and respond to His love. His love for us is settled. Our loving response is now in our court.

Return to fearing God – the method

Reverence – come to God asking Him to help you to fear Him. Colossians gives us the method:

And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men…
Colossians 3:23

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going.
Ecclesiastes 9:10

Do it with excellence. If you are to return to a place of honouring God and experiencing Him as a great and mighty King, then you must begin again to treat Him that way. If you keep throwing Him scraps, you only reinforce your belief that He is not worthy of your best. Begin again to treat God and the things of God as hallowed, as that which ought to receive your highest respect, your best time, your best abilities. Don’t give Him leftovers, be deliberately sacrificial.

When you hold something in high esteem, no one needs to tell you to make a statement about how much it is worth. You actually make a statement to yourself about how much you think it is worth, by how you sacrifice. Consider how King David was offered a piece of land on which to build an altar for free. But David said something which only a true worshipper says: “[I will not] offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God with that which costs me nothing” (2 Samuel 24:24).

Return to zeal – the attitude

We are to come to God with glad expectancy. We are not to come trying to work ourselves into a phoney emotionalism. But we are to come with hearts full of expectation. We are to come to the Word like that. We are to come to prayer like that. We are to come to fellowship like that. We are to go to work like that. We are to serve in church like that.

Really, this kind of zeal is a form of faith. You come believing, expecting God to reward your seeking. And boredom and apathy is a form of unbelief, because you come already disinterested, not expecting there to be anything that will interest you. And that is why Jesus said these paradoxical words: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away” (Matthew 25:29).

The one coming with zeal, gets things to reward his or her zeal. The one coming with deadness of soul, has even the little interest they had is sapped out of them.

So God deals with the motive, the method and the attitude. Do what you do because of love. He is a glorious God who loves you. Be motivated to enjoy Him, delight in Him, find your satisfaction in Him, please Him and adore Him. That’s the motive. Then, what you do – do it heartily. Don’t give God the scraps, but strive to make a point of giving God your best – for He is worthy of it. That’s the method. And then what you do – do it with zeal, with expectancy, expecting God to reveal Himself to you. That’s the attitude.