Haggai 1:3-11

Opened my Bible to this verse last night: 

Then the word of the Lord came by Haggai the prophet, saying, "Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, and this temple to lie in ruins?" Now therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts: 

"Consider your ways! 

You have sown much, and bring in little;

You eat, but do not have enough;

You drink, but you are not filled with drink;

You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm;

And he who earns wages, earns wages to put into a bag with holes."

Thus says the Lord of hosts: "Consider your ways! Go up into the mountains and bring wood and build the temple, that I may take pleasure in it and be glorified," says the Lord. "You looked for much, but indeed it came to little; and when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why?" says the Lord of hosts. "Because of My house that is in ruins, while every one of you runs to his own house. THerefore the heavens above you withhold the dew, and the earth witholds its fruit. For I called for a drought on the land and the mountains, on the grain and the new wine and the oil, on whatever the ground brings forth, on men and livestock and on all the labor of your hands." 

(Haggai 1:3-11, NKJV)

I've heard this passage preached as a warning against wanting excess, working too hard for pleasure and food and money and gain, things of that nature. That IS a lesson we could take away from it, but this passage spoke to me rather loudly about something different last night because of various things happening in my life right now. I'm as guilty as the Jews were, and I know it's a common guilt. The Israelites were kind enough to make all sorts of mistakes that we could learn from all these years later. So follow my thought process for a while? 

We wonder why we don't get the things we want.

We wonder why the things we work for don't always come to fruition.

We wonder why, even when the things we want are "righteous", "good", "natural", somehow our fingertips can never even brush their corners. 

Backstory: So in 538 BC, King Cyrus of Persia allowed any Jewish person in his kingdom to return to Jerusalem, in order to help rebuild the temple. Nice guy. In 537 BC, a guy named Zerubbabel hiked over to Jerusalem with the first group of returning exiles. Another year later, the foundation had been laid, but the Israelites started having some issues with the neighbors. Their enemies from the surrounding lands started opposing the building of the temple, and interfering. This discouraged and frightened the Jewish remnant, who abandoned the building of the temple in order to concentrate on building themselves houses for shelter. And then... they got kinda used to the not-heading-out-to-a-construction-site-every-day life. 

God was not happy. 

Soon the things the Israelites worked for and enjoyed just didn't seem quite as... satisfying. And they became less and less and less so and they didn't come easily or in great number and soon the life they were striving so hard to make comfortable became difficult. 

End backstory. 

So. Here's a question. Were the things the Jews wanted... wrong? 

I really don't think so. 

They were sowing crops, a necessary part of their lives. They were eating, they were drinking, they were clothing themselves. Nothing inappropriate there. They were working to earn wages. Absolutely nothing wrong with being a good, diligent worker providing for yourself and a family. 

They didn't want anything that was necessarily against God's will. They just wanted to live. 

But somewhere along the line, they lost sight of their purpose and their number one priority. 

We could talk for a while about why. There are lots of reasons to consider: selfishness, fear of dying by the hands of their ticked off neighbors, etc. But right now I don't think that's the point. Whatever their reason for abandoning the building and improving the House of the Lord, whatever reason they had for making His kingdom their SECOND priority,  they still... did it. 

Let's face it - we do exactly the same thing. 

Back to what I was saying before - we wonder why things don't work out, even when we're not doing anything wrong. Maybe that's not the only question we're supposed to ask. Maybe the next question to ask after "am I doing anything wrong," is "but, am I doing anything Right?" 

Sometimes things don't go "well" for us because what we want is simply not in God's will for us. But other times, it's because we're not tending to our first priority. The house of the Lord.  

Our service to the Lord. To the Jews, their service was the rebuilding of the temple that was being neglected. Today, the house of the Lord is in even worse shambles than the physical building the Jews had to rebuild. Think of them as an illustration of the spiritual battle that goes on now. Churches experience strife, hatred, neglect, false teachers. Large portions of the US call themselves "Christian", but only a small fraction of that number are true believers - what does this do to our witness? Christians have bad reputations, Christians are portrayed (sometimes rightly so) as judgmental and hate-filled. People drag themselves to church as a sort of symbol and duty, not as a chance to encounter God with other believers. The poor, the orphaned, the widowed, the weak, are left in the cold, they are hungry, they are naked, they are alone. Our Temple, our church is neglected. Our world needs us and somehow we can't even take care of our own people. Our task is as direly important as the Israelites' task, and more difficult. 

Maybe we get so caught up with living a good life that we forget we're not really the point. God wants to work with us while we're working for Him. We don't need to fear that our lives will fall apart if we focus on furthering His kingdom. God provides. God holds us up. God can take care of anything that comes our way. If we're doing His work, we can always be sure that 

He will provide and protect.

The only way we can rebuild the Kingdom is if we give God everything else. Our focus should be serving Him, furthering His will. Letting Him take care of all those details we get caught up in. Food, clothing, family, friends... We should care, but we should not fear. Even if we babysat these aspects of our life, the Israelites proved that life can't give back to us without God. Life loses its flavor without God's will. 



We focus too much on making the things we want to happen happen. We focus too little on listening to the things God wants done.  


Our desires should be His desires. If our definition of Good is what God will give us, we will always be satisfied by our Lord.