Haggai 1:1-11
Sermon
If you saw a house like this, there is a lot wrong with this house, isn’t there? What’s wrong with this? (the list is almost too long)
What would you do if that was the house down the street?
Pull a weed when you walk by
Say something to the owners
Talk to the city or the township
Some of you would probably say, I’ll never even move there. What if it was there after you?
Might you move away?
There are a lot of houses that look like that or something like that.
What would you do if that was your house?
That’s a tougher one, isn’t it? Because it’s one thing to say, I’d get on that house, I’d fix it. But what if you don’t know anything about roofing? What if you don’t know anything about siding? What if don’t know anything about plumbing or electrical or any of the dozens of other skills that you need to keep a house going?
And what if your mom or dad is older, they need help getting to doctors’ appointments and groceries? And what if you are a police officer or you’re a chef at a local restaurant, you just don’t make that much money. What if the whole local economy is slow? People don’t get raises but prices keep going up.
If anything is going to change, there are a lot of issues that you have to deal with.
Adventure
Friends, that is what God gets to today. He wants us to get at rebuilding our homes, our community, and our congregation.
We are going to start looking at the book of Haggai today. I’m sure there are a few of you who have read Haggai a few times, but I suspect most of you know almost nothing about Haggai. Well, here is your chance. Here is the story.
After 70 years in Babylon, the people from Judah – the area around Jerusalem, were allowed to return home.
The country was in shambles. The land was burned. The homes were burned and destroyed. The city of Jerusalem was burned. The temple was burned and ripped down.
I wonder if any of us would have stayed. I wonder if any of us would have looked around and said, yup, this is where I’m going to rebuild my home and this is where I’m going to stay. This is my place.
Friends, there are times to walk away. There are times to say I’m done. There are also times to get up the gumption, the courage to stay and fix a place.
And today God wants you to stay and rebuild this place. He wants us to rebuild our homes, rebuild our church building. He wants to rebuild our congregation.
He wants us to start by consider the time and our ways.
Development
First, the time.
[“These people say, ‘The time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house.’ ” (verse 2) But God spoke back through the prophet, “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?” (verse 4)]
“These people say, ‘The time has not yet come to rebuild the Lord’s house.’ ” (verse 2)
They've returned from exile.
They’re rebuilding their homes
They’ve planted crops.
They’re saying, it isn’t the right time to rebuild the temple.
God responds and says back to them, is it time to live in paneled houses?
I want to be fair to the people. The people don’t say, we don’t want to rebuild God’s house. They say its not the right time. God says, it’s not the right time for your houses. It’s the right time for my house. The debate is about time.
There are two ways to understand these paneled houses. One is that they were fancy, ornate houses. The other is just that they were houses with roofs or enclosed houses. Either way God says, now is the not the time for your houses. Now is the time for my house.
Friends, you might think this is the part where I say, we keep buying stuff. We keep running after stuff. We keep buying bigger and bigger houses. The materialism of this world is terrible.
Here is something you need to know. This whole thing is kind of a surprise. Here is a little history. King David was the best and most famous king of Israel. He got to establish the far boundaries of Israel. He built the palace. And ultimately, he made the nation into people. He did not get to build the temple.
What happened is, he started to build the temple. God came to him and said, wait a second, I didn’t ask you to do this. What do you think you are doing? It was not the right time.
Now to Haggai he says this is the time. This is the time to build my house. God is timeless, yet he pays attention to time. Let’s break this down.
God is eternal. He exists forever. He is also what we call immutable. What does that mean? He doesn’t change. He is always the same.
You and me, we are bound by time. Completely. Our lives are structured by it. We are born, we live, and we die. I know all kinds of things about you based on what age you are, the time of your life, that I don’t know based on events. We’ve got all these little sayings about time to help us think about it.
“It’s not about having time. It’s about making time.” “timing is everything”. “the time of our lives”. God is not like that at all.
We probably don’t want to say God is timeless. He is beyond time. Somehow for God everything is the eternal present. It all is. The shocker is, He is timeless yet he pays attention to time. Let me give us a comparison.
Take a clock. Pretend God is kind of like a clock. A nuclear fission clock. Forever ticking. Never runs out, never stops. Basically timeless.
On the other hand, you and I are a timer. You and I are not timeless. We start and we end. That’s us.
Here is the one other thing to think about with God. God’s not just a clock. He is an alarm.
What do I mean by that? Somehow God in his timelessness manages to pay attention to specific times. I can’t even begin to imagine it. How can you be timeless and yet pay attention to a specific time? Somehow, that’s God. Eternal, yet tied to time.
Think about that. What is that saying for life? There is this one time in the life of Jesus where Jesus says, you and I know how to pay attention to the weather. We get up in the morning and look at the sky and see that it is overcast, so we say, it will probably storm. Then he says, you can interpret those signs, why can’t you read the signs of God’s time?
I think that is just fascinating, because I’m sure you, like me, hear all kinds of people saying, this is what the world is like. You have to get with the times. Don’t you see what is going? These are the times.
And all of that is probably fine. But do you and I know God’s time? At certain points, at certain times, God’s alarm will go off and you would be wise to be tied into it.
I hate that feeling when the alarm goes off beep beep beep and I get jarred awake. I ruin that amazing dream and I’m all groggy from deep sleep. Wouldn’t it be better to wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off and calmly, quietly turn it off?
I think this kind of gets at that point. Everyone has to pay attention to their own timer. We’ve all got that timer of our lives, telling us to work and to get married and retire and everything else. But you and I can live our lives by God’s clock and alarm, or by our own timer.
Haggai even says how we can tell the difference. He tells us “consider your ways”.
“Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. 6 You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.” (Verses 5-6)
Notice what God says. He doesn’t say, consider the outcome of your life. He doesn’t say, think about how things are going. Are you succeeding or failing. He says, consider your ways.
In Hebrew, paths. Literally, think about where you are walking.
If you and I are saying, I feel like I don’t have enough money. I feel like I’m not eating good enough food. I feel like my house isn’t nice enough. I feel like my kids don’t have enough fun. I feel like I’m not getting far enough ahead in life.
If that is what is driving our life, that’s not God’s ways.
The Lord God is the God who says, I love sinners. I forgive sinners. I’m good and generous and I bless and I take care of not good people, not holy people, but people who ask for help, people who repent, and people who confess their sins.
God doesn’t bless people they are good people. God blesses people because he is gracious and merciful and compassionate because of Jesus.
Haggai is telling them what Jesus would one day say, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be given to you as well.”
Think about the time they lived in. They just got back from 70 years in captivity. I know that the land they returned to was devastated. It was war torn. It was a mess.
But what was that time for? That was a time to praise God. That was a time to be God’s people. That was a time to forgive and love. That was a time to proclaim God’s grace. It was a time to confess their sin. It was a time to sacrifice.
That was a time for them to believe the gospel.
Think about a man who had come many years before from almost the exact same place. Almost 1500 years before the Jews returned home, Abraham walked the same path. He went to a new land and a new place. And at each place along the way when he stopped, he built an altar and made a sacrifice. He called those places Shechem and Bethel and
Because he knew the time he watched his ways.
Friends, its okay to look at our lives and say, here is how its going. We know what time it is based on what God has done. But the gospel never says to you and I, if I’m a good person, if I work hard, then God will love me and take care of me and be good to me.
The gospel says God loves sinners. God loves sinners who have lived through a pandemic and say, I will not live forever, my timer is going to go off. God loves sinners
God loves you.
Friends, consider your ways at this time.
Action
Haggai is writing all this so the people build his house.
One of my favorite ways to illustrate what we’re building… I like to use Legos, maybe because I like to build with my sons. I didn’t come up with this idea though. I borrowed it.
So consider this, if I take one Lego brick and I say you are one brick, that’s good. That’s good. You should be the best brick you can be.
And many of you care about your families. So you’re building multiple bricks together. Maybe 3 or 4 or 10, or if you’ve got a large extended family you’ve got 20 or 30.
But you can’t really build anything good with only 5 or 20 Legos. You can make something good with 70 or 80 or 90 Legos.
So here is what I’d like to ask you to do today. On the table in the
Let’s be bold builders. It’s time to consider our ways. Let’s build.