It’s easy to stay busy with the wrong things. Most of us don’t decide to neglect what matters most. We just keep choosing what’s comfortable and putting off what’s hard, until years have gone by.
That’s where God’s people were when the prophet Haggai showed up in 520 BC. They had come home from exile and started rebuilding the temple, but the work had sat untouched for sixteen years. Meanwhile, they had built themselves nice homes. Then came a pointed question from God and a call to stop and think: consider your ways.
In this sermon from Haggai 1:1-11, First Reformed (EPC) looks at what God was after, why nothing they did seemed to satisfy, and how Jesus, the true temple, answers our complacency with good news instead of a longer to-do list.
Read the sermon transcript
Thank you for joining us for this week’s sermon from First Reformed Church in Edgerton, Minnesota. Each week we dig into God’s Word, trusting that the Holy Spirit will continue the good work of sanctification in us.
When you’re working on a large project, it’s easy to find yourself distracted by small easy wins. For example, imagine that you’re in the process of renovating an old home. There is so much to do. Your big plan is to renovate slowly with everything else that you’ve got going on in life. You just can’t work on the project other than on weekends. So you have realistic expectations for this renovation. The house needs serious work, and after several weekends of work, you don’t feel like you’re seeing much progress. So you decide that you’re going to renovate the bedroom and the master bath first, because these changes to the home give you confidence that you can move in. You can make this home your primary residence, and you will feel like you’re making progress because you got something done.
Well, once you’re in, you love the nice new bedroom, but you find that your evening leisure time could use an upgrade. And so you move on to the living room instead of going back to the bigger structural issues that the house has. Well, once the living room is outfitted with your new 75-inch television, your surround sound system, and new furniture, you decide you need another easier win. So you move on to the kitchen, and you get that renovated in the next few months. Well, once you have a nice place to sleep, a great place to take in movies and sports, and a new kitchen to prepare your food, life is really good in your new home.
Each weekend, you find yourself a little less interested in the renovation, and you’re watching your favorite sports teams, and that takes priority over putting in the time to update the home. And before you know it, you haven’t picked up a tool for several weeks. In your comfort, the bigger structural issues that you bypassed to work on these easy wins to make you feel better about your progress, well, the huge issues in the house have gotten worse.
Now notice in my little story there, the decision was never to neglect the house. Not once did we say, “I’m done with the structure.” Every step that was done made sense. Every step was easy to defend, but you just kept choosing what was comfortable and put off what was hard. Now you have a great kitchen in a house that’s falling apart underneath it.
So as we land in the book of Haggai for five weeks, we find the prophet addressing a situation similar to what I’ve just described.
But before we set off in this passage today, it’s important that we set the context so that we can understand what’s going on, and the book of Haggai actually helps us with this in setting the context. So the story behind what we see here is that in the year 586, God used Babylon to judge the people for their idolatry and their unbelief. Babylon’s forces came, they destroyed Jerusalem, and they burned the temple. Well, most of the people were carried off into exile, and they were in Babylon for 70 years. Well then Persia conquered Babylon, and King Cyrus did something extremely unexpected. He let the Hebrew people return to the land, and he told them to rebuild the temple. Again, completely unexpected. And around several, well about 50,000 people returned to the land, and they were led by a governor named Zerubbabel and a priest named Joshua.
Well upon arrival, they got to work. They started by building the altar, and then they laid the foundation of the temple. And when that happened, the people shouted for joy. The older people who returned, the ones who could remember there being a temple, the ones who had memories, they were overcome, and they wept out loud. It was a great and amazing day, but things weren’t perfect.
The people living around them, they were a mixed population. They were descended from foreigners from Assyria, and they had settled in the land generations earlier. Now they said that they worshiped the same God, but they worshiped other gods as well. So they started pushing back on the building of the temple. They threatened the builders, they discouraged them, they even worked against them in the Persian courts to stop the process. Well as a result, the work stopped. Not for a few weeks, not for a few months. Sixteen years. The foundation sat there while the people got on with their lives. They built themselves nice homes, but the house of God remained unfinished.
And so that brings us to the late summer of 520 BC in the second year of King Darius. Nobody had planned to neglect the temple. They had just gotten comfortable. And so to unsettle that comfort, God sends a prophet by the name of Haggai with a short and pointed message.
And so the covenant of God, the covenant God of Israel, comes to his people. And Haggai states this simple fact for God that they’ve given up on the project that was set out for them to do. Now notice that the text here doesn’t say they aren’t going to rebuild it. It says that it’s not the time yet. The time has not yet come. It’s not an attitude of overt rebellion. We won’t build the temple. No, it’s just regular old complacency. We’ll get to it later. We got back to Jerusalem. We built the altar. The foundations were laid. We rejoiced. Grandma and Grandpa got the feels about the altar and the temple being back to some degree. They even cried. And so we did the important stuff. That’s what matters. We can get to finishing it later.
Now it’s easy for us to read this and stand in judgment over these people and what they’ve done. But I think that every last one of us has done the same thing at some point in our lives. We have a time where we are far from God and through His Word and the Holy Spirit, He calls us to repentance. And we acknowledge our need for Him. We have joy. We have an emotional experience and we think that that’s all we need. We go back to our lives and we find ourselves complacent about the things of God still. Our mindset is better maybe and our hearts are in a better place. But we aren’t doing anything to build up our relationship with God. And the Word of the Lord comes to this mindset. He doesn’t question what they’ve already done. Instead, He asks a simple and pointed question.
And as we read this, you likely aren’t sure what a paneled house is. But I think you still know what God is saying to the people here. And honestly, this question cuts deep because it reveals their hypocrisy and ours. These paneled houses were not shanties or huts dug in the mud. Their homes wouldn’t have even been mentioned if they were living in squalor, right? They had come back to the land and they had focused on building up their own homes instead of worrying about the house of the Lord. And you know how this happened. They faced an obstacle in the building of the temple. It became hard. And perhaps it was even a good time with all the stuff that was going on, to take a step back and wait while some of those issues were ironed out. But like the story I imagined at the beginning, where some smaller projects distracted from the larger goal, the people became complacent.
And I think it’s important here that we remember the biggest problem that is caused by the exiles. Now we come at these exiles that we read about in the Old Testament with our 21st century minds, and we see the punishment of being sent into exile as being moved out of their homeland. That they had to move from their homes, that they were separated not only from the place that they loved where they were raised, but they’re also separated from people that they loved. And of course, of course, this is an important part of what was happening. But ultimately they were sent out of the land because they were being removed from the presence of God. Remember, that’s what’s happening when the people in the exiles are being sent away. We have to remember that these exiles are a retelling of the story in the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve fell into sin, they were banished from the garden, and the worst part of that banishment wasn’t that they didn’t live in a beautiful garden anymore. The great calamity wasn’t that their work was hard now. The biggest problem wasn’t even that they were going to die. The worst part of the banishment from the garden was that they were no longer able to be in the presence of God. They were no longer able to commune with Him.
When the exiles came back to the land, the purpose was not just to restore their national identity, their land ownership, or to restore relationships with friends and family. It was to again be near to God through the worship in the temple. When they faced the obstacles of completing the temple, they stopped and they showed that their concern was not with the worship of God, but with their own comfort. So the question that God is asking here is convicting because it forces the readers of Haggai to ask what their priorities are in a way that we can really understand. Even a few thousand years later, we feel the weight of this question, and obviously I’m not talking about your house being nicer than the church or something like that. That’s not the point. And the deeper issue in Haggai’s times wasn’t one of appearances either. The issue was their hearts and their prioritizing themselves over God. This question hits hard because it’s so clear it’s not just for some people who didn’t finish the task of building the temple 2,500 years ago.
So what is the message that the Lord gives to Haggai? It’s a simple statement. He tells them consider your ways. And I love that this statement follows asking about their houses being nice with the temple being in ruins. This prophetic message isn’t just a command, “Go build the temple.” It’s not simply telling them where they are wrong. It paints a picture that lets them consider the condition of their hearts. Look at your house, then look at the house of the Lord. How did we get to this place? How did our priorities move from valuing the things of God and instead emphasizing ourselves? But while the statement to consider their ways tells them to contemplate what has happened, the words of God from the prophet that follow help them in that contemplation.
Look at this list. Planting and harvesting, eating and drinking, being clothed, getting paid. Things are good. Appearances are good. This is ordinary life. They aren’t in exile. They aren’t being invaded. It’s regular life, but none of it is enough. It doesn’t satisfy. And that’s what makes this verse so convicting. They had prioritized themselves so they could have comfortable and secure lives, but God comes to them here and says that the very things that they’ve been building their lives around aren’t delivering. You did all of this to be full, and yet you’re still hungering for more. You wanted to be warm, but you’re not. You wanted to make good wages so you could be comfortable, but you put the money in the bag and it falls out the bottom.
These words were being heard by these people as more than just insightful observations of the situation of their lives. We have to remember that. These are people who knew well the law of God. Moses had told Israel that if they turn from God, they would plant but not harvest, and they would eat without being satisfied. The people would hear these words and realize that Haggai, well God through Haggai, is reminding them of those covenant curses and how they are on the verge of bringing those curses upon themselves. These words here had refreshed their memories on where all of this ends. This road that they’re on leads to judgment and an exile. They had just returned from it, but where they’re headed is leading there again.
But once again, these statements aren’t just tough for a group of Hebrews in Jerusalem in the 6th century BC. These words are here to challenge us as well. Where are we putting our energy? Where do we spend our time and effort on things, but yet we’re still knowing the futility and emptiness of it? We all have areas in our lives where we have been fed to excess and yet we still don’t feel full. We have all felt the way this verse describes, and we know that it’s not random. We are pursuing our desires instead of seeking the things of God.
And as we think about this, along with the people Haggai spoke to, we don’t get long to come up with an answer. God speaks again with those same convicting words. He says, “Consider your ways.” He’s not repeating himself because he’s worried that they’re hard of hearing. The repetition here is for emphasis because he wants them to actually stop and consider their ways. The first statement invites them to consider their ways. The second statement comes after he’s pointed them toward what their way has produced. Consider your ways and while you do so, think about how you have sown a lot of seed but not harvested very much, how you eat and drink but you never have your fill.
And after calling them to examine themselves, God gives them something to do. It’s not a long list or a big activity or program. He tells them to go to the hills and bring wood down. Notice here that he doesn’t tell them to start over. The foundation is already in place. It’s been 16 years but it’s still there. He also doesn’t tell them to do something impressive to signify that they are starting over, that they finally understand what they’re supposed to be doing. God comes to them and tells them what to do next. Go up to the hills, get the wood, build the temple.
And it’s really easy to miss how small that is. When we’ve let something slide for a long time, we tend to think that in order to get back on track, we have to have some profound moment or some dramatic new beginning. And then what happens is we never get back to what we know we should be doing because it feels overwhelming. If I’m going to get on task here, I’ve got to have a big understanding. I’ve got to have some sort of new thing that I’m doing. But that’s not what God tells them to do here. He gives them a task that they can go and they can do right away.
And he doesn’t tell them to do it because it’s the next item on his checklist. He says that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified. We have to be sure that we don’t miss this. God isn’t telling them to build this house because he needs a building, or he likes to see them checking items off a to-do list that he gives them. Remember what I said when we were looking at verse 4? The temple was the place where God would dwell with his people again. This is about His presence, and He wants to take pleasure in it. God desires to be near to His people.
And so the question that we know the answer to, but has been left hanging here, is why have things been so empty? And God answers this as our passage for today closes up. “They looked for much and it came to little. What they did bring home blew away.” God did these things because His house was in ruins. He was causing all of this to happen to call His people back to Himself. He wasn’t going to leave them in their complacency. Instead, He showed them the futility of chasing the things that they wanted more than Him. And this is how God called the people in Haggai’s day back to Himself. And He gave them the straightforward task of bringing the wood and putting up the walls of the temple. But as I’ve said multiple times throughout this passage this morning, this word of the Lord from Haggai applies to us in the 21st century as well.
When we hear these words, “to consider your ways,” and we realize how unsatisfying even our abundance is, what do we do? If I stopped here and said, “Go up to the hills and get your wood. Rearrange your priorities and get to work.” Yes, you’d have something to do. But does that really do anything about the sin of complacency and the guilt you might feel? Instead of a task to do as the people of God in Christ Jesus, we come away from this passage with good news.
The house that the people were building was never the final answer. It was pointing to something far greater. Several hundred years later, Jesus stood at the temple and said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” And John tells us that He was talking about His own body. The place where God dwells with His people is not ultimately a building made with wood from the hills, it’s Jesus.
And the Apostle Paul says that because of Jesus, you are now being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. The presence of God that Adam and Eve lost in the garden, that the exiles longed for, that Haggai’s people were trying to restore, God has brought to us. He has brought Himself near to us as His people. We didn’t build the way back. Jesus did.
And because of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done, we are able to hear these words, “Consider your ways,” differently than the people in Haggai’s day. We don’t have to go up to the hill and drag trees back to town and frame a building to receive the presence of God. God has come near to us in Jesus, and so we are blessed to hear the voice of our loving Father in the words of Haggai and examine where we’ve gotten too comfortable, where we’ve let complacency impact our relationship with God. We are able to hear these words and know that they are the words of a God who loves us way too much to let us drift in complacency.
So what we leave here with today is not a call to do something to earn God’s favor, but a response to the truth that God is already near to us in Christ, and realizing what a blessing that is for us. We open the Word, we pray, we gather together as God’s people, not because we’re trying to get God to show up, but because we know that He already has.
As we finish up, I want us to go back to that house that we pictured when I started. I left that story with a great kitchen, a nice bedroom, and a big television that provided a pretty comfortable life, but the deeper problems in the house were neglected and getting worse.
So here’s the question I want us to take home with us this week. What’s your kitchen? What did you finish first because it was easy and it made you feel like you were making progress? And what’s the structural problem that you keep walking past in your life? Maybe it’s a Bible that’s never open, maybe it’s being too busy to stop and pray, maybe it’s a sin that you’ve been far too comfortable living with. You know what it is, and as you consider your ways, remember that God didn’t tell those people to fix everything at once. He told them to go get wood. The temple was not built in a day. The structure had to be made sound, one load of wood at a time.
And as you think on the question I asked you to ponder, remember you don’t need a plan to overhaul your entire life in order to get started. Pick one thing that you can do this week. Consider your ways, remembering what God has done in Christ and move towards Him in faith. And I want you to do it as somebody who is already at home with Jesus. We’re not working our way back into the presence of God. Jesus brought us to Himself, and we have the gift of God’s presence in the Holy Spirit who is with us and equips us as we are built up in faith.
Let us pray. Great and merciful God, we thank you for the gift of your Word. What the book of Haggai says is it calls us to consider our ways. It is always a good thing to hear your Word and to know that your Spirit is working in us. And we pray, O God, that we would be open to the conviction that comes, that we would consider our ways, we would examine where we become complacent, and we would turn to you in repentance and faith, that you might be glorified in all that we do. It’s in the name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.
Thank you for joining us for this week’s sermon. For more information about First Reformed Church, head to our Facebook page or website edgertonfrc.org.
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