Most of us know what it’s like to hear something true and put off doing anything about it. We mean to get to it. We just keep saying later.
In Haggai 1:12-15, God’s people do something different. After sixteen years of putting off the temple, they hear the word of the LORD through Haggai and obey, and within twenty-three days they are back at work. The text tells us why: they feared the LORD, he promised to be with them, and he stirred up their spirits himself.
In this sermon, we look at what real repentance looks like, why God’s presence is not something we earn by obeying, and how Jesus, Immanuel, is with his people and leads them to repentance and faith. It closes with a simple call to deal with what is in front of you today.
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.
At some point in our lives we’ve all received some sort of correspondence that we really don’t want to deal with. Maybe it’s a bill or a notification of some kind in the mail that you don’t want to open. Maybe you open it and you don’t want to deal with what it has to say until you absolutely have to. Perhaps it’s a text or a voicemail that you are dreading and you see that it has come through from someone and you just leave it. You let it sit unread for hours or maybe even days because you have this deep sense of dread over what you believe the consequences of that message will be. And we do this in hopes that maybe the situation will change or because we believe that maybe later we will be more ready to deal with the situation.
But usually situations don’t change and you fill yourself with dread in dealing with it, struggling with what to do about it. You build it up, you make it even worse, you don’t deal with what is right in front of you. You know, we know that it’s best to face difficult circumstances right away but still what do we do? We delay and we do this with so many things in our lives. The diet, it starts Monday. The budget, we’ll follow it more strictly next payday. The Bible reading plan, well the best time to start that is January 1st. That’s when I’ll do it.
That’s the pattern we see over and over in our lives. We hear what’s true, we feel the weight of it, and we tell ourselves we’ll get to it later. But we all know what happens. We end up telling ourselves, well, the next Monday is better to start the diet, or the next payday, or the next year. I’ll have more time in 2030, right? The cycle repeats.
So as we come to our second week in Haggai we find a similar situation. Last week we saw that the people had returned from exile, they had come to Jerusalem, and after 16 years the temple was still sitting unfinished. They hadn’t decided to neglect it, they just kept saying it wasn’t the right time. And in the meantime they built nice homes for themselves.
Well then we saw that God sent Haggai to them with a message that tells the people to consider their ways. And it was tough to hear. They were told that the reason that they were working hard and nothing ever satisfied them was because the house of the Lord was lying in ruins while they lived in their nice houses. And God told the people to go up to the hills and bring back wood for the temple. He called them not to just consider their ways but He also called them to act. And that’s where we left it last week. We left with the reminder that we are called to consider our ways as well. And it was easy to see that the call of God was not just for the people who abandoned the building of the temple. We need to examine our lives too. But that isn’t where we leave all of that. We can’t just ignore an important text or delay what we know needs to be done. We have to do something and the same thing is true of that call on us that we saw last week to consider our ways.
And so as we look at verse 12 of Haggai 1 this morning, we see the proper response to the call of God. What do they do? They obey. Haggai came to them. He proclaimed the word of the Lord. And what did the people do? They responded. And notice who obeys here, Zerubbabel, the governor of Judah, Joshua, the high priest, and all the remnant of the people. It wasn’t just a few people here or there who believed this and were convicted by it and did something about it. It was all the people.
And notice what this conviction does in them. They feared the Lord. When we hear the word fear, what do we usually think of? We think of being afraid and what do we do when we’re afraid? We want to get away. But that’s not what’s happening here. In Scripture, the fear of the Lord is deep reverence and respect and it’s seeing God for who He is, that He is holy and powerful and good. And it results in taking Him seriously because we understand who He is. So this kind of fear that we read about in the Bible doesn’t send people running away from God. It sends them running to do what He has commanded. They know who is speaking so they do what He has told them to do.
And what we see here in this is simple for us to apply. True repentance moves fast and it moves us to act. It means that we understand our sin and we cease from it. We hear the Word of God and we act upon it today. Not next week or on the 1st of January. The fear of the Lord will move us to repentance. It will cause us to grieve over our sin. And for the people in Haggai’s time, repentance meant that they were to go up to the hills and bring back wood to build the temple. But what does it look like for us? True repentance moves quickly. It leads us to act. It doesn’t stop with us feeling remorse for what we’ve done. Repentance isn’t simply us feeling really bad about our sin. Repentance means that we turn from our sin.
Maybe the Spirit has been at work in you for a long time about a habitual sin or something that you struggle with. Maybe it’s a relationship where you need to admit how you’ve wronged someone and apologize to them. Regardless of what it is, you know what it is. Maybe it’s what comes to mind during the prayer of confession every week. You think about it on Sunday, but on Monday you’re right back to it.
Verse 12 shows us that the time for us to fear the Lord, the time for us to turn to Him in repentance and faith is today. Haggai spoke the Word of the Lord and the people believed and repented and set out to do what God called them to do.
And it’s important to understand that at the root of what caused them to do this was the fear of the Lord. Guilt and remorse make us feel bad for a day or two, but when we understand that it is God who is speaking, when we understand His holiness and we take Him seriously, we will stop negotiating. We grieve over our sin because we understand that it’s more than just a bad habit or that it’s just an oopsie-daisy. We understand that our sin is an offense to a holy God and our sin is against Him.
And I know that’s heavy. Trust me, I get that that’s hard, but like I said, it’s pretty simple and straightforward. The people heard a difficult word from God through Haggai and what did they do? They obeyed. What you might expect as you progress through the story then is continuing hard words. Something like a dire warning like, “This is a good start, but if you don’t see this through, you’re going to get sent into exile just like the people before you.” Or we might see the next task that they need to do after getting the wood from the hills lined out clearly. This is what you absolutely have to do. And based upon what we’ve seen so far in Haggai, that’s a really fair thing to expect. But what’s next isn’t like an envelope or email that we dread opening. Instead, it’s a word from God that tells them of His presence.
And it’s just four words, “I am with you.” It’s not keep going or else. Instead, it’s, “I’m with you.” It’s not scolding. It’s not more commands.
And as we come to this verse, it’s easy to hear this wrong. Our inclination is to think they obeyed and so God showed up. As if His presence had been waiting on them. But that’s not what’s going on here.
Where was God for those 16 years that the temple sat unfinished? Was He sitting there considering forsaking His covenant promises to His people because of their complacency? We saw in the first chapter that He was causing them to not be satisfied with the earthly things they were pursuing. He was near to them, even in their disobedience. But it was in judgment. And it was in rebuke. A God who isn’t near to His people doesn’t send a prophet who brings a word to tell them to consider their ways. The word of the prophet is a reminder that He is their God and they are His people. So what’s new in verse 13 isn’t the presence of God, but that He is announcing and reminding them of who He is. Through the prophet, He is declaring His presence so they can hear it out loud.
And they need this word. Think about where they are in life. They are a people brought back to a land that is not the same one that they left. And they face a difficult task. They have to be wondering what obstacles and opposition they’re going to face in rebuilding the temple. The message from the prophet to the people isn’t a pep talk or a structured plan, but it’s a reminder of the presence of God with His covenant people. Just as God was with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, He is with them. Just as God was present with the people in Exodus, He is with them now. Just as God was present as the people in the book of Joshua were led into the land many years prior and the walls of Jericho fell down, God is with them as they rebuild and restore the temple. The words “I am with you” would not have been received as something new for their generation. They would have heard those words as the same words that were uttered to the people of God through the ages. They would have made the connection. They would have understood that this is a word spoken to the people who were facing tasks too big for them as well. These words “I am with you” remind them of how God parted the sea, how He brought water from a rock, how He fed their fathers with manna in the wilderness, and how He caused the walls of Jericho to fall down.
And so these words are to remind them to rest on who the Lord is, who their covenant God is, and to rest on the promises that He has made to His people instead of relying on their own strength.
And it’s so important, so important that we hear these words and get the order right. We don’t turn from sin so that God will be with us. We turn from sin because He is already with us. Through the Word and the Holy Spirit at work in us, we hear the call to repentance and we believe. If God wasn’t near to us, we would not understand the call to repentance at all. It would fall on deaf ears and we would go right on in our sin. We hear and believe because we know that God is near to us in Christ. He is Immanuel. He is God with us and He came to save sinners. He is with us. Our repentance is never in our own strength, never. He leads us to it and He carries us through.
And that leads us to verse 14 and 15. We’ve seen that they obeyed and we’ve seen that God is with them, but why now? Sixteen years of putting it off and now they get up and go? Well, where did that come from? Well, look at what it says here. Zerubbabel, Joshua, and the remnant are not stirred up by their own conscience, by their own strength, or their own gumption. They are stirred by the Lord. They heard, they believed, and they acted because of God’s work in them. They obeyed and underneath it all was God at work in them.
And that phrase, “stirred up,” is the same word that we see in the book of Ezra that describes what happened when God moved the exiles to go back to the land in the first place. And the idea is to rouse or to wake someone up.
Now parents, you know that you have kids who take more effort than your other kids to get them up and get them going. You know, most people have one kid who sleeps so hard that you’re convinced that if World War III would happen and it was localized in their bedroom, they still wouldn’t wake up. It takes an extraordinary effort to get them to wake up. And let’s be honest, after 16 years, in order to stir the people from sleep, God really had to shake the bed. Their spirits had been asleep for a long time and they weren’t going to get up and get going on their own. God had to wake them up.
And look at what comes out of it. They came and worked on the house of the Lord of Hosts. It wasn’t that He stirred them and they rolled over and went back to sleep. He woke them up and they set out on the task that He called them to.
And notice how the passage here ends. It gives us a date. The 24th day of the sixth month in the second year of Darius the king. That’s 520 BC. Why does the writer bother? Well, because this really happened. Real people, a real day on the calendar. This wasn’t vague spiritual improvement. This is something they did.
And I’m gonna do the math for you. Haggai’s first word came on the first day of the sixth month. The work started on the 24th. That’s 23 days. After 16 years of not yet, they got to work. This is what repentance looks like when God is the one who is stirring it.
And so as we close up, I’m gonna go back to that ominous envelope or email that I started talking about at the beginning. The people of Judah got a message that they didn’t want to open. It was a hard word and they had every reason to dread it. But they opened it. They heard it. They believed it. And 23 days later they were on the job. And the word in that envelope wasn’t only the rebuke, it was four important words. “I am with you.”
So the question I want us to consider in our lives: what are you letting sit unopened? You know what it is. Today is the day to turn to God in repentance. Not next week, not payday, not January 1st. Today. Not because you can work up the courage, but because it’s the Lord who stirs hearts to repentance and He is the one who is with you. And if you’re in Christ, what you’re dreading has already been answered. Remember the words of Paul from Romans, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” The consequence you fear most, Jesus has already taken upon Himself.
And so whatever it is that you’ve been dreading, face it today. The word waiting for you there isn’t condemnation. It’s the same word that the people of Judah heard. “I am with you.” Amen. Let us pray.
Gracious and merciful God, we thank you for this beautiful reminder of your presence in our lives in the book of Haggai. That you were the one who stirred repentance in your people, that you turned them towards you, and we pray, O God, that as we daily confess our sins, that you would continue to stir up in us repentance and faith. That we might move towards you, move to action, that our lives might glorify you, that we might be witnesses to the ends of the earth, to the glory of the salvation that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is in His name 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.
Keep Listening to God’s Word
If this message was a help to you, there is more waiting. Browse the full sermon archive, or follow along with the rest of the Consider Your Ways series through the book of Haggai.
