Please turn in your Bibles to Haggai chapter 1. That’s on pew Bible page 791. And while you’re turning there, let me tell you about the nickname I’ve coined for my son, Archie. I’ve started calling him, “Bear. Bear Biggs” – for several reasons. Actually before I started calling him that, LK got him a Christmas stocking with a bear on it. He turned one–year-old in December so he’s just on the verge of walking, and when he goes from his little baby squat position up to his standing position on his hind legs, it looks just like a bear – well, his only pair of legs, but you know what I mean! But the real reason is because when I was growing up playing football in high school, we had to do these conditioning workouts where we bearcrawled across the field, you know, on our toes and our hands. And that was difficult for us, but that’s just how Archie lives his life. He bearcrawls around the house all the time, very quickly I will add!
We give nicknames to indicate something about a person or draw our minds back to a specific memory of that person. But what do you think about the name, Haggai? Not generally people’s first choice around here when considering names for their children. Y’all will laugh at this, I actually looked up in the church directory to make sure I wouldn’t offend anyone. We didn’t have anyone named Haggai here! So if you’re visiting tonight and your name is Haggai, my apologies! But Haggai means “festive” or “celebration.” He prophesied what we are about to read 520 years before Christ, after the Israelites had returned from exile. But as we read, you’ll notice he doesn’t seem very festive. As he rebukes the Israelites, you probably won’t think of him as someone who makes you want to celebrate. But I do think when you understand the message he is communicating from the Lord you may start to think about him in that way. As he puts his finger on misplaced priorities of the people, you may start to see his vision for where true festival and true celebration is found. It’s not found in building our own houses. It’s not found in seeking our own comforts first, but in the glory of God made manifest, specifically here in building the house of the Lord where all of history is headed.
So let me pray one more time and we’ll read. Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, You give the light of life. You give Your Son, Jesus Christ. And so Lord we ask tonight that You would help us to behold wonderful things in Your Word. We can’t do that without You. Send Your Spirit to be among us as we read and as we meditate on Your Word. It’s in the name of Jesus Christ who makes it possible we pray. Amen.
Haggai chapter 1, starting in verse 1:
“In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest: ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord.’ Then the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, ‘Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? Now, therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways. You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.
Thus says the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways. Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord. You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the Lord of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors.’
Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him. And the people feared the Lord. Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord’s message, ‘I am with you, declares the Lord.’ And the Lord stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people. And they came and worked on the house of the Lord of hosts, their God, on the twenty-fourth day of the month, in the sixth month, in the second year of Darius the king.”
This is God’s Word.
For us to build God’s house, we must consider three things. First, consider our conduct. And I know the passage says “Consider your ways,” but if we don’t make alliterated outlines here, David Strain docks our pay. I don’t know if y’all knew that! No, actually if that were true, Wiley would be paying the church to work here! Consider our conduct. To build God’s house we must consider three things – consider our conduct, consider the command, and consider the keys. Conduct, command and keys.
So first, to build God’s house we must consider our conduct. Look at verse 2 with me. “Thus says the Lord of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the Lord.” This form of prophetic writing is called prophetic disputation where God, through His prophet Haggai, gives the people their own excuse for not being faithful to the covenant. And then He tears down that reasoning because there’s something implicit in their excuse, isn’t there? Did you catch it? It’s like if I say the reason I haven’t started doing my laundry is because I’m watching TV, well then I’m not disputing the fact that I have to do laundry, but it’s just not the right time for me. They’re not disputing the fact that they have an obligation to build the temple; they know it. They would assent to that fact. They’re saying it’s just not the right time. People are busy. It can’t be the right time. That’s obvious to them as Israelites at this time.
And we aren’t given a reason that they think it’s not the right time, but we can probably guess some of those reasons. We can probably resonate with some of those possible reasons. “These are hard economic times, and that’s a big project to rebuild the temple.” “It’s harvest time, and people are busy.” You see, this is a problem of priorities. Their initial vigor when they returned from exile to rebuild the temple was met with opposition, and then it fell out of priority. One theologian said it this way – “There is no suitable time for people who are uninterested.” If you really aren’t interested in something, in your mind there is not a good time to do it.
But do you see what they really are rejecting? The house of the Lord, the temple, the visible place where the presence of God dwelt among the people. So they’re saying either it doesn’t really matter that God is with us, or they’re claiming some sort of cheap grace. “It doesn’t really matter if we follow the Lord. He’ll be with us anyway.” To not want the temple rebuilt as a priority was to reject God Himself.
And you see God’s response in verse 4. “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins?” You see how different their heart is from the heart of King David’s, the heart of King David, who didn’t see it fitting in 2 Samuel 7 that he should live in a house of cedar and the ark of God should dwell in a tent. They had prioritized the luxury of their own homes while putting off the building of the temple to a later date.
Does your heart reflect that of the people here or of David in 2 Samuel 7? Jesus says, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” The “these things” in that verse when Jesus says that, those are the things you need, the things you need to live life. God calls them to consider their ways. He calls us to consider our ways. What has been the profit of seeking self first? What has been the profit of prioritizing our own houses? Well look at what it’s been for the Israelites. Verse 6, even though they’ve put forth hard effort, they’ve harvested little. “You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.” Sounds like trying to keep up with inflation. They’re expending effort but the results don’t match. It’s not that God has sent a famine or in judgment, but that they kept seeking self and they weren’t finding satisfaction.
When you consider your conduct, consider the ways of your life recently, do you find that to be the case? Is seeking self really satisfactory to you, really fulfilling? Haggai says it even more bluntly in verse 9. Why has God made it so unsatisfactory? Why hasn’t He blessed their hard work? “Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house.” That’s the reason. It’s their disobedience to rebuilding the temple.
Does this mean that we can say there’s a causal connection between what we do and whether or not God blesses our actions? I think absolutely we can say that. God made spiritual and material realities consistent with one another, so much so that when we break the moral law, it has physical consequences. If someone is addicted to alcohol, it has physical consequences. When we sin, even if we don’t know what those consequences are, they are real. God made spiritual and material realities consistent, but it’s not in such a way that we can take advantage of God’s system. “If x, then y. If x, then y.” Job was blameless before the Lord and he suffered much. There are exceptions, but there are these general truths.
Like Proverbs says, it’s generally true that if you are diligent you will be wealthy, but that’s not necessarily true in God’s economy. Listen to what Alec Motyer says about this. “We live in a world not as those clever enough to work the system, to manipulate the forces of nature to our advantage, but as those looking in faith and obedience to the God who rules and decides all. Haggai exists to challenge the story science tells, not of the cause and effect way the universe works but of the way life is to be lived in God’s world. The Scriptures have all we need for life and godliness. God controls the forces of nature, the production of our labors, economic realities, and He will not allow His people who He has redeemed, He will not allow us to be satisfied in seeking self first. “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” It just wasn’t the right time to build the house of the Lord. God was not their priority.
We think like that sometimes, don’t we? “It can wait. I can afford to let it wait. Let me figure out my situation first, then I’ll focus on God’s priorities.” I think like that. It’s convicting. I think we can practice sort of a real but lazy faith. Remember the narrative of John 11? Lazarus dies, Jesus arrives, He speaks with Martha and Martha says this to Jesus – “‘Lord, if You had been here my brother would not have died, but even now I know that whatever You ask from God, God will give you.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Your brother will rise again.’ Martha said to Him” – she’s expressing faith here – “Martha said to Him, ‘I know that he will arise in the resurrection on the last day.’ Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he lives. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?’”
What an interesting way for Jesus to respond to her. She expresses faith in the resurrection on the last day, and it’s almost like he is correcting her. He’s not correcting a misunderstanding. There will be a resurrection on the last day. Jesus is saying, “The resurrection Himself, Jesus the Christ, is standing in front of you now. I am here now.” Do we have that same sort of faith? Well, God is building His Church and the gates of hell won’t prevail against it, I know that’s true; I guess we just believe that fact, we wait and we get buy. We build our houses. No, the time to build is now. The time to change our priorities is now. To build God’s house we must first consider our conduct.
Now you might say, “Stephen, they did rebuild the temple. It was destroyed again in AD 70. You want us to go back to Jerusalem and build it again?” Well thank you for asking. I was about to get to that! Second, to build God’s house we must consider the command. We need to focus on this. What is God’s house today and what does it mean to build God’s house today? We have to answer those questions. Look at verse 8. It says, “Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord.” You know you might get the impression from verse 4 that God is rebuking them for using expensive materials for building their houses, but that’s obviously not the critique. It’s not wrong to use expensive materials to build a house. Remember, Haggai’s rebuke comes from misplaced priorities. And we see here in verse 8, we see that here in verse 8. Solomon’s temple was majestic, but God’s emphasis here isn’t on the majesty, but on using that’s there to build it. He says, “Go get the wood from over there.” It’s about our hearts. Do we desire God’s house to be built as a first priority? The greatest commandment is to love God. What are we to take away from this little command in verse 8? Should we go to LeFleur’s Bluff and start chopping down trees? Maybe Twin Lakes? Actually they might need that there! No, we have to answer those two questions that I mentioned earlier, and we’ll take them in turn.
What is God’s house today? In 2 Samuel 7, David says he wants to build God a house and God says he can’t because he is a man of blood, a man of war, but God promises to build David a house in making a covenant with him, the Davidic covenant. That’s a play on the word there by house. God is saying, “I am going to make your name into a dynasty, that there will be a Davidic king on the throne forever.” And we know that King now, currently reigning, is Jesus Christ. And so the idea of temple and the idea of kingdom are inseparably linked here, and we find both, we find the fulfillment of both in Jesus Christ. The temple in Scripture is where God dwells. God now dwells not in a physical building but in His people on account of the finished work of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the temple, and all who are united to Him are the temple. First Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him, for God’s temple is holy and you are that temple.”
If the temple is God’s people, it’s Christians, how do we build it up? Well a few applications here. Back to some of the historical development of this. I think this is important when asking this question. When David establishes his kingdom, he unites the northern and the southern kingdoms. All the tribes, Israel and Judah, by conquering Jerusalem, he takes it back from the Jebusites, and in Romans 10, Paul makes this link that that was foreshadowing of the Gentiles being grafted in under the kingdom of Christ because the scattered tribes of the northern kingdom are associated with the scattered nations. So here’s the application. We build God’s house through evangelism, gathering of the nations. And I’m not going to go too much into that because there’s some great stuff in Haggai chapter 2 that will be very relevant to that. I’m actually jealous of David for getting to preach on it next week.
But David, the king, never gets to build the temple, but he does make preparations for it. We read in Chronicles that he takes contributions for its building up. So here’s the second application. We build God’s house through our finances, through our contributions to the Church of Christ. So the first is evangelism. The second is through our finances. You know, our goal as a church should not primarily be – each year our goal as a church should not primarily be to make budget. If we make budget and building the Lord’s house has not been our priority, then we really haven’t repented in response to this passage. If we don’t make budget, but it really was our priority and we just didn’t have the resources, then we have. You see?
Let me continue some of my historical rehearsing here. So Solomon, David’s greater son, builds the temple which is destroyed in the judgment of Israel when they’re exiled. And Haggai was three when that happened. He was taken in exile and now he’s prophesying as an old man about the rebuilding of it. But when the temple is rebuilt in Ezra-Nehemiah, we never get any indication that the glory of the Lord fills the temple again like it did before. It never says that in Scripture. God’s presence doesn’t return until Christ enters the temple, and then He leaves it again saying, “Behold, your house is left to you desolate,” in Matthew 20:23, and He predicts its destruction right after that.
The point here is this – that the temple is being built up through Christ, who is the temple. He is the temple, and all who are united to Him are a temple. Peter says we are living stones being built up into a spiritual house. We are living stones. God indwells His people. That is truly glorious. That is truly something worth celebrating.
So here’s the third application. How do we build God’s house? It’s by every ministry effort, whether corporate or individual, and every act of growth in grace. If you are a temple, your participation in your own sanctification is building up God’s house. “I know,” you may be saying, “Stephen, you got all that from verse 8.” Well not exactly, but I think that’s what it means to build God’ s house today. Those are things we can do today. It’s not something that’s distant to us in the past, a command to these Israelites only. It’s not something that’s so distant in the future – this will be fulfilled on the last day, although final fulfillment may be there, will be there. The time is now to build God’s house through evangelism, through growing as living stones, bringing in more stones through giving to the church.
You see, there’s something here for us in Haggai. It is true that all of Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, but it’s particularly important to see that here because the modern church can often overlook the minor prophets or even the Old Testament as a whole. I’m sure many of you have seen the movie, The Karate Kid. In it, a wise karate teacher or I guess sensei, Mr. Miyagi, tells his student, Daniel, to do things that are seemingly irrelevant to karate when he was supposed to be teaching him. “Wax on. Wax off. Paint the fence. Paint the house.” And every time he does one of these different things, he has this very specific way of doing it, right? And Daniel is frustrated that he’s not learning karate. But it’s when he discovers that all of these exercises were training and teaching him karate the whole time, they were training his muscle movements, when he finds out “Wax on, wax off” was teaching him different ways of blocking a kick or punch, he’s energized by that fact. He makes that connection and he’s energized by it. The message of Haggai, the command to build the Lord’s house, is a command for us today. Have you made that connection? It’s a command for us today, and we should be energized by its relevance to our lives.
To build God’s house, we must consider our conduct, consider the command, and finally, consider the keys. What are the keys to being able to accomplish this? We know our own hearts. It is difficult for us to make God’s priorities our priorities. Look at verse 12 with me. “Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the Lord their God had sent him. And the people feared the Lord.” The first key, the first step is recognizing the ways we’ve sinned and humbly turning from them in repentance to new obedience. If you, tonight, look back on 2025 and you recognize some misplaced priorities and then you turn from those things in repentance, there is mercy in the work of Jesus Christ. He who never had His priorities out of place and still took on sin, paid the debt we owed for those sins on the cross. “It is finished.”
And look at how God responds to that type of obedience and repentance in verse 13. “Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord’s message, ‘I am with you, declares the Lord.’” It’s the Emmanuel principle. It’s God with us. When we repent, diligently seeking obedience, God enables us to that new obedience. The Puritans call it “quickening us.” We must have God with us to do this. We can’t do it without Him. We must.
It’s God’s providence what happened to me this week. It’s really the Spirit’s working. I was in my car, I was praying, I was actually confessing my own sin, and honestly discouraged by my own sin, and seemingly to me, just out of nowhere – really it was the Holy Spirit working – this verse popped into my mind. It was actually a children’s song that I haven’t sung since I was a kid I don’t think, of a verse, popped into my mind. It hasn’t come up in my Bible reading plan recently. It was just the Spirit. Joshua 1:8-9, “Have I not commanded you, be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid, do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you may go.” That’s true in my own sin. That’s true in your own sin. A counselor might not be a very good counselor if someone is discouraged and they say, “Don’t be discouraged; be strong.” But it’s that last part that energizes us to strength and courage – “For the Lord your God will be with you wherever you may go.”
I’m sure not a few of you watched the Sugar Bowl this past week, and whether you’re a fan or not, the quarterback, Trinidad Chambliss, played an incredible game. I heard descriptions of his play after the game. Someone said he was “unconscious,” he had “ice in his veins,” he was “cooking.” Listen to the words of this theologian talking about this, who I think was cooking when he wrote this. “While in Haggai’s Old Testament terms the presence of the Lord was conditioned upon setting apart a house for the Lord to dwell in, the Lord here is swift to teach that it is not the house perse that concerns Him, but the house as symbolic to our hearts that long for Him to be central to life and dwell in the midst of wills set to obey Him. Where these realities are present, He rushes to assure of His real and living presence. In such context, the Word of God is no dead letter, but a living communication of vital truth.” This word from Haggai, it is no dead letter. It is a living communication of vital truth, and the keys are repentance and the Emmanuel principle – God being with us.
You see their new obedience in action in verse 14. The Lord stirred up their spirits and they worked. It’s ultimately the Word of God intervening in their lives by the prophet, Haggai, that stirs them to God’s priorities. Think of Moses. It wasn’t Moses’ speaking. He was worried about that. It wasn’t his leadership ability that led the Israelites out of slavery through the waters. It wasn’t Daniel’s greatness that stopped the mouths of lions. It was the fact that God was with them, by grace, through faith. If you’re a Christian, your heart is no longer a stone. The Word of God is living and active, sharper than a two-edged sword. Will you respond to it tonight? It’s not your skill that will allow you to conquer. It’s not your expertise or your personality that will accomplish the building of the Lord’s house. It is God with you. It’s God with FPC Jackson. It’s Jesus Christ reigning as King and building up His body as a temple of the Holy Spirit. And when His priorities are your priorities, you have priorities that are worth celebrating. Haggai priorities. Festal priorities.
Let me pray for us.
Heavenly Father, thank You for Your Word to us tonight. Thank You that it is sharper than any two-edged sword, that it is living and active. Lord, I ask that You would stir us by it, that You would bring us to repentance and new obedience into making Your priorities, our priorities. Lord, it’s only by Your grace that we can do any of it, and so we ask that You would be with us, by Your Son, Jesus Christ, by Your Spirit. It’s in the name of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.