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FAST Missions

Daniel Vis

The Moment

I'm going to kneel, invite you to bow your heads.

I have something special the Lord has put on my heart.

And I just want to pray the Lord will enable that message to come through clearly.

Father in heaven, I think we all sense that we are heading into difficult times.

We're going to need leaders for this next year that are filled with the Holy Spirit.

I pray that as we study Your Word this morning, that You would speak to each of our hearts.

Help us to glean the message from the book of Haggai that You intend us to.

We thank You and we ask this in Jesus' name.

So you know this week I was praying about what to share, and I knew I had all these announcements, and there's a lot of stuff happening in our church.

I haven't even really covered everything.

And I was just sort of wrestling, and I had some things I wanted to say, but I didn't really have a passage of Scripture.

And so I was just praying, and I was kind of drawing a blank.

And I even sent a message to the Bulletin, saying, I don't know, I'll just give you a title, you know?

Give you a Scripture, and the Lord will give me something later.

And then right after I sent that out, I went back, and I was reviewing some of my morning watch notes, some of my devotional notes, and I realized the Lord had been giving me a message for a week, like every day, and I just didn't even realize it.

And so I started thinking, this is the exact message to share with this church for right now, for this moment.

So if you have your Bibles, I want to ask you to turn there.

It's right near the end of the Old Testament.

You got Haggai, Zachariah, Malachi, right after Zephaniah.

We're gonna go through this book kind of quickly just to get the context of the story.

You remember the Jews had rebelled against God.

They turned to idols and so on and the Babylonians had come in and destroyed the temple and taken many of the Jews captive, taking them to Babylon.

And then 70 years later, exactly as Jeremiah had prophesied, a decree went forth allowing the Jews to go back and start rebuilding the temple.

In fact, that decree is recorded in the book of Ezra.

He was the 1 that kind of led that first initial return to Jerusalem.

They got the foundation laid, and then they sort of fizzled out.

By the way, it's also interesting, if you're curious about this, Did you know that the Bible actually predicted who it was that would give that decree?

And you can read that in the book of Isaiah, chapter 44, right near the end, right beginning of chapter 45.

It says, even though you haven't known me, I've called you by name, Cyrus.

You're the 1 that's going to let my people go back to Jerusalem and you're going to be the 1 that's going to issue this decree to rebuild the temple.

And it happened exactly the way Isaiah and Jeremiah have prophesied.

The problem was they didn't get the temple finished because soon after Cyrus, who was the 1 that issued that first decree, another Persian emperor came to the throne.

Enemies of God's people, they started complaining, said, you better not let these Jews rebuild this temple.

You better not let them rebuild the city of Jerusalem because they are a bunch of troublemakers And they're going to cause you grief and so art exerts these issued a command and said you need to stop all the building on the temple and it stopped and In fact for years there was no progress on the temple.

They just had the foundation laid, that's all it was.

Finally, another king comes to the throne, his name is Darius, and in the second year of his reign, 2 prophets, maybe more, Haggai and Zechariah, started speaking up and urging the Jews, saying, this is the time you need to get busy and start rebuilding the temple.

The decree had not been reversed to stop building the temple.

This was not something they were supposed to do.

So it was kind of a scary thing, but the prophet's saying, you need to get building the temple.

So I want to pick up the story with that background right in verse 1 of the book of Haggai.

We're just going to go through this kind of quickly.

In the second year of Darius, the king, in the sixth month and the first day of the month came the word of the Lord by Haggai the prophet, and to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the son of Joshua." So you got these 2 guys, you have the governor and you have the high priest, and the prophet is speaking to them saying, "'Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying, This people say, Ah, the time is not come, the time that the Lord's house should be built.

This isn't the time to be working on the temple.

We have this command saying, Stop the building.

And the prophets are saying, no, you need to get serious about starting it up.

Thus speaketh the Lord of hosts, saying to these people, Their time is not come.

The word of the Lord, verse 3, came by Haggai the prophet, saying, Is it time for you to dwell in your nice, comfortable homes?

Is that really the right way to think about what's going on here in Jerusalem?

Now therefore, sayeth the Lord of hosts, consider your ways.

You ever feel that way sometimes, like you're trying to do this and do that, you're trying to do all the right things, and it just seems like it's not working.

You've sown much, you bring in little, you eat, you don't have enough, you drink, but you're not filled with drink, you're cold but you're not warm, and you earn money and you put it into a bag with holes.

Like everything you do, it seems like you're just trying to get ahead and nothing is working.

You're just busy, busy, busy, can't seem to get on top of things, can't seem to make ends meet, can't seem to get caught up on stuff.

Maybe there's a reason that you're having this experience.

Let's say it to the Lord, verse 7, consider your ways.

And you guys are all going back to your houses, but my house is just a bunch of stones on the ground.

Therefore, The heaven over you is stayed from dew.

I called for a drought on the land, on the mountains, on the corn, on the wine, on the oil.

And yet nothing is working because you haven't put me first.

I mean, this is not really a sermon on stewardship, but stewardship is important because it's a test of whether we are putting God first in our life, amen?

And when we don't put God first, like those Jews were doing for 16 years, that temple, that foundation laid there empty with no building on it, no template.

They were worried about their own houses, their own crops, their own wealth, their own careers, whatever.

And God says, look, it's not working for you.

I'm going to put your own money into a bag with holes.

You know, nothing is going to work right because you have not put me first.

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