[Saturday Morning] Apathy and Zeal (Haggai 1:1-15)

Let's pray as we come to God's Word.

Our Father. Your people in the day of Haggai

heard the word of the Lord and all fell upon them.

We pray now that in your mercy and by the power of your spirit

given in your Son, that that same word would come to us and

stir our spirits. Father, we're nothing without

you. We have no power in ourselves as

we pray that Jesus the true vine, in his mercy to us today I

would again pour life into our thirsty souls.

Bless us, we pray in his name, Amen.

I come from the land of rain and drizzle and fog, where the

temperature rarely allows you so much as to put on AT shirt.

I've landed, as far as I can tell, in a land at least in the

summer of red hot sun, of deserts, and of soaring

temperatures. And so it may be that you here

in Texas could associate more nearly than us from the frozen N

with what our forefathers called the noonday demon.

The noonday demon. You may know that in the early

church they began to speak about 7 deadly sins.

It's not a scriptural concept, although each of the seven sins

are clearly there in scripture, but but one of the seven has

been lost. One of the seven has has gone

undercover, as it were. It's what our our forefathers

called the sin of Arcadia. Arcadia.

It's just not a word I suspect that many of us have even heard.

Arcadia literally means to be without care, Atheism without

good, Arcadia without care. And in the early centuries, as

many of the Christians lived in hot, dry, arid lands of the

Middle East, they would notice that as as the sun rose in

particular, that their spiritual zeal would drop.

So the monks who lived out in the desert began to detect in

themselves a kind of spiritual sleepiness that they knew they

were meant to be the the pacesetters, the leaders of

God's people, men of the Word and prayer, and yet they found

their mind could turn to anything except the Lord.

There were incredible accounts of monks pouring out their soul,

being really honest, describing how they were beset.

The task of reading the Scriptures from the moment they

read woke up in the morning until the midday meal, and yet

their mind would drift. They'd start to think, I, I wish

I was in another community. They'd start to think, why are

all the other brother monks holy and I alone find it so hard to

pray and read? They'd long even for someone to

walk past their window, the window of their cell, in order

that they might talk to them and escape the monotony of having to

spend time alone with the Lord. And they diagnosed it as Arcadia

being without care, apathy. In the modern world, we, we talk

about sloth. That's how it's come down to us

with the seven deadly sins. But it's not laziness.

It's not laziness. There are two ways you can ruin

a garden, aren't there? I'm no gardener, but I know

there are two ways you can ruin a garden.

You can go out and trample all over the flowers.

You can kick a football in it. You can let your kids run wild

and everything is gone, but you can also ruin a garden simply by

ignoring it, letting the weeds grow, never mowing the lawn,

letting the hedges become unkempt and wild.

The second way is the path of Acadia not having care.

There are two ways you can ruin a marriage.

As a husband, you can be vile, abusive, aggressive to your wife

and your children, but also you can be apathetic, disinterested,

never investing in your family, never taking time to discover

what what motivates your children, what excites them,

what cares and pressures are on your wife.

Just letting the garden go wild. That second way is the way of

Acadia. Apathy, soul sleepiness with

mission. There are two ways to derail the

mission of God. One is to go hell bent.

And I use the the phrase advisedly hell bent to stop the

advance of the church, to hamper world missions, to derail local

evangelism. That is a path I suspect not a

single individual in this room is trying to take.

But there is a second way of derailing missions, the way of

apathy, the way of Arcadia, and the devil's just as happy with

the second as with the 1st. And that second way, as I

imagine you've already worked out, it's just not to really

care. If someone wants to go to China

to be a missionary, good on them, every blessing and

goodbye. If there are evangelistic events

organized at church or in the local community, lovely, But

it's not for me. I read this morning in in the

oldest British News magazine. There are now more witches in

America than Presbyterians. How's that now?

I've not counted. I can't say I've verified the

facts, but it's a reputable paper, more identifying witches

in America than Presbyterians. And what's our response?

We we're shocked by that, I imagine, but after this morning,

slowly, our souls are so leaden that if you're anything like me,

we begin, frankly not to care. Well, welcome to the world of

6th century BC, welcome to Jerusalem.

Welcome to the book of Haggai. Haggai ministered to people who

were spiritually apathetic, who lost their zeal.

The book of Haggai, if you like, wants to move us from A-Z, A-Z,

sorry, A-Z, from apathy to zeal, just to give us a little bit of

context because it's not a book, I guess that many of us are

super familiar with. Let's think just briefly about

the cast of Haggai and the context.

The cast and the context of Haggai.

You see down there in verse one, we get a very specific date.

Unusually for the Old Testament, Haggai dates his prophecy right

to the day in the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth

month, on the first day of the month.

If you're interested, it's the 29th of August, 520 BC.

That's how specific we can be. And if you're familiar with the

story of the Old Testament, we are therefore right at the end

of that story, around 597, you may remember the Babylonians

swept in and destroyed Judah and Jerusalem, the remnant of God's

people, and took them off into exile.

And prophets like Ezekiel and Daniel lived out of God's land,

out of Israel, off there in Babylon, surviving in exile for

70 years or so. That remained to be the case.

And the temple had been destroyed, the dwelling place of

God on earth burnt to the ground by Nebuchadnezzar.

But but now, now things have changed.

There's some debate over exact dates.

It doesn't matter too much for our purposes this weekend.

But around 538, about 70 years after the exile had begun,

Cyrus, one of the great Persian emperors, wrote the Edict of

Return, sent God's people back to their land.

And as he did say, he did so with extraordinary words.

Let let me read to you from the end of the book of Chronicles.

Now though, it's worth knowing that the way the the Jewish

people in Jesus day arranged the books of what we call the Old

Testament is different to the way we arrange them.

Nothing special about the order, but two Chronicles, as we call

it, would be the end of the Old Testament.

As the the Jews organized their Bible.

So the Old Testament would end with these words as I read them.

Do they remind you of anything? End of two Chronicles.

Here's Cyrus. Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia,

the Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the

earth, and he's charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem,

which is in Judah. Whoever is among you, all his

people, may the Lord his God be with him.

Let him go up. Centuries later, another man

would say something very similar.

The Lord God of heaven has given me all the kingdoms.

All nations are mine. Therefore go and make disciples

of all nations, and I am with you to the end of the age.

Cyrus, as it were, no doubt unbeknownst to him, issues a

kind of Old Testament Great Commission.

I'm the king of everything. OK, he's being arrogant there.

But the nations are all mine. God's people.

Go, go and build the temple, and may the Lord your God be with

you. That is the command that was

echoing in God's people's ears as they headed back to

Jerusalem. There was excitement.

There was joy, there was hope for the future.

Great things were about to happen again.

We've suffered. Now the Lord is going to move

powerfully. Now we'll begin to see this

Yahweh of hosts in all his glory.

And so they began in the book of Ezra to rebuild the temple.

But after a couple of years, they stopped.

And we know from the dating of Haggai that we're about 16-17

years down the line and all that's happened is the

foundations have been laid. There is nowhere to meet,

nowhere to celebrate the Passover, nowhere to sacrifice

the lambs, nowhere to meet with God and worship.

God's people were called to build his church.

You and I know that Our Calling is not to build a bricks and

mortar building in Jerusalem anymore.

The temple that Jesus sends us to build is the temple of the

Holy Spirit, the Church. We fulfill the commands given

through Haggai not by picking up trowels and cement, but by

preaching the gospel to the nations, the nations in Dallas,

the nations in the USA, the nations to the ends of the

earth, and through the church proclaiming the gospel Christ

built. That is what the book of Haggai

is all about, and I hope perhaps you're beginning to see why it's

such an important book for us. As we think about mission, we

are on the most part apathetic about mission.

We're not consumed with zeal. We're like our forefathers.

And the good news of Haggai is there are those who've been

there before us suffering with the same lethargy, the same

sins, the same lack of zeal. And God has come in his grace

and moved in them to stir them with a desire to see the Kingdom

built. And that is, that's my my prayer

for these 24 hours or so that we have together.

There's a little bit a bit about the context.

You can see the cast there as well.

Three main characters will meet over the next day or so.

The most obvious is Haggai first one, the prophet Haggai's name

means my feasts. That'll become important

tomorrow as we get to some of the later passages.

But alongside Haggai, do you see there's a Zerubbabel, the rebel,

the son of Xiaotiel, governor of Judah.

Now, Zerubbabel is the descendant of the kings.

He's in that Davidic line. He's never called a king in the

book, but but he is the one who inherits the throne of David and

it's his bloodline that eventually will pass that throne

on to Christ. So you've got a prophet, a king.

And unsurprisingly, if you know your Old Testament, there's a

priest as well. There is Joshua, first one, the

High Priest, a prophet, a priest, and a king. 3 roles, 3

anointed offices. Each of these men, prophet,

priest and king, at least when the Kingdom is functioning well,

would have had oil poured on their head as they began their

work, and the oil being poured on their head was an anointing,

or if we spoke Hebrew a Messiah ING.

Or if we spoke Greek, a Christ ING Christ, Greek anointed,

Messiah, Hebrew anointed. So in a sense, Haggai is Haggai

Christ the rubbable is the rubbable Christ or the rubbable

Messiah, Joshua is Joshua Messiah, Joshua Christ.

And again, that's going to be important for where we head the

action in Haggai. Is it like if you like is going

to be driven by these Messiah figures?

It is they who are going to take the lead and stir the people to

come after them. Well, there you go.

That's quite enough background. Let's dive into the charge, the

charge. We've seen the context.

What about the charge? What does God want to say to his

people? And it's there really in verse

2. Thus says the Lord of hosts.

These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the

House of the Lord. They've just stopped work.

They haven't become unbelievers. They haven't turned to Barl or

Dagon. They haven't abandoned the

faith. They're just saying, look, not

yet, Lord. They've stopped building the

temple. They've laid down their trowels.

Are they lazy? No, I don't think so.

These seem to be busy people, successful people.

We might even say first four again.

The Lord speaks to Haggai. Is it a time for you yourselves

to dwell in your panelled houses while this house lies in ruins?

In the Old Testament, God calls the Temple his dwelling place,

his house, and he compares the two houses.

He asks the Jewish people, look at your own home, go back to

your front door, walk around the ground floor, look at it, and

then look at my house and tell me which do you care about most?

Look at your panelled houses, he calls them.

The way the houses are described, that the Jews have

built, that the language about them being panelled, It's only

ever used elsewhere in the Old Testament about Solomon's

temple. It's as if God is saying,

whereas your forefathers built me a wonderful temple, you've

just built your own temples for yourself.

They're not lazy people, they're working hard building houses in

the Middle East. It's hard work.

Paddled houses, glamorous houses, all the more hard work.

They are successful, they are busy.

They are not lazy, but they are apathetic to the glory of God

and the Kingdom of God. One writer says this.

As Christians, we are so often captivated by things we don't

really care about and are lukewarm to.

Things that in our heart of hearts mean the most to us find

it very convicting. We're captivated by things we

don't really care about. What fills our Diaries?

What empties our wallets? What consumes our thoughts, our

things we know in our heart of hearts aren't really the most

important things and the things we know really matter in reality

get far less of our dollars, our time, and our thoughts.

How do I diagnose this? Or rather, the Lord diagnosis

the problem a little deeper. He's he turns on the X-ray as it

were in verse 8. Go up to the hills, consider

your ways and bring word and build the house that I may take

pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the Lord.

If you'd really understood two things, says the Lord, you would

have been building that, that that building of the house was

meant to bring me pleasure and give me glory.

And so by implication, the reason that the Jews hadn't been

building the house was because they didn't really care enough

about bringing God pleasure or giving God glory.

I suspect none of them would would have denied that both

things were true and good. The Jews were good

Presbyterians. They knew that the chief end of

man was to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

It wasn't the English in the 17th century who came up with

that. It's a biblical principle, but

they didn't care. Pleasing God was second, third,

4th, 5th on the list of motivating factors, giving him

glory, bringing him glory, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th.

And so they built their own homes to their own glory and

looked to their own pleasure. And my children are of an age

where they're obsessed with Legos.

And there's a show on TV that they they love to watch called

Lego Masters. And the idea is at the beginning

of the show that the contestants who are amazing builders, get

given a challenge, go and build an underwater world or go and

build a, a scene from a fairy tale or a, a, a, a space scape.

And they get 10 hours. And at the end they wheel in

there these incredible creations.

What are they judged on? They're not just judged on

whether they've built something amazing, but whether they've

built what they were asked to build.

If the judge running the competition says I, I want a

wonderful underwater scene and you bring back a spectacular

world W scene, you might have built it brilliantly, but it's

not what the judge was after. How can I ask this?

What are we building? What is our our primary building

project? One day we're going to have to

wheel out before the Lord what we have built.

No doubt for many in this room, what we've built will be

glorious. But is it what God wants built?

What of our time, our thoughts, our dollars have gone into

building His Kingdom, His church?

Or has that just dropped down our list of priorities?

Notice in Haggai, the people aren't anti God.

They're not atheists. They're not anti mission.

Haggai's not a prophet like some of his colleagues who had to

rail against immorality in the church.

It doesn't seem there are any great sins.

There's no sexual scandal. There's no idolatry.

He doesn't have to preach against heresy, false teaching

as some of the other prophets have to do.

The church. In Haggai's day, the people of

God seem to be more or less well behaved, more or less obedient,

more or less orthodox in their thinking.

There's not a a whiff that something has gone wrong there.

They're just apathetic. They just don't care.

They've gone to sleep and they don't say no.

They just say not yet. Did you notice that in verse 2,

these people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the

House of the Lord? It's not we're against it.

It's not that we'll never do it, just not yet.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. I remember as a teenager on a

youth camp hearing the story, fictitious story.

Let me make clear a fictitious story of three demons at

training college. And the senior demon says,

right, we've asked you, how do you stop the Kingdom of God

advancing? And the first demon, junior

demon says, oh, that's easy. I'm going to tell my victim that

there is no God. And the senior devil says

useless, useless. Everybody knows there's a God.

And the second demon says, well, OK, I, I, I won't tell my victim

that there's no God, but rather I'll tell them that he's not the

man. And then the devil says he

useless, useless. The senior devil says useless,

useless. All Christians know deep down

they're meant to be doing something for the Kingdom.

And the third devil, Bill junior devil, puts his hand up and

says, I'll tell my victim there's no hurry.

Brilliant, says the senior devil.

Top of the class. Manana, Manana, tomorrow,

tomorrow. Well, there's the charge.

It is a weighty 1. I hope you feel the the weight

of what the Lord says to his people through Haggai.

But as always, when when God convicts, he does so in order to

comfort and change us, not to crush us and leave us feeling

guilty and in despair. And even in this first chapter

of Haggai, there is good news in verses 12 through to the end.

We won't have time to look at every detail of of chapter 1

this morning, but but you see the word comes and it is the

word that makes such a difference.

If you scan through the the those those verses, you see time

and again there are little phrases like the word of the

Lord or or the message of the Lord and it wakes the people up.

In fact, what what results from Haggai's preaching is verse 12,

the people feared the Lord 1 accommodator says they were

startled awake by the voice of God.

It is the preaching of Haggai that sends the people back on

mission. And let me say, that is the only

thing that is ever going to come to you.

The Angel Gabriel almost certainly can't 100% promise it.

The Angel Gabriel is almost certain not going to visit PCPC,

come out of the heavens, clap his hands together and say get

going on mission. The Seraphim and Cherubim are

not going to appear, but the Word will be preached to you

week by week to stir you to just this task.

Don't wait for something more spectacular.

This is it. It may just be a preacher from a

rocky island in the North Atlantic that God is using and

nobody but this is how He works. It is the Word that cause us to

mission, and it comes with a promise.

Verses 13 and 14, the Lord says I am with you, I am with you.

He doesn't send us on our own, but says go and build in my

power and I will think much more about that tomorrow.

So I don't want to get pulled into it too much today, but it's

never alone. It's in the power of God.

And this is where we begin to see the grace of God in Haggai

Wan, the grace of God to his people.

You see it in the fact that he doesn't just tell them off.

He doesn't just say you have no desire, sort it out rather.

You see, if you take a step back and look at Haggai 1, you see,

actually there is someone with a great desire for the temple to

be built on earth, and it's God. He doesn't look down from heaven

and say, well, they don't want to build a dwelling place for

me. They don't want to build a place

where heaven and earth meet, where I can dwell among them.

So I'll leave them to it. Fine, I'll stay away.

He says they don't want me, and then he sends a prophet to wake

them up so that he can come. Heaven wants reconciliation with

earth far more than earth wants reconciliation with heaven.

God wants to know you far more than you want to know Him.

God loves you far more than you love Him.

He wants to come down far more than you want to go up.

Never doubt His zeal for you, His love for you, His desire to

be with you, and not just you, but those outside the Kingdom.

I'm a Calvinist, I believe in election and preetus all these

things absolutely, but never let that make you think.

God doesn't care about unreached people.

He desires the church to be built.

He desires to be with his people.

His zeal exceeds ours. And that's shattered, I think,

in the the way that it is the prophet, the priest, the king,

whose spirits are stirred up in verse 13.

They take the lead, the Messiahs, and they're a picture

of Jesus. Of course, Jesus, the true

prophet, priest and king, the one great Messiah, He comes to

earth with the purpose of building his church.

We'll see in Haggai. They do get somewhere.

They build a temple. It gets a bit better, but it's

not great. And by the time of Jesus, God's

people are apathetic again. They don't care, but God still

loves them. Nobody asks for Jesus to come,

do they? As the New Testament begins, we

don't find the church on its knees begging for the Messiah.

They're apathetic again. But again God responds in grace

and comes in the person of his Son.

And as the Son comes, he says, he says, actually, my body is

the temple. In John 2.

As he overturns the tables in the temple, he says he'll

destroy the house and rebuild it.

And the disciples look at him and and remember Psalm 69, zeal

for his house will consume him. Jesus full of zeal for the

church, full of zeal for the House of God.

There's no apathy in Christ. So much does he want the Church

to be built that actually he, the true temple, the true

dwelling place of God on earth, will be torn down, will be

destroyed. You may know that the physical

temple was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, but the real temple

of God was destroyed in 33 AD when Jesus was nailed to the

cross. That's when the Romans, and

indeed the Jews and all of us destroyed the real temple of God

as we pinned Him to the cross. But he was there willingly,

knowing that after he'd been destroyed on Good Friday, he'd

be rebuilt, resurrected on Easter Sunday.

The head would rise, as it were, from the grave in order that the

body, the church, might be filled with the Spirit and

brought to life. And so he promises to send his

church and be with them. He rises again to build a

greater body, not just his physical body knit back together

gloriously, that was but the spiritual body of the church.

The church is the temple of the Holy Spirit and amazingly, the

one who has nothing to gain. God doesn't need the church.

He was happy without us, wasn't he?

He didn't need to make the world.

He was perfectly blessed, as Paul calls him before the ages

began. The one who had nothing to gain

is the one with the most zeal to win us back into his house.

We have everything to gain and we're apathetic.

He has nothing to gain and he's full of zeal and love, and that

should stir our hearts. Matthew 16 comes before Matthew

28, doesn't it? It's not an interesting insight.

Matthew 16 comes before Matthew 28.

When you go home this afternoon and someone says, what did the

preacher say? You wouldn't believe this, but

Matthew 28, we know. Go make disciples of all nations

commands comes up at mission conferences all the time.

Go make disciples. But remember 12 chapters

earlier, Jesus said I will build my church.

It's not off you go, I'm going back to heaven.

I've done my bit, Jesus building his church.

But now through you that the people of Haggai start building,

but they don't sit back and say, hey great, the Lord wants a

temple, let's watch him do it miraculously.

Let's see what Gabriel and Michael build.

Nor do they think we'd better go on doing this job because

otherwise God's going to cross with us and he's looking down.

And rather God says through you I will build.

That is how God builds his church.

It is one plan for the nations, but you're on your own.

Not God on his own, but incredibly God through his

people. Go, pray, give.

But ultimately, it is always Christ who is working through

his people, because Christ is full of zeal to see his house

restored. God's desire for you and for the

nations far exceeds our desire for Him.

So in that confidence we go and we build.

Let's pray as we close. Father in Heaven, we pray your

forgiveness for our apathy and ask that in your mercy you would

make us zealous for your Kingdom, zealous for your house,

zealous for your church. Move us, we pray, to be men and

women who know your presence with us and who know at the core

of our being that your mercy is great, your love is everlasting,

and that Your desire for us, incredible though it sounds, far

exceeds ours. For you build your church.

Therefore, we pray in the name of Christ, Amen.