From Apathy to Zeal | Haggai 1:1-11 | Jonty Rhodes

Let me pray and then we'll turn our attention

to Haggai 1. Our Father, all good gifts come

from above and so we pray in your kindness you

would give us a good gift now of your spirit

in order that through him we might see your son,

that we might know more of his grace, more of

the faith and hope to which we're called. And

for this we pray with more zeal in the building

of your kingdom wherever our callings take us.

And this we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. I want

to suggest to you this morning that one of the

seven deadly sins has gone missing. One of the

seven deadly sins has gone missing and Haggai

has found it. Now I realise the seven deadly

sins are probably not quite where you might expect

a kind of reformed Presbyterian pastor to begin.

I realise they're not a strictly biblical concept

and yet there's much wisdom in them. There's

much wisdom in them. Pretty early on in the church's

history in the fourth century. There's a man

called Evagrius. And it was he who first came

up with a list. He had eight, in fact. And one

of them, one of Evagrius' list has more or less

disappeared from our kind of Christian vocab

in a way that the others, lust and gluttony and

pride, have survived. Evagrius noticed, particularly

when he walked among the desert fathers, those

strange characters who went out into the desert,

lived in cells and devoted their lives to reading

and meditating on scripture to prayer. He noticed

there was a particular demon that plagued him.

He became known after a while as the Noonday

Demon, because the middle of the day was a time

when this demon particularly struck. The Noonday

Demon was known as Acadia, or sometimes called

Acedia. It literally means lack of care. Down

the centuries, it turned into sloth. We now speak

of sloth, but that's not how it began. Acedia

struck these desert fathers when they were trying

in the morning to wake up and turn straight away

to prayer and meditation, and yet almost instantly

beginning to get distracted. So Vagris writes

about them being able to think about more or

less anything apart from the scriptures they've

just read. They'd get to the end of a section

and already the words had gone. They turned to

pray and they could think about anything except

what they were trying to pray about. And it's

almost comical if you read him. He describes

how they would look out the window in the hope

that someone might walk past their cells so they

could have a chat. He describes them dreaming

of where else they might be doing ministry. He

talks about them longing, if only I could be

doing a funeral, anything would be more interesting

than this. It's not that monks were lazy. That's

what sloth brings to mind, isn't it? It's not

quite laziness as apathy. A kind of spiritual

weariness. Spiritual weariness, apathy, acedia,

acadia, can strike even the busiest of people.

And that takes us, I think, to the world of Haggai

1. In this gathering, particularly given our

time constraints, I don't want to spend too much

time this morning on the context and the cast,

but just very briefly, so we're somewhere in

the right zone. We're there, verse 1, in the

second year of King Darius. It's actually 520

BC. So Haggai usually dates his prophecies very

specifically. That's the 29th of August, 520

BC. And God's people have returned from exile.

Remember the great commission of the Old Testament

at the end of the book of 2 Chronicles, where

in that great edict of return, the Jewish people

are sent back to rebuild the temple. That's extraordinary

language, actually. Very reminiscent of the end

of Matthew's Gospel. As the exiles return to

Jerusalem, what are they told to do? Well, here's

the words of King Cyrus, king of Persia. The

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

kings of the earth. And he's appointed me to

build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah.

Any of his people among you may go up and may

the Lord their God be with them. See the echoes

of the Great Commission? The Lord, the God of

heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the

earth. All authority in heaven and earth has

been given to me, Sir Jesus, centuries later.

Because I have this authority, what is Cyrus

sending the people to do? Go and build the temple.

What does Jesus send his disciples to do? Go

and build the church. Go and make disciples of

all nations. Go and build the temple of the Holy

Spirit. And even the promise. Or at least the

blessing. May the Lord their God be with him.

It turns into a promise with the Lord Jesus.

And I will be with you to the end of the age.

Those words should have been ringing in the ears

of the exiles as they returned home. But actually,

as the book of Haggai begins, we're maybe 16

or so years later. And although they've laid

the foundations, they've quit the job. They've

quit the job. And so we get the charge in verses

two through four. This is what the Lord Almighty

says. These people say the time has not yet come

to rebuild the Lord's house. Not yet, they say.

The Lord's house is the temple, obviously. We're

not ready yet to put our hands to the plough

and build his house. What have they been doing?

Verse three, the word of the Lord came through

the prophet Haggai. Is it a time for you yourselves

to be living in your paneled houses while this

house remains? 16 years or so of not laziness,

but apathy. They have been busy, haven't they?

The people of Haggai's day. They've been busy

building. They've been working hard. They've

been in many ways a success. They're living in

paneled houses. Almost every time that word comes

elsewhere in the Old Testament, it's used to

describe the temple, the building that Solomon

constructed. It's almost as if they built their

own temples and poured heart, soul, sweat into

that, but neglected the one temple that God called

them to build. Lazy? No. Apathetic? At least

to the things of God, yes. Underneath, Haggai

diagnoses their problem. Verse 7 and 8. This

is what the Lord Almighty says, give careful

thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains

and bring down timber and build my house so that

I may take pleasure in it and be honoured. Kind

of reverse engineer that verse a little bit.

What's it telling us? I mean, there's a command,

go get the timber, get building again, that's

obvious. But why haven't they been building?

Well, because they haven't been concerned, verse

8. with the glory of God and the pleasure of

God. But the whole point of building the temple

was it was meant to bring pleasure to God and

honour or glory to him. These things clearly

haven't been high up the priority list of God's

people. Not lazy, but apathetic, spiritually,

listless. There are a few ways to ruin a garden,

aren't there? I'm no gardener. And I think I've

probably done both ways of ruining the garden.

As a kid, I remember playing football with my...

sort of buddies over the road, constantly getting

told off by the neighbor for kicking football

into the daffodils. You can ruin a garden by

trampling all over the flowers. And actually

as an adult, I don't do that. I've not trashed

my own garden by running outside when my wife's

not looking and kind of shredding the roses and

skipping through the tulips. The way I ruin my

garden nowadays is just by ignoring it. Letting

the weeds grow, not mowing the lawn, leaving

it be. It's that problem that is infected. Haggai's

contemporaries. They're not anti -God. Haggai

is not a prophet like Jeremiah who has to rail

against idolatry. He's not like Hosea who has

to call out sexual immorality. Haggai's not like

Amos who has to put his finger on social injustice

in the nations around and even in God's own people.

Rather, Haggai looks at God's people and just

sees a kind of meh. Who cares? I've got things

to do. It's not high -handed rebellion, is it?

Verse two, it's not, we will not rebuild the

Lord's house, but not yet. Not yet. One of the

very few talks I can remember as a teenager,

to be able to go to Christian meetings, was part

of one talk I can remember. A little illustration,

obviously apocryphal, of... Three junior demons

at Temptor's College got a screw tape situation.

And the senior devil says, right, you're each

going out from here soon. You're graduating.

What are your plans? So the first devil puts

his hand up. The little junior demon puts his

hand up and says, well, I'm going to go and tell

my patient that there is no God. And the instructor

says, useless, useless. Deep down, everyone knows

there's a God. Fail. The second one says, well,

I'm going to tell my patient that there is no

hope. And the instructor says, well, it's better,

but still not great. The third devil puts his

hand up and says, I'm going to say there's no

hurry. Brilliant, says the senior devil, top

of the class. There's no hurry. There's no urgency.

Not yet. Not now. They're busy, but building

the wrong thing. If you've got children or maybe

just a grown up child and you're into Lego. My

kids are obsessed with Lego. There's a lot of

Lego masters in there, the TV show. You've seen

this bit like Bake Off, but with Lego. So the

beginning of every program, a challenge to say

you've got to build maybe an underwater scene

or a space station, whatever it may be. And over

the course of the next ridiculous number of hours,

10, 12 hours, whatever they get, the different

contestants construct these models. How do you

fail at Lego masters? You can fail just by building

a rubbish model. You could also fail by building

a brilliant model of the wrong thing. If the

judges asked for a Western scape and you build

a seaside scene, however brilliant it is, you

wasted your time and you will fall short. Of

course, people in Haggai have built busily, but

they're apathetic to the things of God. We're

going to minister very lightly to busy people.

Well, the two most common answers, whenever you

ask people, how are you doing? Two answers come

back so quickly. Either tired or I'm busy. Almost

always, isn't it? I'm tired or I'm busy. And

in some way, that's just kind of English, British

social discourse. That's fine. You don't have

to pick it all up. But we will minister to busy

people. We will be busy people. Part of our challenge

is to encourage people to be busy about the right

things. And not neglect. A concern, or rather

not to suppress, not to lose, that underlying

motivation for the honour of God and the pleasure

of God as his church is built. I think the strange

thing is that even ministry can do that to us.

Even ministry can do that to us. We can become

incredibly busy. We can be very hard working

at building ministries and yet have lost that

underlying desire to see God on earth. and to

bring in pleasure. There are many critiques of

modern ministry, aren't there? And sometimes

it feels like anybody feels like it can kind

of put their boot into ministers with soft targets

you can't strike back. But think of how the pastor's

study has become an office. Think of how much

easier you find it to answer emails than to pray.

Even ministry, building a slick ministry, putting

together a good CV, keeping the whole show on

the road, can slowly dull our appetite for seeing

God honoured and seeing God glorified. There

can be activity and busyness yet without the

Lord. Spiritual apathy, lack of zeal, infects

pastors and youth workers and missionaries as

much as it does congregation members. One of

the signs that very likely the Lord gives in

his kindness is a lack of fruit, a lack of watering.

Now, clearly, we're in the days of the old covenant.

And so for them, it's very literal. Verse six.

Keep careful thought your ways. Examine yourselves.

You planted much, but harvested little. You eat,

but never have enough. You drink, but never have

your fill. You put on clothes, but you're not

warm. You earn wages only to put them in a purse

with holes in it. Red Fed exhausted me earlier,

didn't we? Some of the laying out of the old

covenant, the Mosaic covenant. The blessings

are not coming in part because of Israel's unfaithfulness.

Verse 10. Therefore, because of you, the heavens

have withheld the dew and the earth its crops.

I call for a drought on the fields, the mountains,

on the gray, the new wine, the produce, on people

and livestock, on all the labor of your hands.

I don't need to tell you that they're under a

different covenant era, that things don't work

as literally with crops and grain and all the

rest. But a kind of dryness, a lack of fruit,

a lack of refreshing from heaven often comes

on the back of this acedia, this spiritual apathy.

And so how does the Lord use Haggai to change

them? How does he move them from A to Z, as it

were, from apathy to zeal? If you know the story

of Haggai, by the end of the book, they are building

again. The project gets back on the road. It

probably doesn't surprise you that part of the

reason for picking this passage this morning

is I've been thinking about Haggai a little bit

recently. I can't say it's totally fresh material,

I'm afraid, prepared for Oak Hill Chapel. But

one of the things I noticed in trying to do a

bit of work on Haggai is that I've got the impression

that people preach Haggai. in one of three, or

often three situations, A, B, C, or I started

to think there was A, B, C, let me skip A straight

to B, building project. You've got a building

project on, okay? And perhaps your congregation

are wealthy and you really want to go for it.

Okay, we need money. I've seen the hot tub on

your back lawn. Yeah, I've seen the nice carpet.

Give, give, give, give, give. When I was a curate,

my boss told me about his time actually as a

curate. And he said the vicar had sat at the

table in the PCC meeting and said, we need to

refurbish the church. And a congregation member

had said, oh, we're putting new carpets down

in our house. You can have the old ones. And

the vicar had said, oh, you're putting new carpets

down. Tell you what, you keep the old ones, we'll

have the new ones. Punchy. Not recommended, by

the way. Building projects. But you know, as

well as I do, that Haggai does not call us directly

to build physical buildings. That's the B, the

C. Crusades. Evangelistic crusades. It's getting

closer to the truth, isn't it? We build the church

as we do evangelism. We preach the gospel. Billy

Graham's in town and you want to whip everybody

up. Put your hands together. Come on, serve.

Put church higher up your priority list. It's

getting closer. I'm sure we're not totally sure

we're there. What about the A? I think sometimes

ministers preach Haggai when they're just angry,

just fed up with congregation. Come on, I've

asked for volunteers for the youth work and we

haven't got any. I've been preaching my guts

out and nothing. Why are you never inviting people

to Christianity Explored? Why is church half

empty on a Sunday? And Haggai becomes a book,

a useful tool for lashing the congregation. And

of course there is a call to repent in Haggai.

We don't want to avoid that. But Haggai 1 is

not just command. not just commands. And Haggai

1 is not just a story of apathy, is it? Haggai

1 is as full of zeal as it is apathy. The apathy

sits with God's people, but the zeal sits with

the Lord. The zeal sits with the Lord. If you

step back and say, what is it that God wants

building? He wants the temple building. What

is the temple? The temple, of course, is the

meeting place between heaven and earth. It is

a place where God and his people will meet. It

is a place where he will be able to gather his

people and they will be able to worship him.

Who desires that temple most in Haggai's one?

Not the people, but God. Heaven's desire to come

to earth far exceeds earth's desire to ascend

to heaven. And that's where we start seeing grace

in Haggai, isn't it? God desires to come down

and meet with this apathetic people. He could

have said to them, look, I've called you back

from exile. You've had this huge warning. I've

got you freed. You started and now yet again

you've turned your back on me and so I'm going

to leave you. But he doesn't. He calls them back

again. Why? Because he wants to dwell with them.

His desire for them far exceeds their desire.

For him. It's bizarre, isn't it? The one who

has nothing to gain has all the zeal. And the

ones who have everything to lose have sort of

apathy. But thank God it's that way around. God

is full of zeal to come and meet with his people.

We know how the story goes on. The temple is

built and it's no great shakes. And by the time

the Lord Jesus comes. God's people is every bit

as apathetic as ever they were in the days of

Haggai. And yet God's zeal remains, doesn't it?

The father's zeal to meet with his people, the

father's zeal for heaven and earth to be reunited

is shown in his sending of his son to earth.

The Holy Spirit's zeal to fill a people is seen

as he prepares a better temple, a true temple,

prepares. the body, the flesh of the Lord Jesus

in the womb of Mary, in order that there might

be a true, holy dwelling place on earth for God.

And God, the son of the Lord Jesus, his zeal

is shown, his passion for his people is shown

as he descends from on high and tabernacles among

us, dwells among us, as he assumes that flesh

to himself. Haggai is a Christmas reading. It's

not quite as out of place as it might be. Haggai

points us to the great temple. On it, the Lord

Jesus. Appropriately, Haggai's name means something

like my feast. If you were to read through the

rest of the book, there's all sorts of kind of

interesting crossovers with the feasts of the

Old Testament. Haggai speaks of Christmas. And

of course, Christmas, as ever, leads to Easter.

Even when the true temple comes, the holy temple

of the Lord Jesus himself, what do we do? We're

not just apathetic. But we destroy the temple.

Nebuchadnezzar destroyed one temple. The Romans

destroyed another temple in 70 AD. But all of

humanity gathers together in 33 AD to destroy

the real temple. It wasn't the nails and hammers

of the Romans in 70 AD, but the nails and hammer

of the centurion in 33 AD that tries to destroy

the real temple. Or it's apathy, but hatred.

And yet God's zeal to meet with his people continues.

The Lord Jesus, knowing what will happen, perseveres,

lays down his life. The temple is destroyed,

but yet built up again and built up again in

order that it might become far greater, in order

that the temple might be not simply his earthly

physical body, but might be the temple that stretches

to the ends of the earth, the temple of the Holy

Spirit, the church of all nations. And so. The

commands of Haggai 1 come to us, not as simply

go build the church, brute commands from heaven,

nor just a kind of, hey, sit back, I've got this,

but rather a promise of the Lord Jesus that I

will build through you. Matthew 16 comes before

Matthew 28, doesn't it? There's an insight for

you. Matthew 16 comes before Matthew 28. Matthew

28, we know, go make disciples of all nations,

but Matthew 16, I will build my church. And the

gates of Hades will not overcome it. Not go build

it for me. I will build. Now, he'll do it through

his church. But it's always the Lord Jesus who

is active in mission, in building, in any kind

of strengthening of the great structure that

is his church. God desires to be with his people.

If you want to move yourself from apathy to zeal,

if you want to spur your congregations and youth

groups and families. from apathy to zeal, then

we need to see his zeal every bit as much as

we need to hear his rebuke. Rebuke without the

passion, without the love, is just going to strike

fear. But when we see it in the context of his

overwhelming desire to descend, to dwell with

us, to call us to himself, we remember that this

is Yahweh, the Lord of hosts, the one who needs

nothing from us and can gain nothing from us.

And we know that... All he's doing ultimately

is giving. Yes, the glory is his. But it's not

an actual gain for God, is it? He is the blessed

God. He needs nothing from us, can gain nothing

from us. Who can give to God? The glory, the

praise, the honour is his, but the gain is all

ours. And so however hard your temple building

work is at the moment, ultimately, even the difficult

tasks are for your good. They're part of his

gift to you. And the reason he's called you to

it is because he knows and he desires to spend

eternity with you and with the people you serve

in order that it might be a blessed temple stretching

from east to west, north to south, with every

nation bowing before the Lord Jesus. Let's pray.

Father in heaven, we confess that very quickly

we move from zeal to apathy. It can't honestly

be said of us that zeal for your house consumed

us. Forgive us our sins, we pray. And we praise

you that we're saved, not by our zeal for you,

but by yours for us. So our hearts, this Christmas

again, we pray with the joy and wonder of seeing

the Lord Jesus coming to tabernacle among us.

And we pray that that love might drive us with

joy to call others to join this great temple

project. and to motivate those who are already

a part of your kingdom to work with ever more

zeal and to see your temple built and the nations

reached. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen.