Haggai 2:1-9 ‘God brings glory from the ordinary’

Inner-city Chicago, the 1920s, the YMCA, which was established to provide food, accommodation and help for young men who were in need.  They were doing it in the name of Christ.  The man who greeted them at the door was Horace Peach.  He was the great grandfather of Seth Lewis, who is a Baptist missionary in Cork.

Horace Peach didn’t have to do the door.  He had been offered more prestigious positions in the YMCA.  He could have been in an office making important decisions.  He could have earned more money.  But he wanted to be on that door, the first to welcome those who were seeking help.  After he died, someone explained, ‘the way he talked to you, you felt important.’

In the 1970s, Horace’s son, Robert, worked in the Sears Tower.  At the time that was the tallest building in the world.  Robert was had a prestigious job.  He was top of his profession.  But God remained top of his priorities.  The Inland Revenue audited him, because they couldn’t believe the amount of his income he gave away.  He lived in an ordinary house.  He served faithfully in his church.  He had a welcoming home.

Horace Peach didn’t want to look impressive.  Robert Peach didn’t need to look impressive.  You see both knew that before God we are nothing, and yet we are everything.  We are weak, broken, failing and sinful people.  Yet God delights to accept us as his beloved children, cleansed and made perfect in the blood of Jesus.  He uses weak people like us to bring His message of peace to the world and build His church.

Dream small – from the ordinary God brings His glory!

1.      Don’t worry if we are living in small days (1-3)

It is now 17^th October 520 B.C.  The people have been working on the temple for four weeks.  Again, God speaks to the people through Haggai.  He asks them three questions.  ‘Who is left who saw the former glory?’ ‘How does the temple look now?’ ‘Does it seem like nothing?’

Remember that sixty-six years earlier the Babylonians destroyed the temple.  There were people the still living who could remember that old temple, Solomon’s temple.  What they now saw being built in front was nothing compared to it.  But they are not to be discouraged!  Around this time, another prophet, Zechariah, was told to tell the people not to despise the day of small things (Zech. 4:10).

I want to live in a time when we see loads of people coming to experience peace in Jesus.  Some of you can remember when, in this city, God seemed to be bringing more people to faith than He is now.  But don’t resent the fact that less may be happening today.  Who knows all that God is doing now?  Who knows how what is being done today will impact later generations?  There is not one moment when Jesus is not building His church. 

Don’t worry if we are living in small days, God is still at work.

2.        Don’t worry if you feel weak (4-5)

God calls the people to be strong, and again He promises that He is with them (4).  That is what He promised them when He rescued them from slavery in Egypt (5).  ‘My Spirit remains in your midst.  Fear not!’  They faced the hostility and threat from surrounding nations.  They would face the grumbling and complaining from within their own community.  But they are not to let these discouragements get the better of them. 

I think that God has to tell them to be strong, because they feel weak.  He promises that He is with them, because they doubt His presence.  We don’t need to depend on our own strength.  God is faithful and strong.  In fact, in Haggai, God is referred to as the LORD of hosts (ESV), the LORD Almighty (NIV), or more literally, Yahweh of Armies.  With Him on our side we have nothing to fear!   It was to these people that Zechariah declared, ‘no, not by might, nor even power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty (Zech. 4:6).

‘When we are weak, then we are strong’ (2 Cor. 12:10).  When we realise that we can’t do God’s work in our strength that we begin to pray.  It is then that we listen for God to say, ‘I am with you’.  When we face the fact that our hearts are not by nature loving and forgiving then we depend on the Holy Spirit for the fruit of love, gentleness and self-control.  In one of my favourite scenes from the book of Acts, it was when the church heard of the threats that were being made against them, that they cried out to God and were filled with the Holy Spirit, and they speak about Jesus publicly, and with great courage (Acts 4:31).

Don’t worry if you feel weak, for it is only then that we depend on the Spirit the promises of God!

3.       Don’t worry if you are ordinary (6-9)

This new temple looked pretty ordinary.  The people in their seventies could tell you that it was nothing compared to Solomon’s temple.  But they were not to be discouraged.  In fact, ‘the later glory of this house shall be greater than the former …’ (9).  From this seemingly unimpressive building comes something marvellous.  From the ordinary, God brings about glory.

Five hundred years later, an unimpressive couple would come to the temple to dedicate their baby—but they could only afford the offering of the poor (Luke 2:24).  That child grew up to be a man who had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him (Is. 53:2).  He was not educated by the finest teachers of the day.  He owned no home (Luke 9:58).  He associated with the wrong people (Matthew 11:19).  He had no wife or children.  So many things that are at the centre of our ambitions just didn’t matter to Him!  As a thirty-year old he was condemned, mocked, spat at and hung naked on a cross.  Nothing could be more shameful in that culture.  Nothing could be weaker.  Yet Jesus’ death brought us life, we are called to boast in His death (Gal. 6:14).

Paul asks us to, ‘think of what you were when you were called.  Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many of you were influential … But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong … so that no one may boast before him (1 Corinthians 1:26-29).  We are stones in the temple God is building (1 Peter 2:5).  God brings beauty from the ashes (Is. 61:3).

I am not sure how this prophecy came about in the day of Haggai.  But follow the direction in which it points.  The temple was finished five years later.  That temple pointed to Jesus, in whom God dwells among us (John 1:14).  Jesus is taking ordinary people and dwelling among us.  Then one day there will be a glory we can not even imagine.  ‘And I saw no temple in the city, for the temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb … by its light the nations will walk and the kings of the earth will bring their glory in’ (Rev. 21:22-24).

‘And in this place I will give peace,’ declares the LORD Almighty (9).

People are not by nature at peace with God.  That is why there were all those sacrifices in the temple.  At the temple an animal died in the place of the people, to teach them that our guilt deserves death, and that God would provide a substitute to die in our place.  But, as the author of the book of Hebrews points out, ‘it is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin’ (Heb.12:4).  Those sacrifices pointed to the prince of peace, whose death on a cross is the Bible’s very definition of love, so that we the guilty ones would never be condemned.  Is that peace something you know?

Conclusion

The temple looked unimpressive.  But from this would come greater glory, than they had seen before.

Sometimes God uses celebrity pastors and mega-churches to build His church.  They get all the attention.  But don’t be followed.  Jesus is building His church every day, and He almost always uses, ordinary people, who humble themselves in prayer, who depend on the Holy Spirit to change them and are not ashamed to talk about a condemned man hanging on a cross.  Fear not, God is with us!

In the 1970s, in the Soviet Union, an old Russian woman aged ninety became seriously ill.  But she didn’t feel her work on earth was complete.  So, she asked her grandson – a Baptist pastor – to pray for her healing.  He prayed and anointed her with oil, and she was healed quite suddenly and miraculously.  The doctor had actually left the house the night before saying that the old lady would not last two more days.

Some years later, she became seriously ill again.  She called her grandson.  But this time she said, ‘today, I go home.  Do not pray.’  She died a few hours later, leaving behind a prayer list of five hundred people, she prayed for every day by name.

Who knows what God did in response to that ordinary, humble woman’s prayers.  That is what I mean dreaming small, and embracing being ordinary.  That is how God brings greater glory out of something that does not look splendid!