Well, good morning. Greetings from Christchurch
Central in England. It is an honour to be with you
and I confess somewhat overwhelming experience this
morning. The first time I ever came to
the States, I got off the plane and went to Chick-fil-A.
The lady there asked me for an extra dime.
I didn't know what a dime was. We started talking.
We uncovered the fact that I come from England, not America.
We chatted a little further. At the end of the conversation
she said to me, can I just say you speak very good English for
a foreigner? So my apology in advance is I'm
aware I do not speak your language.
I hope I will try and speak slowly and clearly in an attempt
to cross cultures. Let me start with a Kennedy.
A story about President Kennedy. You may have heard it visiting
NASA. Walking down one of the
corridors, he came across a man and he didn't realize the man
was just a janitor. He cleaned the bathrooms, swept
the floors, and President Kennedy said to the man, what is
it you do here? The man said.
Mr. President, I'm here to help put a man on the moon.
There is a man with what we would see as a small and
insignificant job, a man whose name is lost to history, but a
man who could connect his life to a greater purpose.
If PCPC is anything like Christchurch, central Leeds, in
many ways it is not, but in crucial ways it will be.
Then like us in the UK, there will be times when your life
does not seem connected to any great purpose, where the
day-to-day tasks that consume your emotions, your heart, your
mind, your money, your time seem incoherent.
They lack connection. And I I hope what the Lord will
do for us this morning through this book of Haggai is sell us
again, set before us a vision for what he is doing, the story
that he is telling, and see how our lives connect into that
story, even in small, seemingly insignificant ways.
To give us a purpose but also a power.
So that missionary work might not be just for those carrying
flags, but for all God's people. The book of Haggai is not a well
known corner of the Bible. So let me just orientate us
briefly. We're at the end of the story of
the Old Testament. God's people have returned from
exile, but the temple lies in ruins.
The temple, you remember, is God's dwelling place on earth.
And if you'd been here yesterday for chapter 1, you would have
seen that through Haggai, the Lord called his people to get
back to the work of building his temple.
They'd actually been back in the land for 1617 years, but they'd
grown apathetic. They weren't anti God, anti
gospel, anti Kingdom, anti temple.
But there were other priorities. They'd poured all their wealth,
all their time, all their energy into building their own houses
and neglected God's house. But by the end of chapter 1, the
Lord had revived them and they were working again.
And yet, as we start chapter 2, we see another problem, verse
three. Who is left among you who saw
the house? The house is the temple.
Who saw it in its former glory? How do you see it now?
Is it not as nothing in your eyes that is the problem for
God's people? Those who remembered what the
temple used to be like in its former glory saw the current
work, and it seemed like nothing.
Those who remembered the prophecies during exile, you'll
have read them, you've heard them preached.
The desert will bloom when you return Ezekiel's prophecy that
the the temple will will be a thing beyond human imagining
that the Spirit will flow to the nations and then they see a few
holes in the ground, a foot or two of walls, a work of God that
seems powerless and purposeless. And so they begin to give up
hope that the prophecy is dated. Did you notice that we're given
a very specific day in verse, one that is unusual for the
prophets. We don't often have the ability
to to pin their prophecy to a particular day.
But Haggai, his name means feasts, my feasts, as in the
celebrations of Israel. And he's preaching here on the
last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, sometimes called
the Feast of Booths. He's preaching on the very day
that Solomon's temple was opened, as it were, when the
glory cloud fell and the people bowed in awe.
And yet now they see a building site as you look around in many
ways, I mean, this morning has been incredible, hasn't it?
I, I, honestly, I've seen nothing like it, heard nothing
like it, the music. And yet, and yet, we know just a
fraction of Dallas are worshipping the Lord this
morning. And that fraction in Dallas is
probably quite large compared to the fractions of the world who
are gathering on the Lord's Day to worship.
It can seem like God's work is not prospering.
I read this week there are now more people identifying as
witches in America than Presbyterians.
That's striking. In my own city, back in Leeds,
one of the largest cities in England, a generous guess is
that 0.7% of people go to church once a month.
That's England, the supposedly Christian nation.
Where is the Lord? What is going on?
Where is the power? Of course, our role is not to
build a physical temple, either in Jerusalem or Dallas or Leeds.
But as the commands of Haggai come to us, they come through
Christ, who sends us out to build the temple of the Holy
Spirit, the church. So in many ways, as Haggai
instructs his people to put their hands to the plow, to pick
up trowel and build a temple, he is saying to us, take the gospel
out, work for the growing of the church, the building of the
Kingdom. And he gives us 2 promises this
morning. First of all, the promise of the
power of God. Be strong.
Verse 4, be strong, but it's not just be strong out there on your
own. Rather, verse 5, my Spirit
remains in your midst. Fear not, you might feel weak,
but my spirit is at work in you. The Lord doesn't send us to work
for Him while He stays off stage to await the results.
Rather, He pours his Spirit into His people to empower them to
build. I've said already that this
prophecy in verse one is dated to the last day of the Feast of
Tabernacles. On that day, Haggai, or rather
the Lord through Haggai, says to God's people, work for me, build
for me, for my spirit is in you. Why did they need telling?
Surely if the Spirit was in them, they'd know already.
They wouldn't need reminding. But the reality is that it's not
always the case for God's people.
We need the Word of God to remind us of the power of God,
even the presence of God. It is the Word that comforts and
strengthens us when we begin to doubt and fear that we are on
our own. Some of you will feel this
morning, or rather worry this morning, that perhaps the Holy
Spirit does not dwell in you, and the cause of those fears is
that your feelings aren't strong enough.
We'll take comfort that on the very same day that Haggai
preached to God's people in ancient Israel, on that very
same day, centuries later, another man came to preach in
John 7. Again, we're given a specific
date, John 737, On the last day of the feast, which is the same
feast that Haggai was preaching in the Feast of Booths, the
great day, Jesus stood up and cried out.
If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.
Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, out of his
heart will flow living waters. And in case we've missed the
point, John then explains. Now this he said about the
Spirit whom those who believed in Him were to receive.
If you put your trust in Christ, you have received the Spirit.
He is in you to empower you. I think it's an incredible thing
that the dates match exactly Haggai's promise.
Build the temple because God's Spirit is within you.
Centuries later, Jesus Christ, the same day, the same feast,
the same festival, Believe in me and the Spirit will be poured
upon you. So believe the Spirit is in you.
Never fear that you are too sinful, too weak, too fallen.
But you've stumbled too many times for the Lord to use you in
building His Kingdom. The Holy Spirit will dwell in
the dustiest of hearts. Your body is a temple of the
Holy Spirit. Your body may be decaying.
It may be a mess physically, and you may be also aware of the
dirt spiritually that dwells within you still.
And yet in His grace the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in us.
There is no less grace and love and mercy in the Spirit than in
the Father or the Son, and He Stoops to dwell in people like
you and me. Believe God's Spirit, He is in
you, and believe therefore that you can do what you thought you
couldn't do. There's a British writer, a
British scholar, who writes on this passage and says this
despondency says I can't, therefore I won't.
The obedience of faith says I can't, but he can and so I will.
That is what the Lord is saying to us through Haggai.
In whatever ways He's calling you to be a part of the building
of His church, be it praying, be it giving, be it going.
Never believe that you have no power to make a difference.
He builds through you. You may say I can't, and He says
you're right on your own. You can't, but He can, and
therefore we obey. We have power, but we also have
purpose. In verses 6 through nine of our
passage, we're given the purpose of God.
Verse 6. For thus says the Lord of hosts.
Yet once more, in a little while I will shake the heavens and the
earth, the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all nations.
So the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill
this house with glory, says the Lord of hosts.
Work is the great command. Verse 4.
Work to build. Go make disciples of all
nations. Why?
Verse 6? Because 4.
For this reason. This is why I'm commanding you
to build. This is why I've given you the
Spirit, because this is going somewhere.
God gives his people in Haggai's day a vision of the future.
He says he's going to shake the world.
And this temple is not just going to be for a few Israelites
in Jerusalem, but for all nations.
I have young children and my youngest likes to play with
sand. And England is always cold.
So we, we bring the sand inside and we, we lay a rug out on the
floor and she sits in the, the middle and she plays with her
sand. And at the end we, we, we tidy
her away, little Iona off the rug.
And then my wife and I will grab the four corners of the rug and
lift it up and shake it and pour the sand back into the box.
God says, I'm going to pick the world up like that rug and shake
it one day and the nations will scream in.
He wants a Church of all tribes, all tongues, all people, and
there will be great glory. The end of the Bible is greater
than the beginning. In fact, this very feast that
Haggai is preaching on, the Feast of Tabernacles, was always
meant to teach God's people. In the Old Testament there was
something greater to come. Two elements of the feast
pointed to that. The first was that this Feast of
Tabernacles, of booths, they had to go and live in the kind of
tents they dwelt in during the Exodus.
And you might think, well, why it's like every, I don't know my
American history dates actually, so let me just not give a date,
but every summer ish when you guys celebrate throwing off the
king. See, we don't study this in our
history lesson, so I can't do the dates every every summer you
serve. It's as if every summer you you
go and get back on a ship and, and lob a load of tea in the
harbour. So recreating what happened
before or you're going to get back on the Mayflower and why
that that that year is over. But nose is God.
This is not just to remind you how I saved you, but also to
remind you that you're not at the end of the journey.
The Old Testament is not the end of the story.
I'm building a temple far greater during that festival. 2
is a second sign that things were meant to be greater.
There was an elaborate series of sacrifices day after day after
day. You can read them in the Book of
Numbers, but if you add up the number of bulls sacrificed, it
comes to 70. Why?
Because 70 in the Bible is the number of the nations.
Right from the book of Genesis with the around the time of the
flood, God sends out 70 nations. That's why Jesus sends out 70
disciples. It is a picture of the nations.
In other words, the sacrifice is meant to be for all nations, not
just one nation. God is saying to his people,
build, rebuild Haggai in your day, rebuild this little small
insignificant looking temple because I promise you it is
connected to a greater goal. God is saying to us this
morning, your life in some way is connected to a great end
goal. The great end goal of the temple
of God that finishes the Book of Revelation.
The temple that fills the whole earth, where every tribe and
tongue and nation is there, where there's no more sin or
suffering, no more death, no more mourning, where we see the
Lord Jesus face to face. Somehow your work is connected
to that end. I don't know how, but it is.
There's an old story in England of three men and each of them
are laying bricks. They're doing the same job.
And as the noble walks past, he asked the first, what are you
doing? And the man says, I'm laying
bricks. He says to the second man, what
are you doing? And the man says, I'm building a
wall. He says to the third man, what
are you doing? And he says, I'm building a
cathedral for the glory of God. He sees the big picture.
As you disciple your kids around the kitchen table, as you turn
up to the missionary prayer meeting, as you increase your
standing order, or whatever it may be seemingly so significant,
tie it to the end goal. God is achieving that end
through your small acts of service.
That is how he builds In Haggai, too.
You will see that the action begins, or rather the commands
are addressed, first of all to Zerubbabel, who's the king, to
Jehovahadak who's the priest, And they come through Haggai,
who's the prophet. 3 anointed offices, prophet, priest and
king. They are, as it were, the
messiahs of the Old Testament. Nothing looked powerful or
spectacular, and yet God was changing the world through them.
And of course they point us forward to the Lord Jesus.
What would you have seen? What would you have seen with
your eyes when the Lord God Almighty decided to change
eternity? You would have seen a small, not
particularly good looking Jewish man walking the streets of
Jerusalem. Nothing spectacular in the
moment where God rescued millions upon millions from the
flames of hell to the glories of heaven.
What would you have seen? You'd have seen a man upon a
cross. You'd have seen three men on
crosses. You'd have seen, frankly, A
mangled corpse of a man nailed, bleeding, choking to death.
It would have looked as of nothing.
And yet there was the temple of the Holy Spirit.
Remember, that's how Jesus describes himself.
He is the true temple, His body, because he was God dwelling on
earth. And that temple was destroyed on
the cross. Why?
Out of love for you and love for the nations.
In order that He might rise again on the third day, pour out
His Spirit on the body, and the disciples might be made to the
ends of the earth. His desire to build His church
far exceeds our desire to build for Him.
His love for you far exceed yours for Him.
And even the way Christ saved and began to build that church
in its atoning death on the cross looked weak.
To the eyes of this world it looked as of nothing, and yet
all the power of God was at work to transform eternity in Him.
All your sins forgiven in Him, your eternity secure in Him the
gift of the Spirit, and in Him to that call not to be passive,
but to work. First four, be strong.
OPCPC declares the Lord be strong, PCA be strong, Dallas,
be strong brothers and sisters this morning, for I am with you.
My Spirit remains in your midst. Work, work to that great end
goal of the renewed heavens and earth.
What is it specifically? The Lord this morning is calling
you to do in that great task? You are called not to put men on
the moon, but you are called to put men and women and children
into glory. And the Lord has equipped you
for that task, and He's got ahead of you in that task.
And he's even walked the path that you will walk, a path of
seeming weakness, despised by the world, and yet to the eyes
of faith, transformative of eternity.
PCPC, in his power, brothers and sisters, in his power, go and
build and connect your story to the great story that God is
telling, the story that ends in everlasting glory, everlasting
peace, and everlasting joy. Let's pray.
Our Father in heaven, forgive us our lack of faith.
Forgive us those times we have doubted the work of your spirit
within us. Forgive us the times we've lived
incoherent lives, seemingly detached from the great story
you are telling, the great building project you have
embarked upon. But we asked this morning that
you would show us where it is that you want us to work for
your glory, for the building of your Kingdom.
Use us, we pray. Our time, our money, our gifts.
Use all that we are to see the Kingdom built.
We pray that for Dallas, for Texas, for the USA, for the
United Kingdom, for every nation on the face of this earth, but
we ask in the name of Jesus, Amen.