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Sep 12, 2021

Build Up

Build Up

Passage: Haggai 1:1-15

Speaker: Patrick Lafferty

Series: Rebuild - Haggai

Keywords: rebuild, glorified, consider, declare, stirred, worked

This season may be the closest thing most of us will ever know about what exile feels like: Life interrupted, a feeling of disorientation and dislocation, separated, if not from place, not a little from peace. To whatever extent we hold--tenuously--to the idea of recovering our world, what would it look like to emerge from exile and begin again? Haggai was roused to speak pointedly when Israel began to give up on the prospect, and the work of recovering what had been lost. But that word is also full of grace.

Readings & Scripture

PREPARATION: Psalm 71:17-23
LEADER: O God, from my youth you have taught me,
and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds.
18 So even to old age and gray hairs,
O God, do not forsake me,
until I proclaim your might to another generation,
your power to all those to come.
19 Your righteousness, O God,
reaches the high heavens.
You who have done great things,
O God, who is like you?
20 You who have made me see many troubles and calamities
will revive me again;
from the depths of the earth
you will bring me up again.
21 You will increase my greatness
and comfort me again.

ALL: I will also praise you with the harp
for your faithfulness, O my God;
I will sing praises to you with the lyre,
O Holy One of Israel.
23 My lips will shout for joy,
when I sing praises to you;
my soul also, which you have redeemed.

CENTRAL TEXT: Haggai 1:1-15
Hag. 1:1 In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest: 2 “Thus says the LORD of hosts: These people say the time has not yet come to rebuild the house of the LORD.” 3 Then the word of the LORD came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, 4 “Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, while this house lies in ruins? 5 Now, therefore, thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. 6 You have sown much, and harvested little. You eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill. You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.

Hag. 1:7 “Thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider your ways. 8 Go up to the hills and bring wood and build the house, that I may take pleasure in it and that I may be glorified, says the LORD. 9 You looked for much, and behold, it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away. Why? declares the LORD of hosts. Because of my house that lies in ruins, while each of you busies himself with his own house. 10 Therefore the heavens above you have withheld the dew, and the earth has withheld its produce. 11 And I have called for a drought on the land and the hills, on the grain, the new wine, the oil, on what the ground brings forth, on man and beast, and on all their labors.”

Hag. 1:12 Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the LORD their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet, as the LORD their God had sent him. And the people feared the LORD. 13 Then Haggai, the messenger of the LORD, spoke to the people with the LORD’S message, “I am with you, declares the LORD.” 14 And the LORD stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua the son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the people. And they came and worked on the house of the LORD of hosts, their God, 15 on the twenty-fourth day of the month, in the sixth month, in the second year of Darius the king.

BENEDICTION: Based on 1 Peter 2:9-10, 24-25
LEADER: You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

ALL: 24 He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds we have been healed. 25 For we were straying like sheep, but have now returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of our souls.

LEADER: The healing mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

ALL: And also with you.

Related SCRIPTURES:

  • Ezra 1-6 (read for background!)
  • Acts 9:31
  • Acts 20:23
  • Romans 15:2
  • 1 Corinthians 8:1
  • 1 Corinthians 14:26
  • 2 Corinthians 10:8
  • 1 Thessalonians 5:11
  • Ephesians 4:12-16, 29
  • Colossians 2:7
  • 1 Peter 2:9
  • Jude 20

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Ever been part of a rebuild project of any sort--whether a physical building, an organization, or something else? What was it? What was it like?
  2. Make sure you get your bearings in the passage. Have a look at Ezra 1-6 for background. What were all the reasons Israel had to cease the rebuilding program? Why might they have had a lasting effect on Israel even after they’d been resolved?
  3. What’s at the root of the Lord’s complaint through Haggai?
  4. What does Haggai argue Israel has experienced as a result of its present condition?
  5. How does Israel, under the leadership of Zerubabbel and Joshua, respond?
  6. What does the New Testament mean by building up the church (or the church being built up)? Who’s involved in that? In what ways?
  7. What has Jesus done to build the church? What does Jesus supply to build it up? 
  8. What might be one needed way to build up the church at this present moment--perhaps a way not explicitly stated in what the New Testament outlines?

QUOTES:

  • Wherever there is prophecy, there is deafness.... John Webster

 

  • I am sick with wanting
    And it's evil and it's daunting
    How I let everything I cherish lay to waste
    I am lost in greed, this time it's definitely me
    I point fingers but there's no one there to blame
    I need for something
    Not let me break it down again
    I need for something
    But not more medicine
    I am sick with wanting
    And it's evil how it's got me
    And everyday is worse than the one before
    The more I have the more I think
    I'm almost where I need to be
    If only I could get a little more
    I need for something
    Now let me break it down again
    I need for something
    But not more medicine
    Something has me (something has me)
    Oh something has me (something has me)
    Acting like someone I don't wanna be
    Something has me (something has me)
    Oh something has me (something has me)
    Acting like someone I know isn't me
    Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
    Temporary is my time
    Ain't nothin' on this world that's mine
    Except the will I found to carry on
    Free is not your right to choose
    It's answering what's asked of you
    To give the love you find until it's gone
    I need for something
    Now let me break it down again
    I need for something
    But not more medicine
    Something has me (something has me)
    Oh something has me (something has me)
    Acting like someone I don't wanna be
    Something has me (something has me)
    Oh something has me (something has me)
    Acting like someone I know isn't me
    Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
    Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
    Ill with want and poisoned by this ugly greed
    - “Ill With Want,” The Avett Brothers

 

 

  • I have the sense that all of this — the brick the roses climb, the lath and plaster, the copper pipes, the oak floors, the coal room, the cracked slab on which it all rests — is a gift. Not to me, but to the future. The house is just passing through my hands. It’s not a purchase, it’s a husbandry. Eula Biss
  • . . .it seems to me that a more profound naiveté sustains the idea that things will get better without a radical reordering at a massive scale of how we, the relatively comfortable and affluent, live our lives. LM Sacasas
  • There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord. Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern. He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.” Abraham Heschel 
  • We want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it. James Davison Hunter
  • desire for status is the one thing that can never be overcome, because it is not enough that I succeed — others must fail. Ed West 

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