There's Hope For TodaySample

Haggai’s view of Israel’s landscape is one of naked honesty. God claims absolute responsibility for the blighting of personal and national prosperity. Read the word of the Lord to a people who lack priority: “I blew it away.”

Some people fail to achieve because they are lazy. Others fail to achieve because they are foolish. Still others languish in mediocrity for a lack of vision. In this situation, God has taken initiative to blow away the pitiful wages paid out during Israel’s recession. Why would He do that? After seventy years of captivity in Babylon, the people returned to a destroyed Jerusalem. The initial enthusiasm to build God’s temple and re-establish worship was displaced by a passion to restore personal properties. The people were working hard, but in self-interest. The temple lay in ruins while the people were paneling their homes and rebuilding their boundary walls. Their hearts were revealed.

Unless God is given His rightful place in the heart, we live lives of frustrated expectation. Disappointment shadows us and the path grows dark. God wants to bless us and infuse our lives with purpose, but until we give Him first place, our lives may rightly be titled: “Gone With the Wind.”