Sermon Tone Analysis

Title: Rebuilding

Had a different message in mind last week, but after praying, felt led to let that sit and stew on a back burner for a while, let it marinate a while longer… and today we’re diving into the minor prophet, Haggai.

Text: Haggai 1:1-11

Now, before we go any further, I want to point out something.

Jesus says, in John 5:39, You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that bear witness about Me;

Well, we’re looking at such a Scripture today and we have to first and foremost ask, what does this text testify about Jesus?

I want to answer that before we go any further: The text is clearly showing a zeal for the Temple that God has, and that people have abandoned.

However, as we’ll see, God does not need a building.

So what does this tell us about Jesus?

Well, what is the New Testament Temple? 1 Corinthians 6:19

We are the temple of the Spirit today - our bodies as individuals, and the church, too - and I don’t mean this building, I mean us.

We are the temple today.

If God says the temple in the Old Testament needed to be rebuilt, then there may come a time when the temple in the New Testament era - our era, must be rebuilt.

Maybe the church has gotten off track, maybe there’s some maintenance needed, or whatever.

But the sad truth is some times a church needs a rebuild.

And we look at this text today and get a guide for what that looks like and why it must be done.

Rebuilding the temple is very similar to rebuilding a church.

Thesis: If we want to rebuild the church, we have to start with rebuilding ourselves.

Intro: There is so much to get in to in this beautiful text this morning I want to jump right into it but before we really start digging into the meat of the sermon this morning, I want to talk about that Title.

“Rebuilding”.

Rebuilding is more than just rebranding - it’s breaking things down to the fundamentals, starting from scratch, starting over from the very basics and building something new.

We’re called to do that with ourselves, you realize that?

When we’re made a new Creation, even those of us who have been saved most of our lives, still we get into a rut.

We get into bad habits, we get into a place we often call a comfort zone, but even that idea - we can be incredibly uncomfortable in a comfort zone, but stay there because it’s all we know.

Even Christians.

We can fall into sin habits, we can fall into “stinking thinking”, we can fall into spiritually unhealthy practices.

I love watching baseball teams and football teams go from losers one season to champions the next.

Like the 1999 St. Louis Rams, with Kurt Warner, or the Chicago Cubs in 2016.

As much as I like seeing teams rebuild, I love it when a person rebuilds, though.

There’s this baseball player I like, even though he isn’t a New York Yankee.

Took less money so his team could sign more good players, will talk with the fans, be personable - I love guys like that.

But this guy is different.

His name’s Joey Votto.

Plays for the Cincinnati Reds.

Votto is rare - he has spent his whole career with the same team.

Since 2007, and he’s had great years every year since - consistently would bat around or well over 300 until 2016, when he started slipping.

Batted .320 in 2017, then .284 in 2018, .261 in 2019, .226 in 2020 - he was on the back end of his career.

He was getting older.

He wasn’t 23 and this wasn’t 2007 anymore.

Votto was 36 years old, kind of getting long in the tooth for a pro-athlete.

So the next season he changed his batting stance.

Changed how high up on his bat he would grip.

Placing of his feet.

And something happened.

Votto had always been a good, consistent hitter, but he barely ever hit over 30 homeruns in a season - but at age 36, when most guys start losing their power, Votto hit 36 - matching his career high.

His batting average began to climb.

He had some of his best career stats - and it began with him looking at himself and saying, “What do I need to change, where do I need to rebuild?”

Sure that’s baseball, not Christianity, but sometimes, there comes a time for a rebuild.

And if we want to rebuild a church, we have to start with rebuilding ourselves.

We have to recognize it’s time to rebuild.

Thom Rainer in his book, Autopsy of a Deceased Church tells the story of a man who visits a friend during a rain storm, and the friend lives in a house with a leaky roof.

The guy says, “Don’t worry about it, we can fix it in the morning.”

The next day, the visitor says, “Okay, let’s get after the roof,” to which his friend says, “Why?

It’s not raining today!”

That’s kind of the approach we take with rebuilds - we want to fix the problems when they’re emergencies, but not fix things we know could be an emergency further down the line.

The people of Israel could have began rebuilding the temple, but it took Haggai motivating them to do it.

Okay, so the first thing we are going to look at is the historical context for a minute, and we’ll spiral out from there.

Notice that Haggai gives us dates, as if we should know when this happens?

That’s to verify when this occurred.

After the exile, it wasn’t uncommon for the prophets to use a date in their writings, the reason being, is that in Isaiah 45, that prophet had written about an important king named Cyrus and his Persian kingdom, and they write down the recordings of their prophecies in the shadow (so to speak) of Isaiah.

If we were going by the exact calendar on your wall, or smartphone - who uses a wall calendar anymore?

It would be August 29th, 520 BC.

But as it is, it’s the Hebrew Calendar, and it is the first day of their month.

It’s a day of celebration, a holy day for the Hebrews - we see this clearly in Numbers 10:10

Eventually, because of the people’s hypocrisy, God refuses to accept their feasts and festivals at that time of the year - again, pointing to Isaiah, we see this made clear:

Isaiah 1:13-14 “Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me.

New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.”

Even in the post-exile era we see this to remain true as both Hosea and Amos rebuke Israel for these feasts (Hosea 2:11 and Amos 8:5).

So this SHOULD HAVE BEEN a time of rejoicing, a time of festivity, but it isn’t.

But that does not mean the people haven’t continued to gather to worship, this doesn’t mean the people have stopped reading and studying the law, I just say all that to make the point that the Festivities aren’t what they used to be.

Okay, lot of people say that about Civic and Commerce events, but now’s not the time to get into that.

The Darius mentioned here is Darius the 1st, not to be confused with the Darius of Nehemiah 12:22, who had seized the throne of Persia in 522 BC, and what followed was 7 months of turmoil, revolts, usurpers, long story short - the empire was in chaos.

The Darius of Nehemiah 12 would come a little later than this guy.

He also should not be confused with Darius the Mede from the book of Daniel.

These are 3 different guys, okay?

Darius 1, Darius the Persian, and Darius the Mede.

All 3 different guys.

Darius here in Haggai is Darius Hystaspes, and he ruled from 522 BC to 486 BC.

Why does this matter?

Because if his kingdom is in turmoil, it makes sense that this king lets the Jewish people go home and begin to rebuild - he does not want or need another revolt right now.

Last thing his kingdom needs is the Jewish people to revolt in the streets.

And that is when God chooses to speak to His people.

In fact, this is the first time, chronologically speaking, that the Lord has spoken to His people since the exile.

That’s not to say God hasn’t been distant, but He has been quiet.

In Ezra, the Bible says God “stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, to rebuild the temple”… but God Himself did not speak.

(Ezra 1:1-2)

And by the time we get to Ezra 5, the people stopped bulding.

So God speaks through Haggai, and He speaks for the first time in the post-exile era.

You remember, last Sunday I said when we looked into the Psalms, we should be more concerned with God’s distance from us, rather than the close proximity of our enemies, our trials, our pain.

Israel has not had God speak through a prophet for at least 70 years, and now Haggai shows up at the end of August, around the time of the harvest - what else happens at the harvest?

What Jewish holiday is it?

Pentecost!

Okay, so God’s about to do something, that resonates with us a little bit here, right?

We’re Pentecostal.

We’re all about the Harvest.

Everything is lining up, hey maybe this is a text for Faith Assembly of God in 2022 AD as much as it was for the nation of Israel in 520 BC.

It’s almost as if there’s a Divine Author behind these words that knows what He’s doing… and what month starts tomorrow?

August… Just saying, maybe God knows what He’s doing!

It says the word of the Lord came by the hand of Haggai the prophet, which means Haggai was God’s instrument through which His word came.