Four passages and a short devotional a day to take you through the whole Bible in one year — right alongside your Spirit Church family.
Real questions from Spirit readers on this passage, answered by our pastors.
Haggai preaches the shortest effective sermon in the Bible: is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin? Give careful thought to your ways.
The people had not refused to build. They had just said not yet for sixteen years. Today is about the difference between no and later, and how later quietly becomes never.
Purses with holes: Haggai's image for prosperity that never satisfies because first things sit in ruins. The returnees were not villains, just busy, and sixteen years of later had normalized the rubble. One sermon, honestly heard, restarted everything, and God's response to their first day back at work was immediate: I am with you.
Psalm 139 is the prayer that keeps later from hardening: search me, test me, see if there is any offensive way in me, an invited audit by the God who already knows. The kingdom announcement of Revelation 11 is coming regardless. Build like it, starting with whatever foundation you abandoned.