A Day to Remember
Haggai 1:1–15
All the remnant of the people, obeyed the voice of the Lord their God. Haggai 1:12

From time to time the preaching of the Word of God strikes home, and a life is genuinely changed. When that happens in large numbers, you have a revival.

This happened under Haggai’s preaching. We recall from our study of the earlier prophets that the warnings given to the Jewish people before God’s judgment by the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions generally went unheeded. Micah had some success. But for the most part the people could not have cared less about the prophets’ warnings. To our joy we see a different kind of response from the people of Judah under Haggai’s ministry. They had been negligent of God’s work. They had invented flimsy excuses as to why they were inactive. But they were not basically hostile to God or his commandments, as the people living before the exile had been. They really wanted to please God. So when the word of the Lord came to them by Haggai, they recognized it as a true word of God and did what God commanded.

The chapter concludes: “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, on the twenty-fourth day of the month, in the sixth month, in the second year of Darius the king” (vv. 14–15).

There is an interesting note in that last verse, where we are told that the people resumed the work on the twenty-fourth day of the month. If we compare that with the first verse of the chapter, where we are told that Haggai began to preach on the first day of the month, we find that the change came about in just twenty-three days. Haggai spoke on August 30, 520 BC. The work began on the twenty-first of September.

I wonder if there is a date like that in your life or if today might possibly become that day. I do not mean the day of your conversion; you may or may not have a known day for that. I mean the day in which you finally got the priorities of your life straightened out and determined that from that time on you would put God and his work first in everything. You need to do that. You need to ask yourself these questions: Is my own comfort of greater importance to me than the work of God? Am I making increasing efforts to get ahead financially but finding greater and greater disappointment in my life? If the answer is yes, just turn around and get on with God’s business. Obey him. Put him first in your life.

Taken from Come to the Waters by James Boice ISBN 9798887790954 used with permission from P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg NJ 08865

Scripture quotations are from the ESV (the Holy Bible English Standard Version) copyright 2001 by Crossway a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved.