What might change in your personal approach to worship if one of your chief concerns was to do so while striving to be holy? What about the way your local church comes together corporately? One of the things Old Testament Believers had to do was evaluate every activity, person, and thing as to its state of holiness and either reject that which was polluted by sin, or submit it to God’s Word and ways to make it acceptable according to His standards of holiness. The process is called “consecration”. And I find myself wondering more and more what has happened to our sensitivity to the quality of holiness of our possessions, relationships, and worship.
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Just like the people during Haggai’s time, God’s work can, at times, seem daunting and overwhelming. An underlying theme to nearly every biblical story and person is that they had to undertake God’s work while being vastly outnumbered and overshadowed. Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Israel, Gideon, Samuel, David, Josiah, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel (and on and on and on the list goes) all had to continue on God’s path alone in the face of numerical majorities surrounding them. So what is a source of encouragement distinguishing the work of the One True God from the numerically more abundant false gods of the nations all about? The rest of the Person of God in the form of the trinity: the Son and the Spirit.
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There is an interesting sequence of events here which might serve as a framework for what must take place in order for a true spiritual revival to materialize. First they heard and obeyed God’s Word, then they “showed reverence for the Lord“, and afterward God “stirred up the spirit” of everyone to undertake the work of rebuilding God’s house. It would seem that the most popular methodology of our day claiming to disclose how to build a church works exactly backward from this example from Scripture. Today’s church growth strategy is to first build in order to attract people who will hopefully be stirred by the music and production values leading to some kind of eventual connection with God.
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There’s a term in this verse which was very commonly used by my parents and grandparents which I’m not sure I’ve actually heard anyone else use in the past 2 or 3 decades. You see, once upon a time, more important than Sunday School programs, more important than Children’s Church activities, more important than going to every extreme length imaginable to which we now go to make each child feel special, was the teaching of “reverence for the Lord“. One was taught that our own identity and desires were secondary to those of God’s.
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I returned to a church assuming a position of leadership and the most pressing problem seemed to be the youth group. Despite having a full-time youth pastor, less than half of the teens whose parents regularly attended Sunday morning services were themselves attending even one of the many weekly youth activities offered. I quickly got tired of hearing everyone’s theories and simply called each kid and/or parent to get a definitive answer. Some of them were to be expected from a teen demographic, being involved in seasonal activities such as scouting or sports, such that their attendance was only spotty temporarily; the recurring and most popular answer I received, however, floored me: “We don’t want our kid to be over-involved in church; we want them to be ‘balanced’ and participate in other things while they’re still young.”
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