SOUNDING OUT:
Consider Your Ways

  Haggai was a prophet who only prophesied for about three months. He lived during the time when the people of Israel were trying to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. It had been destroyed because Israel refused to listen to the prophet Jeremiah seventy years earlier. Then Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came from the north and destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the temple and took Israel captive.

  Then after seventy years God freed Israel and they returned to rebuild the city and the temple. During the rebuilding of the temple, Israel was threatened by outsiders. They were intimidated and quit working on the temple. God called upon Haggai to give Israel His Word concerning the situation.

  “Consider your ways!” means “think about what you are doing with your lives.” If people would honestly take a look at their lives and what they are doing, then maybe some positive changes would happen in their lives. Most people just flow through life, like a river in its banks.

  What Haggai is describing, sounds like the broken cisterns. They never had what they needed. If you go God’s way you’ll always have enough, and when you earn something you will profit. Without God in your life you can never really profit. It just will not last.

  Look at how verse six is sandwiched in between those exhortations to “Consider your ways!” to “take a look at what you are doing with your life.” If you read the rest of Haggai, the people responded positively to the Word of God given by Haggai, and they went back to work, and finished building the Temple.

  I frequently “take a checkup from the neck up.” II Corinthians 13:5 says, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove [dokimazo] your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates [adokimos; unfit or unproven]?” “Prove” is the Greek dokimazo, which means to test or prove. It is used of checking the quality or metal for pureness. We are to prove ourselves. One of the connotations from the Greek is that the testing or proving is looking for a positive outcome. When we prove ourselves we should expect we pass the test.

  Another use of that word is found in I Corinthians 11:28, which concerns holy communion. It says, “Let a man examine [dokimazo] himself.” It is important that we keep our hearts and motives pure recognizing what Jesus Christ has done for us. We would certainly not pass the test had Jesus Christ not paid the price for us. We have God’s goodness and grace freely because of the accomplished work of His son. We want to be strong and stay strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. Our identification with him causes us to pass the test with “flying colors.”

  We have one life to live, and we are to live by the faith of Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. You have probably heard it said, “That our life is God’s gift to us, and what we do with it is our gift to Him.” We live moment by moment, and what we do with the “nows” in life will reveal the end product of our life. We are born and we die. Those are the boundaries of our earthly existence. The challenges we face and the decisions we make will impact how we spend our “nows” in between the boundaries.

  God so loved that He gave His only begotten son, and look at the result of this act of love: the redemption and salvation of all mankind. Instead of having just His only begotten Son, He has acquired sons of God upon sons of God. Every time a man or a woman accepts Jesus as Lord and believes in his or her heart that God has raised him from the dead–“Bang!” God gets another son, another wonderful addition to His family.

  As we learn to give our time and our life to God we’ll soon find out that instead of losing life, we gain it. Spending time with God in His Word is a very important use of our time, and therefore of our lives. As we give of our lives to God, we will receive far more than we have sacrificed. “Consider your ways!” and expect God to bless your life as you learn to love and give to Him.

  We may have tried a lot of things in this life and sacrificed our time and lives on things that turned out to be of no profit. On the other hand, maybe there was still some learning or profit, even if it didn’t turn out to be what we had anticipated. But, with God we should never be disappointed in our expectations. God loves us and wants to work in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. That only happens “now,” in the present.