by Tammy Phillips
July 24, 2021
” Now therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts; Consider your ways.” (Haggai 1:5 KJV)
Now, it is so easy to get from place to place. We enter our beginning and end point in our GPS (Global Positioning System …which sounds like something from Star Trek). We push a button. We are given turn by turn instructions and even have a voice to guide us if we wish. If life was only that simple! What if we could enter a starting point as single and destination as married? Push a button and then receive turn by turn directions to our perfect mate. The LORD knows I made so many wrong turns and went down so many dead-end roads in an attempt to find my husband.
The LORD had told His people to rebuild His house two years after they came out of Babylonian captivity. They worked on it for two years and stopped. Fourteen years later, enter Haggai, again. His people had stopped work on the temple, but had taken time to build themselves nice, new homes. They had said that the time had not come to work on God’s house and offered up a lot of excuses.
How many of us have nice, new, decorated homes? However, we have not spent any time on the temple of the LORD. “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and [that] the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16 NKJV) Yes! After we follow Jesus, we are the temple of God, and He lives in us. We have some restoration, renewal and transformation that needs to take place on the inside. We are washed and perfected by the word of God. The only way that this happens is to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what [is] that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” (Romans 12:2 NKJV) Sadly, we do not have an easy GPS directing us which way to turn, but if we listen to God, He will teach us the way to go.
Where are we going? What are we doing? Which direction is our life going? Have we come to the Lord? If we have, are we following Jesus? Are we being obedient to His word? Are we doing what He has asked or called us to do? Are we going the right way?
This is what the Lord said to His people in Haggai 1:5 and 7: Now! It is time. Consider your ways! The Hebrew figure of speech means “put your heart on your roads.” In other words, think about where you are going. Set your mind on the path of your inner man.
The Lord tells them later through Haggai that they had not lived their best lives because they had been going the wrong way. They had been living their own lives as they pleased, doing what they wanted to do and not what the LORD had told them to do. They had been running around building and decorating their own homes, while His laid in waste.
I enCOURAGE you to “consider your ways.” Put your heart on the road. Are you obedient to the calling of God on your life? Are you following Jesus as Savior and Lord? Are you working on your temple? Did you begin the process eighteen years or forty years ago and it is still incomplete? ARE YOU GOING THE RIGHT WAY? What would the LORD have you to do? Tune in tomorrow.
Complete in Him 