Title: How to Overhaul Your Priorities
Text: Haggai 1:1-15
Thesis: We accomplish the most important things in life when we focus on God’s priorities.
Series: The Bible in 90 Days Whole Church Challenge
Introduction
I heard a joke this past week about a young man who was driving his BMW around a curve when he realized the car was out of control and about to plummet over a cliff. The young man jumped out, but his left arm was severed from his body. He stood there looking down at his burning BMW and said, "Oh, no! My car! My car!"
A man, who had stopped to help, said, "Mister, you have just lost your left arm, and you’re crying about your car?"
The young man looked down and said, "Oh no, my Rolex! My Rolex!" (Frank Pollard, "Do You Like Where You Live?," Preaching Today, Tape No. 10)
Our text today is about priorities and in particular, misplaced priorities.
I. Recognize misplaced priorities.
This is what the Lord Almighty says: “These people say, ‘The time has not yet come for the Lord’s house to be built.’ [Yet] Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses and this temple to lie in ruins?” Haggai 1:2 and 4
In our story today the Jewish people who were previously living in exile had returned to their homeland and were attempting to get resettled in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. The place is in ruins so they had set about rebuilding their homes.
This is an easy enough scenario to grasp. Just think bombed out villages in wartime; burned out homes after the Hayman Fire gutted over 138,000 acres; blown away homes after a mile-wide tornado swept through Windsor; or washed away communities after Katrina. The natural thing to do is return and rebuild. The returning exiles were focused on rebuilding their homes and businesses and apparently had collectively decided that the rebuilding of the temple could wait… rebuilding the temple was not at the top of their list of priorities.
Apparently God was not pleased and said so through his prophet Haggai: “These people say, ‘The time has not yet come for the Lord’s house to be built.’ [Yet] Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses and this temple to lie in ruins?” Haggai 1:2 and 4
During the 13 years Peter Lynch was the manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund, Magellan was the top-ranked general equity fund. Time called Lynch the nation’s "number one money manager." But Lynch’s money-managing success came with a price. Lynch writes:
As much as I enjoyed managing a portfolio the size of the GNP of Ecuador, I missed being home to watch the children grow up. They change fast. They almost had to introduce themselves to me every weekend. I was spending more time with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Sallie Mae than I spent with them. When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae, and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget your children’s birthdays, there’s a good chance you’ve become too wrapped up in your work.
In 1989…I was celebrating my 46th birthday with my wife, Carolyn, and my daughters, Mary, Annie, and Beth. In the middle of the party, I had a revelation. I remembered that my father had died when he was 46 years old. You start to feel mortal when you realize you’re only going to exist for a little while, whereas you’re going to be dead for a long time. You start wishing you’d seen more school plays and afternoon soccer games. You remind yourself that nobody on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I’d spent more time at the office." (Peter Lynch, Beating the Street (Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 11; submitted by Aaron Goerner)
There is nothing inherently wrong with prioritizing the building or rebuilding of your home or being devoted to your work. However they become misplaced priorities when they displace other equally or more important priorities..
There is a bit of a clue in our text as to the nature of the Hebrews’ misplaced priorities. God did not take issue with the fact that they needed to put a roof over their heads. God jibe was in reference to the fact that the homes they were building were “paneled houses.” The inference is that they were busy building some pretty upscale homes. So the misplaced priority in the mind of God had to do with the love of the people for large and spacious homes at the expense of the total neglect of the rebuilding of the temple. Or God observed that they were delaying the rebuilding of the temple because they could not afford to rebuild the temple for God (and their community) and their own designer homes at the same time.
So when the people said, “This isn’t a good time to begin rebuilding God’s house because we are too busy and financially strapped just building our own dream homes.” God reacted and said, “Is it time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house is in ruins?”
This is a church fund-raiser’s dream passage… God’s house and God’s work are important and to neglect the care for and the life and ministry of the church is to have misplaced priorities and is an affront to God.
This issue is not whether people have nice homes or work hard at their jobs… the issue is whether the nice home or the good job detracts from other equally or more important priorities.
No time and no money for God’s house while one has plenty of time and money for other things is a misplaced priority. No time for one’s family when one has plenty of time to work is a misplaced priority. Being willing to give one’s right arm for a Rolex watch is a misplaced priority.
So what is important to us? What occupies our time and our money? What do we think about when we aren’t thinking about anything? Who and what are we neglecting? Who and what need to be prioritized in our lives?
There is a good reason for our getting our priorities in proper order. The text teaches that God does not bless misplaced priorities.
II. Realize that God will not bless misplaced priorities.
Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but have harvested little… You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away…” Haggai 1:5-6 and 9-11
While the people were focused on building and living in designer homes and working hard to make a living… things were not going well. And because things were not going well, they thought that during a recession or depression was not a good time to be investing in a capital fund drive to rebuild the temple.
They were planting for bumper crops but having meager harvests. They never seemed to have enough food or money. It was as if they cashed their pay checks and put the money in their pockets and before they got home… it was gone. They were living in what the health, wealth and prosperity preachers call “lack.” They were living in lack and because they were living in lack they could not imagine investing time and money in the temple.
Interestingly, God pointed out, it was because of their misplaced priorities that God was withholding his blessing. In verse 10 God said, “Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain and the new wine, the oil and whatever the ground produces, on men and cattle and on the labor of your hands.”
I am not prepared to say that whenever life gets difficult it is a sign that our priorities are misplaced and that God is withholding his blessing. But God made no bones about pointing out that it was because their priorities were out of whack, he would not bless their lives.
Perhaps it is fitting to at least, in God’s words we, “give careful thought to our ways.” Is there an area in our lives that does not reflect the blessing of God and is it possible that our priorities are misplaced and God wants to get our attention?
Ancient church father Augustine of Hippo once said, “Christ is not valued at all, unless he is valued above all.”
Until those folks in Jerusalem moved God from the bottom of their list of priorities to the top of their list of priorities… they were not going to enjoy the goodness of God in the land of the living. They were living in lack when a simple rearranging of misplaced priorities would have resulted in God’s blessing.
In The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), Arlie Russell Hochschild details a Fortune 500 company and finds a surprising trend: despite family-friendly policies in the workplace, employees are opting to spend more, not less, time in the office. Over the past two decades, the average worker has lengthened his or her work schedule by 164 hours every month and shortened vacation time by 14 percent..
Hochschild asserts that Americans are not working overtime because of money or a fear of layoffs. Instead, the average worker doesn’t mind that work is eroding time at home. Apparently, somewhere in between "Have a good day, dear" and "Honey, I’m home," there has been a role reversal between home and work. Thanks to twentieth-century concepts such as company spirit and loyalty, the workplace is becoming increasingly cozy and comfortable, while home, with its diapers, dirty dishes, and divorce, is becoming increasingly harried and hectic. One interviewee tells her, "I come to work to relax." A major finding that Hochschild did not anticipate was the extent to which home and family life had become like work to the parents she studied. The psychological demands of modern family relationships, which often include the experience of divorce and blending of families, "call for emotional skills many people don’t possess," said Hochschild. "Meanwhile, work is a far more inviting place than it used to be. We often imagine the worker as a cog in a machine or just a number. But modern management philosophies like ’total quality’—in Fortune 500 companies at least—are geared toward empowering the worker and making him or her feel appreciated. That’s all to the good. The downside is that under certain circumstances, the family cannot compete." (Adapted from Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Ahhhh, Sweet Work," PBS Online Newshour ,7-31-97)
It is difficult for God to bless the home of a person who prioritizes career over family. It is difficult for God to bless the life of the person who does not honor God in all and above all.
God was gracious to his people… when they realized the error of their ways and reordered their priorities, God blessed them again.
III. Restore priorities to their proper place.
The whole remnant of the people obeyed the voice of the Lord their God and the message of the prophet Haggai. Haggai 1:12b
To their credit, when the people heard that God was not blessing them because their priorities were askew, they took steps to get their lives in order.
William H. Hinson tells us why animal trainers carry a stool when they go into a cage of lions. They have their whips, of course, and their pistols are at their sides. But invariably they also carry a stool. Hinson says it is the most important tool of the trainer. He holds the stool by the back and thrusts the legs toward the face of the wild animal. Those who know maintain that the animal tries to focus on all four legs at once. In the attempt to focus on all four, a kind of paralysis overwhelms the animal, and it becomes tame, weak, and disabled because its attention is fragmented. (John Maxwell; Developing the Leader within You, (Thomas Nelson, 1993), p. 31; submitted by Eugene A. Maddox, Interlachen, Florida)
When we are attempting to focus on four legs at once we are also distracted and in some ways paralyzed… we cannot attack, so to speak, because we are not focused.
However, if we were to take the four legs of the stool that represent our priorities in terms of the investment of our time, attention, energy and resources, and rearrange them in a prioritized list, we regain our perspective and our focus.
The priorities in our lives are not legs on a stool. They are not all equal. So when we list them according to importance we regain our perspective.
I remember a eulogy a grandson gave at his grandfather’s funeral. The grandfather had worked for a large, national oil and gas company. At that time, they were notorious for moving their employees around. On one occasion the man was told that he was being transferred to another state. The transfer was not one that would have benefited his family. So he went in to see his boss and he said, “This is what is important to me, my God, my family, my dog and then my company.” (I understand that he was encouraged to take early retirement soon thereafter.)
When the people got it right, God began to bless them.
Then Haggai, the Lord’s messenger, gave this message of the Lord to the people: “I am with you.” declares the Lord. So the Lord stirred up the spirit of the people and they came and began to work on the house of the Lord Almighty, their God. Haggai 1:13-14
Conclusion
Tim Sanders—former chief solutions officer at Yahoo! and author of Love Is the Killer App—shares the following thought about establishing priorities:
Take your life and all the things that you think are important, and put them in one of three categories. These three categories are represented by three items: glass, metal, and rubber.
The things that are made of rubber, when you drop them, will bounce back. Nothing really happens when these kinds of things get dropped. So, for instance (and I enjoy sporting events, so don’t take me wrong here), if I miss a Seahawks’ game, my life will bounce along real fine. It doesn’t change anything and nothing is lost—my missing a game or a season of football will not alter my marriage or my spiritual life. I can take ’em or leave ’em.
Things that are made of metal, when they get dropped, create a lot of noise. But you can recover from the drop. You miss a meeting at work, you can get the cliff notes. Or if you forget to balance your checkbook and lose track of how much you have in your account, and the bank notifies you that you have been spending more than you have—that’s going to create a little bit of noise in your life, but you can recover from it.
Then there are things made of glass. And when you drop one of these, it will shatter into pieces and never be the same. Even though you can piece it back together, it will still be missing some pieces. It certainly won’t look the same, and I doubt that you could actually fill it up with water, because the consequences of it be being broken will forever affect how it’s used.
The thing is, you’re the only person who knows what those things are that you can’t afford to drop. More than likely, they have a lot to do with your relationships. Your marriage, your family, and your friends. (Tim Sanders, www.sanderssays.typepad.com (8-25-06); submitted by Gino Grunberg, Gig Harbor, Washington)
How is it that we may begin to anticipate God’s renewed blessing in our lives? We begin by honoring God first in all things. Our relationship with God and with the people we love are precious and to be prioritized.
Christ is not valued at all, unless he is valued above all!
