Check Your Priorities

Whenever I put something important in my pocket I instinctively check to make sure it doesn't have a hole in the bottom. If the object is quite important I find my fingers rechecking. We don't want to lose things that are important to us. We don't want to work hard only to have our earnings slip away.

That is the idea behind this powerful image in Haggai 1:6. "And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes." Picture someone getting paid for a job with cash and driving home from work with the cash on the passenger seat; every so often a bill gets disturbed by the wind and swept out the open window until the whole pile disappeared?

That was happening to the Jewish people who had returned from exile in Babylon to resettle Jerusalem. They were working hard but had little to show for it. And the prophet Haggai explained why: your priorities are off! You are working hard to make a blessed life for yourself but your choices are different from those God has promised to bless.

We know what that's like, right? Let's hear in Haggai 1 a word from God asking us three questions: Where are your priorities? Do you think you can manipulate my way of blessing? And will you listen to my word?