His House

Haggai, "This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Give careful thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored,' says the LORD. 'You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?' declares the LORD Almighty. 'Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with his own house. Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops.'" I love to read about the Temple of the LORD. I love to see how He wanted His house to be treated. I love this because, I finally realized by looking at how much He loved His house, how much He loves me. Once we have seen how much we need Him, and ask Him to come and live in us, we become the House of the LORD. But just like the people Haggai was speaking to, we become lazy.

We start off with a boom, then we become content with our progress and start turning from Him again. I have done it; I have seen it. We get caught in our sins. Our desires tell on us, because our desires are where we spend our time. Then our sins are pointed out to us and we think we are about to loose everything, so we beg for forgiveness. We ask those we love to forgive us and we expect God to never leave us. So our hearts are open to others and to God and for a while we are wanting others to help us. For a while we change, then we become relaxed and our true love comes calling us back. We no longer have the immediate fear of loosing everything because of our sin, so we start slowly walking back to our love. Then before we know it, we are no longer working with God on His house, but we are living with our true hearts revealed by our actions.

It is hard to constantly be working on myself. I start feeling tired and I start following the desire to relax, but He never wants us to stop working on His house. I am the house of God and so are you. If we become relaxed and start letting the roof leak, then soon the floor will mold. That little thing that seems so harmless, is a crack in the window. If we allow the crack to remain, then pretty soon we will have only glass outside and an open hole where the window used to be. Those little desires that lead us away from our true work, destroy us from the moment we allow them to enter. Only in the beginning we do not feel the wind blowing in all around us. We only see a small scratch.

Where is your hearts desire? What do you hold dear in your hands? It is actually very easy to see what you treasure. Others can see it. They see where you spend your time. They see where your hearts desire lays. Do you see it in yourself? When was the last time you stopped and looked at the house of God? Have you become lazy and relaxed in your work to improve His house? Where do you spend your time? What are you really in love with?

Oswald Chambers, "Many of us appear to be all right in general, but there are still some areas in which we are careless and lazy... Not only must our relationship to God be right, but the outward expression of that relationship must also be right. Ultimately, God will allow nothing to escape; every detail of our lives is under His scrutiny. God will bring us back in countless ways to the same point over and over again. And He never tires of bringing us back to that one point until we learn the lesson, because His purpose is to produce the finished product. It may be a problem arising from our impulsive nature, but again and again, with the most persistent patience, God has brought us back to that one particular point. Or the problem may be our idle and wandering thinking, or our independent nature and self-interest. Through this process, God is trying to impress upon us the one thing that is not entirely right in our lives." Do you see where you have become lazy in your construction of His house? Because others do, or will...

http://www.rbc.org/devotionals/my-utmost-for-his-highest/07/31/devotion.aspx?year=2009