When What We See Isn't What We Get

The book of Haggai addresses the Hebrew people who returned from exile expecting to rebuild their glorious temple, only to find their efforts looking small and disappointing compared to the past. God reminds them that His presence precedes His project - they don't work to earn God's presence, but work because He is already with them. The mess they see is part of God's method of transformation, like construction scaffolding that signals progress rather than failure. Resurrection logic calls us to live by God's promises rather than current appearances, participating actively in His long-term construction project even when we can't see the full picture.

Transcript

I was just about to say how thankful I am that our young people are up here in the front. I changed my mind.

All right, listen, I'm going to invite you this morning, if you have your Bibles, to open up to the book of Hegai. Get ready. This is a book we don't spend a whole lot of time in. But listen, I have done series after series after series this year, and I was like, you know what? It would be fun to go to the lectionary and read what the lectionary has for us today.

And of course, it's from the book of Hegai, a prophetic book, and we're going to dive right in. So, Hegai in. It's in the Old Testament, kind of towards the end of the Old Testament. We're going to start in chapter one, and we're going to read verses one through nine. If you don't have your Bibles with you, you can follow along on the screen.

Hegai 2, 1 through 9. Yep. All right, here's what the word of the Lord is for us. This morning on the 21st day of the seventh month, the word of the Lord came through the prophet. Speak to Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, to Joshua, son of Jozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people.

Ask them, who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it not seem to you like nothing? But now be strong, Zerubbabel, declares the Lord. Be strong.

Joshua, son of Jozdak, the high priest. Be strong, all you people of the land, declares the Lord, and work for I am with you, declares the Lord Almighty. This is what I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt, and my spirit remains among you. Do not fear. This is what the Lord Almighty says.

In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land. I will shake all nations, and what is desired by all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory, says the Lord Almighty. The silver is mine and the gold is mine, declares the Lord Almighty. The glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house, says the Lord Almighty. And in this place I will grant peace, declares the Lord Almighty.

We're going to go over this in a minute and tell you what we're talking about, but I'm going to ask you a question. I want you guys to be thinking about this. Have you ever had one of those moments where what you saw didn't really line up with what you got. For instance, let's say you order something online. The picture looks amazing.

You saw that, it has all these great five star reviews. Then the box shows up to your door and it looks like it was run over by a forklift. Anybody ever had that happen to you? Yes, I think many of us. And then you open it and you go, oh, my gosh, this is not at all what I was expecting.

I've heard horror stories about people who buy stuff on ebay. And it's this beautiful, like, rocking chair or something very antique and very nice. And it shows up and it's like a doll furniture. You ever seen that? Right.

Anyway, I don't know if you guys collect things. Anybody a collector in here? What do you collect? What do you collect? 3D prints.

3D prints? I have a 3D printer. Do you have one?

Okay, all right, well, I will send Jimmy with some for you. What else? What are some things you collect? What? Warhammer 40K models.

Warhammer 40K models. Okay, just say nerd. All right, it's okay. Listen, I'm with you, Right? Yeah, go ahead.

Vintage what? Vintage ladders. Oh, lighters. I was like, you gotta have a storehouse.

What else? What do you collect? Sports cards. Yeah, that's what a lot of people collect. That's very cool.

Lily. What? Trek. Oh, all right, Dan, what do you collect? Dinosaur bones.

Yeah. You do? I've seen a few of them. I'm very impressed. Yes.

Sylvia, what do you collect? Swatches. Okay, well, I think many of us are familiar with, like, collecting coins, right? Some of us collect coins, some of us collect stamps. Anybody collect, like, paintings or artwork or thimbles?

My sister has a teacup collection. I was like, okay, what? You have a what bottle? Oh, okay, that's interesting. Oh, yes, ma'.

Am. A what eggplate. Okay. I'm learning so much today, guys. This is okay, all right.

I would say I get rid of cats, so there's that. All right, listen, some of you, if you know me at all, you know that I am the kind of nerd that collects things like Xboxes. So my wife will tell you that she loves my eclectic taste and loves all the things that I bring home and build shelves for and put on them. But I collect special edition Xboxes. I started collecting Xbox 360s because, you know, they're pretty cool.

I currently now have 24 unique Xboxes and over 60 different special edition controllers. See that? And I have to tell you, I'm also the kind of nerd that will never pay full price for any of these things. Like, I do really, really well at searching for the best versions of these things I can get. And by the way, all those things are kind of hung on the wall by 3D prints because I 3D printed the hang.

Like, again, if this tells you anything about how nerdy I am, you know. Right. Yeah. So listen, I think sometimes when we collect things and we're purchasing things to add to our collection, sometimes things show up and they are not in the state that we were promised. Right.

And doesn't that just tick you off? Makes you so mad on occasion. I've gotten a few of these xboxes that when I've opened the console, it was like the FedEx guy pulled the box out and karate kicked it into my porch. Right. So some of these things are rare.

You don't get to find them very often. And when you get them in good condition, you want them to stay in good condition. Sometimes you open up the box and it is not at all what you expected. And life, I think, does that to us too sometimes, doesn't it? What we get handed out to us doesn't always line up with what we want God to be doing behind the scenes for us.

And this, my friends, is exactly what's happening in the reading that we just read from the book of Hegai. If we look back in time a little bit from what's happening in our scripture, we can see that the year is pretty early in human history. Actually, this takes place sometime after the year 587 BCE. The Hebrew people in 587 were exiled from their homeland. They were taken out of Israel and they were spread all throughout the Babylonian empire.

This we call the Babylonian exile. Now, not only were the Hebrew people taken into exile, but the cities of Jerusalem. Sorry. The city walls of Jerusalem were knocked down and destroyed. Much of the city was set on fire and also had become dilapidated over time.

And it was demolished. And then Solomon's great temple had also been destroyed. And as a result of this religion, as the Hebrew people had known it, would change forever. And these people spent almost 70 years in exile. And after the Babylonian empire was conquered by the Persian empire, the Persian king, Darius the first made a proclamation that allowed the Hebrew people to finally go home.

They could return back to Jerusalem, they could begin to rebuild the walls, and they could plan on how they were going to rebuild the temple. So in the reading that we read just a few minutes ago, God's people had returned from exile and they've started to rebuild the temple, but it's not going so great. The foundation looks smaller than the original one. It was underwhelming, kind of pitiful looking, actually. And so some of the old timers were sitting around and they were shaking their heads, saying things like, this doesn't hold a candle to what we used to have.

And God shows up in the prophet Haggai and offers a word. He says, what you're seeing now isn't what you're going to get through. The prophet, God is telling his people not to write the obituary while God is still building the story. So let's hear again how Hegai begins. We'll read verse two and three.

It says, speak to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, to Joshua, son of Jozdak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people. Ask them, who of you is left who saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Does it seem to you like nothing?

They were comparing the present work to past glory and they didn't like what they saw. Does it seem like nothing? That's kind of a harsh way to say that, right?

But does that sound at all familiar to you? You ever heard something similar to that? I have worked in many churches in my life, and I have heard phrases like, this church used to be so full. People used to pray so much more. Back in my day, we used to have Sunday school classes that were just bursting with young people.

I remember when I couldn't find a parking spot in the parking lot of the church, and now the parking lot's just empty. You ever heard anything like that? Hear me when I say this. There is nothing wrong with remembering the good old days. But there can be danger when nostalgia blinds us to what God is doing in our moment.

I used to work at a prominent church downtown. It was a United Methodist church, and I worked there for a few years before we were able to start our congregation here in Brookside. When I was going through the interview process, they asked me some of the usual questions. Questions about my thought on different social issues, about my experiences in ministry up to this point. And they also ask the really important questions, like, are you an OU guy or an OSU guy?

Are you on sprc? No, no, you don't need to know. All right, sorry. For those of you who are not Methodist, SPRC is staff Parish relations committee. They're the people that hire and fire.

So anyway, so eventually they asked me if I had any questions for them. And so I asked them about some of the Things that they, as a church were the most proud of, things that they, as a church have done recently that have inspired them and gotten them excited about ministry. And everyone in that room, we're sitting at this huge, long conference table. Everybody, every eye in this room turns and faces the oldest member of the committee. This man was a very successful lawyer, and he was the lay leader of this church.

He was the longest serving member of this church. And his membership went all the way back to the 1950s. He, at the time, was in his early 80s. When he started to talk, I could tell that his mind had taken him back in time, right back to a time when the church was more active and vibrant. He started to talk about this move of the spirit that happened in the 1970s as the church kind of experienced revival and growth and life.

And he said that the seats were full and people were having to turn away from being turned away from the choir because there just wasn't enough room in the choir loft to fill with all these voices. They had to frantically build new facilities. They bought more property around their church to expand their campus. As he reminisced about how impactful the church had been back then, he began to get a little emotional. Friends.

He pointed us back to the 1970s. He and many other members of the church couldn't point to a single thing that they were proud or excited about that had happened between the 1970s and in 2017. When I was there for this interview, these folks sitting in the staff parish relations interview were looking back on the glory days of their church. At the same time, they were experiencing both a longing for what they had and a bit of discouragement because they didn't have that anymore. Their church membership was down, their attendance was down.

And just for clarity, in the 1970s, this church grew quickly. And they saw a membership of over 9,000 people in the 1970s, and they experienced more than 2,000 people every single Sunday morning in church. And here it was in 2017 when I was interviewed and their average weekly attendance was less than 1000 and on the steep decline. I was interviewing to start a new church as a second campus. There was incredible potential for us to grow and to develop a new identity, to do things that we can be excited about.

But the leadership of that church was stuck in the past. And they were afraid that when we split to make the second church campus, that we would take resources rather than become a new resource in a new area.

They couldn't see what God was doing right in that moment. And because of their fear, the Creation of community. Brookside was seen as a threat to their stability, not as an opportunity for growth and renewal. And as a result, our church plant was basically abandoned and we weren't really established until much, much later. They were blinded by nostalgia.

Likewise, a few months ago, I was walking downtown and saw one of those many old Tulsa skyscrapers that was being renovated. We've all seen that, right? Half the brick was gone. Scaffolding was everywhere, Trucks and people were blocking the sidewalk. Roads were shut down so that deliveries could become could be coming and going.

And honestly, it looked worse in that moment than it did when the windows were boarded and it was abandoned. A man walking by overheard him say they should have just left it alone. I liked it much better the way it was before.

But what neither of us could see was the architectural rendering of that building. We only saw a simple part of the process, and we couldn't see the vision of what that building was going to become. The mess was the process. And oftentimes that's the case in life. We don't know the full story or the future plans that we are going to be involved with.

And in our reading this morning, that's exactly where the people of Israel are standing in the middle of the mess. They're right on the foundation of the temple, and it looks tiny compared to what they had known before. And they didn't realize that the mess was part of God's process.

Friends, oftentimes we measure by memory rather than the promise of what's coming in the future. The Israelites were remembering Solomon's temple, and if you remember us talking about it in the past, that building was filled with gold. There was gold laid everywhere in this building, up in the roof, in the walls. There was splendor. The building brought status to the Israelite people.

They were forgetting that the real glory was never in the facility. It was in the presence of God within that facility.

Many of us, we assume, lack because our seed hasn't sprouted yet. We talked a little bit last week about new life whenever we plant seeds. And then later on chapter two, verse 19, Haggai asks, is there still seed in the barn yet? From this day on, I will bless you. Oftentimes we don't recognize what's happening because all we see is this dead, shriveled up thing that we don't get to see it until it's growing and it's been planted and it's beginning to do what the process calls it to be.

In other words, you haven't seen the harvest because you haven't waited long enough for the seed to break through. We often forget that sometimes the mess is part of the method. The rebuilding looked chaotic, but it was sacred chaos. Like scaffolding on a renovation site, the mess signals transformation and progress. Anybody in here a builder?

Anybody do big construction projects? Okay. No. Nobody? Kyle was like, maybe me sometimes.

Anybody done a home remodel project? Right? So let's take it to a smaller scale. We're not talking big buildings anymore. We're talking about the plastic all over all of your cool stuff that you don't want to get dusty, right?

We're talking about the cleanup process. We're talking about the toilet taken off of its wax seal and set somewhere else in your house where it doesn't belong. The mess becomes the process. God's method often includes disruption before restoration can happen. And then we overlook the emotional weight of return.

So the buildings that the Hebrew people were mourning over, they weren't just buildings for them. The people who were coming back to exile or from exile were survivors of some of the hardest life imaginable. I can't imagine being taken out of Tulsa and sent to, like, New York City. That's just weird to me. But these people were taken from their homeland and spread all over the ancient world.

And when they were coming home, nothing was the way they remembered it. The temple was more than a building for these people. It was a symbol of identity, hope, and perseverance. And without it, what do we have? Their disappointment was real.

But God's encouragement in that moment through the prophet Haggai was louder. Get to work. I'm here with you.

I think in Tulsa, we know a lot about what it's like to look at empty church buildings, closed factories, changing neighborhoods. And we think to ourselves, it's just not what it used to be. But maybe God is whispering us something along the lines of we shouldn't be writing the obituary either. While God is still working in the story, God is not finished with our city, he's not finished with our church, and he's certainly not finished with us. What we see in this moment isn't what we're going to end up with long term, because God is not done with any of us yet.

So if we shouldn't settle for what we see, then what should we do? Haggai tells us in verse four, he says, be strong and work for God is with you.

God's presence precedes his project. God doesn't say, if you guys just work harder, I'll eventually show up. God Says, I'm already with you. Now let's get going. So if we read verses four and five, it says this, but now be strong.

Zerubbabel declares the Lord, be strong. Joshua, son of Jozdak, the high priest, be strong, all of you people of the land, declares the Lord and work for I am with you. This is what I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt. And my spirit remains among you. Do not fear.

What I don't think we get oftentimes is that this same language is resurrection, language that comes centuries before Jesus does. Things are looking dead. The city is laying in waste. It's ruined. The temple looks like it will never stand again in the same way that it once did.

But God says, my spirit abides. I am with you. Fear. Get busy. Reminds me from, you know, my issues that I have in the things that I also collect and do.

Speaking of 3D printers, you know, I love 3D printing, and I have a couple, probably too many 3D printers. But when you start out a 3D print, it looks like nothing. It's a bare build plate. It's a hot nozzle spitting out thin layers of molten plastic. And eventually, after time, it starts to create something.

The print isn't just about what we see in the moment. It's about what's being built one layer at a time, by a design we can't fully see until it's completed. Faith, for us is a lot like that. God's presence is the design file. It's like the unseen blueprint.

Our job is to keep our printers running, to keep layering hope on top of hope, work on top of work, because presence precedes the project. Now, I don't want to get confused here in this moment. I don't want you guys to mishear what I'm trying to tell you. We cannot earn our way into the presence of God. We cannot work our way to salvation.

What Haggai is pointing us to in this prophecy is that people have to work to make their society better, their home better. If they want a temple to be built, they're going to have to be the ones to do it. If they want city walls, they're going to have to be the ones that do the work. If they want a society where they can live in safety, with food and supplies, and for all the inhabitants of the land, they're going to have to do the work.

One thing that the scripture should remind us of is that God's presence is foundational, not conditional. We don't work to earn God's presence. We work because God is already in and around the things that we're doing. The people who come back to Israel feared that they had to earn God's love. They had to earn God's favor by finishing the temple.

Once we build it, once it's complete, then God's presence will show up and fill the temple. And Hegai is saying, that's not how it works. God flips the script here. God doesn't say, if you want me in the presence, you're going to have to build it. He says, I am here now build.

This echoes the book of the Exodus. God doesn't wait for Israel to be perfect before he delivers them out of the hands of slavery. He showed up in their mess and he led them out. That is the kind of God that we serve in our lives. We often think, if I pray more or serve more or give more to the church, then God will surely bless me.

He will show up. That is a terrible theology that we've talked about in here before. That is not what God believes or wants us to believe about himself. Hey, guy. Reminds us that God's spirit is already among his people.

God's presence is the starting point, not the reward.

Next, the scripture serves as a reminder that faith should never be passive. It's participatory. It means we can't just expect God to save us and work for our benefit without living the way that Jesus taught us to live. As I mentioned earlier, we cannot earn our salvation. But our salvation, friends, has some requirements.

Faith isn't about quietly believing. It's holding fast to the promises of God. It's showing up, it's working the ground even when the harvest isn't visible. Friends, we are called to live our faith every single day that we live.

And that is a way that we're being invited to serve and love and participate in society in a way that benefits others. Our faith is not about showing up to church for one hour a week and calling it good. If this hour doesn't change us, we have spent our hour doing something we don't need to be doing.

This work that we're called to do is messy, but the promise is solid. We're not going to see quick results in our faith, but we can trust God in the process. Rebuilding a temple wasn't glamorous for anybody, Right? It was slow, frustrating, and unimpressive. It took over 20 years for the people to rebuild the temple.

And when it was done, yeah, it was a little bit of a disappointment. There wasn't the Same kind of gold. There wasn't the same kind of size. It was not what it had once been. But even when it was completed, God had even bigger plans.

It was generations later that the temple was rebuilt again by King Herod and became even more stupendous than it had been in its history.

I want to remind you, God does not measure us by the polish of our lives. He measures us by how we accept and welcome his presence. In verse nine, God says, the glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house. And in this place, I will grant peace. That's not because the architecture was better or they used better, stronger materials.

It's because the people were learning to build with faith instead of fear.

In our lives, the work of our healing, rebuilding, forgiving, and hoping again. When we've experienced these disappointments in life, it can feel very, very messy. But the promise is solid. God is with us.

The scaffolding may wobble, the bricks may be uneven, but the foundation is divine. Which means that our future is going to be better. As many of you know, we host in this place, the Brookside Business association, and their meetings are here once a month. And we heard this week from our Lieutenant governor, Matt Pennell. Just this week, we heard about how in Tulsa, our industries are beginning to change.

Our neighborhoods are beginning to shift. We are working to diversify who we are as a city and as a state. I think many of you know that we have relied very, very heavily on oil and gas in Oklahoma. And our lieutenant governor told us this week that things are beginning to shift as we seek to renew our tax base and expand our infrastructure. We are looking at the future of industry for what comes next.

As many of you know, data centers are what is coming next. With the rise of AI, much of human life is beginning to take more shape on the cloud. We have to have infrastructure for that. And currently there are two large data centers being prepared for and planned outside of Tulsa, but nearby. And this is going to take time, resources, and lots of maneuvering between businesses and residential worlds.

As you know, these things are coming into our suburbs. But even here in Brookside, in our own city, in our town, in our area, we are seeing new buildings replacing the old ones. And often many of us are kind of angered by the work that it takes to make progress, aren't we? When we were not we, but when the best hardware was destroyed to bring in a chicken restaurant, people, I cannot tell you how mean they were. Shakey's Pizza used to be there.

I'm not 100. I don't know what that means.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. I hurt some feelings. Sorry. Oh, gosh.

But so often we get so ticked off by the process, right? Blocked traffic lanes, broken water lines, stoplights that blink red. And everybody doesn't know what to do when a stoplight blinks red, right? All of this happens so that new and better things can come. Sometimes it looks like we're taking a step backward.

In order for us to take two steps forward, and as we also begin the serious work of building our next church home on our property right next door, we have to stop and we have to remember that there is pain associated with growth. Levi sometimes comes home, he's like, man, my legs hurt. You're growing. Those are growing pains. That's exciting.

It's not fun. But there is pain associated with growth. And if we want to grow and continue to be the people that God has called us to be, that means we're going to have to make some sacrifices.

Through God's word that we have read today, we can hear the spirit is saying, take courage, friends. Work, don't go to rest. I am here with you. Presence precedes the project. We're not working alone.

God's fingerprints are already the blueprints for our future clarity, for our city, for our church, and for us as individuals. So I want to read a little bit more of the scripture that comes to us from the lectionary today. It comes to us from the book of Luke, chapter 20. Jesus has an encounter with the Sadducees. You ever heard that word before?

The Sadducees, these were a group of religious leaders who refused to believe in the resurrection, not just the resurrection of Jesus, but they refused to believe in any sort of afterlife because it didn't fit what they thought science had proved over and over again to them. So let's read. And this is Luke, chapter 20, verses 27 through 40. It says. Some of the Sadducees who say there is no resurrection, came to Jesus with a question.

Teacher, they said. And they said it really snotty, like, teacher Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, that man must marry the widow and rise up offspring for his brother. Now, there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and dies childless. The second, and then the third married her.

And in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection, whose wife shall she be?

Since the seven were married to her, Jesus replied, the people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage. And they can no longer die, for they are like the angels. They are God's children, since they are children of the resurrection. But in the account of the burning bush, even Moses showed that the dead rise, for he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.

He is not a God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive. Some of the teachers of the law responded, well, said teacher. And no one dared to ask him any more questions. The Sadducees come to Jesus and they ask an absurd hypothetical that they don't even believe the premise of in the Resurrection, by the way, we don't believe in it. Why would you do that other than to trap Jesus?

Then they give the story, the seven brothers, one woman, everybody dies in their turn. Whose wife is she going to be when the end comes and all are raised? They think they've cornered Jesus with logic. But Jesus answered, those who were considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. Indeed, they cannot die anymore because they're like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection.

In other words, you're asking resurrection questions with this world assumptions.

And I think sometimes we are like the Sadducees in that way. The Sadducees can't imagine a reality bigger than the one that they already know. They refuse to believe in eternal life because they can't prove that it's real. And because of their doubt and Jesus promise that what we do and how we believe has eternal implications. The Sadducees, they had to challenge him.

And Jesus, through his response to that challenge, shows us that resurrection isn't something that's off in a distance. It's not a distant doctrine. It's a present reality. Jesus says God is not the God of the dead, but a God of the living, reminding us that resurrection should change how we live now. If we have a hope of the future where life doesn't have to end, then that should impact everything that we do today.

Resurrection isn't just something that happens to us at the end. It's a lens through which we should see the world. And that lens is one that refuses to be confined by scarcity, fear, or finality. And that's echoed in the book of the psalms, in Psalms 145, 17 and 18. It says this.

The Lord is righteous in all his ways and faithful in all he does. The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. That nearness, friends, is resurrection nearness. The living God among the living. These words of scripture prove to us that the resurrection isn't a doctrine to defend, but a rhythm of how we should live our lives.

Resurrection logic says the future is already shaping the present. We don't live by what we see, we live by what God has promised. And this interaction between Jesus and the Sadducees shows us that resurrection logic breaks scarcity logic. If God brings life from death, there's no room anymore for us to fear for despair or for giving up what looks like it's too far gone.

I once met a man who was running a startup company here in Tulsa. We have a great town for that. And he told me, everything now is about speed. The next app, the next funding source, the next big thing. And then he said, you know what I realized?

I don't want to build something fast. I want to build something that lasts.

And he didn't realize it then, but that phrase is resurrection logic. It's living now in the light of something to come. It's investing your time, your money, your relationships, your energy into things that don't die. Things like love and justice and mercy and hope. We live in a city and in a world that's obsessed with what's coming next.

The next oil boom, the next big development, the next big church trend. But resurrection logic says what's unseen matters most, what you build for eternity outlasts what you can measure now. So here's the message that I want you to hear from me today. Church. Don't settle for what you see.

Whatever current state your relationships are in, whatever car you drive, whatever house you live in, whatever church you worship in, this is not the end. Don't settle for what we see. Stop working because. Don't stop working because the glory of what we've worked for looks small or insignificant. Don't measure God's promises by your progress report, because what we see isn't what we're going to get.

When Hagai looked at a half built temple, God said, the glory of this later house will be greater than the former. And that prophecy came to fruition when the Son of God stood in that temple. And then he spoke about peace and a love that turned the whole world upside down. When the Thessalonian believers in the first century feared that the end of the world was coming and they missed Jesus resurrection. Paul said to them, stand firm.

When the Sadducees couldn't imagine resurrection, Jesus says, you don't know the Scriptures and you clearly don't know God. And when the word Sorry. When the world saw a crucified man on a cross, God was already preparing an empty tomb. The story wasn't over for the Israelites when the temple was destroyed. It wasn't over when the Thessalonian church, when they thought that they had missed the resurrection of Jesus.

The story wasn't over when the Sadducees misunderstood God's word in a way that mistook their knowledge instead of faith. The great news is for us today that our story isn't over and we have a lot of work that we still have to do. But like Hagai says, the great news is God is with us. And if God is with us, who can be against us? Church let's pray.