‘Therefore the heaven over you is stayed from dew, and the earth is stayed from her fruit’, and it gets worse. ‘And I called for a drought upon the land, and upon the mountains.
Sometimes you look around the churches of our land and you have to conclude that the prevailing problem is churches doing nothing to evangelise, nothing to visit the community, nothing to run Sunday Schools, or to preach the gospel of Christ, even though they love it and believe in it. All these things are happening. Then you begin to think, where are the men? They are just sitting in the pews. They have lost their vision, their zeal, their energy, and their initiative. It is not just the crops; it is the people too who will be weakened and diminished. That is surely what it means, not to mention the cattle, and all the labour of the hands. We know that we are utterly dependent on God’s blessing, but have we stopped looking for blessing, and praying? It was a short, sharp sermon from Haggai, and it is one of the most successful sermons in the whole of the word of God.