BE STRONG__AND WORK!! - CHAPTER # 2 - CLASSIC SERMONS

GEORGE CAMPBELL MORGAN
(1863-1945) was the son of a British Baptist preacher and preached his first sermon when he was 13 years old. He had no formal training for the ministry, but his tireless devotion to the study of the Bible helped him to become one of the leading Bible teachers of his day. Rejected by the Methodists, he was ordained into the Congregational ministry. He was associated with Dwight L. Moody in the Northfield Bible conference and as an itinerant Bible teacher. He is best known as the pastor of Westminister Chapel, London (1904-17 and 1933-35). During his second term there, he had Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones as his associate.
# 1 __BE Strong__And Work !! _Be strong . . . . saith the Lord . . . and work: for I am with you, saith the Lord of hosts (HAGGAI 2:4)
These words were uttered about 2,500 years ago, yet they come to us and to our day with a pertinence that is almost startling. This is not surprising, for our times have much in common with those of the old Hebrew prophets. There are certain senses__the statement must be made and received guardedly__in which the prophetic writings made a profounder appeal to us than do the apostolic writings. Men today know so much more than they do, with the result that they begin to question the things they know. That was the condition in the time of the prophets. Therefore these prophetic writings are powerful in the conditions addressed, in the principles recognized, and in the appeals made. So from this ancient writing of Haggai we take out these words and find that they are living and powerful words, coming to us not faint and far from that Eastern land and that bygone time, but with an immediateness that leads us to feel that they are verily the word of the Lord to us.
  # 2 __In the book of Ezra we have the account of the laying of the stones of the second temple. Because a decree forbidding the work had been obtained from Artaxerxes, the house of God lay waste for fifteen years. It had that almost appalling aspect of desolation, not of a structure battered and bruised and beaten, and in some sense made beautiful by the tempests and time, but of a structure commenced and never finished. At the death of the king this edict lost its authority, but the people did not proceed with the building, citing difficulty, danger, and poverty as reasons. Yet all the while neither danger nor difficulty nor poverty prevented them from building their own house__houses of beauty and luxury. To such a people the messages of Haggai came, and this brief prophecy of only two chapters tells the story of how he delivered these four prophecies in conjunction with Zechariah, and how the people arose and built the house of the Lord.  
# 3 __In our text three things are found with which I propose to deal: first, the need revealed by the command to "work"; second, the responsibility that rested on the people in view of the need; finally, the encouragement given to them to take up that responsibility and meet that need. The need was to build the house of God. The responsibility was that they should be strong and work. The encouragement was the promise and covenant that God made with them: "I am with you, said the Lord of hosts." 
# 4 __The Need for a House of God _The house of God has been neglected. We can imagine men saying: Why building to our children? The question was answered by the prophesyings of Haggai and Zechariah. One supreme answer was given to all such inquiry. It was the answer of the final, fundamental fact of all human life, the fact of God.
# 5 __In one of his sermons at our Mundesley Bible Conference, my friend John A. Hutton said something which those of us who heard him will never forget, and he said it in such a way that we shall never forget. Speaking of the spies who went to spy out the land of Canaan and afterwards described themselves as grasshoppers, Mr Hutton said that those men thought they were looking at the facts of the case, but they were not looking at facts, they were looking at circumstances. He declared that there is but one Fact, and that is God. All other things are circumstances related to that Fact. That is the underlying truth which made necessary the building of the house of God in that bygone age. God is the age-abiding Fact, the ever and everywhere present Fact, and men who forget Him are leaving out of their calculations the supreme quantity, and therefore their findings are inevitably doomed to be wrong.
 # 6 _A science that forgets God is blind, seeing only that which is near, and at last boasting itself that it has no interest in anything that is far. The philosophy that excludes God is equally incomplete, and therefore incompetent. Science starts with emptiness of mind and perfectly proper attitude. Philosophy starts with a question, What is Truth? That is a perfect fair method of operation. But science proceeding to the discovery of the facts will inevitably finally touch God. The question is whether it will dare to call Him God when it finds Him. That philosophy attempts to account for things and to give us the true wisdom of life must take God into account. The question is whether it will ultimately do so or not.
# 7 _The one fact from which there is no escape is that fact of God. God is not distanced from human life. In Him we live and move and have our being (ACTS 17:28). God is not uninterested in human life. If the great revelation of these sacred writings is to be trusted, there is absolutely nothing in which God is not interested.
# 8 _In passing, let me urge very seriously those of you who have not been reading the Old Testament recently to read it once more, without prejudice, simply to see it as revealing God's interest in the common things of life, the commonplaces of life. It is the Old Testament that teaches you that God puts human tears into His bottle. It is the Old Testament that tells that God knows whether the garment you wear is a mixture of wool and something else or not. The Old Testament tells us that God is interested in the fringes that people wear on their garments. Trivial things, you say. That is our God! He is the God of the infinitely small as well as of the infinitely great, not alienated from any part of human life, knowing our downsitting and our uprising, our going out and our coming in; near to us in the casual as well as in the critical, numbering the hairs of our head. That is the supreme Fact of life, and the Fact from which there can be no escape.
# 9 _The supreme obligation on human life is its relationship to God, therefore it is important to build His house. In the days in which Haggai exercised his ministry, the building of the house was entirely material. The house was the true rallying point for the people, the place of worship, the place where men gathering together did not seek the presence of God, but remembered His presence, recognized His power, reminded their own hearts anew of the abiding fact of His covenant with them and of His perpetual care of them. Moreover, in that ancient Hebrew economy, the house of God was essentially the house of prayer for all nations, as our Lord Himself did say in the days of His flesh, quoting from the ancient prophecies.
# 10 _Then how supremely important it was that the house should be built. There, for fifteen years, having been raised but a few feet in all probability from the ground, the first few courses laid, it had stood desolate, overgrown with verdure, moss-covered, a perpetual revelation of the fact that people who bore the name of  God had largely forgotten Him. The supreme need in that hour was not the rearrangement of policy with surrounding nations, not the rediscovery of a lost art, not increase in commerce; the supreme necessity was that the house of God should be built, the sacramental symbol of the nation's relationship to Him.
# 11 _Today the house of God is no longer material; it is living, it is spiritual, it is the church of God in the divine economy is an institute of praise and prayer and prophecy. An institute of praise, a living temple of living souls whose eyes are toward the light, whose faces are irradiated with joy, who are living in the midst of the sorrows and desolations of time as men and women who have found mastery over sorrow and desolation in their fellowship with the unseen and eternal.
# 12 _That is true of the Catholic Church, the whole church, and in that function of the church all things that divide us cease to be, and we realize that the building of the church of God is of supreme importance in order that there may be maintained in the midst of the sorrows and sins of humanity a living testimony to the gladness and holiness that are possible to men as they live in right relationship with God. Nothing, therefore, can be more important than this building of the church, the building of it stone upon stone, of living stones brought into touch with the Living Stone, whose preciousness is made over to them that they may share that preciousness and bear testimony in their glad, pure, consenting life to what the Kingdom of God really means in the world.
# 13 _Whereas the house of God today is no longer material but spiritual, the material is still a very real symbol of the spiritual. When the church of God in any place in any locality is careless about the material place of assembly, the place of its worship and its work, it is a sign and evidence that its life at a low ebb.
# 14 _Let us not, however, lose sight of the larger matter, the necessity for the continuation of the building of the spiritual house of God. There is nothing this nation needs more than that the church of God itself should be more clearly seen. Therefore there is no work more important than that of the continuity of the building of that spiritual house which, in the life of the nation, is not to be dictated to by the nation, but to exercise its threefold function of praise, prayer, prophecy, and so contribute to the true essential strength of the national life.
# 15 _The First Responsibility: To Be Strong
These words spoken in the olden days by the prophet indicated not only the need, but the responsibility. The spiritual value of this old-time story is here most marked, most definite. These people were to "be strong"; that is the first thing. And they were to "work"; that was the second. These two things cannot be separated. There can be no work apart from strength; there can be no strength, such as the prophet referred to, which does not express itself in work. "Be strong . . . and work." 
# 16 _This charge to the people was a suggestion of their weakness, the weakness that had prevented, and still was preventing, them from building the house of God. We discover the elements of the weakness in the most simple way by looking at the prophecy. In the first place their weakness consisted in the fact that they were careless about this matter. They said, "It is not the time for us to come, the time for the Lord's houses to be built" (HAGGAI 1:2). That is so startlingly modern that I hardly know what to say about it. It is not the time! The modern man will not speak so simply; the modern man will  say that it is not the psychological moment. That means the same thing. Whenever, in the presence of super abounding need, man says, "It is not the psychological moment," know well that the cleverness of his argument is revelation of the carelessness of his heart. The time is not come; we are waiting for the time, for some moment electric with inspirational opportunity. People who wait for that moment never find it, and do not want to find it.  
# 17 _Another element of weakness to which the prophet drew attention is revealed in the question he asked: "Is it a time for you yourselves to dwell in your cieled houses, while this house lieth waste?" (HAGGAI 1:4). The second element of weakness in the life of the people was luxury and comfort; they were dwelling in their own paneled houses, perhaps even while discussing over and over in their social gatherings the neglected condition of the house of God. The set time had not come to build it; but the time had come to build their own houses, and to panel them with beauty.
  # 18 __There was yet another element of weakness. We discover it by another question: "Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? And how do ye see it now? Is it not in your eyes as nothing?" (HAGGAI 2:3). The third element of weakness was contempt for that very house which lay unfinished, and contempt for any man who suggested that it ever could be restored to its ancient glory. This contempt was born of a great past, of which the people were always talking, and in which they rejoiced, to the neglect of the present, with its terrific responsibility and its glorious opportunity. The collateral writings to this prophecy reveal some of the reasons for the contempt. The sacred fire was no longer burning, the shekinah glory was no longer manifested, the ark and the cherubim were no longer in their places, the urim and the thummim had been lost, and the spirit of prophecy was silent. All these things were absent. The people looked back to the days when these things were there in all their glory, and they held the present in supreme contempt, both as to its conditions and as to the idea that it was possible to restore the lost glory.
# 19 _I say again, the picture is wonderfully modern. We still have the carelessness which says, The time has not come. It expresses itself often in prayer for revival. The revival is here, if we will but have it so, I pray you talk no more about the indifference of the nation; talk if you will of the indifference of the church to its own evangel, its own gospel, its own living powers. The set time has not come, so men still say. 
# 20 - Then there is the weakness resulting from comfort. The church of God today is suffering from material prosperity within her own borders. Things which our fathers spoke of as luxuries we speak of as necessities. For all spiritual service we are being rendered weak, anemic, enervated by the beautiful houses and the comforts of our lives. The old Spartan heroism of our fathers, the simpler life, and the great poverty, have largely passed away. It is the time to build our own houses and dwell in them. 
# 21 - Another element of weakness present with us is our perpetual looking back and sighing for departed glories, for the voice of preachers of other days, for the prayer meetings that once were held, for all those peculiar manifestations of the presence of God in past  days. The old men are sighing for these and looking with contempt on the present hour, disbelieving in the possibility of  revival and the building of the house of God. 
# 22 - Said the prophet to these men, and now says the Word of our God to us, "Be strong" (2:4). If we would know what our strength is, we may know it by examining our weakness. Over against every element of weakness we are to place an element of strength. Over against carelessness what shall we put? Listen to the voice of the prophet. "Consider your ways. Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put ot into a bag with holes. Thus saith the Lord of hosts: Consider your ways" (1:5__7). One of the first conditions of real strength will be obedience to that command, the consideration of our ways.