Two Key Sermons from Haggai about Misplaced Priorities

As the Pastoral Search Committee and Board of Elders prepare our church (Lake Bible Church in Lake Oswego, OR) to call a new Senior Pastor, Juli & I thought it would be beneficial for all who have been blessed by Pastor Jim’s 34-year ministry at Lake, T.F.W. and J.A.B. to hear a key sermon from when he first began.

But first, here is the April 28, 2024 announcement by John Dotson (Pastor of Men and Student Ministries) and Mike Sheffield, Elder Board Chairman (from 1:23:00-1:29:24):

Pastor John:

“For 34-some years plus, God raised up for this congregation a man that was dedicated and faithful not only to Him but to a flock of people called a congregation. His words have meant great things in people’s lives. The very motto that we use here as a church, ‘A Place where People Care and Truth Matters,’ has reflected over this whole generation, not just with you, but with those that God has raised here and now have gone beyond to other places. It echoes throughout the world, ‘A Place where People Care and Truth Matters.’

“That verse (Phil. 1:6) says that God’s Word work will be completed until the day of Christ Jesus. Well after 34-some years, the Lord has tarried. He hasn’t returned. He will, and He could.

“Our Board of Elders, through prayer, much prayer and much conversation, have decided that it is time to at least begin the search for the man that God is preparing, just as God prepared Jim Andrews for this congregation, for this time, for the man who would then  come and follow and take this ministry on the same path for not only us but for the congregation that will be birthed through us into the next generation.

“Now here’s where we’re fortunate: Jim is still our pastor. Jim will be our pastor until that time that God brings in the man that he will hand the mantle off to. We will follow his leadership , we will be encouraged, we will be blessed, and our relationship with Christ will thrive just as it has for 34-plus years because of the heart and the dedication Jim Andrews has to his relationship to Christ and to the work of God that Jim so eloquently declares to us each week.

“It is our desire, both as a staff and as Elders, that you begin to pray. Pray for that man that God is preparing right now. It is not going to be, “Hey, we are next week, and here’s the replacement.” That’s not gonna happen. It’s going to take time. We are not, as Mike has said, going to get ahead of the Holy Spirit.

“We’re going to trust. We’re going to move forward because Christ hasn’t returned. And there are people out there who need Jesus Christ even at the completion of Jim’s work, whenever that will be.

“We’ve had a mission. It doesn’t change. We need to pray and ask God’s guidance, we ask God’s intervention for the next generation for the spiritual children for the spiritual grandchildren who will come through the work of Lake Bible Church until Jesus Christ returns.”

Chairman Mike:

“Yes, John is right. We as elders have been talking, praying, praying, praying, and talking and have come to the conclusion that to maintain the unity that Jim has been talking about, and not only unity but continuity in this congregation. We think it best to start the search, however long that is going to take. Jim has written to me and said that he will remain Senior Pastor until such a replacement is found, which I’m thankful for. And I think we should all be thankful for.

“But we didn’t want it to be kind of, you know, behind closed doors and things like that. We will be searching, I mean, I kind of anticipate this as a long, drawn-out process, but as John said, my desire and all the hearts of the elders desire is to not get ahead of the Lord on this. Not get in front of the Spirit. and it’s taken a long time to come to this conclusion, but I think it will take a long time to change also, but we’re asking that you continue to pray, continue to put your trust in the Lord, continue to pray that Jim continues to speak the truth as he has for 34 years and will continue to do so as long as the Lord leaves him here.

“We just appreciate that we have a pastor that we can love, that we can respect, that we can respect his preaching, we never have to doubt that what we’re hearing is the truth, and anybody that follows him is going to have some very large shoes to fill, and those will be criteria that will be out front. And so we just ask, as elders, that you all pray that we will continue to pray, and as this process moves along, we’ll give updates as need be.

“We’ll probably have a little more detail updated as to what the process is exactly going to be at the business meeting on June 30.”  1:29:34

 

Now here is a portion of that key sermon from 1990, followed by highlights from a recent The Final Word program (2024) from the same book of Haggai.

Pastor Jim began preaching weekly at Lake on March 18, 1990, and by April 22, he had been called to become Lake’s Interim Pastor. In that Sunday sermon, he began a 3-part series on The Importance of Rightly Placed Priorities:

@21:29 “Let me try to set the background and here’s what I’d like to show you from Haggai. I want to show you from Haggai, in fact, I’m going to be talking about this general theme for the next three Sundays: the importance of a rightly placed priorities. I’m talking now about the danger of misplaced priorities. But I’d like you to see my thesis illustrated in Haggai in three respects. I’d like for you to see the timeless, the timeless problem, I like for you to see the timeless consequence. And I’d like for you to see the timeless cure.”

(For the full, lightly edited transcript, click here:)

For Juli & me, the sermons that Jim preached that first year as Interim Pastor (1990-1991) have much more than mere sentimental value to us. Of course, we were grateful that, as Jim preached every week, he shared with the congregation (listen from about 6:00-8:15) about our disabling disease, now known as M.E. (myalgic encephalomyelitis). Since we had been unable to attend church for the previous year, we were grateful for any contact with fellow Christians. Olsie brought us Jim’s messages each week on cassette tape, and we listened intently. Our severe suffering created in us a hunger for God’s Word like never before. So we were being fed by and cared for at the same time by LBC.

Also, since we intended to build a custom, environmentally safe home on the west side of town (near LBC) that would accommodate Juli’s multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), we gradually began considering Lake to be our own church.

The outpouring of love and support for Jim & Olsie, and for us, was quite overwhelming, as Jim describes in this Haggai sermon (listen @6:45). A few years later, we officially became members at Lake.

So again, we would like for all LBC members and attenders (and TFW listeners and JAB readers) to hear and read excerpts from this key message, as well as a recent TFW program from the same book of Haggai.

4/22/90 Sunday Morning Sermon:

After explaining the historical background of the exiles who had returned from Babylon but disobediently failed to complete the Temple, Pastor Jim explains that the Lord gave the prophet Haggai a message for them: “Consider your ways” (1:5):

@29:27, “Now people, I don’t speak profanely. I’m trying to speak graphically. So I’m speaking almost literally. If I would translate that, what He would say to some of us, now we’re talking about priorities, not the things in themselves. “I don’t have time to do that. Those things are nice. But I’ve got to get my investment portfolio in order. I mean, I’ve got 6 kids, understand, I mean, we’ve got a business, you have to take care of business, you understand that. The trouble with you creatures is you’ve never been. You have to take care of these things. And, well, you have to have Volvos, BMW’s, and Mercedes, and you have to dress for success. You understand that? And you have to have a house. And I’ve got to have four, five bedroom and a three car garage. And that stuff costs money. Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Jim? I mean, I want to serve the Lord. But I have to do it on my terms so that my convenience, because life is life. I’m a victim of the tyranny of the urgent and these things have to be done.

Now do you hear the Lord’s answer? The problem now let’s identify it clearly, or the problem is a timeless problem not just endemic to their day, not just a native or originating in their day but existing yesterday, but this

They were putting their personal priority, the lust for their creature comforts, for their own financial security well ahead of the demands of the worship service. That’s flat-out what they were doing. And that problem is still with us. And when that happens, life begins to become loose at the bolts, and life starts heading south. And I’ll tell you the reason, I’ll tell you the reasons we don’t wake up to it.”

[Later in the sermon, Pastor Jim makes an important caveat regarding how to interpret difficult circumstances in our lives:]

@36:49, Now, friends, I’ve got to qualify, it’s very important. I don’t want you to hear me say that when we get our agenda right, we get our priorities rightly placed, that’s the end of the problem. I don’t want you to hear me saying that if you have any of those kinds of problems, it is because of misplaced priorities. In fact, sometimes that is emphatically not the case. Because what often happens when people start to do right, when they start the designs, when they do get their agenda in order, some things can go very, very wrong, because there is an Enemy out there. We call it, I hesitate to use this terminology because of some who use it and what they mean by it, but the Bible does talk about spiritual warfare

But there are other things that will come together. There are other things that will not come together, they will not work out. Because we’re working on a collision course with God, we’re treating God as if he’s not there. And we claim Christ as our Savior, but we’re ignoring him as the Lord of our priorities.

[Later, Pastor Jim concludes:]

38:49  And I’m asking you to do what the prophet Haggai said, “consider your ways.” Evaluate, and if necessary, it’s not necessary in every case, but if necessary, evaluate, those priorities…

40:30: God will honor those who will honor Him (1 Sam. 2:30). But when we treat Him as if He is not, and we try to live life on our own agenda, and ignore him, do you know what he does? Here’s a word for that. He sabotages. Literally, that’s what he did to these people. He absolutely sabotages.

So what’s the answer [for misplaced priorities]? The answer, the cure. It’s simple. God is a gracious God. We’re an erring people. We’re a people who are weak, and we are falling, and he understands our fallenness. Our heavenly Father does not desire to beat up on us. He desires merely to correct and to bless us. And what he calls for us to do is to sit down and to consider our ways. And considering our ways, if necessary, evaluate, and to say to ourselves, “Heavenly Father, first things first, a lot of secondary things have begun to rule my life. I’m not going to let that happen anymore by the grace of God. I see this and this and this. I’m in business, but I’m going to put You first.” Ends @43:00

Now we’d like to share highlights (the full, lightly edited transcript is here) from the final TFW program (Application) from the Haggai series (recorded in 2018, aired in 2018 and re-posted in 2024)

@7:25, 1) God doesn’t want simply more of your life, more of your time, more of your energy, more of your money. My friends, God wants to be first, period. And if we expect to be blessed by God in the ways that God is willing to bless us, then we’ve got to get our priorities in order. And a lot of people don’t seem to understand that…

@8:11, 2) A second lesson that we can learn from these words of Haggai is this. That all the religiosity, all of the ceremony, all the ritual, all the outward service of God in the world is of no account in God’s eyes if we are defiled on the inside. For us, this life is not about God giving us happiness, it is about us gaining, by the grace of God through the work of His Spirit, holiness. What God wants of you and me is to be is a holy people. The road to happiness, in the biblical sense of the idea, runs straight through holiness. That is God’s first priority. I do not mean that God does not care that you’re happy. Of course he does. He wants you to be happy. But I’m telling you happiness runs through holiness…

@10:25… But when the outward things are not accompanied by the spirit that is supposed to attend them, they’re abominations in God’s sight. God really wants at the end of the day, obedience, heart obedience, and not just the outward performance of religious rituals.

Well, we see this in Haggai, that God wants holiness. And if we’re defiled on the inside, everything that we touch is defiled: all of our ceremonies, all of our rituals, all of our so-called sacrifices. If they’re not attended by a Holy Spirit, then they’re trashed.

@11:05, 3) That brings me to a third point. And we see this in chapter two of Haggai, where Haggai asks the priests for a ruling concerning ritual law and then makes an application of it. And that is this: pollution is much easier to spread than holiness. Thomas V Moore, in his little book on the Minor Prophets, has made this very trenchant comment, “One drop of filth will defile a vase of water; many drops of water will not purify a vase of filth.” Let’s remember that. Pollution is much easier to spread than holiness.

@11:55, 4) This brings me to a fourth application of the things that we see in Haggai, the Prophet: No amount of religious ceremonies or rituals, no matter how appropriate in themselves (I’m thinking in modern terms, baptism as appropriate, observing communion is appropriate, attending church is appropriate; “Neglect, not the assembling of yourselves together and so much the more, don’t neglect it, as you see the day the day of the Lord approaching, were taught, and Hebrews chapter 10, verse 25.” All of these things are appropriate in and of themselves.)

But no amount of religious ceremony or rituals, no matter how appropriate in themselves, can make one right who is polluted by willful disobedience to God’s commands. People delude themselves in that way. We can go to church, we can pray up a storm. But if we’re lifting up defiled hands, unholy hands, the careful observance of these rituals does not make us right. It cannot compensate for that.

[Illustration:] I remember years ago seems like another lifetime when I was in my first church out of seminary. I had a man on that church who was a deacon, it was a Baptist church, what are called elders and most other churches were called deacons in that church. He was a major pain in the differential, you know what I mean?

But like many of his type, he was a man whose hands were defiled. He was not really a good man, and he was unfit for his office. But the deacons were deacons for life, so he had tenure, so to speak, and there was no getting rid of him and I had to deal with him and some others of his own ilk.

But boy, was he rigorous about the Lord’s Supper. He was not rigorous about personal holiness, but people like that sometimes will compensate. And they make their reputation as a person of piety by being very tight and rigorous on matters of ritual. Boy, you’ve got to baptize by immersion. And I believe in baptism by immersion.

But you would think that heaven was going to riot if you’re baptized any other way. When it came to communion, if you offered communion, as I did one Sunday, to a man who had, this was unbelievable, who had just received Christ, but he hadn’t become a member of our church yet. Oh, did that rattle his cage, and he accosted me outside the church after the service, “How come you offered that man communion when he wasn’t even a member of the church?” And I said, “Brother, I do believe if the Lord Jesus Christ were there, he wouldn’t have been the least bit concerned about whether the man was a member of our church or not, is only concerned about whether he was a member of the kingdom of God. And when that man came to Christ today and confess Christ before this people and sat down on the front row, I asked you to serve him because now he has a brother in the Lord. Well, that seems obvious, I’m sure to virtually everybody out there who hears what I’m saying.

But some people don’t get it. They do not understand that no amount of religious ceremony or rituals can make one right. That’s what this man didn’t understand about himself, a man polluted by willful disobedience to God’s command, but he tried to compensate by being very legalistic about all of these details of church ritual and church membership. A lot of nonsense.

@15:37, 5) Now, I’ll make a fifth point of application of Haggai. When things go wrong or haywire in our lives, folks, the first thing we ought to do, and very often, the last thing that many do, is what Haggai says twice in his first message, “Consider our ways.” “Consider your ways,” the Lord said. We need to consider our ways, consider the possibility that the Lord may be firing a shot across our bow, chastening, we call it, to draw our attention to unfinished business that needs our prompt attention. That’s a good thing.

Very often, what we’re going through is just testing. The Lord tests His people, we see it all through the scriptures. We say Jesus testing his disciples. He tests the church, that is good. Because in the end, it strengthens our faith.

But lots of times, there’s something going on in our lives. There’s an uncleanness, there’s a defilement, there’s disobedience. It may be disobedience by way of commission; it may be disobedience by the way of omission. But whatever it is, it’s something that we may be ignoring. It’s something that we may not be fully conscious of. And the Lord is shaking us up and rattling our cage a little bit.

And I don’t know about you, but in my case, I think, I can’t remember all cases, but it has been rather a habit with me when things go wrong, and I think it’s a good habit, is to first of all, say, “Lord, is there something I’m doing? Is there something that is displeasing to You? Am I out of line, out of alignment with Your will in some way? And is this or that or whatever it is, is this a message that You’re sending me so that I will be alerted, and I will wake up and see things in a different light?”

Sometimes they’re just outright scandal in our lives and things start breaking apart. And the Lord is sending a message, saying, “This is not right. This is reprehensible. This is an abomination in My sight.”

“What Lord?”

And does He say, “Consider your ways. What about this? What about that?”

Folks, we need to go there, a lot of people never do. They’re just not properly introspective spiritually. And they don’t have a Haggai standing right there speaking with the voice of God, but we do have the Word of God. And if we’re in the Word of God, and we do have the Spirit of God inside us, and the Spirit of God works through the Word to make us alert to these things, when we have eyes to see and ears to hear when we want to please God but may not be doing so.

So I say again, when things go wrong or haywire in our lives, the first thing we ought to do, but very often, the last thing many do, is to consider our ways and to ask ourselves the question, if the Lord just may be firing a shot across our bow, to draw attention to unfinished business that needs our prompt attention, and eventually when and you ask, the Lord will show it to you.

And if it’s not there, you examine your conscience, you examine your ways before the Lord, the Lord will communicate that to you also. He’ll do it through his Word, He will do it through His Spirit, or He will do it through both. Or he will do it through righteous, pious friends or others, who the Spirit of God will use to assure you that the things that you might be too hard on yourselves about are not, in fact, the issue at all.

But that’s a good process for all of us. It keeps us squaring the books at the end of the day, so to speak.

@19:30, 6) Now another point of application, number six, if God has left us a clear and unequivocal promise, and I do emphasize clear and unequivocal promise, we ought to run boldly with it against all contradictions, providing we are certain we have met the stipulations. Here’s an example. God has given us a promise; in fact, our Lord Jesus gave it to us at the end of Matthew chapter six. He said, speaking to His disciples, warning them against getting all caught up in all of the worry traps that so many people get embedded in, worrying about money, worrying about food, worrying about house payments, worried about car payments, and we can understand easily how people go there, especially if a man or woman is out of a job or both, why that wouldn’t be an anxiety…

But our Lord tried to calm our fears, and He told us, “That’s what the Gentiles, that’s where the pagans go with these things. My advice to you,” the Lord Jesus said, “is do this, Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven. That is, Seek first the rule of God in your life. You make that ‘Job One.’  You make that your priority, and all of these things that you need, and I emphasize need, and all these things that people tend to worry about instead of seeking first the kingdom of God, these things that you need will be added unto you. That’s a promise. Do not fear,” the Lord says, “I am with you, My Spirit is with you.”…

@22:26, 7) Which brings up a seventh point: In difficult circumstances, all we really need to know to get through it is this: “I am with you,” says the Lord, My Spirit is abiding in your midst.” And in our case, His spirit is not only in the midst of us as a church, but His Spirit is abiding in us. “Therefore, do not fear. Do not crumble like a cookie; walk through the obstacles, continuously putting one foot in front of the other in the blind spots.” It’s okay to say Lord, “I don’t know what’s going on. It’s okay to say, “Lord, I trust you that you are with me, even though it doesn’t seem like you’re with me. I trust You to take care of me even though at the moment, it’s not apparent that You are. The Lord is good with that. Just trust Him. “I am with you.” And that ought to be enough to light our fires and to carry us through.

I close with this: God is never pleased with us, my friends when we allow his rightful place, which is first place in our lives, to be usurped by our own selfish agenda. When we do that, when we drift into that territory, we can expect the Lord to challenge our priorities in one way or another. And that’ll usually involve some complicating of our lives, and probably some pain, probably involved that until we get on the right page. It was with these folk, and the Lord has not changed. So let’s remember these things and benefit by them.

Friends, thank you for listening and reading. Please pray for our church as we select a new Senior Pastor.

Paul & Juli Grose