I Am With You

"It is smaller than it was." That was the honest verdict of the old men, and Haggai records it without arguing: is it not in your eyes in comparison of it as nothing?

The objection is the right one to start with, because it is the objection the people themselves raised. Anyone who had seen Solomon's temple was now looking at a foundation that did not compare, laid by a reduced people in a provincial town under a foreign empire, and the natural conclusion was that this work was not worth doing well. The work in front of you is smaller than the work you imagined. A class of four. A parent who no longer knows your name. Six years of a ministry that has not grown.

Watch what God never says to them. He does not tell them the building is secretly impressive. He does not appeal to their potential or reframe the numbers. He says be strong three times, once to the governor, once to the priest, once to all ye people of the land, and then he says work. And the reason attached is not a projection about the outcome: for I am with you, saith the LORD of hosts. Five verses on He does say the latter house will exceed the former, but that is a promise about a future none of them lived to see, and it is not what He gives them to work with today. Today He gives them Himself.

So the invitation stands, and it is an invitation rather than an instruction. You may do the small work without requiring it to justify itself first. The four people. The visit. The meal. Nobody is asking you to believe it is bigger than it is. You are only being offered company in it, by someone who has never regarded a small work as beneath him.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 80 is Meditate (Joshua 1:8).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna