Home Improvement

“Is it time for you yourselves to dwell in your paneled houses, and this temple to lie in ruins?....Consider your ways!�?(Haggai 1:4-5)

Home Improvement was a hit TV show from 1991-1999 that launched the career of Tim Allen who played Tim “The Tool Man�?Taylor. It along with the growth of Home Depot show the obsession we all have with building or remodeling our houses. The prophet Haggai wrote about a people who didn’t care about building God’s house because they were so centered on their own houses or worldly needs. When our world focuses on nothing but making more money, chasing pleasure, building bigger and better homes, and failing to make the Word of God FIRST place in our lives, this should be a warning to us.

There is a crisis of Biblical proportions in the house of God today. The moral fiber of our secular society has eroded with Hollywood, sex, drugs and rock ‘n�?roll, and the erosion has creeped not so quietly into the Church. Greed, money, drugs, SELF, and pleasure are not just the gods of the wicked or unsaved, but they are the gods of many believers today. When we blend in with the immoralities of an ungodly and morally bankrupt world, we’ll lose God’s many blessings and we’ll put our wages into bags with holes.(Haggai 1:6) We must therefore consider our ways and resist the temptation to blend in and accept what is being paraded by the ungodly.

Jesus entered the temple and drove out all the merchants who were doing business there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves. He bluntly told them, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.�?(Matthew 21:13). Jesus came into Jerusalem only to find The Usual Suspects buying and selling in the temple. This was acceptable because their fathers did it, and it was just business as usual. They had abused God’s house and turned it into an altar to the god of money. God called us to be salt in a world without flavor. “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.�?(Matthew 5:13)