The Desire of All Nations

Scripture: Haggai (with Hebrews 12:26–28)

Before this session, read the short book of Haggai: the prophet’s call to the returned exiles to stop neglecting the house of the LORD while they panel their own, the repeated summons to consider their ways, the comfort that God is with His people in the work, the promise that the future splendor of this temple will be greater than that of former times, and the word that the nations will bring their treasures when the LORD shakes them (2:7), the verse older translations render “the desire of all nations shall come.” Then read Hebrews 12:26–28, where the apostle takes up Haggai’s shaking of heaven and earth and points it to the kingdom that cannot be shaken. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what does it mean to put the LORD’s house first when our own comfort competes for the time and the means? And why has the Church so long heard in Haggai 2:7 the coming of Christ?

I will also shake up all the nations, and they will offer their treasures; then I will fill this temple with glory, says the LORD who rules over all.
(Haggai 2:7)

The House That Lay Waste

With Haggai we step across the great divide of the Old Testament. Every prophet we have met until now spoke before the catastrophe, warning of a day of the LORD that had not yet fallen. Haggai speaks after it. The thing the others foretold had come to pass: Jerusalem had been taken, the temple of Solomon burned to the ground, and the people carried away to Babylon for seventy years. And now a remnant had come home: a small, poor, discouraged company, straggling back under the Persian king’s decree to a ruined city and a holy place that was nothing but a heap of blackened stones. Haggai’s book is precisely dated, to the year and the month and the day, in the second year of Darius the king (520 B.C.), some five hundred years before the birth of the One toward whom the whole book leans. He is the first of the three post-exilic prophets, the men who spoke to the people of the rebuilding.

It helps to remember how the people had come to be there. Some seventy years before, the Babylonians had carried Judah into exile; and then Babylon itself fell, and the Persian king Cyrus issued a decree permitting the exiles to return and rebuild the house of their God. A first company had come back under Zerubbabel the governor and Joshua the high priest, perhaps fifty thousand souls: a remnant, and a discouraged one. For the reality of the return fell far short of the glittering promises of restoration the earlier prophets had sung. They had dreamed of a glorious homecoming; they found a ruined city, hostile neighbors, hard ground, and a temple they could not seem to finish. The grand prophecies seemed to have shrunk to this small, struggling business of mere survival. It is the particular ache of the already and not yet: the promise truly begun, yet so far from its fullness that faith can scarcely recognize it. And it is into that ache that Haggai speaks.

And the rebuilding had stalled. The returned exiles had laid the foundation of a new temple soon after they arrived, but opposition and discouragement had set in, and the work had simply stopped, and stayed stopped for some sixteen years. In the meantime the people had not been idle; they had built and finished their own houses, comfortable and paneled, while the house of the LORD lay open to the weather, a foundation and little more. It is into that situation (a community that had quietly decided its own comfort came first and God’s house could wait) that Haggai brings the word of the LORD. And the word begins not with comfort but with a question that cuts.

Consider Your Ways

Is it right for you to live in richly paneled houses while my temple is in ruins? (1:4). The people had a ready excuse: The time for rebuilding the LORD’s temple has not yet come (1:2). Not yet; conditions are not right; we cannot afford it; perhaps later. And Haggai exposes the excuse for what it is by pointing at their own finished, paneled homes. They had found the time and the means for their own comfort; it was only the LORD’s house for which there was never quite enough. The issue was never really resources; it was priorities. They had simply put themselves first and God last, and dressed the disorder in the language of practicality.

Here then is what the LORD who rules over all says: “Think carefully about what you are doing” (1:5). The Hebrew says, literally, “set your heart upon your ways,” and the older versions render it “consider your ways.” And then the LORD holds up to them the strange futility of their lives. You have planted much, but have harvested little. You eat, but are never filled. You drink, but are still thirsty. You put on clothes, but are not warm. Those who earn wages end up with holes in their money bags (1:6). Here is one of the most vivid pictures in the prophets: a man working hard, earning his wage, and dropping it straight into a purse full of holes, so that no matter how much he puts in, it is always empty. We must be careful how we read this, for it is not a crude bargain, not give to the building fund and God will pad your bank account. It is something deeper and more searching. The first commandment is that we shall have no other gods, that we shall fear, love, and trust God above all things; and when a people invert that order, putting their own comfort in the place that belongs to God, they find that the comfort itself turns to ash in their hands. We were made for God first, and when He is displaced, even our gains become a bag with holes. The emptiness is not God being petty; it is the built-in futility of a life lived for the wrong thing.

The Lord Jesus would one day put the positive side of this principle in words every Christian knows: But above all pursue his kingdom and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matthew 6:33). The promise and the warning are two sides of one truth. When God is sought first, the rest finds its proper place and its proper blessing; when God is displaced and all these things are sought first, they slip through the fingers like water and never satisfy. This is not a counsel of poverty or a contempt for honest work and daily bread; the LORD does not despise the paneled house as such, and He means in this very book to bless His people’s labor. The point is the order of our loves. Put first things first, and the second things are received as gifts; put second things first, and even the first things are lost along with them. Haggai’s stalled temple is simply the visible shape of an invisible disorder in the heart, the disorder the first commandment exists to expose.

Twice in the chapter the LORD calls them to set their hearts upon their ways (1:5, 7). It is the language of the law calling for self-examination: stop, look honestly at how you are actually living, and see the disorder you have grown comfortable with. The summons is not finally to a building project but to a reordering of the heart: Go up to the hill country and bring back timber to build the temple. Then I will be pleased and honored (1:8). Put first things first. Let the LORD have the place that is His. And the drought and the scarcity they had been suffering, the LORD now explains, had been His own summons all along: not random misfortune, but the hand of a Father trying to call a distracted people back to Himself before it was too late.

There is a tender truth buried in the LORD’s explanation of the drought, and it is one the New Testament makes explicit: that the hard providences of God toward His people are not the strokes of an enemy but the discipline of a Father. For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, the apostle writes (Hebrews 12:6); the scarcity and the failed harvests were not God turning against His people but God refusing to let them drift away comfortable and unconverted. He had withheld the rain to get their attention, to interrupt the easy slide into a religion of leftovers, to call them home before the drift hardened into something worse. We do not always read our own hard seasons rightly; we take them for misfortune, or for God’s absence, when they may be His most loving summons. Haggai teaches us to ask, when the harvest fails and the bag seems full of holes, whether the LORD is not in it after all, calling us to consider our ways and to put Him first again.

I Am with You

What happens next is one of the loveliest things in the Twelve, because the people actually listen. Then Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel and the high priest Joshua son of Jehozadak, along with the whole remnant of the people, obeyed the LORD their God. … and the people began to respect the LORD (1:12). The governor, the high priest, and the ordinary people together hear the word and turn. And the LORD’s response to their turning is immediate and tender. Before they have laid a single new stone, while the obedience is still only a stirring in the heart, He sends them the words that are the gospel center of the whole book: “I am with you!” says the LORD (1:13).

This is the deep pattern of the whole gospel, and it is worth pausing to see it clearly, because so much false religion gets it exactly backward. False religion says: do the work, and perhaps God will be with you; earn the presence, achieve the acceptance, and the favor of God will be your wage. The gospel says the reverse: God is with you first, freely, and the work flows out of that gift. The apostle puts it in a single line: We love because he loved us first (1 John 4:19). The love comes first, as a gift; our love is only the echo of it. So here: the LORD does not bargain build, and I will come; He declares I am with you, and the building is the glad response of a people already assured of His presence. This is the order the Lutheran Confessions guard so jealously: first the gift, then the fruit; first justification, freely given, then the good works that grow from it as surely as fruit grows from a living tree. Reverse the order, and you have lost the gospel.

Notice the order, for it is the order of the gospel itself. The LORD does not say, Build my house, and then I will be with you, work first, presence as the reward. He says, I am with you, and the work flows out of that assurance. The presence is the gift; the labor is the response. This is Immanuel, God with us, the same promise that ran through Zephaniah’s in your midst and that would one day take flesh in the Lord Jesus, who left His Church with the very same words: I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). The discouraged builder, the struggling congregation, the believer worn down by a work that seems to go nowhere: all of them are met by this word before they are asked for anything. I am with you. And then, so strengthened, the LORD energized and encouraged Zerubbabel … and the whole remnant of the people. They came and worked on the temple of their God (1:14). Even their willingness to build was the LORD’s own stirring within them. From first to last, the work was His gift before it was their labor.

There is something quietly profound in the way the text describes their response. It does not merely say the people decided to obey; it says the LORD energized and encouraged them. The Hebrew is more vivid still: the LORD “stirred up the spirit” of Zerubbabel, and the spirit of Joshua, and the spirit of all the remnant. Even their willingness to build was not finally their own achievement but the LORD’s own work within them. This is the gospel’s testimony everywhere: that the very faith and obedience God requires of us, He must first work in us; that, as the apostle says, the one bringing forth in you both the desire and the effort … is God (Philippians 2:13). We are not the source even of our own turning; when we turn, it is because grace has turned us. This guards us from pride on the one side (we cannot boast of an obedience God Himself stirred up) and from despair on the other, for the God who commands the work is the God who supplies the very willingness to do it. The discouraged builder need not summon the strength from within; he may ask the LORD to stir his spirit, and the LORD delights to do it.

Who Saw This House in Its Former Splendor?

But once the work resumes, a new discouragement sets in, subtler than the first. As the modest new temple begins to take shape, the oldest among them (men who as children had seen Solomon’s temple in its glory before the Babylonians burned it) begin to weep, for the new house is so plainly inferior. The LORD names their grief exactly: Who among you survivors saw the former splendor of this temple? How does it look to you now? Isn’t it nothing by comparison? (2:3). The new temple had no ark, no visible glory-cloud, none of the splendor of the old; beside the memory of Solomon’s house it looked like nothing at all. It is the particular discouragement of the small and the diminished, of every believer and every congregation who looks at what they can manage now and grieves that it is so much less than what once was.

And to that grief the LORD speaks a triple word of courage and the great gospel reason behind it. Even so, take heart, Zerubbabel … Take heart, Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and all you citizens of the land … and begin to work. For I am with you, says the LORD who rules over all (2:4). Again the ground of the courage is not the size of the building or the strength of the builders, but the presence of God: I am with you. They are not told that the new temple will rival the old in marble and gold; they are told that God is with them, and that this is enough. The day of small things is not despised by the LORD, however much it is despised by those who measure glory in grandeur. He is about to tell them why the modest house they are raising will, in fact, hold a glory that makes Solomon’s temple look like the shadow it always was.

The companion prophet Zechariah, working alongside Haggai in these same months, would give this comfort its classic phrase: For who dares make light of small beginnings? (Zechariah 4:10). The Hebrew says, literally, “Who has despised the day of small things?” The LORD has a way, all through the Scriptures, of working through the small and the unimpressive: the younger son, the barren woman, the little flock, the mustard seed, the five loaves, the manger in the backwater town. The world measures glory by size and splendor and counts the small as nothing; God delights to hide His greatest works in the things the world overlooks. This is a word the Church has needed in every diminished age, and one our own small and struggling congregations need now. A faithful little flock, meeting in a plain building, few in number and slender in means, weeping perhaps over what the church once was, is not despised by the LORD; it may be the very place where His glory chooses to dwell. He does not measure His house by what the old men remember; He fills it with Himself.

Moreover, the LORD who rules over all says: “In just a little while I will once again shake the sky and the earth, the sea and the dry ground. I will also shake up all the nations, and they will offer their treasures; then I will fill this temple with glory,” says the LORD who rules over all (2:6–7). The promise reaches far past the little band of builders and their modest stones. The LORD will shake the whole created order, and shake all the nations, and into the house they are building He will bring a glory worthy of the shaking.

And what is it that the nations bring? The phrase has been read in more than one way, and both readings finally meet in the same place. The Hebrew says, literally, that “the desire of all the nations” (the desirable, precious thing) “will come,” and because the verb is plural, most modern translators, the NET among them, take it as the treasures of the nations: the wealth and the peoples of the Gentile world streaming in to the house of God, the great ingathering we have watched promised again and again through the Twelve. The very next verse supports that reading: The silver and gold will be mine (2:8). But the Church, following the ancient Latin rendering “the Desired of all nations shall come,” has long heard in it something deeper: a title for the Coming One Himself, the Desire of all nations, the One whom the whole heathen world, in all its restless idolatry and longing, was blindly seeking without knowing His name. The text does not require that identification, and we should not press it as though it did. Yet read canonically, it fittingly directs us to Christ, for the treasures of the nations are finally the nations themselves, gathered to the One who is their true treasure. Every nation’s hunger for God, every reaching after the divine in all the religions of mankind, was at bottom a hunger for Him; and He is the desire of all nations whether they know to name Him or not. The glory that would fill the house, as the New Testament shows us, was not to be gold or grandeur but a Person: the Lord Himself, come at last into His temple.

There is a profound truth in calling Him the Desire of all nations, for the human heart is a desiring thing, and underneath all its desires is one it cannot name. The pagan world in all its restless idolatry (building its temples, carving its gods, reaching after the divine in a thousand confused ways) was at bottom hungry for the true God it had lost, seeking Him blindly in the dark. A great teacher of the early Church, Augustine, confessed it for all of us: that God has made us for Himself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Him. Every nation’s longing, every idol ever carved, every philosophy that ever reached toward heaven, was a groping after the One the nations did not know to name; and He is the Desire of all nations, the only true object of the hunger that drives the whole restless race of men. When He came, He came as the answer to a longing older and deeper than Israel, the satisfaction the whole world had been blindly seeking; and He comes still to every restless heart that has wearied of its idols.

The apostle to the Hebrews shows us how to read the shaking. Now he has promised, “I will once more shake not only the earth but heaven too,” he writes, quoting this very passage, and explains: Now this phrase “once more” indicates the removal of what is shaken, that is, of created things, so that what is unshaken may remain (Hebrews 12:26–27). The shaking of heaven and earth is God’s clearing away of everything temporary and provisional (the old covenant with its shadows, the whole present order of things) so that the unshakable kingdom may stand revealed. That shaking began when Christ came the first time, dismantling the age of shadows; and it will be finished when He comes again and the heavens and earth are shaken for the last time, and only the kingdom that cannot be shaken remains. To the small, anxious builders, clutching their modest stones in a shaking world, the word is one of deep comfort: what you are part of cannot be shaken, because the glory that fills it is the unshakable Lord Himself.

The apostle draws the comfort out for us. So since we are receiving an unshakable kingdom, let us give thanks, and through this let us offer worship pleasing to God in devotion and awe (Hebrews 12:28). Everything around us can be shaken, and one day will be: the kingdoms of this world, the institutions we lean on, the securities we build, our health and our wealth and the whole visible order; all of it is provisional, and all of it is destined for the final shaking. But the believer is receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and belongs to it now. This is the deep steadiness beneath the Christian’s life in a shaking world: not that the shaking will spare us, but that what we most belong to is precisely the thing the shaking cannot touch. It is the same comfort Habakkuk found when the fig tree failed: a joy and a security that do not rest on the things that can be shaken, but on the unshakable God. Let the heavens and the earth be shaken; the kingdom remains, and we with it.

The Glory of the Latter House

Then comes the verse that has been fought over, and that we must read with care, for it is a favorite quarry of those who look for a future, rebuilt, physical temple. “The silver and gold will be mine,” says the LORD who rules over all. “The future splendor of this temple will be greater than that of former times,” the LORD who rules over all declares, “and in this place I will give peace” (2:8–9). How could the glory of that modest second temple ever be greater than Solomon’s? Not in silver and gold: the LORD waves those away as already His, and the second house never matched the first in splendor. It was greater, the Church has long confessed, for one reason above all, and it is the reason the whole book has been driving toward.

There is a way of reading prophecy that always looks for the glory of God in outward grandeur (in a rebuilt temple of gold, in restored sacrifices, in visible splendor and earthly magnificence) and is forever disappointed by the plainness of how God actually works. Luther called this instinct a theology of glory, and set against it the theology of the cross: the truth that God reveals His greatest glory not in splendor but hidden beneath its opposite, in weakness, lowliness, and shame. The plain second temple is a parable of it. So is the stable, and the carpenter’s shop, and the cross itself, where the glory of God blazed out most fully precisely where the eye saw only a dying man. To insist that Haggai’s promise still awaits a future temple of marble and blood sacrifices is to fall back into the theology of glory, to keep searching for splendor when the true glory has already come, hidden, in the flesh of the Lord Jesus. Faith learns to find the glory of God where He has actually put it, which is almost never where the eye would look.

The glory of the latter house was greater because the Lord Jesus walked its courts. The second temple, later enlarged by Herod, was the temple standing in the days of our Lord; it was into that house that God came in person, carried in as an infant to be presented, teaching in its courts as a boy and as a man, cleansing it with a whip of cords, calling it His Father’s house. The glory that filled the latter house was not the shekinah cloud of old but the very God of that cloud, now in human flesh, walking on human feet across the temple pavement. Here is the theology of the cross applied to a building: the glory of God comes not in the grandeur the eye expects but hidden in humility, just as it came hidden in a manger and on a cross. The old men wept that the new house was so plain; they did not dream that its plainness would one day hold the unveiled presence of God Himself. And in this place I will give peace: read canonically, this fittingly directs us to the One who came into that house and is Himself our peace, the peace made by His blood, the peace we heard promised in Micah’s Bethlehem. This is why we do not look, as some do, for the glory of Haggai’s prophecy in a future temple of stone with its altars and sacrifices restored. To do so is to turn back to the shadow after the substance has come; the glory was given when Christ entered the second temple, and the true and final temple is now His own body, raised in three days, and the Church which is His body, the house of living stones in which God dwells by His Spirit.

A Signet for Zerubbabel

The book closes with a word spoken over one man, and it is a word that reaches across the centuries to the cradle in Bethlehem. On that day, says the LORD who rules over all, I will take you, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, my servant, says the LORD, and I will make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, says the LORD who rules over all (2:23). To understand the weight of it, we must remember Zerubbabel’s grandfather, King Jehoiachin, also called Coniah or Jeconiah, over whom the LORD had pronounced judgment in the days of the exile: As surely as I am the living God, you, Jeconiah, king of Judah, son of Jehoiakim, will not be the earthly representative of my authority. Indeed, I will take that right away from you (Jeremiah 22:24). The NET gives the sense; the Hebrew gives the picture: “even if Coniah … were the signet ring on my right hand, I would pull you off from there.” The royal signet (the king’s ring, the very seal of his authority) had been torn off and cast away in the judgment of the exile. The Davidic line had seemed finished, the promise to David in ruins.

And now, to Zerubbabel the grandson, a descendant of David governing a tiny province under a foreign empire, the LORD says: I will make you like a signet ring. The ring that was pulled off is restored. The Davidic line, which had seemed cut down to a dead stump in the exile, is honored again and carried forward, and carried forward, the genealogies tell us, straight toward the Lord Jesus, for Zerubbabel stands in the line of the kings in the very record of Christ’s descent (Matthew 1:12; Luke 3:27). The signet restored to Zerubbabel is God’s pledge that the covenant with David has not failed, that the promise is still moving through history toward its fulfillment in great David’s greater Son. The shaking of all the kingdoms of the earth, with which this final oracle opens, is set against the unshakable faithfulness of God to one small governor and the royal line he carried. Kingdoms rise and fall and are shaken to pieces; the promise to David, and the King it was leading to, cannot be moved.

Step back and see the long faithfulness of God in this. He had promised David that his throne would be established forever, that a son of his would reign without end. Through the centuries that promise had seemed to fail again and again: wicked kings, a divided kingdom, and at last the catastrophe of the exile, when the crown fell and the signet was pulled away and the line of David sank to a stump cut off at the ground. By every human measure the promise was dead. And yet here, in a small governor of a subject province, the LORD quietly keeps it alive, declaring the signet restored; and the genealogies show us the line running on from Zerubbabel, through the silent centuries, down to a carpenter of Nazareth and his betrothed, and to the child born in Bethlehem who is great David’s greater Son. We have watched this thread before, in Amos’s fallen booth raised again and in Micah’s Ruler from Bethlehem; here it is once more. God keeps His covenant across the ruin of empires and the wreck of dynasties, and not one word of His promise to David failed to find its yes in Christ.

Gathering the Threads

Haggai is the prophet of the rebuilding, and his book is far weightier than its two short chapters suggest. He finds a discouraged remnant who had quietly decided their own comfort came first and the LORD’s house could wait, and he calls them twice to consider their ways: to see the disorder of a life that puts self before God, and the strange futility that follows, the wage dropped into a bag with holes. But the heart of the book is not the rebuke; it is the gospel word that comes the moment they turn: I am with you. The presence is the gift, and the work flows from it, not the other way around. And when the old men weep that the new house is so plain beside the old, the LORD answers their grief with a promise that lifts the whole horizon: He will shake heaven and earth and all the nations, and the treasures of the nations will come, and He will fill that modest house with a glory greater than Solomon’s.

And all of it is the things concerning Himself. The Church has rightly loved to call the Lord Jesus the Desire of all nations, the One the whole heathen world was blindly longing for; the glory that made the latter house greater was not gold but God in the flesh walking its courts; the peace given in that place points us to the peace He made by His blood; and the signet restored to Zerubbabel was the pledge that the line of David ran on, unbroken through exile, toward the King who would be born in David’s town. The shaking that began when He first came, and will be finished when He comes again, is clearing away everything that can be shaken, so that the kingdom which cannot be shaken may remain. To a small and struggling people, weeping over how little they could manage, Haggai’s word is the word the Church has needed in every diminished age: do not despise the day of small things, and do not measure glory by grandeur, for the LORD is with you, and the glory that fills His house is the unshakable Christ Himself. Build, then, and take heart; the Desire of all nations has come.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

The people said, The time for rebuilding the LORD’s temple has not yet come (1:2), yet had found the time and means to live in richly paneled houses (1:4). How does the call to think carefully about what you are doing (literally, “set your heart on your ways,” 1:5) expose the real issue as priorities rather than resources? Where do we dress the same disorder in the language of practicality?
Those who earn wages end up with holes in their money bags (1:6). Why is this not a crude bargain (give to God and prosper) but the deeper truth of the first commandment? How does a life that displaces God find even its gains turning to emptiness?
Before a single new stone is laid, the LORD says, I am with you! (1:13). Why does it matter that the presence comes first and the work flows from it, rather than the reverse? How is this the same promise as Immanuel and the Lord Jesus’s I am with you always (Matthew 28:20)?
The old men wept that the new temple was nothing by comparison with Solomon’s (2:3). How does the LORD answer the discouragement of the small and the diminished? Why must we not despise the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10) or measure glory by grandeur?
The future splendor of this temple will be greater than that of former times (2:9), though it was plainer in silver and gold. Why was its glory greater, and how does this guard us against looking for the prophecy’s fulfillment in a future rebuilt temple of stone? How is the true and final temple now Christ and His body?
The signet pulled from Coniah (Jeremiah 22:24) is restored to Zerubbabel (2:23), who stands in the line of Christ. What does this teach about God’s faithfulness to His promise through the darkest times? How does the unshakable kingdom (Hebrews 12:28) comfort us in a shaking world?

Looking Ahead

Haggai did not labor alone. In the very same year, to the very same discouraged community and the very same stalled building project, the LORD raised up a second voice: a younger prophet named Zechariah, who prophesied alongside Haggai and joined him in stirring the people to build. But where Haggai is brief and blunt and practical, Zechariah is vast and strange and luminous, the most richly Christological of all the Twelve, so full of visions of the Coming One that he has been called the Apocalypse of the Old Testament. Over the next several sessions we will give him the room his riches deserve. We begin with his night visions (eight strange and glorious scenes given in a single night) and come to the great moment when Joshua the high priest, standing accused and filthy before the LORD, is stripped of his filthy clothes and dressed in fine ones, and the LORD declares: I am about to introduce my servant, the Branch (3:8). The priest cleansed, and the Branch promised: the gospel in vision.

Before the next session, read Zechariah 1–6: the prophet’s call to return to the LORD, the eight night visions, the cleansing and reclothing of Joshua the high priest, the promise of the servant called the Branch (3:8), and the crowning of Joshua as a sign of the priest-king to come (6:11–13). It is strange and vivid material; read it slowly and let the images work. Ask how a filthy priest declared clean pictures the gospel, and who the Branch, the priest on His throne, turned out to be.

Closing Prayer

O LORD who rules over all, who shakes the heavens and the earth and yet stoops to dwell with a small and discouraged people, we confess that we have too often built and paneled our own houses while Your house and Your work waited for whatever time and means were left over. Make us consider our ways. Show us the bag with holes that our self-seeking has become, and teach us that we were made for You first, and find only emptiness when we put ourselves in Your place. Forgive us, and reorder our loves.

We bless You for the word that meets us before we have laid a single stone: I am with you. We thank You that the Desire of all nations has come: that the glory which filled Your house was no longer gold or cloud but Your own Son, our Lord Jesus, God in our flesh, walking among us and making peace by His blood. Make us strong for the work You have given, however small it seems in our eyes; let us not despise the day of small things nor measure Your glory by its grandeur; and hold us fast in the kingdom that cannot be shaken, when all that can be shaken is passing away. Be with us, as You promised; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.