Haggai 1:5,6 – Give Careful Thought to Your Ways

Mindfulness is all the rage now. What is mindfulness? “Mindfulness is the cognitive skill, usually developed through meditation, of sustaining meta-attention of the contents of one’s own mind in the present moment” (Wikipedia). It has Hindu and Buddhist origins. “Clinical psychology and psychiatry since the 1970s have developed a number of therapeutic applications based on mindfulness for helping people experiencing a variety of psychological conditions” like depression, stress, anxiety and drug addiction (Wikipedia). Yahweh was calling Israel to a kind of mindfulness, not one focused on their own thoughts, but on the condition they were experiencing and what might be causing it, that is, their “ways.”

⁵ Now this is what Yahweh Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. ⁶ You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.” (Haggai 1:5-6)

Yahweh wants Israel to examine their ways, the way they have not made worship of Yahweh a priority, allowing His house to remain unbuilt, and focusing on their own comfort. They have experienced poor harvests of essential foods as a result, insufficient clothing to protect them from the weather, and dwindling wages. They shouldn’t have needed a prophet to tell them God was judging them. They had the law of Moses.

³⁸ “You will carry much seed out to the field but gather little in, because locusts will devour it. ³⁹ You will plant vineyards and dress them but neither drink the wine nor gather the grapes, because worms will eat them. ⁴⁰ You will have olive trees throughout your territory but not anoint yourself with the oil, because your olives will fall off unripe. (Deuteronomy 28:38-40, NIV)

Moses had told them that Yahweh would bless the nation with all it needed when they were keeping covenant with Yahweh, but would bring insufficiency to their lives when they failed to keep covenant. And Israel was definitely experiencing insufficiency.

How mindful are you of your ways? Are they covenant-keeping ways, or are you walking in disobedience to God, concerned more for yourself than Him? Give careful thought to your ways. There is no point in being in denial, in ignoring the truth of how you are living. Christian, there is no quicker way to spiritual health than acknowledging your straying from the path.

Jesus warned the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2:4, “You have forsaken your first love.” Take some mindfulness of your heart’s desires. Is Jesus your first love? “Repent,” Jesus says, and return to your former worshipful love. “To the one who is victorious,” he says, “I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” (Revelation 2:7)