The Purse
With Holes

A devotional entry on Haggai 1, Malachi 3, and why full effort with no arrival is a question of order rather than discipline.

I finished everything last week.

Not most of it. Everything. The workshop outline, the landing pages, the LinkedIn posts. I closed the laptop Friday night and looked at a list with nothing left on it.

Then I sat there and waited to feel something.

Nothing came. I went looking for the satisfaction I'd assumed was waiting at the bottom of that list, and it wasn't there. What was there instead was the next list, already assembling itself before I'd finished putting the first one down.

I told myself I was tired. That's the acceptable explanation, and it's usually partly true. But I've been tired before and still known that something mattered. This was different. This was the specific hollowness of having worked very hard and having nothing to show for it that I could name.

I've felt it before. I felt it for two years running a business I eventually closed.

Consider your ways

Haggai is preaching to people who came home from exile and got to work. They were not lazy. That's the part everyone skips. These were industrious people — planting, building, earning, putting real effort into real days.

And none of it was landing.

They planted a lot and harvested a little. They ate and stayed hungry. They put on clothes and couldn't get warm. And then the line that stopped me cold: their wages went into a purse with holes in it.

"Why are you living in luxurious houses while my house lies in ruins? This is what the Lord of Heaven's Armies says: Look at what's happening to you! You have planted much but harvest little. You eat but are not satisfied. You drink but are still thirsty. You put on clothes but cannot keep warm. Your wages disappear as though you were putting them in pockets filled with holes!

"This is what the Lord of Heaven's Armies says: Look at what's happening to you! Now go up into the hills, bring down timber, and rebuild my house. Then I will take pleasure in it and be honored, says the Lord. You hoped for rich harvests, but they were poor. And when you brought your harvest home, I blew it away. Why? Because my house lies in ruins, says the Lord of Heaven's Armies, while all of you are busy building your own fine houses. It's because of you that the heavens withhold the dew and the earth produces no crops. I have called for a drought on your fields and hills—a drought to wither the grain and grapes and olive trees and all your other crops, a drought to starve you and your livestock and to ruin everything you have worked so hard to get."

Haggai 1:4–11 · New Living Translation

Now watch what God does not say to them.

He does not say work harder. He does not say you should have planted more. He doesn't hand them a productivity correction — which is what I would have expected, and honestly what I would have preferred, because a productivity correction is something I know how to obey.

He asks them a question instead. Is it time for you to be living in finished, paneled houses while My house lies in ruins?

They had been home for years. The temple was still rubble. And in the meantime, everyone had gotten their own place beautiful.

That's the diagnosis. Not laziness. Order. They had put their house above His house, and they had been sincere about it the entire time.

He blew it away

The next part is the one I sat with the longest, because it's not comfortable and I don't think we're supposed to make it comfortable.

God says: you looked for much, and it came to little. And when you brought it home, I blew it away.

The holes in the purse were not an accident. They were not market conditions. They were not a bad quarter. God says plainly that He was the one deflating it — that He called for the drought, that it touched the grain and the wine and the oil and everything their hands had labored over.

That is hard to digest. Sit in it anyway.

Because here's the mercy hiding inside it: God didn't take everything. He let them keep working. He let them keep earning. He just wouldn't let them thrive.

We tend to picture the consequences of disobedience as catastrophe — the collapse, the loss, the thing everyone can see. Sometimes it is. But far more often, in my experience and in this text, it looks like spinning your wheels. Effort that goes in and doesn't come out. Months of motion with nothing to show for it. A business that produces revenue and no margin. A calendar that's full and a life that's stalled.

That's not God abandoning you. That's God refusing to fund a direction He didn't send you in.

He will not prosper us in selfish pursuits at the expense of His kingdom. He loves us far too much to make that comfortable. If He blessed the paneled houses, we would never build the temple — we'd just build a bigger house.

I have called that season a hard year. I have called it bad timing and a tough market and burnout. I don't know that I ever once called it what Haggai calls it. Disobedience.

First the house, then the harvest

But this is not where the book leaves them, and it isn't where He leaves us.

God tells them to go up the mountain, bring the timber down, and build the house — so that He may take pleasure in it and be honored in it. That's the whole ask. Put My house first.

They obeyed. It took them twenty-three days.

And what God says to them next is not a lecture. It's this: I am with you. And later: from this day on, I will bless you.

The fruit was never withheld from them permanently. It was withheld from them out of order.

And God says the same thing again through Malachi, decades later — to the children and grandchildren of the very people Haggai preached to.

"Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do," says the Lord of Heaven's Armies, "I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won't have enough room to take it in! Try it! Put me to the test! Your crops will be abundant, for I will guard them from insects and disease. Your grapes will not fall from the vine before they are ripe," says the Lord of Heaven's Armies. "Then all nations will call you blessed, for your land will be such a delight," says the Lord of Heaven's Armies.

Malachi 3:10–12 · New Living Translation

By then the temple had been rebuilt. The house was standing. But the people had stopped bringing anything into it — the storehouse was empty, and once again their harvests were being eaten alive. The failure had simply changed costume. Same disorder, new generation.

And God's answer is nearly word for word what it was in Haggai. Bring it into My house first. Then watch what I do.

Except here He adds something He almost never offers anywhere else in Scripture: test Me on this. Try it and see. He promises to throw open heaven, to pour out more than there is room to hold, and — this is the part that reads like Haggai in reverse — He promises to guard the harvest itself. To stop the thing that has been eating it before it ever reaches the table.

It's build His house first, and I will protect the harvest myself.

This is also the same thing Jesus says centuries later, and we quote it so often we've sanded the edges off: seek first the kingdom, and everything else gets added to you.

Not instead of. Added.

God is not asking you to want less. He's telling you the order matters — and that when His kingdom is genuinely first, you will receive what you need and a great deal of what you actually wanted, and you'll be able to enjoy it, which is the part most of us have never experienced.

The paneled house isn't the sin. Building it first is.

The one thing to do this week

Don't reorganize your year. Don't rebuild your systems. Not this week.

Take one thing off your list — one — and ask two questions in this order:

The second question is the one most of us start with, and it's a good question. But it can't be answered honestly until the first one is. Buy back my Tuesdays is a fine assignment if the Tuesdays go to His kingdom. It's another panel on my own house if they don't.

If you can't answer either one, you've found the hole in the purse. That's not a failure. It's the first honest thing you've done with that item in a long time — and honesty is the only thing Haggai actually asks for. Consider your ways. That's it. He says it twice, and then He says I am with you.