His words apply to a supernatural condition of things with which he is dealing, but they contain truths illustrated by it and true for ever.  For us all, as truly as for those Jews, the first thing, the primary, all-embracing duty, is to serve God, to obey, love, and live with Him.  The same selfish and worldly excuses have force with us:  ’We have business to look after; men must live; we have no time to think about religion; I have built a new mill that occupies my thoughts; I have found a new plaything, and I must try it; I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’  So God and His claims, Christ and His love, are hustled into a corner to be attended to when opportunity serves, but to be neglected in the meantime.  And the same result follows, not by miracle, but by natural necessity.  Haggai puts these results in our text with bitter, indignant amplification.  His words are all the working out of one idea-the unprofitableness, on the whole and in the long-run, of a godless life.  He illustrates this in the clauses of our text in various forms, and my purpose now is simply to apply each of these to the realities of a godless life.

I. It is a life of fruitless toil.

The Prophet pictures the sowing, the abundant seed thrown broadcast, the long waiting, and then, finally, a wretched harvest—­a few prematurely yellow ears and short stalks.  I remember a friend telling me that when he was a boy he went out reaping with his father in one of our years of great drought; and after a day’s work threshed out all that he had cut, and carried it home with him in his handkerchief.  That is what Haggai saw realised in fact, because the sowing had been without God.  It is what we may see in others and feel in ourselves.  It is the very law and curse of godless toil with its unproductive harvest.  The builders set out to build a tower whose top shall reach to heaven, and they never get higher than a story or two.  There is nothing more tragic than the contrast between what a man actually accomplishes in his life and what he planned when he began it.  Many and many of our lives are like the half-built houses in Pompeii, where the stones are lying that had been all squared and polished, and have never been lifted to their place in the unfinished walls.  Much of the seed never comes up at all; and what we gather is always less than what we expected.  The prize gleams before us; when we get it, is it as good as it looked when it hung tempting at the unreached goal?  A fox-brush is scarcely sufficient payment for riding over half a county.  Ah! but you say, there is the enthusiasm and stir of the pursuit.  Well, yes; it is something if it is training you for something, and if you can say that faculties worth the cultivating are developed in that way:  and whether that is so depends on what you think a man is made for, and on whether these are faculties which will last and find their scope as long as you last.  Consider what you are, what you seek; and then say whether the most fruitful harvest from which God and His love are left out is not little.