Human nature the way it is, we have perfected excuses to an art form.

I know Adam and Eve started it in the garden, but we have perfected it.

I think it was Corey Tim Boom who said, the blood of Jesus never cleanses an excuse. You see, that is why

the scripture repeatedly says, if we confess, he forgives. If we confess, he forgives.

People make all sorts of excuses as to why they cannot come to worship or why they can't serve and why they

can't give and why they can't commit to anything and why is this and why is that. In the last message,

we began to look at how the Lord is speaking to our generation through the ancient prophet Haggai.

After several hundred years of God sending his people prophet after prophet after profit

and challenging them to stop compromising and stop worshipping Yahweh one day and bail

for the rest of the week. And finally, God had enough.

And he said to them that I'm going to send you into an exile. I'm going to send you for 70 years

out of your country. And sure enough, Nebekid Nassar of Babylon came and he ravished Jerusalem,

destroyed it, and took hundreds of thousands of people

captives in Babylon. But God also promised through the prophet Jeremiah that 70 years from that

time he's going to bring them back, he's going to bring the faithful back to the heart of worship,

that he's going to bring them back to Jerusalem, the city of God.

And right on schedule, God fulfilled his promise.

And the way he fulfilled this promise was absolutely the most unlikely way.

He used a pagan king by the name of Cyrus, and Cyrus issued a decree,

and he said that all of the Jews who want to go back to Jerusalem, they are allowed to go back.

And out of the hundreds of thousands of Jews in Babylon, only about 50,000 in total returned to Jerusalem.

The rest, they loved the world too much. They enjoyed the worldly environment in Babylon.

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