Choices Matter

Mary Hunt said, “Debt keeps you stuck in the trap of using your future to pay for your past.” 
 A very wise person once said, “Too often we spend money we don’t have for things we don’t need to impress people we don’t even like.”
Someone else said, “When our outgo exceeds our income, then our upkeep will become our downfall.” 
Culture tells us that our priorities should be:
1. Lifestyle – where we live, how we dress, what we drive, etc.
2. Debt – then we worry how we will pay for the lifestyle we live.
3. Savings – hopefully we can retire when we are 65
4. Giving – if there is anything left we will give
But the mind and heart of God is much different:
1. Giving – We are created in the image of God – John 3:16
2. Savings –
3. Lifestyle -- 
The Pull of the Culture or the Priorities of the Culture = Selfishness
Haggai 1:1-2 say, “In the second year of King Darius, on the first day of the sixth month, the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Hehozadak, the high priest: ;This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘ These people say, “The time has not yet come for the Lord’s house to be built”’”.
(V3) “Then the word of the Lord came through the prophet Haggai: “Is it a time for you yourselves to be living in your paneled houses, while this house remains a ruin?’”
Verse 5 says, “Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Give careful thought to your ways.’” “’You have planted much, but have 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 purse with holes in it.’”
verse 7: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build the house [God’s house], so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored.’”
verse 9, “You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little.”
verse 9 God says, “What you brought home, I blew away.”
“’Why? declares the Lord Almighty. ‘Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you are busy with your own house.’”  
V10 “Therefore,” God says, “because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops. I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, the oil and whatever the ground produces, on men and cattle, and on the labor of your hands.”
God is the One behind the problems.
God is the One behind the blessings.
Malachi 3:8-9: “Will a man rob God?” “Yet you rob me. But you ask, ‘How do we robe you?’ In tithes and offerings. You are under a curse—the whole nation of you because you are robbing me.”
“’Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this,’ says the Lord Almighty, ‘and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it.’”  
God is in control. 
John 3:16…”For God so loved the World He GAVE.”
So putting God first is elementary.
Proverbs 10:22: “The blessing of the Lord brings wealth, and he adds no trouble to it.” 
2 Chronricles 26:5 says of Uzziah that “as long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success.”