God has to wake his people up and prod them. He has to do that with us sometimes. We allow our challenges in our lives—our aches and our pains, our diminished bank accounts, our getting fired from our jobs, and our unruly children, to dictate. These things are going to come upon us, but we have a choice as to how we are enduring them. Do we continue to do the one thing that God commands us to do—which is to love him with all our heart, strength, and mind, and to love our neighbour as ourselves?...Or do we give up on that too and just sit and do nothing? It was not God who told his people to stop building that temple. God was patient with those people. They should have rightly reckoned here: we not only have a decree [from Cyrus], but we have our God.1
William Harrell
1 Now the prophets, Haggai and Zechariah the son of Iddo, prophesied to the Jews who were in Judah and Jerusalem, in the name of the God of Israel who was over them.