Legacy — Part 2 | What Are You Leaving?
What does your calendar and your bank statement say about what's actually first in your life? Most of us would say God is at the center, but if a stranger looked at where our time and money actually go, would they reach the same conclusion? In Part 2 of Legacy, Pastor Jess DiSabatino opens the book of Haggai (only two chapters and thirty-eight verses) to ask one uncomfortable question: when did God slip from first place, and what would it take to put Him back?
Series: Legacy
Scripture: Haggai 1 and 2
Pastor: Jess DiSabatino
Date: June 14, 2026
Key Takeaways
God has slipped to second place. The Israelites in Haggai did not reject God outright. They just delayed His work, telling themselves "the time has not yet come" to rebuild the temple while they lived in heavily upgraded, paneled houses. Sixteen years of "we will get to it later." We do the same thing today. We push off devotion, service, generosity, telling ourselves we will focus on God once life calms down, once the bills are caught up, once the kids are older. In 1903, the town of Frank, Alberta sat at the base of Turtle Mountain. The local Blackfoot people had warned settlers for generations that it was "the mountain that moves." But the coal mine at the base was prosperous, so people kept building. One morning the mountain sheared off and buried the town in ninety seconds. The warning signs were there. The problem was nobody looked up. That is the picture of Haggai. We are too busy building our lives at the base of the mountain.
When you put God second, everything else breaks. When our priorities are backwards, the things we chase fail to satisfy us the way we thought they would. Haggai describes it brutally: you sow much but harvest little. You eat but never have enough. You earn wages and put them into a bag with holes. This is what trying to fill a spiritual void with material gain looks like. There is a sociological term for it called hedonic adaptation: the psychological boost of any new luxury (a renovation, a new gadget, a bigger house) wears off in about two weeks and we return to our baseline. C.S. Lewis said it best: put first things first and second things get thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both.
Drift happens slowly, not all at once. Spiritual neglect rarely happens through one massive decision to walk away from faith. It happens through slow leaks. Distractions, new bills, changing schedules, a slowly crowding calendar. The Israelites did not blow up the temple project. They just got busy. For sixteen years. Most of us are not in a spiritual blowout. We are in a slow leak. The question is whether we will notice it in time to do something, or whether we will keep treating the warning lights on the dashboard as mere suggestions until the tire is flat on the side of the road.
Money is a diagnostic tool, not the goal. God does not need your money. He says it plainly in Haggai: "The silver is mine, and the gold is mine." He is not short on resources. But money is the most accurate diagnostic tool we have for spiritual health, because money reflects what we actually trust and value, not just what we say we trust and value. The first line item in your budget tells the real story. A single mom in our community shared once that she sets aside the first twenty dollars of every paycheck for God before she pays any other bill. Her reason: "It reminds me that God is ahead of my power bill." That is what legacy looks like. Not a big number on a check. A small, consistent act that tells the next generation God is honored above the standard expenses of life.
True legacy is poured into a story bigger than your own. Leaving a legacy means realizing you are part of a story that started before you and continues after you. When the foundation of the second temple was laid, the older generation wept because it looked tiny and unimpressive next to Solomon's golden temple. But God said: you haven't seen anything yet. Jesus Himself would one day walk through those doors, bringing a glory that gold could never match. We can never assume God's best days are behind us. In 1882, architect Antoni Gaudí began designing the Sagrada Família in Barcelona knowing he would not live to see it finished. When people asked him about the timeline he said, "My client is not in a hurry." He lived by a simple philosophy: love first, details later. He understood his role in a much larger narrative. The legacy we are leaving is not measured by what gets done in our lifetime. It is measured by what we hand off. The thing you want your kids to grow up and say is not "my parents were perfect." It is "my parents weren't perfect, but Jesus was first in their life."
