Hosea Chapter 1 The word of the Lord that came to Hosea the son
of Beery, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah,
kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash
king of Israel. When the Lord first spoke
through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, Go take yourself a wife
of whoredom, and have children of whoredom, for the land
commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.
So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of DIB Lame, and she
conceived and bore him a son. And the Lord said to him, Call
his name Jezreel. For in just a little while I
will punish the House of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I
will put an end to the Kingdom of the House of Israel.
And on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of
Jezreel. She conceived again and bore a
daughter. And the Lord said to him, Call
her name no mercy, for I will have no more.
I will no more have mercy on the House of Israel to forgive them
at all, but I will have mercy on the House of Judah, and I will
save them by the Lord their God. I will not save them by bow, or
by sword, or by war, or by horses, or by horsemen.
When she had weaned no mercy, she conceived and bore a son.
And the Lord said, Call his name, not my people, for you are
not my people, and I am not your God.
Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand
of the sea, which cannot be measured or numbered.
And in the place where it was said to them, You are not my
people, it shall be said to them, children of the living
God. And the children of Judah.
And the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they
shall appoint for themselves one head, and they shall go up from
the land. For great shall be the day of
Jezreel. All right, let's turn to chapter
3. And the Lord said to me, go
again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an
adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel,
though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.
So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and an Omer and a
lethic of barley. And I said to her, You must
dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore or
belong to another man. So will I also be to you.
For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without a king
or Prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without effort or
household gods. Afterward the children of God,
the children of Israel, shall return and seek the Lord their
God, and David their king. And they shall come in fear to
the Lord and to His goodness in the latter days.
This is the word of the Lord. What's going on?
Poor City family and friends, it's good to be with you.
My name is Tanner, the lead pastor here.
And at Poor City. We love God's word, y'all.
God wrote this book through a bunch of different authors over
time, but it's telling one story.
And sometimes what's helpful, helpful with a big story like
the Bible, is to zoom in on some details, like microscopic.
And sometimes it's helpful to zoom out and read a little
longer sections at a time to get more of a feel for the story.
So today we start a series called 12 Prophets, which will
be a book a week for 12 weeks. OK, so this is like a sermon
that is an overview of the entire book of Hosea.
We won't be in Hosea every week. Are you all with me?
And through this, my hope through this genre is we just
see God's passion. It's more of a poetic genre,
which is difficult for some of us, but there's a lot of beauty
in it. And I hope the intimidation
factor goes down and the beauty just comes to the surface.
And my prayer for us is that we will walk out of this as God's
people in a new and fresh way, just belonging to him and
displaying his goodness to our to our friends and neighbors,
and that more people will come to Christ and we'll just be more
fully devoted to his goodness. Amen.
So pray with me just over the series and we'll dive into this
great book of Hosea, our Father, we love you.
Thank you for your word. God, it never returns void and
every genre has value. Lord, this story today is
powerful. What a powerful, powerful image
of your love for your people. God, this word still speaks to
your New Testament church. So give us eyes to see, ears to
hear, Lord, what we know not right now, would you teach us
what we have not, would you give us and what we are not, would
you make us. Let the words of my mouth and
the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.
And everybody who agree with that said, Amen.
All right, y'all. One of my favorite movies that
I've been thinking about this week in preparation for this is
called Diary of a Mad Black Woman by Madea.
OK, the Madea, it's in the Tyler Perry.
I love the Madea movies. Now, this is probably the most
serious of all the Madea movies. And if you've seen the movie,
there's an intensity to this one, OK, Basically, you have a
relationship where the woman is in love with her man and he
could not care less. He's arrogant.
He is mean to her. And just as the audience, you're
watching it, cringing just throughout the movie because you
see what's coming. He's playing her and it reaches
a climax at the moment, the movie when she comes home and
her closet is full of new clothes.
She is so duped that she is like putting the clothes on and
squeezing them and like, oh, Charles, you finally like, thank
you. He walks into the room and
you're like getting chills at this point and she's like thank
you so much I can't believe you did this.
And he laughs. He says those aren't for you.
And another woman is standing outside and he says you got to
get out right now. And he picks her up and kicks
her out the house. Now there's something about that
emotionally, y'all, and just how she is just devastated, just
utterly blown away, heart ripped out.
There is something about that experience that God understands.
He understands what it's like to be cheated on.
He understands what it's like for him to love more than he's
loved back. Marriage is intensely intimate,
and what the book of Hosea gives to the Bible, what it
contributes, is what we always kind of knew deep down but
didn't really have words for, is that marriage really is about
God and his people. He gave it as a gift to people
to reflect his relationship with his people.
We see that even more clearly in the New Testament and in Hosea.
Hosea has a message. So many of the prophets are
speakers. They're talkers of the truth.
But even more than Hosea has a message, his life is the
message. You're going to go love somebody
who don't love you back. And by doing so, you are
preaching through your life to my people what I am like to
them. So he makes him the prophetic
message. Are you with me?
So in this book, God is just going to open up his heart, His
heart of pain, His heart of being overlooked, unappreciated.
But what's unique and different about God than about any movie
we can wrap our mind around is God is not going to respond with
pettiness and with just moodiness for moodiness sake.
What God is going to do is put his heart out there of pain.
But his love is so powerful. He loves the unlovable until
they love him back. That's God.
God is so good that He can warn you and eventually say, have it
your way then and even use the have it your way then to bring
you back to him. You see what I'm saying?
He's going to send them into exile and still bring them back.
And you know what we're going to have to do as we walk through
this 12 profit series over the coming weeks.
We're going to have to take everything we read together.
That's going to be the beauty of what we're going to do and the
challenge because God is intense in these books and intensity is
good. We're going to see his heart
poured out maybe in ways you've never seen it.
And we've got to hold it all intention because you're going
to not like some things we read. And it's going to be like, whoa,
OK, we're going to talk judgment Day of the Lord, hell, all of
it. And we're going to talk amazing
passages of love and justice and things.
MOK was quoting from Amos. You didn't even know was from
Amos. OK.
And we love it when we hear that, but we've got to hold that
attention with what God says about reality in other ways.
Are you all with me? We got to let His words speak
and we got to take God as He really is.
So my prayer for today is that God's passion for you, for his
people as a collective bride would shine through.
And you would walk out of here wanting to be in covenant
relationship with Him and committed to Him and seeing that
He wants to flow His love through you to the other people
in your life who though they are unlovable.
So once were we, so are we. And as we allow Him to do that,
He will even get to them through us to get there.
We're going to take this story in four turns.
We're going to talk about the marriage symbol, the cheating
symbol, the opportunity to turn back, and then lastly, the power
to turn back. If you are ready, let me hear
you say I'm ready. OK, point #1 married to God, the
symbol of union. This is what verse two said in
chapter 1 when the Lord first spoke through Hosea.
The Lord said to Hosea, go take to yourself a wife of whoredom
and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great
whoredom by forsaking the Lord. So just to be clear, what God is
doing is telling a man named Hosea OK in the the 9th century
BC to go marry a woman named Gomer who had a reputation of
loving other people. OK.
And what this metaphor does is it really gives us two things.
First, the marriage metaphor captures God's story.
Somebody say story, OK, What we've got to understand is that
God has wed himself to his people.
God uses other images to describe his relationship to his
people in the Bible, right? So like in Chapter 11, verse
one, here's a famous one that gets quoted in Matthew 2.
When Israel was a child, I loved him and out of Egypt I called my
son. So marriage is not the only way
that God he uses in a metaphor to describe how he's related to
his people. He calls them his son.
He calls them his vine that he planted in a field you might be
aware of. But from the beginning, what
this book is teaching us is that marriage was one of the the the
symbols. God wanted people, his people to
think of how he relates to them. So when you look at the story of
the people of God in the Old Testament, when he calls them
out of Egypt, it's like he is betrothing himself to them.
Like they are united to one another.
And the the covenant, if you will, the marriage ceremony
takes place at Mount Sinai. OK, this is where the 10
commandments happen. There's a covenant that goes
down and he's like, y'all are my people.
And honestly, the the marriage gift, if you will, is that they
get the law. The gift they get is to have
God's law is to get to be God's people is the gift.
I bought you out of all people on the earth, I bought you.
And if you go read chapters like Deuteronomy 6-7 and eight, why'd
you choose us? Because you chose us.
There was no thing they did to make them the bride.
It was just you, my bride. Why?
Because you my bride. Why am I your bride?
Because you are OK. Are y'all with me?
So he just chose them. And the reason this, this symbol
is so beautiful, y'all is it shows that what God's after at
his core is relationship. He's not after a business
transaction with his people. He tells them all the time.
I chose y'all, I bought y'all. I gave you my law because I love
you. Because I'm me, I chose you.
So this isn't about earning your statuses, bride.
This is just describing what it's like to be in relationship
with God. It's a lover and a lover.
It's passion, it's love. It's not transaction, it's not a
business partnership, it's not a performance.
It's just a genuine relationship.
The second thing this metaphor does is it just shows us God's
passion, just passion. If any part of us thinks God is
just up there and don't care, this book hits US right in the
face because he is like a spouse.
This is what he says in chapter 2 verses 16 and 17.
And in that day declares the Lord, you will call me my
husband, and no longer will you call me my Baal, for I will
remove the names of the Baal's from her mouth and they shall be
remembered by my name no more. Hey, quick plug, some of y'all
are like, what's a Baal and should I say Baal or Baal?
Welcome to the, you know, scholars and seminary people
love to be like he said, Dale, it's ball brother.
Well, listen, in this series you do have some learning to do, OK,
And we're going to try to do that in little ways.
We've already done kind of a primer podcast I encourage you
to go listen to and there's different things we're going to
try to do to help you come into understanding all the history
around it. But in short, OK, the people of
God were going through the motions of what God gave them to
do at Sinai, but did not give a RIP about the Lord.
So they could say, oh, we're married to you, we love you.
But their hearts were actually with Baal.
And for now, what you need to know is that was the God of the
nations. But when God put his people in
the promised land, one of the things that was just assumed all
along, he said in Leviticus 18, Deuteronomy 28 was but if I
drive the nations out and put you in and you become them, you
got to get out. Are you with me?
So if you become the nations, the land is going to spit you
out. OK.
So to use our our movie from the beginning, OK, as the audience
in that movie, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, we see who that guy
really is, but the woman is duped.
Are you with me? This is the moment I just want
you to hear. God is not duped.
He's not naive. He sees his people's heart don't
care about him. He sees they love what the
nations love. When they get in trouble, they
scramble to get help from anybody but the Lord.
And he's grieved by that. And all these conversations
about exile and judgement as you read these books week over week
are just God's way of saying, I see, and I'm begging you to
reconsider and to change. So yo, marriage is the symbol
that we're given here. Marriage is the symbol of the
New Testament. We read in Ephesians 5 that
Christ is wed to his bride, the church.
So I just got to say real quick, like if you still don't really
get the point of like church or being a member of a local
church, yo, God does see a relationship with individuals
and all of us get to be married to God through Christ, right?
But part of the joy is being a part of the collective bride.
He's talking about the people of God as a whole, not just
individuals. Are you with me?
So the concept of like solo Christianing just as foreign to
the Bible, OK. And in a lot of ways, it's why
we're gathered here today. It's because we're the bride and
he wants to gather with us as a unit.
OK, so let's move on to talk about the symbol of cheating on
the Lord. Cheating on God is the symbol of
faithlessness, chapter 3, verse one.
And the Lord said to me, go again, love a woman who is loved
by another man and is an adulterous even as the Lord
loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods
and love cakes of raisins. So one of the things scholars
like to do is they like to debate, was she an adulterous
type woman before they got married, but then not after?
Or was she only one after? And I think the answer is yes.
Like, I think the point of the illustration is that even upon
being married, she was unfaithful, right?
And now you continuing to love her despite her faithlessness is
what I'm doing to my people. That's kind of the whole point.
But it's funny how many books have been written on that
concept I just showed you. So what I want to do is I want
to talk about this cheating symbol and, and stepping out on
your, your spouse, so to speak, of what the people of God were
doing to the Lord. But I want to be really clear
how that applies to you based on whether you're a Christian or
not. OK, to put it bluntly, the
people cheating on God are the Christians in the room, right?
The people cheating on God are the ones who are the people of
God or the, the, the ones who think they're the people of God.
We are the adulterous party. Are you with me?
If you are not a Christian? It's kind of like God has
offered himself in marriage to you and you just reject the
proposal. Does that make sense?
You're not really cheating. You are rejecting totally.
Are you with me? You're invited into covenant
relationship with the Lord. That's what it means to know
Jesus. To be full of the Spirit is to
be in union with God through Christ.
So Christians in the room, this applies most totally in the
passion to us because we are the covenant people of God.
And if you are not a believer, God is offering himself to you,
and a lot of what we're going to say still applies.
So all of what I'm about to say applies to both groups, but in
different ways. And hopefully now you understand
that based on that analogy, here we go.
First, sinners are false lovers. That's what the cheating imagery
gives us. We are false lovers, you all.
To sin is to love the wrong thing.
Human beings love. That's what we do.
Your heart was designed to love. So to sin is to love the wrong
thing too much. One of the things, if you're
just getting around the Bible, we're going to constantly say to
you, this is not religious space, religious conversations.
We're having human conversations in this room because your heart
loves whether you ever attend church again or not.
The questions you got to be processing is what was I
designed to love and to be in alignment with?
That is what you were designed for.
And to step out of alignment with that is silly and it leads
to a lot of pain. But that is what sin does.
So if you have this category that to sin is just to break a
contractual law and it makes you a bad person.
That's true. But it's also that you are
choosing lovers for your soul that you are not designed to
give your soul to. Are you with me?
And that process of heartbreak is part of what makes life so
miserable. There was a guy in the 5th
century, a dude named Augustin. He wrote a book called
Confessions. OK, And I might encourage you if
you're a searcher of, of Christian truth right now, just
truth generally, that could be a great book for you.
Y'all over almost how many years ago Math somebody 1600 years
ago, this brother wrote down basically when I was chasing
women and chasing the bottle and chasing these things.
Now I know I was chasing God. I had a hole I was trying to
fill with things that can't fill it.
Are you with me? That is the best image of what
sin is. It is US throwing ourselves at
false lovers. It's stepping out over and over
and over, forsaking the one who could actually fill us eternal
water itself to go get a sip of Sprite and be thirsty again.
That is one of the best illustrations of what the human
soul is doing when it sins. It's not just that you are a bad
person breaking laws, it is that you are responsible for your
your own misery by chasing after lovers that cannot satisfy you.
But that's not all that sin is. Sin is also twisting.
The second thing I want you to see in this metaphor is that
sinners are twisters, OK? We twist God, OK?
And to really appreciate this, I got to do a little history,
right? So just put your learning hat on
for like 2 minutes. It's going to be dope, I
promise, OK? The best way to help you
understand this is that the prophetic books are kind of like
on one column and on the other column happening at the same
side time as the historical books.
So imagine like things are happening.
The prophetic books are the commentary on what's happening.
Are you with me? It's like if you ever like have
seen a video where somebody is a commentator on a video.
So you're watching a video of a person side by side to a video,
press and play on the video and then they comment on the video.
Have you ever seen that? Well, the the video is the
historical books and then the person commentating is the
prophetic books. Are you with me?
And then we are the ones pressing play.
But you got to know that the historical stuff is happening
and the person is being like, can y'all believe this?
So think of the historical books like a trashy reality TV show
that was the people of God that I'm about to explain to you.
And then the prophetic books are God pressing pause and being
like, I see what you're doing. I see what you're doing.
Are y'all with me? Like that's God's way of being.
Like, I see all this. Let me explain to you just how
bad it was. OK, historically, there's a 200
year spiral that's falling apart that Hosea is riding at the tail
end of. OK, at around 950 BC, the
Kingdom is united. All right, David hands it off to
Solomon. Solomon hands it off to his son
Rehab Olam. And around 9:30 BC, the Kingdom
of God splits. I'm about to show you a map.
Check this map out. OK, Now you have Israel in the
north, Judah in the South. That's easy to remember because
I comes before J. That's how I remember it.
Israel in the north, Judah in the South.
OK, and you'll notice on this map there's all the different
prophets and where they are located when they do their
ministry. All right, now just to show you,
this happens in 9:30-ish, what I'm about to explain to you.
So imagine 200 years after that, the first king in Israel was a
dude named Jeroboam, OK? He was not of the Davidic line,
the David line, the the God's King line goes with Judah in the
South. OK, so up in Israel, Jeroboam
gets this idea. If I don't put my stamp on my
reign right now, they're all going to go back to the David
line. So I got to do something.
So what he does is he says, let me get 2 calves, 2 false gods,
OK? And he puts one of them at Dan,
which is so far north it's above what our map can show you.
And the other one he puts in Bethel, which if you could see
Bethel, look all the way to the bottom of the green right above
where it says Jeremiah. That's Bethel.
Let me break down for you what he's doing.
No matter where you live in Israel, all the way up to the
top or the bottom or anywhere in between, you can come worship a
false God and not have to go down to Jerusalem where God
requires us to worship. So he what he did, y'all was he
created a new system and he said, this is what he says.
These are your gods who brought you out of Egypt.
Pay careful attention to what I'm about to say.
He didn't say we're done with Yahweh.
He twisted Yahweh into a system of his own making.
Are you with me? He took the story of God.
He took all of it. He took all of the truth and he
just reapplied it in his way. He built new altars, He built
new systems of worship. And he could say, we're doing
the same thing. I've just made it more
convenient for you. Don't go to Jerusalem.
Don't worry about going down to Judah.
And so you can see, This is why you can put that map down.
This is why Israel falls sooner than Judah.
Judah will fall to the Babylonians in 586.
Israel will fall in 722 to the Assyrians.
Judah doesn't get corrupted quite as fast.
And honestly, part of why the prophetic books are written,
some of them like Hosea, is to beg Israel to change because
your sister Judah is being tempted by what y'all are doing.
Are you with me? Like please stop showing them
how to be cheating on me because that's what y'all doing.
So hopefully what that gives you a sense of is that sinners have
this propensity in church. I need y'all to listen to me.
They're not Christians. This won't make as much sense to
the false lovers. Make sense to them.
What's unique to us Christians in the room is we take the real
thing and just twist it into our version of the real thing.
We aren't the ones who say I'm out with the Lord, bump it, I'm
gone. So we think we're better than
everybody and we're self-righteous, but we have
created systems of our own making all the time.
We become our own purity police. We become our own priest.
We give ourselves the benefit of the doubt on things.
We don't compare ourselves to God's word.
We compare ourselves to other Christians.
We compare ourselves to our neighbors, to our lost friends,
and we become a God unto ourselves.
And we don't look at it like we built a false calf.
But the main issue in the Bible for people who call themselves
followers of Yahweh, of Jesus, is that they build the whole
thing and it looks like the real thing, but it's their thing.
So sinners are false lovers, but sinners are also twisters, which
leads us to the opportunity we have.
Y'all, the whole reason this book was written to plead with
them to turn back. It's not too late.
Turn back. And what can be confusing when
you read a prophetic book is in one sentence God will say it's
over and the next sentence will say it's not over.
OK. And it's like he's talking out
of both sides of his mouth, but he isn't.
But let me just bring you in on how that feels.
Look at Chapter 11, verse 5. They shall not return to the
land of Egypt, but Assyria shall be their king because they have
refused to return to me. So what God is saying is that
the world power of Assyria is going to come throw down.
Y'all are too far gone to not go into exile.
So they will go into exile in 722 BC, but that doesn't mean
that God is done with them. Look at chapter 14, verses one
through 4. Return, O Israel, to the Lord
your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
Take with you words and return to the Lord.
Say to him, Take away all iniquity, accept what is good,
and we will pay with bulls the vowels of our lips.
Assyria shall not save us. We will not ride on horses, and
we will say no more our God to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy. I will heal their apostasy.
I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.
So what God was doing was giving them over to what they wanted.
And that means exile. It means this year is going to
take you over. But even as that happens, he's
hoping that they cut themselves to the heart and turn back to
him. Are you with me?
He's the parent that warns and warns and warns and warns.
And then eventually he's like, OK.
But even in the OK and give over, he's pleading that that
process brings them back. Are you with me?
But turning back is not casual, y'all?
It's not just like, ah, this didn't work out.
Assyria set us up, didn't he? The Lord saw that one coming.
Maybe the Lord will take us back.
It's more like a violent turning back.
It's a turning back of the heart.
I want to show you one of my favorite verses in the book that
gets this idea of of turning back to the Lord.
Chapter 10, verse 12 says this. So for yourselves, righteousness
reap steadfast love, break up your fallow ground.
For it is time to seek the Lord, that He may come and reign
righteousness upon you. Somebody say break up your
fallow ground. Yeah.
And other translations say unplowed ground.
I heard one teacher give an illustration of what that means.
So I want to give it to you because it helped me.
He basically said, imagine you have 100 acres that you are
farming and getting crop out of, and it's producing.
You got workers, you got a system, OK?
And then through neglect or whatever it is, you fire a
worker. You can't keep up.
Now we're down to 90, OK? And over time, the 90 becomes 80
all the way down to where you're only using 20 acres.
Those 80 over time, the more time goes by, become rock hard,
no longer fertile. You're not planting, you're not
producing. Excuse me, That 80 is fallow
ground. The 80 had potential that
because of your neglect has been wasted.
Are you with me? It is the potential it had but
is now lost. And you're operating on the 20
and it going to act like there ain't the 80 that you wasted.
Are you with me? So I want to be very clear.
This is where the connections are for the New Testament
church. This is where the connections
are for Port City Church in the series.
Y'all. This series is not a guilt trip,
it's a field trip. OK Jesus calls us the salt of
the earth and the light of the world.
That is our identity. That's who we are.
No amount of us walking in good works in these things is going
to make God love us more. So should we just sit back and
Netflix and chill till the Lord comes back and maybe go to a
Bible study once a month? No you know what I mean?
Like the the idea is break up the fallow ground means tap into
the potential you have with the Lord.
Not some of performance for the Lord, but what God intends to do
in us and through us for the good of others.
Think about the potential of the 80 acres, y'all, and our passion
for Jesus, our love of people are just turning our hearts up
and telling them and plowing them to say, Lord, please make
my life more than Netflix and chill.
And the goal of all that, y'all, is that we would become who we
made us to be. That we would host people at our
tables that we disagree with, that we would give money away,
that the poor would thrive, that our city would thrive.
That's what's at stake. Our neighbors are what's at
stake. God's glory is what's at stake
and our joy is what's at stake. And to get there we have to
break up the fallow ground. And if I'm honest, y'all, when I
hear about the potential and you hear motivating stories and
maybe somebody who lives in a different context and does
extreme things for God, what we can do is we can look at
ourselves and wish we were more and we like the idea of it.
And we have a pull ourselves up by the bootstraps kind of self
pity party. And if we're doing good, we get
private one. If we're doing bad, we feel bad.
I just want to say what the Lord has in mind with break up the
fallow ground is deeper than that.
It's even deeper than feeling bad.
It's deeper than just conviction for conviction's sake or
showcasing how bad we feel. And, and you know, walking
around weeping and things like that, you know what we're
talking about. Honestly, it looks like the
apostle Paul's life. I don't know if the apostle Paul
encourages you, but he encourages me because he was a
Sinner. But it kind of shows us what
life is possible like in Christ. I just want to give you one
example of his life that just blows my mind every time I think
about it. In Romans Chapter 9, we're not
going to turn there, but at one point in Romans 9, by the way,
he quotes the book of Hosea. So I encourage you to go read it
later. But one of the things Paul's
doing there is he is talking about the Jewish people as a
whole and how they are rejecting the Lord in general.
Obviously there's always exceptions and his heart is just
broken. He's like, yo, they don't care
my brother, they don't care my brothers.
According to the flesh, they don't see who Jesus is.
They're blinded. And he says it's just an
astonishing statement, says I wish that I could be cursed so
that they could be brought in. I wish I could be cut off that
they might find life in Christ. I wish I couldn't see so they
could see. Why do I bring that up, Church,
When we read the New Testament, do you get the sense that we're
just some moping around? We don't really love the Lord
the best we can hope for. I just wait till we get to
heaven. Or do you get the sense that
full of the Spirit, the church can actually walk in newness of
life is actually possible. Not that that means we're
sinless, but when you read Paul's life, you get the sense
that we can actually live with Jesus.
It's possible to go from continually breaking the Lord's
heart to actually sharing his heart.
Paul enter God's heart. He shared in his sufferings.
He was a participant in grace. This is the New Testament
church. It is not like woe is me, I'm a
cheater on the Lord at all times.
Yes, the New Testament church is sinful, but we have given
ourselves over to the Lord's heart and full of the Spirit
breaking up the fallow ground, we are Co reigning with Him for
the good of our city and the glory of God and our own joy.
Are you with me? So y'all, if that weren't
possible, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
That's the new covenant. That's what makes Christ better
than the old covenant. That's what makes the new
marriage better. Amen.
So let's talk about that point #4 behold our Redeemer, the
power. We need y'all to do this takes a
different kind of power because if we're honest, y'all, what we
can do when we hear about intensity and loving the Lord a
lot is we can just start to step outside of ourselves and stare
at ourselves and berate ourselves and make pledges and
and start to just New Year's resolution.
This thing of how we're going to be better and our attention
ironically goes on to ourselves. Do y'all see that we don't like
ourselves? Maybe if I try harder, I like
myself. Maybe if I'm like that person, I
like myself and our eyes just go down.
Well, if we're honest, when we look at ourselves, what we see,
what we hear is I should be a Hosea, but I feel like a Gomer.
I feel like the spouse who is still stepping out on the Lord
and y'all, that's because we still kind of are right?
Let's read Hosea 3 one through 3 again and the Lord said to me,
go again. Somebody say again love a woman
who was loved by another man as an adulteress, even as the Lord
loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods.
I love cakes of raisins. I wish I could go deep on the
raisins thing. Y'all come to equipment.
We will talk about raisins. OK?
So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and a Homer an olefic
of barley. And I said to her, You must
dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the horror or
belong to another man. So will I also be to you, y'all,
The point of the book of Hosea isn't about Gomer's life change.
It's about Hosea, right? It's about how God chases down
Gomer's. The point of the book, yes, we
got some ground to plow, y'all. We've got some things to change.
But the point of the book is this the imagery of again, words
like again, just jump off the page.
So I bought her for 15 shekels. This is an image of Hosea going
to one of the lovers and paying them to get her back, which
obviously points to what God is doing with Assyria and then
using like he's he's the payment price.
But it points to the truer and greater Hosea, who is Jesus, who
would pay for us with his own blood.
He did not buy us because we're first round draft picks who are
going to be faithful, right yo the the New Testament teaches us
that though we are faithless, He remains faithful.
Guys, we have a Redeemer who will not stop buying us, who
will not stop paying the price, who will not stop chasing us,
who will not stop cleansing us. This is not about your
willpower. This is about his redeeming
power as you behold him loving you.
When you're loveless, you will become one more who loves those
who are loveless. You will say things like Paul,
not so much as you just bootstrap yourself towards Paul,
but as you see the Christ that Paul saw, as you see him, you
will become like him. Paul never lost sight.
He says I am the chief of sinners, I'm the chief Gomer.
He never lost sight of that. He was not like, what are y'all
doing in Corinth? Y'all a bunch of idiots, you
know, like a little bit. He's like, oh, I got to plow
some ground. Y'all doing some crazy stuff and
some crazy stuff was going down in Corinth.
But he never said it above them. He said it like hey grace,
Jesus, gospel, this whole thing. Okay, so at every turn the power
to be different comes through seeing the Christ who buys you
and makes you different. Y'all?
There's something so powerful about being loved when you don't
deserve it. Ironically, I'm convinced the
power for the church to change is still just the same old
gospel. What we do is we get into the
church, we become Christians, and you just think, now it's on
you. Now it's about you showing how
you looking at Jesus as an example and then in your own
strength going and doing it makes you different.
But y'all, the power to be who God is calling you to be comes
to still being the faithless bride that God keeps loving
anyways. And it's as you keep looking at
that in the face and receiving it that you will become who he's
calling you to be. Are you with me When I was 19
years old, I was a new believer and I was still the worst.
I still am the worst. I'm not and this is not I used
to this is a this is this is what the last 15 years have been
like between me and Jesus. OK, the guy who led me to faith
was a guy named John. John was the man.
John was better than me at everything.
OK, But one day I had a basketball game coming up and
John rebounded for me for 30 minutes straight and did not
shoot once. OK guys, just imagine being my
friend, OK? John is rebounding for me.
He's way better than me at basketball.
At 1 moment, John gave me a piece of feedback about
something I was doing, and I told him to shut up and give me
the ball. Whoo, y'all, Even as I tell you
that that's an embarrassing story.
But y'all, you know what John didn't do?
He didn't sermonize me. He didn't moralize me.
He didn't lecture me. He kept rebounding for me, and
we went and got some dinner after.
Now, who's the Gomer there? Who's the Hosea?
You're looking at the Gomer. OK, that was the Gomer.
He was the Hosea. But this is what's important,
y'all? You know who John felt like?
John felt like Gomer. You know what was going on in
his head, Lord? I got about this.
Much more patience for Tanner. I love him.
Help me to love him. He's really hard to love, Lord.
But I know you have loved me when I'm unlovable.
So help me to love him when he's unlovable.
So here. Here's what's ironic.
There's not Gomers and Hosea's. You know, the point is, the more
you allow yourself to be a washed but stumbling broken
vessel, who is a Gomer? Somebody's going to look at you
and say you were Hosea to me and you'd be like Father God if you
only knew in my parenting, in my teaching, in my whatever it is
you do. You feel like you're holding on
by a thread, but you're being empowered by a vessel with
endless, unfathomable grace. It is as you allow yourself to
just put yourself in the positions the Lord's calling to
put you in. He wants you in not because you
are sufficient in Hosea, but you are a dependent Gomer.
Somebody will look at you and say you are a Hosea and I'm a
Gomer and you can be like, you have no idea because I'm Gomer.
Does that make sense? This sermon is not about making
you into a Hosea as much as it is realizing you have a Hosea in
Christ. And if we will put ourself where
the New Testament calls us to be loving our enemies, which is so
hard y'all, there's like 1000 things in the New Testament you
don't have the power to do. But as you step into them and
let the Lord love you when you are so hard to love, you will
demonstrate Kingdom power for people who need it.
And they will look at you and say what planet are you from?
And you'll just say it is not me, it's Christ in me.
Amen. If you are a Gomer, pray with
me. Our Father, we love you and I'm
just so grateful that you love us when we're unlovable.
We thank you for the gospel. We thank you that at great cost
to yourself, Father, you sent the Son full of the Spirit, just
like us, yet without sin. At the end of his life, God, he
took death. God took death on a cross, a
violent criminal's death, to purchase us for yourself so that
when we trust you, when we turn to you, when we believe you,
when we let go of our lesser loves, when we just throw
ourselves down for mercy, God, you give it.
So Father, I pray for anyone in here who does not know you that
they would see you chasing them down in your love.
God, please help them to see how much you love them more than
anything else they're chasing can.
And Father, I pray for your church.
May we not feel like we've graduated from being a Gomer.
God, may we just get good at being Gomer.
May we be loved by you. May we be good at seeing that
you're the Redeemer. God, you are good.
And Lord, may we not run into sin so that grace may abound.
God, may we be ones who who throw ourselves into your law of
liberty and love of neighbor God and just trusting that you will
provide the power in the moment of need and God, would people
get saved through our stumbling? Would people get saved through
our loving them when they're unlovable because you love us
when we're unlovable. God do it for your glory.
Save sinners. Strengthen your church.
We pray in Christ's name, Amen.