The Breaking Heart Of God — Clayton Dougan

To speak at our conference in Scotland, in Greenock, Scotland, just two years ago. And at that time, he had a major heart condition developed and requiring major surgery. And it's taken him quite a while to recover his full health.

And he's now back, just beginning back into ministry in a full wake, full time capacity. And I'm just so delighted to have been able to invite him to be here with us. I met Clayton for the first time back in the mid 80s, when I was pastor in the Alliance Church in Victoria.

And Clayton immigrated from Scotland with his wife, Isabel. And I met him as an expert, of course. We got fellowship in, and he came to speak very soon at my church. And over the next couple of years, I developed a deep friendship with him and with Dennis Scott, another local pastor, and the late, dear Keith Price.

Many of you know Keith Price. I can see many of you nodding your heads. And we just had a wonderful fellowship together. And we used to go out to little cafes, and we talked together. It was quite unique because they were three brethren men.

And here I was, a charismatic, and yet I was one of them. And I think what really united us was not the doctrinal differences, because they were certainly never united, but we all had a passion for God.

And as you know, Keith wrote a book. He was mentored by Tozer, and he wrote a book late in life, and the book was called Thirsting After God. And that described his heart, and described our hearts. And I'm just so delighted that Clayton is able to be our speaker today.

And I've invited Charles, if you would come up, please, and Andrew, if you would come, please, to pray for our brother as he comes to minister God's Word to us.

Father, we thank you for your anointing on this brother, Clayton. Thank you for calling him to yourself, saving his soul, for putting your Holy Spirit in him, for igniting a love for you and a passion for the needs of our world, recognizing that the gospel of Jesus Christ alone is the answer to the deep needs of the human heart.

And thank you for the many who found a life through the ministry of Clayton, those who were in darkness but came to life because you revealed yourself through his life, through his ministry. And we thank you for what you laid on his heart for us this afternoon, and we pray that we are not listening to the voice only of a man, but through his voice.

We will hear very clearly the voice of the Spirit of God deep in our hearts, drawing us more deeply into relationship with yourself, some of us into repentance, some of us into submission, into surrender, into yieldedness, into consecration, into fullness, all those things we need to be recipients of your glory and the agents for your work in our world.

So we pray that he will know your anointing and we will know the anointing on receiving the word into our hearts this afternoon. In.

Jesus' name, amen. Thank you so much, and good afternoon everybody. You've heard a few accents this week, but none quite like this one. Charles thinks it's an impediment, but we pray for him. And Gareth Evans thinks that everybody in heaven will speak with a Welsh accent, but he, you know, he hasn't been enlightened yet.

Wait till we all get our Scottish accents. I'd like you to turn your Bible, please, this afternoon to Hosea, the prophecy of Hosea. And just while you're looking for that, and by the way, it's just after the book of Daniel, or as one preacher said, you'll find it in the clean bit of your Bible.

You'll find it. Yes, as you can hear, I was born and raised in Scotland. I was saved as a boy, and then after high school, I went into the banking world and worked for a bank called the British Linen Bank.

It's one of the old Scottish banks. It began as a linen company and then got into the banking thing, and when I tell my Canadian friends that, they think I'm laundering money, you know, working for the Linen Bank.

But anyway, I worked there, and while I was in the banking profession, I began to have a real desire to serve the Lord, spent time with a senior evangelist in Scotland, and God just, through various experiences, showed to me that He had, in His wonderful grace, given me the gift of an evangelist.

And so, with my wife Isabel, Richard told us this morning that he married the most wonderful girl in the world, but I disagree with that. My wife Isabel has been my partner in serving the Lord for forty-five years now, and God has been so gracious, and we give Him the glory.

Hosea 10:12 and the Call to Revival

So, let's turn to the Word of God right now, and we're reading from the book of Hosea and chapter 10, and I'm only going to read one verse. We will refer to a great many other Scriptures in the course of the message, but Hosea chapter 10 and verse 12, it says, "'Soul with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness.

Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, until He comes to rain righteousness on you.'". And trust that God will write those words upon our hearts today and speak to us with power.

Yet somebody said about the prophet Hosea that Hosea was the prophet for Israel's zero hour. Hosea was the prophet for Israel's zero hour. In other words, the message of Hosea came to the people of Israel at a very crucial time, a time of great need, a time of great spiritual poverty.

And ladies and gentlemen, today when we think of this and apply it to our own hearts and lives, I don't know whether we would call today our zero hour, but I'm sure you will agree with me, we're in a situation of desperate need, and we need God to visit us today.

I believe we're living in a day of spiritual bankruptcy. I believe we're living in a day of spiritual bankruptcy among the people of God. And I believe, too, that when we say that, what do we mean? We mean that we're in a day in our lives where there is no longer in our society a consciousness of Almighty God.

There's no real awareness of God. And people of God, I want to say to you today, the thing that will create a new God consciousness in our society is when the church starts again to experience the mighty presence of God among His people.

It's when the presence of God comes among the people of God that that will overflow into our world. I had occasion to be in a court of law just about a week ago, and I was sitting in the public gallery.

And it's, you know, people say nowadays, we affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No mention of God. And then they proceed to lie through their teeth, and nobody bats an eyelid.

Why? Because there is no consciousness of God. And when the presence of God comes, people, that is not something that you and I can manufacture. That is something that, as we've heard already this week, is a sovereign move of God by His Holy Spirit when God comes upon His people.

I want to tell you today, if the Spirit of God comes upon the church in Canada, all the world will know. There will be a new consciousness, a new awareness of Almighty God. In preparing for this time this week and praying and seeking God, I happened to be reading a magazine article, and there was a definition of revival in there that I don't think I will ever forget.

It's very simple. The definition said that revival is when eternity invades time. When eternity invades time. Have you ever taken time to sit down and imagine the concept of eternity? Have you ever sat down and maybe read some of the chapters in the book of Revelation, chapter 4 and 5, for example, when we have those amazing pictures of what it's like around the throne in the presence of Almighty God and the exalted Lamb of God sitting at God's right hand?

Have you ever thought to imagine what it's like in eternity, people? And I want to tell you today, when we think about eternity invading time, we're not going to have just a happy time. It's not going to be a time when we will just get all blessed up and then we'll go on and do our own thing.

If eternity invades time, people, you and I will never be the same again. We will never be the same again. If eternity invaded time at this very moment, the preacher and everybody in this room would be flat on our faces before the holiness of God, overwhelmed with the wonder of who He is.

And men and women today, I pray God with all my being that God would send us a time when eternity would invade time, when the Lord would come among us. He's coming one day. We know that. But when He would come in mercy and grant us a time of revival, a time when the Spirit of God would move in tremendous power.

Hosea's Prophetic Picture of God's Broken Heart

Now, when we come to the book of Hosea, and we keep those things in our minds, the first thing I want to suggest to you is I want you to see from the book of Hosea what I'm calling the call to revival.

The call to revival. Now, having just said—let me qualify that, if I may—having just said that revival is a divine act of Almighty God, when God in His sovereignty invades time. We understand that. We do understand that.

But I also believe that God would so work in our lives, He would call us to anticipate with joy and to anticipate with hunger and passion that God would do exactly what we want Him to do. And the reason I say that to you is in the text that we read together, it says, Break up your fallow ground, for it's time to seek the Lord until He comes.

Until He comes to rain righteousness on you. And I believe the Lord wants us to seek Him with expectant hearts, to seek Him expecting to see something happen, expecting to see, and we'll develop that as we go along.

Now, this call for revival in Hosea's day, first of all, I believe it was a call, what I'm saying, a call from within, within Hosea's heart. The book of Hosea is divided nicely into two sections. The first three chapters are Hosea's personal testimony, and then from then on, God begins to speak in chapter 4, right through to the end to chapter 14.

And in those first three chapters, we see a deep experience that Hosea was having between him and God. For whatever reason, Hosea's wife had gone into harlotry. She had broken his heart. She had gone into harlotry as a prostitute.

And God said to Hosea, I want you to take her back. I want you to take her back, and I want you to have more children with this wife who had gone into unfaithfulness and harlotry. And what was God saying to Hosea?

God was saying, Hosea, what's happened to you is a visual aid of the relationship between Me and My people. It's a visual aid of what's happened in the relationship between Almighty God and His earthly people Israel.

And God was challenging Hosea with this incredible challenge, and He was showing him, people, can you imagine what it must have been like for Hosea? Can you imagine the agonies that this man must have gone through in this whole experience?

Can you imagine the depths to which he had gone emotionally and in every other way? It must have been a horrific experience. And what God was saying to him was this. God was showing to Hosea on this occasion the awfulness, the awful significance of Israel's sin, the awful significance of it all.

And God was bringing home to Hosea just exactly what had happened in the relationship between God and His people. After all that God had done for them, they had gone after other gods. People, did you know?

Has it dawned on you yet that sin in your life, sin in my life, it hurts God? It breaks His heart. That is why I am particularly thankful today for times in my life when God has convicted me of sin and brought me to a place of utter brokenness before the cross.

When you get a sense, people, of what your sin does to God, I'm telling you, you will only want to weep. You will only want to fall at His feet with a tremendous sense of the awfulness of your own heart.

People have a problem sometimes these days facing up to the fact that they are sinful. God's been giving me a new insight recently into that Scripture where it says, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

I want to tell you, people, when you see the glory of God, when you get a little glimpse of the glory of God, you will know how sinful you really are. You will know that you have a heart within you that the other prophet says is desperately wicked in comparison with the glory of God.

My heart is desperately wicked. And men and women today in Hosea's day and in our day, sin in our hearts, sin in our churches, it hurts God. It grieves His heart. It grieves His heart. It breaks His heart.

But alongside this visual aid of the relationship between Jehovah and Israel, there is also a glorious picture of the persevering love of God. Amen. Aren't you glad about that today? Men and women, let's get this straight.

If this isn't true, none of us would be here today. If this isn't true, all of us would have been judged long ago. But thank God for His persevering love. Thank God that He doesn't let us go. Thank God that in Hosea's heart, by the grace of God, as he was obedient to the Lord, the very persevering love of God was being reproduced in Hosea's heart.

And through his own lonely grief over his wayward wife Gomer, Hosea got a new appreciation of the amazing love of Almighty God. Men and women today, I don't know how it grabs you today, but I want to tell you I am very excited about this.

I am so excited about this right now, I could burst. I think this is so amazing that God yearns for His people. He longs for His people. He longs, dear people, He longs for you. He longs for me. Isn't that amazing?

In spite of what we've done to Him, in spite of how we've grieved His Spirit, He longs for us to draw us to Himself. He longs for us to come into the blessing of His persevering and forgiving love. Oh, hallelujah.

Praise His wonderful name. You see, folks, God is holy. God is righteous. God is just. And in the Word of God, God is revealed to us in several different ways. He's revealed to us, as Creator. Now, did God create the world and humanity?

Did God do that just to possess them? No. He's revealed in the Word of God as King. Did He do that? Did He give Himself that position just to reign over us? No. That's part of the story, but that's not exclusively what it is.

He's revealed in the Word as Judge. Is He that just solely to judge? No, because He's also revealed in the Word as Father. And as Father, He longs for relationship. He longs for intimacy in communion between Himself and His people.

I've been so blessed in recent times, and God just laid this Scripture on my heart, but I was looking at the first book of Samuel in chapter 13 and reading there about King David and how the Lord said He had sought a king, He sought somebody.

But notice what it says. God had sought for Himself a man after His own heart. He didn't seek for David, you see, just so that he would be king. That was secondary. He sought for a man after His own heart.

And when we get to the New Testament and we come to the letter of Paul to Titus, let me read a little Scripture with you. Chapter 2 of Titus, verse 11,. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires, to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in this present age.

All of this, people, it's from the grace of God, God reaching out to you and me to bring us to Himself, to bring us into relationship. And then he says, in order that our lives be changed like that, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Oh, people, are you looking for that today? Listen to me, we've got to keep before us the big picture. Amen? Now listen to me, folks. Even if God sent us revival today, it would be just to prepare us further for that amazing time when we're going to see His glory.

Keep in mind the big picture. And then he says, listen to verse 14, Who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify—and here it is again—to purify for Himself, for Himself, a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.

People, I want to remind you today the reason God saved you. If you're sitting in this congregation today and you're rejoicing that you're a new creature in Christ, it is all by the grace of God, and God did it so that you would be for Himself.

And the whole heart of God is to bring us into a deep, deep enjoyment of that relationship. Hallelujah. And when we think of all of that, people, it brings me back to this thought, and it's good for us to look at it in the light of the cross.

Salvation by Grace and Life in Christ

God gave His Son to make it all possible. We come to the foot of the cross, and we see that sin breaks God's heart. It doesn't just break His law. It breaks His heart. Amen? Sin breaks God's heart. I'm thankful that God has taken me in my lifetime on a number of occasions, and He's taken me to weep over my sin.

Praise His wonderful name. And I want to say to you again, people, let us never lose sight of the big picture. In Ephesians chapter 2, when Paul has just been telling us how that by the grace of God we are saved, one stage we were dead, Charles was just telling us yesterday about a message he heard somewhere on the raising of Lazarus, and the speaker said, Lazarus had one thing wrong with him.

You get it, eh? He was dead. He got a big problem. He was dead. And people, listen to me, before you knew Jesus, so were you. And you were in a condition that only God could change. Amen? Only God could change that.

And like the power of Jesus that raised Lazarus from the dead, Ephesians 2 tells us that God raised us out of the death of our sin, hallelujah, and made us alive, made us alive in Christ, seated us with Him in heavenly places.

That is your position if you're a believer today. And listen to me, people, how shame on us if we persist in sin and disobedience, not enjoying all that God has given us in Christ. Amen? And when Paul says we've been raised and seated with Him in heavenly places, he says in verse 7, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

It's going to take all eternity for God to reveal all He's done for us in His Son. Doesn't that put within your heart today a longing for Him? A longing, oh God, after all You've done for me, how could I ever for one moment be content with this mediocrity, with this disobedience, with this half-baked Christian experience, with this one thing today and something else tomorrow?

I get increasingly burdened. I meet Christians all the time. They never open their Bibles from one Sunday to the next. That breaks God's heart, people. How can we ever, how can we ever hope to be enjoying the things that God has for us in Christ?

He's longing, as our text says, He's longing to rain His blessing upon us. Amen. He's longing for that. I want to tell you, if God puts in your heart today a hunger for that blessing, then He's going to give it to you.

Amen? Seek Him with all your heart. I want you to know, people, God's grace is so amazing, and I want you to know, too, that lost souls, people out there who don't know Christ, they're lost to the heart of God.

I pray, God, that through this conference and if God sends, well, I know it will happen, if God sends us revival, one of the things that will happen is that we will have a new appreciation of what it means to be lost, and our hearts will break over people who are lost because they don't know Christ.

Our hearts will ache, and people, the people, they're lost to the heart of God, and He's longing to bring them to Himself. Amen? He's longing to create among His people that renewed sense of His presence, His majesty, and His glory that it will overthrow, and everybody around us will know that God's doing something really special.

I long for it. So, there was that call to revival from within. There was a call to revival from above. Chapters 4 through 14 of Hosea, we find there that God is calling His people. He's calling them to come back to Himself, calling them again and again.

The Call to Return and Be Healed

Listen to me, folks. Listen to me as we hear the Word of God today. Is God touching your heart? Is God drawing you to Himself in a new way? Is God saying to the church in Victoria today, my heart aches for you, my people?

My heart longs after you, my people. My heart longs to bless you, my people. Are we hearing from the Lord? He's longing to do that. And you know, in John 5 verse 6, I love this story about the healing of the man at the Pool of Bethesda.

Thirty-eight years he lay there. Thirty-eight years. But I love the phrase, verse 6, when Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been a long time in that condition. Oh, has the Lord got to come to you and me today and say, I know, my child, you've been in this mess for a long time?

Then Jesus says to the man, do you wish to get well? Oh, hallelujah. Isn't that great? I believe Jesus is saying to the church in Victoria and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, throughout Canada today, that Jesus is saying, do you want to get well?

Do you want to get well? Do you long for my blessing? Jesus is standing there and He's saying, do you want to get well? People, bring your life into the sunlight of His presence. Amen? Bring your life into the searchlight of His glory.

I don't know if any of you have been lately down at Ogden Point, and you've maybe seen the big new sundial down there. It's a very interesting thing, and it's got all sorts of lines and markings on it, and depending on the time of year, if you stand in the right spot, you can tell the time.

But of course, the sun's got to shine for that to happen. Amen? You've got to stand there and allow the light and glory of the sun to come upon you. Oh, people, you would stand in the light of the glory of the presence of Jesus, and He'll tell you what time it is in your life.

He'll tell you what you need. He'll say to you, do you want to get better? Do you want to get well? Do you want my touch of blessing on your heart, on your life? In Isaiah's day, the heart of the matter was that there was no knowledge of God.

There was no knowledge of God. People growing as a Christian is growing in the knowledge of God. Being a Christian is not just getting a ticket to heaven, and then drifting your way through the rest of your life.

We were talking about Alan Redpath the other day, and somebody was telling me how he said years ago, it's possible. It's possible to be a saved soul, and yet a wasted life. A saved soul, but a wasted life.

Oh, men and women today, this is the first day of the rest of your life. Amen? This is the first day of the rest of your life, and Jesus is maybe saying to people here this afternoon, do you want to get well?

Do you want that touch of renewal and blessing and revival? When you go through the letter to—not the letter, excuse me, the prophecy of Hosea, and see some of the things that God was saying, you come into chapter 4, and at the beginning of this section when God begins to speak, and in this chapter, at verse number 1, for example, God's heart is breaking because there is no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge of God in the land.

That's what was breaking His heart. There was no knowledge of God in the land. Down at verse 3, it says, Therefore the land mourns, and everyone who lives in it languishes, along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and also the fish of the sea, disappear.

Listen to me, people. Do you know that the sin of mankind affects even the planet around us, our environment? We're all supposed to be environmentally conscious these days. Amen? I want you to know that when Christ died on a cross, men and women, He redeemed everything that sin had ruined.

Everything. The book of Romans tells me that creation groans, waiting for the redemption of the people of God. And God one day is going to bring into being a new heaven and a new earth. And God has redeemed His creation.

Hallelujah! Everything! And we talk about our oceans and the diminishing cod stocks and all this kind of stuff. I want to tell you, people, if we came back to God, all that will change. Do you not believe me?

Some of us may remember seeing our video some time ago about the move of God in a little place called Pond Inlet in northern Quebec, I think it is. And part of the stuff, because of the sin and the brokenness among the people in that community, the caribou even had left.

The berries had stopped growing on the tundra. When the revival came, the berries grew again, and the caribou returned. Men and women, God is a big God, and this is the one we long would come among us, eternity invading time, and this old world hasn't got the foggiest idea what will happen when God comes.

And sad to say, neither do we have the time. You go on to verse 6 of this chapter 4, and God says, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because they have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being My priest, since you have forgotten the law of your God.

You've forgotten the law of your God. Oh, men and women, how we need to come back to the Lord. You go over to chapter 5, and you read there at verse number 6, He says, They will go with their flocks and their herds to seek the Lord, but they will not find Him.

He has withdrawn from them. Down at verse 15, these sad words, I will go away and return to My place, God says, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face. In their affliction, they will earnestly seek Me.

Do you know what I want to say to you today? There's somebody, there's a guy standing here before you today, and if there's any Scripture in the whole Word of God that I am profoundly grateful for, it is the Scripture in the New Testament, in 2 Corinthians, where God talks about godly sorrow.

He says, Godly sorrow leads a man or a woman to repentance, and it leaves no regret. Hallelujah! Come on, people, that is worth getting excited about. Amen? That is worth giving God glory for. It leaves no regret, and brokenness and confession and repentance before the cross of Calvary means renewal.

It means forgiveness. Praise His wonderful name. It means the removal of the rottenness of our sin. Praise God. Then you come into chapter 6. After having just said that, verse 1 of chapter 6, come let us return to the Lord.

There really should be a word-like saying in there between the last verse of chapter 5 and the first of chapter 6. In their affliction, they will earnestly seek Me, saying, Come, let us return to the Lord.

Come, let us return to the Lord. For He has torn us, but He will heal us. He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days. He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him.

So, let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going forth is as certain as the dawn, and He will come to us like the rain, and like the spring rain watering the earth. Oh, hallelujah. Don't you long for that?

Don't you just long? Oh, my brother or sister today, if you're sitting here and you know Jesus is saying to you, do you want to get well? You know you've got to do business with God today. Don't you just long to feel the refreshing rain of His presence upon your whole being?

Don't you just long for that healing that only He can bring? Our God wants to meet with us. He wants to do these great things for us as His people. And God goes on in chapters 8 through 10 and 11 through 14, and He talks about awful judgment.

We don't have time to go into all the details today, but He talks some very solemn words there. And then in chapters 11 through 14, and it's in this section, by the way, up to chapter 10 that we have our text, and God's longing heart, His yearning heart is saying to them, sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness, break up your fallow ground.

It's time to seek the Lord until He comes to rain righteousness on you. We'll come back to that in just a moment. But in 11 through 14, we find the heart of God is yearning, the yearning of God for His people, the yearning of God.

It says, My people are bent on turning from Me. Though they call them to the One on High, none at all exalts Him. And God longs for His people, longs that they would come back, longs that they would return to Him and into that intimate fellowship with Himself.

Idolatry and the Conditions for Revival

So people, all this problem that Isaiah was facing, all this problem, all happened, listen to me, it all happened because in the day of Jeroboam, they installed two false gods, one in Dan and one in Bethel.

And that was the root of the problem. They set up false gods in their lives. Now listen to me, people. I'm not here to tell you what your idols are. You know what they are, and you're probably thinking about them right at this moment.

But I'm here to tell you that if Jesus Christ is not Lord of all in your life, He is not Lord at all. And if He is not Lord in my life and your life, that means there are idols there, and they need to be mercilessly destroyed.

They need to be torn down and smashed to bits at the foot of the cross, no matter what. And I'm telling you right now, you will not make one iota of progress until that happens. God showed me in recent months through the experiences of open-heart surgery and all the like of it, how easy it is for a man to have his ministry as an idol.

And God faced me up with my own mortality, and God said to me and broke me down over this until I was prepared to say, Lord, whatever, You have Your way. Even if my whole ministry is to the couple next door to me, that's fine with me.

If You want everything else, take it away, Lord. Because if it's an idol in my life, I'm wasting Your time, my time, and everybody's time. God wants to be Lord, people. Absolute, unquestioning Lord. Now, just to illustrate some of the things I'm trying to say to you here, I want to say go on from the call to revival to talk a little bit about the conditions for revival.

And I want to say this to you, and I almost hesitate in some way to do this, but I feel the Lord wants me to do it, so I better do it, hadn't I? And I was greatly privileged. Gareth's already told you that I'm a good brethren boy.

And I was privileged to grow up in an assembly in central Scotland, and I was saved and baptized there as a boy. And that assembly in central Scotland was alive with the presence of God, because God gave us revival.

It was just a little village, just a little village. An evangelist came one time, and he was a godly man, and he prayed his heart out, and he preached his heart out, and nothing happened. He called the church together.

He said, brothers and sisters, there is something in this church that is grieving the Holy Spirit. And he called us to prayer. I will never forget it. I was about twelve or thirteen at the time. It was written indelibly on my mind to this day.

He called us to prayer. We went into a prayer meeting that went on all night, and all of a sudden the Spirit of God came upon that meeting, and brothers and sisters were standing up and confessing sin.

They were repenting before the Lord. They were getting right with God and with one another, and God was moving by His Spirit in a powerful way. And the presence of God was there. And in the middle of the night, I'll never forget it, the door of the little church opened, and a man walked in, and one of our elders was called Jimmy Black.