Break Up Your Fallow Ground — Ian Paisley

Hosea 10: The Call to Break Up Fallow Ground

We want to turn to Hosea, the book of Hosea, and we are turning to the 10th chapter. We will just read some verses from this chapter, chapter 10 of Hosea and verse 1. Israel is an empty vine, he bringeth forth fruit unto himself.

According to the multitude of his fruit, he hath increased the altars. According to the goodness of his land, they have made goodly images. Their heart is divided, nor shall they be found faltering. He shall break down their altars, he shall spoil their images.

For now they shall say, We have no king, because we fear not the Lord. What then should a king do for us? They have spoken words, swearing falsely, and making a covenant. Thus judgment springeth up as hemlock in the furrows of the field.

The inhabitants of Samaria shall fear because of the calves of Betheban. For the people thereof shall mould over it, and the priests thereof that rejoiced on it, for the glory thereof, because it is departed from it.

It shall be also carried unto Assyria for a present to King Jerob. Ephraim shall receive shame, and Israel shall be ashamed of his own counsel. As for Samaria, her king is cut off as the foam upon the water.

The high places also of Eben, the sin of Israel shall be destroyed. The thorn and the thistle shall come up on their altars, and they shall say to the mountains, Cover us, and to the hills, fall upon us.

O Israel, thou hast sinned from the days of Gebeah. There they stood the battle in Gebeah against the children of iniquity, did not overtake them. It is in my desire that I should chastise them, and the people shall be gathered against them, when they shall find themselves in their two furrows.

And Ephraim is as a heifer that is taught, and loveth to tread out the corn. But I fast over upon her fair neck. I will make Ephraim to ride, and Judah shall plow, and Jacob shall break his cloth. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy.

Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and reign righteousness upon you. Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity. Ye have eaten the fruit of lies, because I didst trust in my way, in the multitude of thy mighty men.

Therefore shall a tumult arise among thy people, and all thy fortresses shall be spoiled, as Shalman spoiled Beth Arbel in the day of battle. The mother was dashed in pieces upon her children. So shall Bethel do unto you, because of your great wickedness.

In a morning shall the king of Israel utterly be cut off, and God will stamp with his own divine approval this reading from his very own infallible book. Let's stand together for a word of prayer before we have the preaching.

Father in heaven, we thank thee for this opportunity to draw near unto thee. We thank thee for the ministers and elders of the churches that are here, and we pray, O God, that this week there may be a searching of our hearts and a doing of heart business before God.

We look out in a world that's full of sin, full of wickedness, full of evil. We can see the rising tide of potpourri on every hand. We can see the curse of ecumenism. We can see contemporary religion fighting against the true Christ and the true church.

And we thank our God of the darkness that's over the land, and the gross darkness that covers the people. And we thank our God of this great earthquake and those that are left without home, without clothes, without water, without food, and without hope.

And, O God, we groan within ourselves and cry out to thee and say, how long, O Lord, holy and true. O God, we pray that when they turn individually in this service to thyself, may men have personal dealings with their God today.

We pray, our God, you would shut us away from the circumstances of the gathering and shut us in with yourself and speak to our hearts. Lord, we need to hear thy voice. We need to obey thy voice. We need to have clean hearts and a right spirit and the joy of thy salvation.

So we pray that thou wilt do that searching work. We thank thee for thy presence yesterday and thy blessing upon the preacher and thy blessing upon the holy word of God. Continue to work this week. Let the tide rise.

Let our God the wind blow. Let God deal with us. And may we go away humiliated and broken but blessed of God and desiring to be at our best in what little time is left until Jesus comes again. So, Lord, be with us now and help us.

And to this end, I take the promise, Holy Ghost, the blessed power of Pentecost to fill me to the uttermost. I take, thank God he undertakes for me. And the people of God said, Amen. Very pure Amen. The people of God said, Amen.

That's a bit better. Amen. I want to draw your attention to the 12th verse of this 10th chapter of Hosea. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy. Break up your fallow ground. For it is time to seek the Lord till he come and rain righteousness upon you.

Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy. Break up your fallow ground. For it is time to seek the Lord till he come and rain righteousness upon you. You will notice that this text starts with righteousness and ends with righteousness.

Righteousness in an Unrighteous Generation

God is a righteous God. God's work has to be done in righteousness. The saints of God and the ministers of God are to be clothed in righteousness. We don't live in a righteous world. We live in an unrighteous world.

We live in a crooked world, a sinful world. A world, the whole world, we are told by the Apostle John, lieth in wickedness or lieth in the very lap of wickedness. In wickedness. The wickedness is oozing out of the putrefaction of this old world in which we live.

I'm afraid many of us have been so taken with that that we are not aware of how dark is the stain, how terrible is the stench, the voice of sin that sends wreaks to heaven and demands the judgment of a thrice holy God.

And we're living in a Sodom and Gomorrah generation. And Sodom and Gomorrahism has been reportedly born. Sodom has been born again. In this earth of ours. And there's no need for me to stand here and put out a catalog of the terrible sins of the day.

We're all aware of them and how those sins have tainted Christians. How those sins have taken their toll on churches. How those sins have taken their toll upon the ministers of God. But in this verse, we have a call to sowing time.

And this is a time when God's people and God's ministers are called to sow. The only hope for the world is the word of God. The only hope for the world is the preaching of the word of God. The only hope for the world is the sowing of the word of the living God.

Because nothing else will meet the need. You needn't try stumps. You needn't try conformity to the world. You needn't try to have some pleasant way to tickle the palates of people's tongues and tickle their ears.

It's all in vain. There's only one remedy for this world and it is the word of the living God. The word of God. How it should grip us. How it should control us. How it should be the thing that moves in our mind and in our heart continually.

The blessed man of Sam 1. He was a delighted man. There's not many delighted people today. There's plenty of vinegar Christians sitting in church pews. And when they look up at the preacher on a Sunday morning, they would scunner you.

Scunner is a good North Antrim word. They would scunner you. There is no pleasantness about them. Why? They're not delighting in God's word. You can't run six days a week with a devil's crowd and then pretend to have the joy of the Lord in your heart on Sunday.

It couldn't be done. Because their delight is in the law of the Lord. And in his law, they may meditate day and night. Of course, there's not many Christians chew the cud today. There's not many meditations upon God's word.

That's why we don't have the great preaching that we had in days in our past when men meditated on the word and found things in the book that no one else found and preached them with a born-again tongue and a born-again message and a born-again liberty in their souls.

And that's what God wants out of us today, that we might all be born again and we may be born again in our preaching. My father used to say to me, if you get a good sermon, son, preach it again. But before you preach it, see that it's born again in your heart.

And if we're not preaching messages that are born again, there'll be nobody born again through them. Because born-again messages brings about the new birth in the hearts of hearers. So in this verse, we have five things.

It is, of course, a message of grace. Five is the number of grace. And first of all, I've called your attention to the time of sowing. It is time to seek. And the word Lord here is in small capitals, which means it is Jehovah.

It is time to seek Jehovah. You see, this whole chapter is about idolatry, false gods, false elders, false sacrifice. False religion and the curse of God upon us. But here in the middle of the chapter, there is a revelation of Jehovah, the one, only true and living God.

And you better remember that we're coming to an age when there's going to be persecution on those that believe that there's only one true God. And there's only one true religion. And there's only one true church.

And there's only one true Bible. And there's going to be trouble in the world. And that's why we have all these new pieces of legislation that you're not to criticize. You can curse Jesus on the wireless and nobody will say anything about that.

You can say things about the Bible on the wireless and nobody will say anything about that. But if you say anything about Allah, if you say anything about the Quran, then you're going to be in trouble.

There is a standard arising today that is depicted in the book of Revelation, the dark days before Jesus comes again. And we need to awaken to that fact. Now it says here it is time to seek. The most important thing a preacher can do, the most important thing a church can do is to seek the Lord.

The most important thing that we should engage in is seeking the Lord, seeking the Lord. You seek a thing, you have a good illustration of that in our Lord's parable about the lost coin, that the woman lit a candle and she took her brush and she searched determined that we were determined this week to find what would be a great job of work.

The things that we have forfeited in our ministry, the things that we have set aside, the things that are all important to a ministry in this first stage of going to seek, you should be thankful that God has given you the mental strength to understand his work.

The faculties, the use of our faculties are a wonderful thing. It's a great thing to have the intelligence to use our faculties for the glory of God and for the truth of God. And God has given us a grasp of our faculties.

You can wake up tomorrow morning and your faculties could be gone. You can wake up tomorrow morning and your day of really thinking clearly and rightly would be finished. But thank God every morning God gives us the time for the use of our faculties and we need the use of our faculties.

I often go to talk to people who are dying. I'm surprised about one thing and it's an amazing thing and it is this. These people are doting until you talk about something that's spiritual and then you're amazed, totally amazed about the perfectness of their memory and the perfectness of their mind and the perfectness of their love of the Savior.

That's an amazing thing and I have seen that over and over again. It would be a good thing, wouldn't it, if we applied more time of our mental ability when we have our faculties to really know and love and understand the Word and really know and love and understand the Lord.

It would be a great thing. We have time because we have time to exercise our mental powers. We have time because God has given us physical strength and you can't do the work of God without physical strength and the Lord can renew our physical strength.

We all have our infirmities, we all are going down the valley, target of all that that means but thank God, God can give us physical power. He renews the youth like the eagles and God can renew our youthfulness by giving to us that physical strength that we need and we should not abuse our physical strength.

You see God's people say that they believe in keeping one day holy but dear help a minister if he goes off for one day every week. If your minister shut the door of the manse and said nobody received here on Monday, it's my Sabbath, they would be aroused, they would have them at presbytery and they would say we can't find them and people die and people are sick, you can't find them.

But my friend, if you don't keep a Sabbath in your life, you can't expect God to honor you. Every one of us needs that day of rest. It doesn't say in the Bible seven days for the preacher and six days for everybody else but it says everyone must keep the Sabbath and if you have no Sabbath and if you think that you are a good minister because you're at the beck and call of everybody and some dear wee woman that wants to fill a form for a pension thinks a minister should be there to fill it for and direct her thing, that's not what God called you to be.

God called you to have a Sabbath day. We don't have it. There's fellas laughing here today and they don't have it. But if they made up their mind I'm going to have a Sabbath day, I'm going to take off.

If something happened at this conference today that every minister said we're going to have a Sabbath day and they spent that day in rest, relaxation, we would have a different type of minister. The last you need your body is not any different from anybody else's body and it needs that.

And I would exhort you, I'd exhort you to thank God for the physical ability that God can give us. Also, I'd like you to notice it is time for us to really seek the Lord. We've got to seek Him. How do we seek God?

We seek God with all our heart and with all our mind and with all our strength. We seek Him with all our strength. We really seek the Lord. Could I ask you a question? How many times do you really seek the Lord?

How many times do you really seek the Lord? Really seek. This isn't playing about. It's real heart searching and really seeking the Lord. Seek. It is time to seek the Lord. Now is the accepted. Now is a day of salvation.

While that applies primarily to personal salvation, it also applies to salvation from all things. And we may need to be saved from laziness and sleepiness and worldliness and sinfulness and now it's the accepted time that we should be.

And so this time is a very important factor. And how time flies away. I don't know about you, but I know when I take up the Bible and start to study, in no time the hour has fled away. And what is half an hour with the Bible?

It's nothing. You need more than half an hour. You need hours. No wonder the old man, what did it say of Mr. Luther, three hours every day he prayed. And he said, if I don't pray for three hours, then I am not a good minister of Jesus Christ.

And many of us pray for three hours. Mr. Spurgeon said there wasn't a 20 minutes in his day that he didn't have part of that 20 minutes to pray. And he says, part of every 20 minutes I have given to God for prayer.

God doesn't want a prayer book prayer. He doesn't want, Mr. Spurgeon said in one of his sermons, God save us from the nasal twang of preachers and from their grunts. And I thought that was a very good statement.

And God doesn't want to have your nasal twang in his ear, nor does he want your grunts. He wants you just to pray and talk to him face to face as a man talketh unto his ram. That's what he's looking for.

Plain, straight talk between the holy God and my unholy, unrighteous soul. That needs harmony. And so we have here a cry. The sowing is over and you go home. Seek the Lord. He issued a series of very good tracts.

Bishop ever dared to do that. And he used to have a coach station. Drove the coach. He sat at the window of these tracts. He said if one got in the railway train, he did the same. He sat at the window and he opened the window.

And then he started to get the letters. See it. He sowed because you're not sowing. For the past 35 years, I have had police officers with me every day. It's like a continual prison. You meet them when you come down for your breakfast and you say goodbye to them at supper time.

And before they leave, you say what time tomorrow. And you know they'll be there tomorrow waiting for you. And if you hadn't a time fixture that you ignored them, you would go mad. You'd think you were having a life sentence.

And it's no wonder that one prominent politician couldn't stick them anymore. So he just struck one of them in the head and then they took them off him because he was a danger to him. I'll not mention that politician.

He was an official in the university. But let me say to you this. But this passed me over. Very nice man. A very polite man. And a very gracious man. But he was hard as far as the gospel. And then I was invited.

And I had the great joy leading him to a full assurance. And it's marvelous his development. How he has developed and witnessed to others. Your bread will return to you after many days. Don't you worry about the reaping.

God will take care of the reaping. One sows, another reaps. But it's God that gives the increase. What man whom drove me for many years. Sent for me when he was in his last illness. And he said, you know, he said, sir, I should have come to Christ.

Do you think the Lord would take me in? I said, the Lord will take you in now. And thank God that deep man was taken in before he passed away. And witnessed a good confession. Do not despair, my brother.

God will answer your prayers. And God will answer your prayers if you seek the Lord. It is time to seek the Lord. I trust that today there will be planted a precious seed in your heart. That you're going to seek the Lord in this question.

Breaking Up the Fallow Ground of the Heart

It's time to seek. Let's come to the second thing. The task of sowing. Break up a low ground. But that is not what it says. You are. Though some preachers think that if they give their congregations a good battering on Sunday morning.

And are far excellent in whipping them. And scourging them. And lumping up their congregation's eyes. When you get that plank of wood. That's what the Lord said. So you better get down to that. And here it says break up your fallow ground.

Way of agriculture. In the old days when people did plough and sow and reap. They gave a subsidy to people who broke up. And they paid them a sum of money for ground that was ploughed that hadn't been ploughed for a seven year period.

And if you could prove that a field had not been ploughed for seven years. And you ploughed it. You got a subsidy. Why if all of us allowed God to plough our hearts today. What a subsidy it would be to ourselves.

To our homes. To our families. To our churches. And to the neighborhood in which we live. Break up. It doesn't say Lord break up my fallow ground. It's a direct order to you. There are some things that God doesn't do.

And God doesn't break up your fallow ground. You have to break it up. Now how do you break up your fallow ground? Number one by acknowledging that it's fallow ground. By coming to the place of wisdom.

Where you look at yourself and you say yes this is fallow ground. It's not bearing fruit. The fruit of the Spirit is not here. The fruit of soul winning is not here. The fruit of loving the Bible is not here.

The fruit of a love for my brethren is not here. The fruit for a love of my congregation is not here. The fruit of the love of my parish is not here. And the town in which I live it's not there. It's fallow ground.

You need to acknowledge it. You'll not have any of it broken up until you face up to it. That there's fallow ground in your heart. In your life. In your ministry. In your church. You've got to face it.

That's the first thing. Then lay to your heart the commands of God concerning the state of the heart. You know what we need? A revival of heart religion. Heart religion. See there's so often our religion is a veneer.

It's not heart religion. It starts on the outside and works in. That's false religion. True religion starts on the inside and works out. That's true religion. And we must have that fallow ground. And we must ask the Lord by his grace to help us to face up to how it is fallow.

And of course it's got fallow because the plow shear has not entered it. You see the word of God is a plow. The word of God is a plow. It goes down and it turns up the soil. Why does the soil need turned up?

Because in turning up the soil you enable the soil to drink in from the sun and the climate. The ingredients it needs to make it good ground. You know when you study that parable of sowing the seed. There's nothing said about the seed because the seed's the same.

Whether it falls by the wayside or whether it falls among thorns or it falls on stony ground or it falls because the seed is the same. The seed of God's word is the same. Hasn't changed. So that's not the worry.

The worry is the ground into which the seed falls. It was the same seed that brought forth a hundred fold as the seed that fell by the wayside. What was wrong? The soil was wrong. And what's wrong with us?

The soil is wrong. That's what's wrong with us. Fallow ground. I went to a place called Six Mile Cross in Frenchland and I remember George Watson taking me up with two horses and he said I'll run a score down the field for you and you just try and keep to that score and then I'll leave you.

So he put a score down the field with a plow and he says take it. And I said what am I supposed to do? He says you're going to plow. And the best way you plow you plow. And he says I've just warned you of something.

When the horses come to the end of the furrow they'll want you to pull out of it. And he said you keep a firm rein on them because they will make S's in the field instead of a straight thing. And I proved that because a piece of ground I was plowing was in Frenchland up above the railway line, Mr. Greer will know it well, out the Carrickmore Road and you could see it from the bottom road and when the people looked up all they saw was S's doing a sort of code.

Break up, God needs to keep a tight rein on us. God needs to teach us the discipline of having the fallow ground broken up. And when I turned over that soil all I saw was creepy crawling things running for shelter.

Yes, worms and all sorts of centipedes with a hundred legs of them dashing away. When God turns out your heart you'll be amazed how rotten your heart is. You'll be amazed about how appalling it is. You'll be amazed about the creepy crawling things of hell and Satan that's in your heart.

There's nothing nice about a heart that's deceitful above all things. I'm desperately wicked, did you ever study that verse? It's the heart of man is deceitful above all things, above all things. It's the climax of evil, the heart of man.

I was reading in my lesson this morning coming down to this service in the book of Genesis about the imagination of man's heart as only evil continues, imagination of man's heart. The heart has to have itself broken up and the sunshine and the snow and the rain has to go through the process and then after it's plowed you have to break the clods.

And in those days when I plowed then you had to gather the stones. Not many farmers gather stones of land today but in the old days you gathered the stones and what a work that was. And then you got the harrow or the disc plough which had discs on it and these discs, steel discs went round and cut up the sods, cut them up until that ground was as good as any ground that was going to be made into a tennis court or a golf course.

It was ready for the seed, only then it was ready. There are some people who sow on fallow ground and they might as well sow by the wayside among thorns. In fact there's another reference in the Old Testament to fallow ground, it's the only reference there is, there's only two of the five of them as far as I know.

Of course don't ever trust a Cruden's concordance, for Mr. Cruden he wasn't too wise in the head and not only that but he missed out at least 40 references. The best concordance is by a man called Walker, Walker's Comprehensive Concordance, that's the best one and it has more than 40 ,000 more references than old Cruden has in his.

But I'm only saying that by the way. Chapter 4 of Jeremiah, break up your fallow ground and sow not among thorns. Jeremiah 4 and verse 3, sow not among thorns, that's what we've been doing, sowing among thorns, break up your fallow ground.

And then comes the sowing and George Watson said to me very wisely, I don't care who does the sowing but I care who does the breaking up and preparing the sowing and he was a very wise man for the preparation of the sowing and some people don't want to sow but they don't want to do any preparation and you can't do it and God is saying break up your fallow ground, now this is to do with our own heart but it's also to do with the heart of others, we have to work upon our people that their fallow ground might be broken up and you'll never scold a person into praying so quit scolding and you'll never hammer a person into doing things for the Lord.

The best way is for you to show an example and if you show an example a praying preacher will have a praying congregation, a paying preacher, a man that tithes his money he will have tithers in his congregation, a lover of souls in the minister will make his people love the souls of men, a missionary vision in the minister will make his people have a missionary vision, it will be reflective and you'll only lift your congregation as high spiritually as you are yourself, if you think you're going to produce a race of giants and you're only a dwarf, God help you, you'll soon be disillusioned.

I want to say today it is important that we apply ourselves to that, break up into the Old Testament and see men whose fallow ground was broken up, God did a hard work in their lives, God did a hard work in their souls, God did a hard work among their people and what benefit it was to the people.

We see it in the New Testament, we see it in church history, we see it in the great reformation times, in the days of great revival, what was it? It was a breaking up of the fallow ground, that's what it was.

There was no difference between the gospels in the darkest day of church history and in the brightest day of revival in church history, the seed was the same. It's to do with the ground, we've got a ground, we've got a soil problem, we've got to face up to that, break up.

Sowing Righteousness and Reaping Mercy

If you look thirdly, you'll find that we have the test of soil, sow to yourselves in righteousness and reap in mercy. This of a work of grace in our heart can be tested by two things, the manifestation of righteousness, reaping in mercy.

Now what is it to sow to ourselves? We understand sowing in the field, how do we sow to our self-righteousness? We sow to our self-righteousness by the applying of God's righteousness to the ground of our heart that we have broken, and we have broken the fallow ground and we sow to ourselves righteousness.

But the very seed that we're going to sow to others, we sow it in our soul hearts. And if that seed bears love for souls in your heart, it'll bear love for souls in your people's heart. If that seed causes you to say goodbye to the world and separate you and make you a non-conformist to all the things of the world, it will do the same among your people.

It is the same seed that works the same way. And Christians have something in common. Now what do they have in common? The results of the seed produces the same thing in all their lives. We're born again.

We have a common birth because the seed was sown. We are sanctified. We have a common sanctification because the seed is sown. We have an urge to pray because the seed has been sown. It's all now to do with the seed.

Sow to yourselves in righteousness. I wonder how many of us can say, when I come to the Bible, I take the Bible as the seed-sowing time for me. Are we appropriating the seed of God's Word so that that Word has a living power within us?

Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it'll fighteth alone, but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit. The story of our Savior, He was a corn of wheat that fell into the ground and died.

But it also has to do with the Word of God. Every characteristic of Christ is true to His Book because both the Word of God and the Incarnate Word are the same. And if you want to know what the Incarnate Word is like, read the Inspired Word.

There's no other place where you'll get a true picture of Christ than in His own most precious Word. Sow to your righteousness. And that is why I was studying his Bible a few years ago in Greenville. The Bible's for everyone.

The housewife's. My wife, I should have bought that for you, dear. The housewife's Bible. The busy man's Bible. The preacher's Bible. The Bible for children. The children's Bible. The teenage Bible. The businessman's Bible.

Ways that you could study the Bible. But none of these Bibles are being studied. We haven't a whole squad. To study the Bible is simple. It is to read it. To read it. That's the way you do it. It is reading that opens the Word of God.

And of course, it's not reading quickly. It's reading quietly, slowly, and receiving the Word. Receiving. Oh, that we might learn that. That we might learn what it is to have that righteousness sown in our heart and to have that mercy being weeped in our soul.

If you're weeping mercy in your own spiritual life, you'll long that others out there in the hillsides, out of Christ, will have that mercy. The same thing as you're enjoying. You'll want to share it with them.

And I long for a day when people will really and truly give themselves to the Word of God. And I'm very glad that in our church at the moment we have a group of young people. You know, children's meetings are tremendous things.

But we need to follow up the children that we lead to Christ. And we have recently started a little circle for those young children who in the Sunday school and in our children meeting come to Christ.

And you know, it's the best class we have in the church. Young people who love their Bible. Young out of the mouth of babes and sucklings. And the things these young people say about the Bible are staggering.

Absolutely staggering. They bamboozle the doctors of divinity that are in the church. Bamboozle them completely. Just tiny mites. But they've started to read the Bible. And a mother said to me the other day, you know, my little boy said, Mr. Paisley, he reads his Bible through every year.

Mommy, could I have a yearly Bible? She said, you can. So she bought him a yearly Bible. And she sent me word that every day he spends his time, goes up to his bedroom, sits down and reads the whole part of the Bible.

It's only a young child. Oh, if we can get that into the hearts of our children. We will be putting men and women out. The boys and girls of today are the men and women of tomorrow. And I believe that we should be evangelizing the men and women of tomorrow.