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Source: https://www.sermonindex.net/speakers/ea-johnston/reality-of-god-in-the-life/
In the book of Hosea, we find a picture of the people of God who have backed away from God. They have strayed. They have returned to their own ways and self-reliance and self-preservation. They owe a great disappointment to God, for their backsliding into sin is very grievous to Him.
And because of their rebellion and disobedience to God, God is in a quandary with them. We see this in verse 4 of chapter 6, where God says, O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?
God is asking, what shall I do? It's not that God does not know what to do. He is pondering what He is going to do and how He is going to do it, because the people are in a very precarious position because of sin.
We see their instability in the rest of verse 4. For your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew, it goeth away. This speaks of their broken promises to return to Him in a lasting way. Instead of an utter and complete surrender, what they give God is partial obedience from a divided heart.
All of their good intentions of returning to Him are only as a morning cloud that appears for a little while, and it's gone. Their vows of commitment to Him are but like dew on the morning grass that dissipates as soon as it arrives.
What shall I do unto thee? God laments. I wonder if this has happened to us. Have we promised God a thing in our walk with Him, and for a time, for a brief little time, while we are fine with Him? But then, like the Jews in Hosea's day, we turn away from God, and turn our backs to Him, and go back to our sins.
The title of my message day, friends, is The Reality of God in the Life, and it is here where all our trouble begins. The churches in America need revival. The people of God lie under a false perception as they have become a self-reliant people.
Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing. The churches in America lie under a fog of complacency and conformity, and is blinded to their own condition, that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.
The picture of Ephraim and Judah in their backslidden state is a sad one. Their difficulties lie in their false returns. There is no permanence in the return to God. There is no dependability in it, no real substance because they lack true heartfelt repentance, and they fail to submit to God in their service to Him.
It's all a sham and a fraud with broken vows and trampled promises that are like morning clouds and fleeting dew. But there's a reason why our young people today have left the churches and droves. The kids that grew up in church, as soon as they got out of high school and got out on their own, they don't want anything to do with church anymore.
It's all our fault. We caved into them and gave them the music they wanted. We gave them the kind of worship they wanted. We gave them movie nights and pizza nights. We treated them like spoiled kids, and we gave them what they wanted instead of giving them what they needed.
And the kids grew up and got some sense, and they looked around and saw the hypocrisy of their parents, that their parents acted one way at church on Sunday but behaved in quite another way during home and the week.
They grew up under a philosophy of do as I say rather than do as I do, and the teenagers saw right through it. But what put the nail in the coffin wasn't so much the church's failure to reach the kids with the gospel, it was the sad fact that the kids looked at their parents and saw no reality of God there in their lives.
And that young generation walked away from God. I wonder how hard it must have been to be a Jewish teenager in the days of Hosea and to see the fraud in the lives of their parents, that all their promises to God were broken time and time again, that the kids just lived with a bunch of hypocrites.
It's no wonder a generation came along that knew not God. And that's where we are today, friends. And God in heaven looks down at us, and he laments, What shall I do unto thee? What shall I do? So he sends floods and fires and storms of terrifying and damaging winds.
He does all he can by sending us his remedial judgments in a hope to get our attention and to get us to return to him. But we keep making broken promises. We keep going our own way. And when that doesn't work, he sends a great plague that kills nearly a million people around the world.
And where are we? We're hiding behind our cloth masks. God told the Jews by his prophet Hosea, O Israel, return unto the Lord thy God, for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity. Take with you words and turn to the Lord.
I believe it's high time for us to get serious with God because God gets serious with those who get serious with him. And we need to do it while some of us still have a chance. We can be cut off at any moment.
Our children deserve to see what it's like to have a godly parent who has the reality of God in their life. Or they will just go on in their course and one day drop on down to hell when they die.