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Don Filcek; Hosea 3 He Bought Her
Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series on the book of Hosea, a study in God's relentless love. Let's listen in.
Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. As Julia said, I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And good morning to you. Glad that we're able to be together. I'm really glad for the opportunity that we have every Sunday to gather together in the Lord's house.
Recast Church has been meeting for over 15 years here in the Matawan area. It's been awesome to see God work in our community. And it's been cool how God has worked in our history to remind us that the church is not.
A building.
Now, in English, we call a church a gathering of people who worship God. But also, we have a tendency to call that the building too. But it's not just a building. We started meeting in 2009 in a storefront up off of Red Arrow Highway by Kitty U. Up there, we moved to the school cafeteria, definitely not a church building.
And met several years there while we were building this building and then here we are. But I just say all of that to remind you that a church is a gathering of people. Christ didn't die for this building.
He died for us, amen? It's not brick and mortar. I encourage all of us to lean into that definition. And I think the more that you lean into that definition of church being the gathering of God's people and being the people themselves, the more that we actually recognize why we need to be growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service together.
These things are meant to be done in community. We are made for relationships. The thing that Jesus left here on this planet was his church. We are saved in a community for a community for the purpose of worshiping him in community.
And the title of this message this morning is He Bought Her. He bought her. Now, the direct context is going to be that in the book of Hosea, he is Hosea, her is his wife, Gomer. But the metaphor is more intentional than that because the call for Hosea to love his promiscuous unfaithful wife and to pursue her and pay off her debts and to buy her back are intentionally and explicitly a metaphor for God and his people.
He, God, bought her, the church. And at the risk of stealing my own thunder, it's good for us to go there right away because we're going to see in our text that Hosea had to pay 15 shekels of silver and a homer and a lethic of barley to buy back his wife.
Kind of strange, but Jesus will, of course, pay a much higher price to buy back his filthy promiscuous wife. The metaphor here in Hosea is potent because it uses both shock over her extreme promiscuity while also shocking us with his extremely relentless love.
So we're going to open our Bibles here in a minute. You can open your Bibles, your scripture journals, or your devices to Hosea chapter 3. I've put kind of a PG -13, this one was between G and PG -13, I mean, between G and PG in terms of its word usage.
But as I read this, you know, those of you with young kids, those double doors are available back there and there's a room back there with some people if you want to take them out there. I'll give you just a second as I get ready to read this.
It's a short passage, super short, just five verses. But just give that as an option for you. But Hosea chapter 3, recast this as God's holy word, this is what he desires to communicate.
To us.
It is meant to shock us, God is not above shocking us, and so the entire book of Hosea does so to some degree. Hosea chapter 3, starting in verse 1. 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 a homer 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 king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods.
Afterward, 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. Let's pray. Father, I thank You for the opportunity that we have to hear from Your Word.
I thank You that You are a God who speaks to us. You have spoken through Your Word and You have declared what is true of You. You have revealed Yourself and we praise You and we thank You for being a communicative God who tells us about ourselves, tells us about You.
Father, I pray that You would speak to our hearts of Your love, Your care, Your concern for Your people. You have pursued us relentlessly. You have redeemed us with a high cost and You are reforming us more and more into the image of Your Son.
We thank You. We thank You for the work that You have done and that as we get an opportunity to peer into this old covenant and the ending of an old covenant and the beginning of a new covenant and we thank You for the way that You have made a covenant with us in the blood of Your Son, making the sacrifice that our hearts needed, that we needed for the destiny of our souls, a broken rift in our relationship with You, healed and mended through the payment paid on our behalf by Jesus Christ, our Lord and King and Savior.
We thank You for the love that that expresses to our hearts that then is reforming us and changing us more and more into His image and we thank You for the Gospel. Father, I pray that You would receive these songs that we sing now as praise and worship to You, that we would shed the concerns and the worries of this past week.
I know that some of those concerns are good things. There's good stuff that's happened. There's hard things. There's some that are going through devastating roads right now and Father, I pray that You would allow those things to fade into the background as we have an opportunity to lift You high and to recognize that it's the invisible things that we can't see that matter the most and the things of this life that crowd us out and crowd in, Father, I pray that You would let those things fade and let the glorious reality that we have an eternity together with You, promised by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.
Alright, thanks a lot to the band for leading us. I encourage you to get comfortable and keep your Bibles open to Hosea chapter 3. As we march through this message, you'll see, I mean, again, just reiterate that the message is basically PG, parental guidance, just in some of the things that I'll have to say in light of the text, but you'll see as we go through it.
God will only ever be redeeming and saving an unworthy, disinterested, self-centered, adulterous, and idolatrous people. That's the only people He has to save, that's the only people He has to work with.
The project of redemption in the book of Hosea is being furthered here in chapter 3, and it highlights, really chapter 3 highlights what it means for God to continue the project of redemption after He has proven our faithlessness.
That's what the law is all about, proving our faithlessness. And we will always be tempted in a sinful state, in the way that we live, we've never had a pure day in our life, and so in our sinful state, we will always think and be tempted to think we are good enough, we are strong enough, we are wise enough, or at best we can be, right?
We will think that we can be those things. The foray into an old covenant law shows us that a false assessment of ourselves is real and true for everyone. In chapter 3, He has to go back and buy His people from sinful, idolatrous ways.
In these first three chapters of Hosea, the prophet was commanded to marry a promiscuous woman, and boy, oh boy, did he complete the assignment. He found one. Her promiscuity is all over the place. Just to clarify, because there's a lot of confusion over what she does and doesn't do here, and I don't want to get into the nuances of it, but there are hints of prostitution, there are hints of cult pagan temple practices that she engages in, as well as at least in our text, one dalliance with a friend, in quotes.
All of this paints a picture of opportunistic promiscuity. She is always down for whatever. And this does a great job painting an image of the human condition regarding sin. The tame way we think about this, if we're honest, we tend to tone things down a bit,.
Right?
You might even have, at times, been offended by some things that I've said during this series, or maybe offended by some things that I say this morning. We have a tendency to tone down our sin and kind of talk about it and kid-glove it in simple terms and in demure ways, but we sing the song prone to wander, these lyrics from a song, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.
How many of you know that line from a song? Okay? But Hosea, here, exposes our hearts for our tendency to whore our way through life, selling our birthright for a little Debbie snack cake. That's what's real.
I don't know for you, is it Swiss cake rolls, is it oatmeal cream pies, is it star crunches, you know? I mean, what is it for you? Is it the zebra cakes, right? It's raising cakes for them in the text, you'll see here in a second, but what is it for you?
We are more than, here's the point, church, and what Hosea is trying to push over on us and really God is trying to express to us in pulling, not pulling any punches, we are more than just a little prone to wander.
That's what's true of you and me. Prone to wander, that's a cute way of stating we are promiscuous, adulterous, idolatrous, prostituting whores. Shocked? That's what the text is telling us. This is what God says of his people who were doing their best to keep his laws.
They have his laws. They have it in writing. They know what they're supposed to be doing. They have the Ten Commandments. They have a relationship and a covenant with God whereby he says, if you follow my laws and be my people, I will be your God and I will bless you.
Now certainly in the spirit and through Christ, we have hope for a better present and a better.
Future, right?
Amen? But it is only due to his relentless love, his redeeming love, and his reforming love that we have hope. And so here's our outline this morning. I just gave it to you. God's relentless love, verse one.
God's redeeming love, verses two and three. God's reforming love, verses four and five. Again, a short text, a little bit of a shorter message this morning, but potent in terms of understanding what God is trying to communicate to a people who are promiscuous like us.
He starts in verse one with his relentless love. The word of the Lord came to Hosea again, we see, and we are meant to assume some passage of time has happened. Since chapter two, there's been a separation between Hosea and Gomer.
Chapter one and two contain divorce and separation type language, and she is out now on her own living a life of promiscuity. The metaphor is mixed by the language employed in this verse to actually understand what.
She's doing.
She is loved by another man. That word, another man, is actually a word that's often translated in the Hebrew language as friend. She's living with a friend. And I mean, she's with a friend. And this is less like prostitution and more like just plain old run-of-the-mill adultery.
She's married to Hosea, but she is living with another man. And Hosea is commanded to go again and love this unfaithful adulteress. Now the reason he is to go love her again and win her back is given for us in verse one.
You can see it there, 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. Even as the Lord loves the children of Israel.
There's a metaphor at play here. Hosea is being called upon to act out the part of God in his relentless love toward you and me, toward his people, toward Israel. This is a tough calling that Hosea is given.
But I just, before we get too empathetic or sympathetic or whatever you feel toward Hosea, I just want to make sure that you don't allow the focus to go over to Hosea because the text doesn't. This is a tough calling for him, of course, but the text doesn't go over to how he feels about this.
It turns instead by the end of verse one to God and his, here's the spotlight, God's relentless love toward his wayward people. How many of you are glad for that? Just glad for that? Note the way that God highlights the sinfulness of his people in the midst of displaying his love for them.
He says, this is the kind of people I love. This is the kind of people that I have to love. They turn to other gods and they love cakes of raisins. The way the word love is used in verse one, it's used four times, by the way, the Hebrew word for love is four times there, used in different ways to help guide us in the intended flow of thought of the author and really God.
It says, Hosea is called to love Gomer. That's the first use of love. Gomer is being loved, quote-unquote, by another man. God loves his children. They love cake. They love cake. Like, yeah, absolutely.
Think like little Debbie or big Debra, however you conceive of it, right? You got to get the big Debra up there, so however that works. And while it can come across as humorous, church, it is dangerously serious.
It is dangerously serious. And why is it dangerous? I throw that up there as a joke, just to highlight for just a second. Church, we love stupid things, don't we? We love dumb things. The image of God's people choosing raisin cakes over him, like how many of you, it's shocking.
It's scandalous.
It's more scandalous than the use of the word whore in the text. God's people loving raisin cakes more than him, what? Our passions and desires run in all kinds of wayward directions, don't they? The very calling of Hosea to go back to love Gomer again is a signpost of God's relentless love toward a people who love stupid things.
He will go get her from the hotel, and he will go again, and he will go again, and he will go again, not because she's worthy, not because she deserves it, and not even particularly because she wants his restoration, but because of his steadfast, faithful, relentless love.
Our salvation is a project from God, not a project on our part to get to God, amen? So the command is clear to Hosea, go again in love, so we might expect obedience to read in verse 2, so he went and loved.
But there's something really cool in this passage that is a lesson for all of us. The command to go love is never fulfilled by the verb love. I command you to go love, and so you go love?
That doesn't fulfill it.
That's not how that works. The command to love can only ever be fulfilled by an action verb. And so we see the action of God in the second movement of the text, not just God's relentless love, God's redeeming love, verses 2 and 3.
Because God says to Hosea, go love her, so what does he do? He buys her. That's the verb. It doesn't say he went and, so he obeyed God and he went and loved her, no, he went and bought her. To make this woman his own is going to take payment.
To make God's people his own is going to take payment. Now we might immediately become uncomfortable with verse 2, so he bought her. He bought her. So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and a homer and a lethic of barley.
And I mean, I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of people being for sale. Like, just the idea that he could go buy her is troubling to some degree and ought to be troubling to everybody in the room, right?
So I bought her.
What?
People ought never to be for sale, but we know that they are. Oh, it might offend our sensibilities, but they are, and often by choice, be it online or on a street corner or in the more insidious and terrifying reality of sex trafficking in our day and age.
And yet there, here, in this ancient cultural context, Gomer has slid into some serious indebtedness that must be overcome for him to get his wife back. Now we're not given any details. We don't know who she owed money to.
We don't know how she got into the circumstance, but it's pretty clear from the text and the words that are used that she owes money, and how she came to owe the money, or even if she is now, speculation that she's now engaged in a life of prostitution to cover her debts.
That's not stated in the text, but there's obviously cause for speculation about her lifestyle and who the debt is owed to. But the price paid is intriguing, and a lot of scholars make much of this. It happens to be approximately equal to other documents that reflect the redemption price of a slave.
It's quite likely that she has sold herself into slavery to make ends meet. He is buying her freedom, would be the indication. But the fact that she is loved by a friend, in verse 1, highlights that this woman is all over the board when it comes to sexual unfaithfulness.
She is extreme in her adultery. But rather than get too far into the weeds of the cultural moment of Hosea's day and get too far down into the road of trying to speculate about Gomer and where she's at in life, let's lean into the metaphor that God is attempting to land on us here this morning.
At the center of the gospel is the reality that we can be bought, and God has done so through the precious blood of His Son. We are all slaves, every single one of us, like it or not. We are born into slavery.
We are owned by our sinful nature. We are owned by the world's systems of sinfulness, and we are owned by the evil one who has filled us with lies, right? The point in Hosea is that it cost Hosea to get her back.
Redemption has always cost something. That's what the word redemption means, by the way. The word redemption means to buy back, and He buys her back from her sinfulness. And His purchase of her is meant to bring her into His love and protection.
Like I said, redemption means buying back, and it is a major theme and a massive plot of the entire Bible. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you know, if you read from Genesis to Revelation, it has a story.
It is a story. Genesis to Revelation, like it tells a story of creation, a good creation, a place created with goodness and wholeness, and it all being declared very good, and then we broke it. That's the fall.
Creation.
Fall.
Redemption.
Consummation. Why do so many of our stories begin with something good that's broken, that then in the end.
Is restored?
Because that's the true story. That's the true story, and it tells the story. And redemption begins, in the Bible it begins, it's predicted before Genesis 12, but it starts in Genesis 12 with the calling of Abram.
That's the first movement of God in the steps of redemption, of buying us back, is to single out a guy, make some promises to him, carve out a nation, and begin the process of bringing forth a Messiah.
By the way, the theme of redemption concludes with the ascension of Jesus to the right hand of the Father, and everything after that is moving rapidly in toward consummation, that last movement of God fixing it all in the end and making it better than it was in the beginning.
It's not merely a restoration of the way things were, it's an improvement of the way that things were. But note that in this redemption comes a standard. In verse 3, he says in essence, I paid your debts, I've set you free with my purchase, now stay with me and be my wife.
Stop playing the whore. Stop pursuing other lovers and other paramours. Settle into my family. You shall not go over into the arms of any other man, he says. And as you are faithfully mine, says God, so will I faithfully be yours.
Now I need to point out what is completely absent from this passage, and where our minds have a tendency to go, and novels, and all kinds of writings about Hosea have a tendency to go there, and that's how did Gomer feel about it, how did Hosea feel about it?
How did Gomer feel about this? What we do know, what we do know, we don't know whether she wanted to be out away from Hosea. It doesn't tell us anything about her opinion in the matter. It doesn't say, man, I like this other guy better than you, why are you coming and pursuing me all the time?
Why do you keep coming around? Didn't we already get a divorce? Didn't we already separate? Isn't this already over? What we do know is this, Hosea had to issue commands in light of his redemption of her.
He has to say to her, I bought you, so cut it out. I bought you, so cut it out. And I wonder if you can hear the voice of God to you in this at all, I have redeemed you, so cut it out. Stop whoring after entertainment.
Stop it with the lust and greed. Stop it with the gossip and slander and malice and unforgiveness. I bought you, says the Almighty, you are mine, now live like it. And of course, God purchased us, as I already said, with more than 15 shekels of silver and some barley.
I love the way that the Apostle Peter tells us in such beautiful terms in 1 Peter 1, 18 through 19. He says this, he tells us what we were bought with. You were ransomed from the feudal ways inherited from your forefathers.
Not with perishable things, such as silver or gold or barley, my addition, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. The new covenant comes with better promises, the author of Hebrews tells us, but it also comes with a much, much, much more impressive and awesome redemption price, amen?
Not sheep, not goats, not oxen, not barley, not doves, not wine, not silver, not gold, but the precious blood of Jesus Christ, our Lord. And so let me ask you, church, let me ask you as an individual right now, yes, I'm talking.
To you.
If you feel like I'm talking to you, then I'm talking to you.
Are you His? Are you His?
If you trust in His sacrifice for you, if you've asked Him to apply that purchase price of His blood to your account to forgive you of your sins, and you take Him as your Lord and King, He will cancel your debt and bring you back into His family.
But those He redeems, He also calls into a life of repentance and reformation. And that leads us, you see, His redemption of us, it leads to the last point, His redemption of us, His purchase of us through His redeeming love leads to the last description of His love for His people in verses 4 and 5.
Not only is it relentless, not only is His love relentless, not only is His love redeeming, but it is also reforming. Verses 4 and 5, God's reforming love. God's redeeming love never sits idle.
It never ends there.
It never ends with Him paying the price for an individual and them just kind of sitting in that. When His redemption is applied, it always calls the redeemed into reformation, into.
Change.
While we lack any information about Gomer's response to this whole relentless redeeming love, I can tell you clearly what it's meant to produce within us, His love for us. When we fully grasp His relentless love with which He's pursued us, when we really understand just how costly the redemption price was that He paid for us, our hearts come into the knowledge of what true love really is.
Prior to knowing the love of Christ, it's hard to see the difference between loving tacos, loving little Debbie snack cakes, loving a sunset, loving a husband and wife, or wife or loving God, right? We have all kinds of loves, don't we?
What's the difference? But in Christ, the word love is filled up to overflowing with steadfast faithfulness, with sacrifice, with gracious forgiveness. Do you see those things at His cross for you? Do you see those things in reality being given to you?
His steadfast faithfulness is more than just an example, but an example. More than just a call for us to sacrifice because it's a legitimate, real sacrifice that He made for us, but it is a call and a sacrifice, isn't it?
More than just go now and forgive like I did because it's a legitimate forgiveness. Your debt wiped clean because of what He did, amen? But also, therefore, forgive as He has forgiven you. The Reformation power of His purchase of us is a lifelong project called sanctification, and He begins it in us when we trust Him by faith.
In verses 4 and 5, give a glimpse of the Reformation of His people. Just as Gomer was to dwell for many days without giving in to her lust for her paramours, so too will God's people spend many days without the things that entice them into pagan idolatry.
And this is talking about Israel, like in Hosea's day. Their kings and princes led them astray. They were tempted by pagan rituals. They were tempted by superstitions and divinations and the use of the word pillar and all these high places that they would go to get their fortunes told or the ephod that would tell them the future and all of these illicit things that they were doing that were against God but in the end were being misused rather.
Some of these things are good things, like sacrifice is a good thing, but they weren't performing them correctly and things like that. But in the immediate context, this is fulfilled, this prediction that they're going to spend some time away from this is fulfilled through exile.
The Assyrians are going to come in and conquer the north, and then the Babylonians are going to come in and attack Jerusalem and take Jerusalem into exile. The Jews will spend a long season apart from their religious autonomy.
And now we contend that the season extends all the way up to the present. Now they had a little bit of a blip back in the land after the resettling, but the Jews right now, as we speak, cannot practice their religion as expressed in the Old Testament because presently there's a mosque on the location of the temple.
They can't rebuild the temple. They are still in a season of spiritual wandering, no sacrifices, no Davidic king. Without spiritual guidance, at least not receiving their Davidic king, he has come. But Hosea now peers far into the future at the end here in verses 4 and 5, and really verse 5, he peers far into the future from the ancient times that he's writing and he sees that in the latter days, you can see that as the last phrase of this text, in the latter days the children of Israel will return and seek the Lord their God, and they will return and seek for their Davidic king, the Messiah, the one promised all over the place in the Old Testament, the one revealed in the New Testament as Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
Of God.
And note the precision of this passage as it lines up like the lost last puzzle piece. Any of you ever put a puzzle together and you can't find the last piece? It's always in my pocket. My family, I always grab one just to get to put the last piece in because that's the way.
I roll.
Everything's competition, isn't it? But that last puzzle piece, it's awesome how Hosea fits in with Revelation there so tightly.
It's amazing.
Written centuries apart, centuries and centuries apart, and they will come in fear to the Lord and to His goodness in the latter days, says Hosea. Now why would they come in fear to the Lord? I believe this will all be filled by a quite literal return of many Jews to their Messiah in latter days as indicated also in the book of Revelation, and the coming in fear also lines up well with the cataclysmic context in which the Jews will come back in mass to their Messiah.
Come in fear why? They will see it. And the prophet Jeremiah also predicted the same return of the Jews to her king. In Jeremiah 30 verse 9, you don't need to turn there, it's going to be up on the screen, but they shall serve the Lord their God and David their king whom I will raise up for them.
Whom I will raise up for them. You talk about prophecies that are just like a laser focused on Jesus, but they shall serve the Lord their God and David their king whom I will raise up for them. But before we get away from the plot of Hosea and too far into the really intriguing parts of end times prophecy, you can ask me about that if you want later, but let me draw us back to the point here of God's reforming love.
His relentless love and His redeeming love give way to His reforming love. His love causes people to forsake those things that tempt and allure us all away from Him. His love causes people to keep returning to Him and to keep seeking Him.
His love calls us to return to and seek out Jesus Christ, the son of David who is promised the throne of God eternally. And His love calls us to come trembling, trembling church, to His goodness. Come trembling to His goodness.
I can only describe the paradox of trembling fear in the presence of His goodness as the type of trembling one might feel in the presence of a judge, an earthly judge, who has the right to sentence you to death, but instead sets you free.
Can you imagine trembling before that judge? Can you imagine the trembling in the presence of goodness, of grace, of mercy, of kindness, like that kind of trembling? Like I know what you could have done, I know what you could have done, and I'm in awe and eternally grateful for what you did, paying the price for me.
How ought we to live in light of God's relentless, redeeming, and reforming love, church? First, the first call of application this morning is to be honest and therefore humble, and I put these really tight together.
That's why I didn't make them two different points, be honest, be humble. No, if you're honest, you'll be humble. That's what I believe we're called to. Verse 1 doesn't paint a pretty picture of you and me or Israel.
Well, you might be tempted to say that His Old Testament people, you know, this is about Old Testament people. I'm so much better. I believe that Hosea calls us all to a bit of humility here. He's identifying for what is true of all of us, whether we'll admit it or not, is another matter altogether.
But I almost entitled this series, Hoaring Our Way Through the Book of Hosea, and I did just say it out loud, but I didn't title that because my focus groups were saying that's.
Way off message.
So my focus groups being my wife, who said, no, don't name it that, and even the men's group was like not too hot on it. But I almost named it that, and I got all of my notes here. And I almost named it that because the book exists to indict us.
It exists to indict us while shining a spotlight on God's steadfast love for His people. You see, I think that I fear, and I mean, part of kind of like wanting to name it that is to just identify what's true of us.
Where do you find yourself in the text? Because everybody identifies themselves as David, the giant slayer, but who identifies themselves as Goliath, the one in opposition to God?
Nobody.
I have never heard a single soul say, I'm more like Goliath in the story. I'm more like the one that ought to be slain. I'm more like the one who deserves the rock between the eyes. Have you ever heard anybody say that?
No, everybody's David. Everybody's David, right? Like you want to be the hero. Are you Hosea in this text?
No.
Sorry to break it to you. Not a single one of you. Some of you are like, you don't know me, I'm a pretty good guy, I'm a pretty good lady. I do know what scripture says is true of you. You are not Hosea in this text, you are not the hero.
You are the one who needed to be rescued. You are the one who needed to be bought back from your sinful lifestyle.
That's you.
I know that to be true of you. And let me suggest that, and you need to know it to be true of you. That's where the being honest comes in so that then humility settles on you. You see, I would suggest to you that the gospel comes with this humility that is a major key to living well in this world.
If you grasp this and you know that you were bought, that what you deserved was eternal condemnation and you were bought off the, you know, just basically out in the arms of another lover and God came and got you back.
And you see, humility serves all different kinds of capacities. It serves unity, the unity of the church. You are not always right, and neither am I. Humility serves the love of a family.
We're able to say we're sorry and ask for forgiveness.
Humility serves us in all of human interactions because the arrogant jerks are the worst kind of jerks, right? At best, be a humble jerk. Better to not be a jerk at all.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Steve.
That was good for a laugh. Be honest. Be honest and therefore humble. If you are honest, I believe that's a big step towards being humble because you know yourself. You know the things you don't, you wouldn't want on the screen of your life, right?
Do you know those things? Anything pop into mind when you think about like us watching your entire life and especially the dark bits? Anybody kind of go like, oh, that kind of honest. Yes, that kind of honest.
So how about humility? Did you just feel that feeling of like dread, that feeling of like, oh, I'm not that great. That's what I'm talking about. Honest humility, that's the crud that he died for. That's the crud that he rescued you from.
That's the crud that the gospel brings a humble perspective to. And then the second thing is rejoice in redemption. Here in a moment, we get to remember together the way that he purchased us. He paid the debt we owed and bought us back from our life of sin.
While we were slaves to our lusts and our sins, he sent his son to buy us back. So how can we not rejoice? When you come to those tables, don't come with a morose and sad demeanor. Come to the tables with gladness and with rejoicing.
How much did he love you? He loved you this much and then he was nailed there to die for you. And lastly, keep returning, keep returning to him and keep reforming. There are things we ought to do without, right church?
There are things we ought to do without. For the people of Israel, there were some things they needed to spend many days away.
From.
They needed a long season without religious autonomy, without self-rule, without pagan divination. But what do you need to get rid of in order to return and seek the Lord? Maybe it's a literal season of canceling streaming services.
Maybe you need to look into buying a brick that's a device that helps shut down your phone for extended periods of time. Maybe there are more obvious things you need to root out in your life and they're just very clear, things like drunkenness or pornography or gossip or gluttony.
God's love is relentless. God's love is redeeming. And church, God's love is reforming. Let's come to the tables rejoicing in his comprehensive love expressed in the book of Hosea and let's go out from here leaning on him for wisdom as he shows us what he desires to reform in us.
I mean, in this sense, I think we ought to just consider taking the trash out. We ought to consider taking the trash out. What needs to be taken out of your life? What needs to be removed? And let's trust in him by his spirit to empower us to make the changes that he desires within us.
Do you know his relentless love? Do you know his redeeming love? Are you experiencing his reforming love? Let me encourage all of us to walk with joy into that love this week.
Let's pray.
Father, I thank you for your love. It's a word that's overused, I think, and to some degree it just becomes a mashup of a variety of different emotions and different things. Yeah, I love Little Debbie Snack Cakes and love Taco Tuesday and we say we love you.
And those things cannot hardly even exist together. It's just hard to imagine using those same words. Your love for us is relentless. It's redeeming. It's reforming. Father, I pray that you would meet us at those places where some of us need to know that we're pursued by you.
Some of us need to know that you're not giving up on us. Some of us need to mine down deeper into the price that you paid for us. And that's a good method of humility, right? Father, just to show us, anybody here who has pride in their hearts to root that out with the payment price.
Jesus didn't come here for those guys over there. He came here to die for me and my sins and my brokenness and my darkness. So, Father, I pray that this message would breed humility in all of our hearts, but it would also breed within us a resolve to reform, that there would be ongoing changes, that you would be working, that metaphorically we would take the trash out.
That this would be a message where we would recognize that there are things in our lives that may or may not even be sin, that there are things that are not sin, that are gray areas that we still ought to do without.
That our worship of you and our love for others and our engagement in community would be better if we canceled some things. So, Father, I pray that you would just guide and direct us into that process and empower us and demonstrate your power in us to change.
We ask this in Jesus' name.
Amen.