Hosea 8 Knowing the Lord

ReCAST Church of Mattawan

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You're listening 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.

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Let's listen in. Good morning and welcome to Recast Church.

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I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And it's a joy to gather together this morning, even though it feels like it's eight o 'clock and not nine o 'clock to most of us, and we'll see who shows up at ten.

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So that's going to be fun. But God in his grace is bringing us together and continuing to bring us together as a community that is growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service.

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And just to remind you, what do we mean by growing in faith? We mean that we grow in faith by hearing from the

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Lord through his word and believing that the scriptures are testifying what's true about him.

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We know him because he has seen fit to reveal himself to us in writing through many prophets and apostles,

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Old and New Testament. He has revealed himself, told us about himself, shown us how he rolls in the work that he does in human history.

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Last week, we heard a message of caution about empty religion. And this week, it's going to be kind of a related message focusing more specifically on a call to all of us to know the

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Lord. God has made clear that he desires his people to love him, and he desires his people to pursue him in truth.

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And the knowledge of God, just to clarify, is not a static one -and -done kind of thing like,

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I met him, I know him. I cannot say I know someone just because I shook their hand and we were introduced at one time, right?

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Like, do you say, I know them because I shook their hand and know their name, right? Like, do you say,

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I know them, or do you say, I met them once? The kind of relational knowledge we are called to is a life of interpersonal relationship with the

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Almighty God, reading his Word to know him, belief and trust in him, conversations with him through prayer, conversations with him through hearing him speak to us in his

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Word, walking in his ways through hours and days and years. As we saw last week in Hosea 6, verse 3,

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God's people are called to know the Lord. And it says, know the Lord and press on to know the

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Lord. It's a lifelong endeavor that will give way eventually to, praise God, an eternal endeavor.

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For the infinite God, there will always be more to know of him, more to discover, more to cherish about him.

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And that's why our eternal state is eternal because there will always be more to know.

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There will always…we will not exhaust the knowledge of the infinite. So our text is similar to last week, and we're in the

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Old Testament prophet of Hosea here so it is negative. This is an Old Testament prophetic indictment of God's people all throughout

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Hosea. They are not knowing the Lord. They are not in a state of ongoing relationship with him.

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They are forgetting him and neglecting relationship with him while they pursue the knowledge of themselves, the knowledge of foreign affairs, and even the knowledge of pagan gods and goddesses.

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The text will be diagnostic to their problems, but also I think we'll see it diagnostic to our own as well.

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But we're going to be flipping it a little bit today in our message and looking at when we come to the applications to see what is missing from Israel that is causing this judgment, and I will be flipping the caution that we see in the text into a more proactive encouragement for all of us to continue to press on to know the

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Lord. Last week we saw the definition of empty religion, and this week there is more of the same.

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Religion that is, I'm going through the motions, doing the activities, doing the things without really a heart love for God.

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And this week there's more of that, but my hope and prayer over this message this morning is that we walk away from here more motivated to know the

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Lord. Even as we see the people of Israel playing, pretend, and acting like they know him.

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Even as their sin is held up as the cause of the barrier between them and their

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God, and even as they are strangers to his ways and constantly in a relationship of forgetting him.

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I'm hopeful, church, for better for us, and I hope this message might be used to call us all up into a more intentional pursuit of the knowledge of our

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Lord. So let's open our Bibles or your scripture journals or your devices to Hosea chapter 8. Recast, this is

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God's holy word. This is what he desires us to take in. So Hosea 8, let's honor the word by giving it our attention as I read.

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Try to prevent your mind from wandering and look at the connections and look at the points and look at the words and see what

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God is saying in this. Hosea chapter 8. Set the trumpet to your lips.

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One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord because they have transgressed my covenant and rebelled against my law.

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To me they cry, my God, we, Israel, know you. Israel has spurned the good.

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The enemy shall pursue him. They made kings, but not through me. They set up princes, but I knew it not.

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With their silver and gold, they made idols for their own destruction. I have spurned your calf,

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O Samaria. My anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of innocence? For it is from Israel.

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A craftsman made it. It is not God. The calf of Samaria shall be broken to pieces.

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For they sow the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads.

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It shall yield no flower. If it were to yield, strangers would devour it. Israel has swallowed up.

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Already they are among the nations as a useless vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild donkey wandering alone.

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Ephraim has hired lovers. Though they hire allies among the nations, I will soon gather them up, and the kings and princes shall soon writhe because of the tribute.

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Because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning, they have become to him altars for sinning. Were I to write for him my laws, by the 10 ,000s they would be regarded as a strange thing.

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As for my sacrificial offerings, they sacrifice meat and eat it, but the Lord does not accept them.

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Now he will remember their iniquity and punish their sins. They shall return to Egypt, for Israel has forgotten his maker and built palaces, and Judah has multiplied fortified cities.

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So I will send fire upon his cities, and it shall devour her strongholds."

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Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in praise this morning. Father, we thank you for your word that reveals who you are.

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We love the comforting bits. We love the parts that are about your grace. The eternal promise of preparing a place for us, and our sins washed away, and you taking those sins and casting them as far as the east is from the west, and into the sea of forgetfulness, and yet we recognize a call to ongoing relationship with you.

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We who are broken, we who are full of sin, we who are full of ourselves, are full of entertainment, are full of all kinds of things that would wage war against our knowing you, and just our routine forgetfulness,

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Father. I pray that you would meet us here in this place with an extra measure of your grace, and an extra measure of your mercy, that we who once were strangers to you have now had the barrier of sin removed by Jesus Christ at the cross, and are now set free to pursue the genuine, true knowledge of you in grace.

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Father, we thank you for Christ, who is himself eternal life. Not that he gives us eternal life, but he is.

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The knowledge of you, and the knowledge of your son, that is eternal life, and we thank you that we can come into the knowledge of you, into relationship with you, not just having met you once in our youth around a campfire, at camp, or summer camp, or VBS, but an ongoing relationship with you, on into adulthood, on into maturity.

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Father, I thank you that you continue to relate to your people, that you continue to walk with us day by day, and I pray that you would help us to be mindful of your presence with us even now, as we come before your throne in worship, that we would be thinking about you, not ourselves, not our week, not the things that we have yet to do, not how tired we are, but Father, that you would press on our hearts your glory, your majesty, and your amazing, amazing, amazing, unfathomable grace.

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And I ask all of this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, yeah, go ahead and get seated, and then if you want to reopen your

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Bibles to Hosea chapter 8, or your devices, or however you access God's word, so that you can see, and track, and follow along with the message this morning.

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Start off with a statement that I think is true, there is something latent in the human heart that draws us all to worship, everyone a worshiper.

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We're designed for it, and we were created in a perfect state of relationship toward the

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Almighty, when we think about where we come from, we were in a perfect state of worship at one point. The categories in the garden were well -defined,

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He, the Creator, Adam and Eve, the created, and He would come down and walk with them in the cool of the day,

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Genesis tells us. Whatever that walking looked like, and how many of you would just love to see what that meant?

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Like, I don't even know what that means, but He came down and He walked with them in the cool of the day. Whatever that looked like, it's clearly meant to evoke within us an image of God in ongoing relationship with His image bearers, continuing to relate to us, continuing to lean in, continuing in relationship to walk with them, not just create them and then walk away, but create them and walk with them.

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And then rebellion, then sin, the thought planted in the garden was a mixing of categorical reality.

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The serpent convinced Eve and Adam that they could be like God. The enticement was to know better than Him.

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The enticement was to call into question His authority and His validity. Does He really know what's best for you?

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Is He truly worthy of your adoration? Is He worthy of your obedience?

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These, the very heart of the questions that the serpent asked Eve. And since that day, it's been a challenge to know the

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Lord, right? It's a challenge to know Him. It's a challenge to walk with Him in relationship.

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It has been an epic struggle for humanity to walk with the Lord after that decision to reject

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Him. And in our moral corruption, we continue to seek other things to worship, worshiping the created rather than the creator.

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Here in Hosea chapter 8, we're going to see three movements focused on God's people in relationship to knowing

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Him. The text expresses in the negative what His old covenant people are doing that is resulting in their judgment and rejection by their

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God. My goal in this message is to encourage us all to do the opposite, to encourage us to do the opposite.

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We're going to see what they're doing. We're going to see what's between them and God. And so these are the three things that are kind of highlights of the broken relationship between God's old covenant people and Him.

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The first is playing pretend, verses 1 through 6. The second is the barrier of sin, verses 7 through 11.

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And the third is being strangers to God, verses 12 through 14. And these are all, again, things that they are leaning into and things that I'm going to encourage us to lean away from this morning.

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That's going to be really, really vital. In verses 1 through 1 and 2, we see the central point of the opening six verses.

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God's people are playing pretend, verses 1 through 6. We are more than halfway through the book of Hosea as of chapter 8, and by now it ought to be obvious that judgment will be coming for Israel in the form of invasion.

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That's been said multiple times, and it's even said to some degree, at least hinted at in this text.

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But that invasion is not random, and that's part of the reason for the book of Hosea to begin with is to identify that, hey, bad things are coming for you, but those bad things are not random.

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God is sending Hosea to be sure that the people do not have room, any room at all, to miss the theological lessons of the conquest that's coming for them, that they don't miss, that there's a theological reality undergirding the invasion that is coming.

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When the conquest comes for them, they will be able to look back, and that remnant that survives the invasion will be able to look back at the accuracy of the prophet

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Hosea and say, he was sent by God, and he was sent to call us all back into relationship with him.

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Now, a warning of impending battle begins our text. Sound the trumpet. The vulture is circling over the house of God, awaiting what?

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What's a vulture circling over? Carrion? Slaughter?

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And the reason the battle is coming is expressed clearly at the end of verse 1. God's family,

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God's chosen people, the people called out by His name have broken the covenant with Him.

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They have rebelled against His ways and His laws. Now, once again, we start off with the theme of the entire book of Hosea.

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God has entered into a covenant relationship with Israel. Israel has entered into a covenant relationship with their

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God. And this is likened to a marriage covenant throughout the book of Hosea, particularly those first three chapters.

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But His people, God's people are unfaithful. They're having affairs. They go out and they sleep around.

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And they're looking for other lovers. All the while, they are saying something kind of crazy in verse 2 of chapter 8.

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You see it there. "'To me,' says God, "'To me,' they cry, "'My God, we, Israel, we know you.'"

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Now I'm calling this playing pretend. They have an active imagination.

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They are self -deceived into thinking that they know Him, but they know nothing of Him.

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They are distant from Him. They have rejected Him, according to verse 3, spurning the good, where the good of Israel has always been shown to be her

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God. What are they rejecting? What good are they rejecting? The Almighty Himself. Now, I can see room in this for a couple of types of people in ancient

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Israel and a couple of types of people in this room. Some who would say, "'My

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God, we know you,' while they do not. And it's worth considering for the benefit of our hearts today where we're at in this."

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There are those who know they are lying when they say it. There are those who say it and are intentionally deceptive.

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They're literally putting it on for a show. They just left the high place where they engaged in cult prostitution and they say, "'We know you,

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God.' They just sacrificed a goat to Asherah, the goddess of fertility, or sacrificed a goat to Baal, her imaginary guy, the storm god.

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And they claim they know the Almighty God while they know that they are distant from Him."

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That's a scary place to be. But then there would be others, others like who

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Jesus speaks of in Scripture. These are the very tragic people who have been misled and deceived.

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And they will say to Jesus on that day, "'Lord, Lord, look at our resume.

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Look at all that we have done for you.' But He will say to them, "'Depart from Me.

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I don't know you, and you don't know Me.'" The title of this message is, "'Know the

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Lord. Know the Lord.'" They don't know Him. They have trusted.

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They haven't trusted in Him. They've trusted in other things. They've done many things in His service, but they have never come to receive

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His work for them. The apostle John in his gospel defines what our hearts are longing for, what our hearts really...

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Ecclesiastes says that eternity is bound up in our hearts. There's a hunger and a desire for eternity. In every human heart, there's a desire for more than this life, and John says, let me define that eternity that you're looking for.

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John 17 3, he says this, and this is eternal life. Oh, he's going to define it.

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Ears ought to perk up. This is the longing of every heart. This is what... This ought to resonate with you right away.

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This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true

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God. And Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. Eternal life comes in the knowledge of God and the knowledge of His Son, Jesus Christ.

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Salvation comes through relationship, relationship, knowledge, relationship to Jesus.

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Connection to Him. Knowing what He has done and trusting in His kindness and His mercy and His grace to forgive on the basis of His sacrifice on the cross.

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Yes, having a shake hands and meet Jesus kind of moment. Amen? How many of you had that moment?

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Shaking hands, someone introduced you, and it's like, hey, this is my Savior. This is my Lord. This is my

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King. His name is Jesus. You ought to meet Him. And you met Him. But not merely having met

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Him, church, like not having shaken His hand once in a casual greeting when you were a child, but knowing

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Him. Are you hearing it? Knowing Him, walking with Him, ongoing relationship with Him, that's eternal life.

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That is good life. That is abundant life. Playing pretend with the knowledge of God as Israel is, is the realm of those who are arrogant and or liars.

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And here are some indications in the coming verse that they have just been playing pretend. These serve as a good tool of assessment for us as well.

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In verse 4, they appoint leaders without consulting God. And in verse 4, they are manufacturing their own idols, two very clear indicators that they are playing pretend.

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They claim to know God while doing everything in their own strength. That's getting close to home, isn't it?

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Does that get close to home for anybody here? Doing everything in their own strength.

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Not relating to God in the day -to -day, but saying with their lips, we know you.

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A person who tells me that they know God, but never consults with God, may very well be in a pretend relationship with God, right?

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The people of Israel are making huge decisions, like who's going to be the next king? And God isn't even factoring into that decision.

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You never consulted me. You never checked with me. I don't even know your process anymore.

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And further, a person who proclaims that they are in relationship with the Almighty God while manufacturing other things to worship in their life is also playing pretend, finding things to worship, searching for things to worship, engaged in the pursuit of entertainments and lusts and pleasures and all kinds of things, trying to find something to satisfy.

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Is your heart satisfied? Is it satisfied in relationship with God, or are you still searching for something?

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If you're still searching for something, come rest at the feet of Jesus. The northern kingdom of Israel set up a literal, this is just crazy, it's just crazy and mind -bending to understand the history of Israel and understand that they set up literal golden calves.

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Like, they set up golden calves, one in the city of Dan and one in the city of Bethel, and talk about ignorance regarding the history of their relationship with God, their people.

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Anyone who could set up a golden calf to worship in Israel is someone who is not at all a student of God's ways,

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God's laws, or God's history with His people, right? How many of you know, like, there's that whole golden calf thing at Mount Sinai, like the giving of the

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Ten Commandments broke and Moses all ticked and all that stuff and grind it up and drink it and all kinds of weird stuff going on there.

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And yet, this is precisely what King Jeroboam I did in the northern kingdom of Israel. One of his first acts as king.

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They break off from the southern tribe of Judah and Judah becomes its own nation and Israel becomes its own nation.

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They each appoint their own kings, Jeroboam the king of the north, and he says, you know what, we can't go down to Jerusalem anymore to worship, so let's make our own worship.

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And they make golden calves. You can find that, by the way. That's all recorded for us in 1 Kings chapter 12.

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I'm not going to read that. You don't need to turn over there. Jot it down and go back and read it later if you're interested in this kind of history and this kind of stuff.

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1 Kings 12, verses 28 through 31. Again, it's 1 Kings 12, 28 through 31 if you're taking notes.

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Go back and read that and you can see the making and the building of those golden calves in the northern kingdom.

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And God will reject the false worship of His people who have rejected Him as their greatest good.

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Against their idolatry, God's righteous anger burns, the text tells us. In exasperation at the end of verse 5,

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God asks them a rhetorical question that lands on us as well. Think about this question.

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How long will we be incapable of innocence? How long will you be incapable of innocence?

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Incapable of innocence seems like a strange construction, doesn't it? And yet it defines all of us pretty well, doesn't it?

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Incapable of innocence. And here it shows the standard that the law sets out to clarify.

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We need innocence and we cannot produce it. We need rather one to come rescue us from our corruption and corruptibility nestled here in God's exasperation with His old covenant people as a reminder that we need something we cannot produce ourselves, church.

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We need a Savior. We need a hero to rescue us from a circumstance we cannot solve on our own.

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We cannot make ourselves innocent. You know it. You know it deep in your heart.

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You cannot scrub enough. You cannot clean enough. You can't give enough. You can't attend church enough.

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You know that you cannot outweigh and outbalance the bad that you've done against God. You know it in your heart.

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But God mocks the idolatry in verse 6. How can they worship that which was made by the hands of a craftsman?

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And how can we church worship things that are not God? God will smash to pieces all things we trust that are not of Him.

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And there are indications, or are there indications in your life that you're playing pretend with God? I want you to seriously think about it.

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Are you consulting with Him over your decisions? Are you seeking false gods and idols to pacify you?

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Do you still have some emptiness in your heart? Whether it's through deception or through knowing and high -handed sin, let me encourage all who have even a smidge of a feeling in you that you might be pretending to run to Jesus today.

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Talk it out with Him. Let Him know you love Him. That you want to know Him more.

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You want to trust Him more. You want to love Him more. And then come up with a plan to continue to seek

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Him in truth. Some of us will say, my God, I, fill in your name, my

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God, I, Don, know you. And many of us in the room,

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I'm hopeful, I'm very hopeful that many of you mean it when you say it. You can say it and you can mean it.

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And we trust it, and we trust Him, and we feel it. We know our failures, but we are continuing in a relationship with God where we're continuing in the knowledge of Him, just seeking to know

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Him better. And if that's you, my encouragement to you is different, it's to not let your guard down.

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Don't coast and assume some past momentum is going to carry you. Keep praying, keep studying, keep confessing, keep walking with your

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Lord. Somebody comes into my office and they say, I'm not sure if I'm a believer, but I prayed when I was a child. I'm like, what's your relationship look like right now to God?

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Do you know Him today? Are you walking with Him today? Are you seeking to love Him more today?

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Are you getting that? Like, that's the question. The question isn't what happened at a campfire when you were a kid.

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What happened at VBS when you were a kid? The question is what's happened since then. That's what

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I'm concerned with. That's what Scripture is concerned with. Knowing the Lord, not meeting Him, not shaking

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His hand, but walking with Him day by day by day. Keep walking with the

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Lord. The second call to know the Lord identifies a major enemy to our knowledge of God that they were encountering and we all encounter it.

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It's this, the barrier of sin, verses 7 through 11. There's a major barrier of sin in Israel. There is in our lives as well.

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We're using our lives to sow something, church. You're planting seeds every single day.

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You don't think of yourself as a farmer, but you are. You're planting. Every day we are planting actions and traits and attitudes that will produce a harvest down the road.

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Some actions that you have started recently, like some of the things that you have started doing in the last six months will be a habitual part of your life a year from now.

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Do you realize that? There are things that you just started. There are things that you just started doing that are going to be a habit a year from now.

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You sow, I mean, just an example, and here's an example of something. Say you sow a daily wake up and read the

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Bible kind of action in your life and you do that now and in a couple of years that becomes a routine.

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That's a good thing, right? It just becomes a thing that you do, but it also, we know, works in the negative as well.

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In Hosea, we see that God's people are sowing wind. That's emptiness. That's vanity.

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It's nothingness. They're sowing a little wind. They're going to reap a hurricane, a whirlwind, a tornado, depends on your translation.

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But the word there is a wind, a wind -based storm, think really bad things, tornado, hurricane.

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Sin is a huge barrier in our lives together with God, even when, church, it starts small.

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Israel sowed a little bit of wind, but it will reap much wind to their destruction.

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And I would ask you, what do we sow in small quantities that might eventually drown us?

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What are you sowing in small quantities right now in your life that might result in your destruction?

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We might sow a little bit to lust, sow a little bit to drunkenness just on the weekends with our friends.

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That might be the start. Sow a little bit to grumbling and complaining. Sow a little bit to anger. Sow a little bit to materialism and that gotta buy the next thing and like a flood, the harvest of rage and the harvest of lust and the harvest of negativity overwhelms us like a hurricane.

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Some of us have been around long enough to see it. We've seen it in our lives. We've seen it in others. We're tempted, church, to see small sins as small and we couldn't be more wrong.

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We can't see small sins as small. They won't remain that way. But the harvest of a little sin is worse than you can imagine in the sowing.

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Do you know what I'm talking about? Much worse than you imagine. Israel was swallowed by their sin.

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They were rendered as a useless vessel. What can God do with this filthy chamber pot is the word that's used there.

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Sin is a major barrier to knowing God. And in verse 9 we see that sin has led the people out of their relationship with God.

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You see, we rarely would think I'm going to go out today and I'm going to dabble in some sin that's going to eventually result in me forsaking the

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Lord. That's not how the logic works in our minds, right? I'm going to go out and I'm just going to do a little bit of this on the side and it's going to be okay.

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We don't do it with that thought in mind. As Christians, actually, we're more likely to have a convoluted attitude that muddies the glory of grace in our thoughts about sin.

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Thinking something more along the lines of this is probably more prominent in our hearts and minds and something we have to wrestle through.

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And that's, I will give in to this temptation because God is gracious and He will cover it for me.

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But this ignores a deeper reality that all of our sin is a step out of relationship with God.

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The call here this morning is, know the Lord. But to sin is to step out of relationship with Him.

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All of it looks like a wild donkey in heat, alone but on the prowl. All of it looks like wandering around looking for a lover for hire as verse 9 tells us.

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When we sin, we are looking to step out of our relationship with God. All on the premise that with the hopes and the vision that He will take us back at the end of whatever the affair is.

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And I said in an earlier sermon, you don't know if you will even want to be back with God when the affair ends.

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You might get caught up in a whirlwind to your own destruction. Now none of this is meant to teach my views on eternal security.

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But I do prefer to leave the cautions of Scripture with their teeth intact. If you're willing to keep on sinning because quote unquote

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His grace is big and wide, Scripture has a big caution for you. If that's been your attitude, if that's been where you've been walking, that's been where you've been living in relationship to God or out of relationship to God, kind of going like, well,

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He'll just forgive in the end and it'll all be okay. I can do whatever I want. Scripture cautions you.

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Shall we go on sinning that grace may increase? Paul shouts, may it not be.

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How dare you? And in verse 10, we find that sin becomes a vicious taskmaster.

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The very sins of compromise that Israel thought would help them has ultimately brought them to their knees.

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They hired an ally nation called Assyria to protect them. And this is a funny way to word it to say that they hired

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Assyria to protect them because they are actually paying the bully their lunch money to keep him from beating them up. They're not hiring

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Assyria to protect them from some third party, not hiring Assyria to protect them from Egypt or from Babylon.

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They are hiring Assyria to protect them from Assyria. They're paying tribute to Assyria to keep them from invading

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Israel. And it doesn't take long for that tribute to become oppressive, causing the leadership of Israel to squirm and writhe under the financial pressure of heavy tribute, paying, paying, paying all of their gold and all of their silver to just keep their nation alive.

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Sin will produce results we didn't see coming. That's the point here. Sin will come back to roost. Sow the wind, reap the hurricane.

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If there's anything that you get out of this message, it's that caution. And we just don't get to determine any of the repercussions of our sin.

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We think we can manage it. We think we can control it. And we have no control over it at all. Sin has a way of being creative in its exposure.

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Have you noticed that? Has a creative way of finding you out. I'll tell you a little bit of a story that's a little uncomfortable, but I'm going to throw it in there because just the very ugh of it is like ugh.

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I know of a pastor in the UP who was teaching the youth group of his church.

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This is years ago, by the way. He connected his computer to the projector, and the last thing that he was watching by video showed up on the screen in front of the youth group.

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And it was what you think it was. I don't think that that man could have ever imagined that that's how his ministry would

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That's how he got found out. You don't get to control the repercussions of your sin, church.

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You don't get to determine the day or the hour of your exposure. God is creative.

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God is just. God is right. How will your sin find you out?

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In some way, that is more painful than the sowing. Sown is a gentle breeze, reaped like an earth -scraping storm that rips up trees by the roots and levels everything you love.

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Be warned, church, and deal with your sin. That's what you're playing with when you sow just a little bit of sin.

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And the last way that sin produces a barrier between us and God is found in verse 11. Sin warps our worship and our devotion.

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What an amazing irony is found here in this text. The people of Israel, in verse 11, can be a bit confusing to our ears because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning.

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They have become to him altars for sinning. It sounds like self, like a redundancy or something. But what they're trying to do, what this is getting at, is they're literally trying to create altars to deal with their sin.

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And in the crafting of those altars, they are sinning. There is one altar upon which they are to take their sacrifices for sin.

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Where's it found? Does anybody know? Jerusalem, in the temple. There is one altar upon which they are supposed to take offerings for their sins.

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And instead, they're multiplying altars to deal with their sin. And God says, don't build altars.

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Go to Jerusalem. Take your sacrifices there. But that's too far. That's going all the way down to Jerusalem.

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That's tough. How about we just build a bunch of altars all over the place so you're never more than a mile away from a place of worship?

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Sin warps our worship and devotion, and there's this just crazy irony. They make altars for sacrifices, and they do this in a sinful way.

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And even, the point being, even when we try to deal with our own sin, we will be found to sin in that process, in pride and arrogance, attempting to solve our own sin problem.

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Sin is a barrier to the knowledge of the Almighty God. And so the call is to keep short accounts with God.

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Here's the hope. Confession and repentance need to be a regular part of what it means to be in relationship in the knowledge of God.

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A relationship between God and sinful people requires confession and repentance. Fight sin in our own lives, church.

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Choke it out wherever you can. Put it to death. What the Puritans called mortifying the flesh, putting to death the deeds of the body, avoiding places and situations and anything that forms a routine temptation, and you know where they are and you know how they come to you.

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But also, knowing God. Knowing God means trusting that His forgiveness is real.

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His forgiveness is available. His love for His people is complete in Jesus Christ.

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Not so that we can go on sinning, but so that we can be set free to keep loving Him and serving Him and serving one another, useful to Him.

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Commit to dealing with sin through confession, through repentance, and through battle, while trusting in His work on the cross to forgive and His indwelling spirit to empower you.

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And the final and shorter section of Hosea 8 identifies the place where fake relationships with God and sowing our lives to sin will lead.

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His people have become strangers to Him, verses 12 through 14. The laws of God, church, are never enough.

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No amount of legal clarification. God could multiply the number of commands He's given us by 10, and it's never going to get to the heart of the matter.

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How many of you know that what your heart doesn't need is just more rules? That's not going to solve it.

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That's not going to fix it. Here in Hosea, the law is proving its worth. It does what it's good at.

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It shines a spotlight on our fallen hearts. It highlights that the law cannot save or rescue us.

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God could increase clarity and spell out what He desires in increasing details, and His people would still not get it.

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We see in verse 12 that the problem of the people is not a lack of the knowledge of what God requires of His people.

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That's not what we lack. We don't lack the knowledge. At issue is the lack of love we have for Him in our hearts.

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I want you to consider David. Man, I tell you what, if the only thing you knew about David was what it actually tells us he did, what would be your assessment of his life?

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If you only knew what Scripture tells us he did externally, what would be your assessment of his life?

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Man, we ought to throw out the Psalms. That bum wrote that stuff. I mean, what would you do with that?

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But consider David, who Scripture tells us is a man after God's own heart, and we have to be told that's true.

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We have to be told that because it's not evident. We wouldn't come to that conclusion externally.

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We have to be told he was a man after God's own heart. There was something, in other words, in David's heart that's hard for us to see.

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There's something in his heart that we cannot find on the outside of him. We have a hard time finding it.

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But somewhere deeper than his sin with Bathsheba, somewhere deeper than his obvious external brokenness, somewhere deeper than his murder of her husband

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Uriah was a heart in relationship with God.

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And I hold out hope that Ravi Zacharias had that heart. I hold out hope that my mom had that heart.

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I hold out hope that my grandparents had that heart. And my only hope for anybody that I love that has died is that they had that heart.

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Amen? That's it. There is no other hope. I can't take solace in someone's actions.

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I don't take solace in how much they gave to missions. I don't take solace in how dedicated they were to church attendance.

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I say either they had a heart that loved God and they were in relationship with Him or they're damned.

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Those are the two options. Either they loved Him and they knew Him and were loved by Him and He knew them, or they're gone.

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And we are not good judges of the outside. I think David exists for that very reason to go like, hey, here's a guy.

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Look at this list of things that he did. Now go read his Psalms and recognize that that's a man who loved me.

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What? And he did these things? How can that be? And it's because we are not rescued by our performance.

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We are not rescued by any laws. Our law keeping, it's just not there.

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It's not always clear to us where people stand, but living by law alone cannot achieve the righteousness of God.

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Even if He, God, were to give us 10 times the laws we currently have, it says 10 ,000 in there.

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There's about 680, I think it's 682 or something like that, the number of laws in the

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Old Testament given to the people. If you were to go through and look at the discrete command form in the

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Hebrew language of the commands coming from God to people, and he says 10 ,000 here, more than 10 times the number of laws would not do it for us.

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To remain in pretending and to remain in sin is to remain a stranger to the Almighty, His ways being strange to us and our ways being off -putting to Him.

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They are not acceptable to Him, even if they go through the religious motions of sacrifices and feasting, says verse 13.

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It's not about the external. He will return them back to the state that they were in before the Exodus, back in slavery to Egypt.

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He will remember their iniquities, the text tells us, and punish their sins even as they have forgotten their

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Maker. Here's the image of Hosea 8. Here's the snapshot.

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God's people who say they know Him are pretending they know Him. Their sin is a continual barrier to their genuine knowledge of Him, and they have become strangers to Him.

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They have forgotten their Maker, and He will judge them with a destructive fire sent against their cities by the invading forces of the

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Assyrians. End of the chapter. Now, that's a bit of a downer, but let's consider what we're meant to learn and put into practice from this ancient indictment to the people of Israel.

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The first application point is this, pursue the knowledge of God in love and thanks.

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He has made this new covenant easier than the old covenant, because at its heart is a covenant of incredible love expressed through His blood sacrificed for us.

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I can testify that He has won my heart with sacrifice and love. He has not called us all to mundane drudgery, to heartless obedience, or a hopeless task.

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So, ask yourself this question with genuine force in your heart today, do you love Him? Do you love

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Him? Do you know Him? And if not, cry out to Him from the place of sin and ask

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Him to rescue you and save you today. If you do know Him, and you do love

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Him, then keep talking to Him, keep listening to Him, keep walking with Him, keep pursuing

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Him. Pursue the knowledge of God. The second is deal harshly with your sin, or it's going to deal harshly with you.

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Deal harshly with your sin. Sin is a barrier to our relationship with the Holy One. If we confess our sins,

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He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, amen?

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A life of confession, and a life of repentance, and a life of honest battle against sin is the

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Christian life. You know how to define the Christian life? It's a fight. It's a knock down, drag out fight with His flesh.

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It's an ongoing battle in the power of the Spirit to continue to walk with Him in relationship.

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Fight your sin, expose it to the light, don't give it any oxygen, keep short accounts, meaning, and I say that often but I don't know if you know what

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I mean by that, be quick to confess when your sin is exposed, when it's brought to the light, when you're praying and God says, what about that?

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Be quick to say, I'm sorry, that is wrong and I want to change and I want to turn from that and I want to turn to you.

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Keep short accounts, be quick to confess, and battle those entrenched sins. Fight dirty in your battle against sin.

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Struggling with porn? Cut the internet off at your home. You're like, I can't do that. Yes, you can.

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You absolutely can. Go to the library and check your email, bro. Like, for real. Like, fight dirty against it.

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Like, battle, like, I mean, I remember in high school, this is embarrassing, I don't think I want to go into this.

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I got in a fight in high school, more than one, I got in a fight in high school with a guy who was much better fighting than me, and I realized that at the point where he picked up a rock in the middle of a fight, and I was like, okay, bro, back off.

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So fighting dirty is taking whatever is available at our disposal to battle it and put it to death.

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Like, there's no kid -gloving sin, there's no like, oh, well, but it's like, okay, it'll go away if I just do, if I just, you gotta attack it.

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You gotta attack it head on. You gotta engage other people. You've gotta bring others in to like, check on your life and make sure that you're walking with him.

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Fight dirty in your battle against sin. Lastly, rejoice at being brought into his family through faith in the sacrifice of his son.

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We're no longer strangers, church, but we are sons and daughters of the King.

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We are joint heirs with Christ. He calls us his friends, and he promised to go and prepare a place for us and to return and bring us to him forever.

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He is eternal life. To be in relationship with the Father and the Son is eternal life.

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Let's remember that as we take communion together. If you belong to Jesus Christ, let's remember that on the night that he was betrayed, he took bread and broke it, saying, this is my body broken for you.

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Do this as often as you take it in remembrance of me, and he likewise took the cup of wine, saying this cup is a new covenant in my blood.

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As often as you drink it together, drink it in remembrance of him. Church, let's press on to keep knowing the

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Lord. Let's take the battle to our sins, and let's rejoice that we are no longer strangers, but he calls us friends, friends of God through Jesus Christ, our

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Lord. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your grace and your mercy and hope and love expressed at the cross.

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The place where the barrier of our relationship with you, that barrier of sin was broken down because of what

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Jesus Christ did, the hope that we have, and we recognize that all sin is against you.

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All sin is an attempt to get away from you. All sin is an attempt to step out of relationship with you. Father, I pray that you would empower your people, even now as we are convicted and many of us are thinking through our lives and what needs to change and how we need to give more of our lives to you and relate to you more, walk with you, pray with you, pray to you, talk and hear from you in your word.

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Father, I pray that you would establish increasingly strong relationships between us and you here in this fellowship, that Recast would be a strong church that continues to lean in, continues to keep short accounts with you.

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Where sin does get the upper hand, we are quick to flip that through the power of your spirit.

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Father, I pray that you would meet us in this communion, recognizing there's not a worthy person in the room.

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If we had to be worthy in our souls in order to take communion, none of us would, but this comes down to recognizing what you have done for us, you sending your son to die for us, taking the just penalty that our sins deserved on him.

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Father, I pray that you would help us to walk this week in gladness, in fighting sin and continuing to lean into relationship and in gladness that we are no longer strangers but we are called your friends.