Well, that doesn't sound very sinful. Your kids seem moral. And this is true for many Christians. Is that really that sinful? To become an adherent of mechanical religion? Yes, it is. It is a privilege to be here with you this afternoon. I wanted to come down. I talked to Brother Raymond on the phone. I said, I want to be encouraging. I want to be a blessing. Knowing the caliber of preaching that y'all are used to, I hope to not disappoint. But by God's grace, I think he will impart to us very precious truths this afternoon. Open your Bibles to Hosea chapter 2. Hosea chapter 2. Hosea is nestled between Daniel and Joel. if you need help finding it. I want to read to us the entire chapter because I think the first half will serve as a good backdrop for what needs to be said in the second. So if you found yourself there, with a small blessing, I will then read the Word of God. Father God, I come to you this afternoon in the name of Jesus Christ, the righteous. Spirit of the living God, I pray that you would breathe on us, that you would be with us in a powerful way. Lord, as I am a man in a room full of men and women, we need the oh God to lift us up. We need the oh God to empower us. We need the oh God to give us power over sin. We need the oh God to do every little thing that we do. Father, I pray this afternoon that you would give us what we need from the text and that we would all greatly benefit from your word today. Open our eyes that we may behold wondrous things from thy law, incline our hearts to thee, O God. Turn our eyes away from the worthless thing and establish your word in our heart. that we might live to the glory of God alone, the power of the Spirit, eyes fixed on Christ. Amen. Hosea chapter two. Say to your brothers, Ami, and to your sisters, Ruhemah, contend with your mother, contend for she is not my wife and I am not her husband. and let her put away her harlotry from her face and her adultery from between her breast, or I will strip her naked and expose her as on the day when she was born. I will also make her like a wilderness, make her like a desert land and slay her with thirst. Also, I will have no compassion on her children because they are children. of harlotry, for their mother has played the harlot. She who conceived them has acted shamefully, for she said, I will go after my lovers who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink. Therefore, behold, I will hedge up her way with thorns and I will build a wall against her so that she cannot find her pass. She will pursue her lovers but she will not overtake them, and she will seek them, but will not find them. Then she will say, I will go back to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now. For she does not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and lavished on her silver and gold, which they use for bail. Therefore, I will take back my grain at harvest time and my new wine in its season. I will also take away my wool and my flax given to cover her nakedness. And then I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will rescue her out of my hand. I will also put an end to all her gaiety, her feast, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her festal assemblies. I will destroy her vines and fig trees, of which she said, these are my wages, which my lovers have given me, and I will make them a forest, and the beast of the field will devour them. I will punish her for the days of the bells. When she used to offer sacrifices to them and adorn herself with her earrings and jewelry and follow her lover so that she forgot me, declares the Lord. That sounds very dark. That's a very dark passage of scripture. I'm sorry I had to read it, but I'm I think the turning point is here and and it is time to turn our eyes to the joy that comes with the Lord. And I'll so I'll continue reading, therefore, behold, I will allure her. Bring her into the wilderness and speak kindly to her. Then I will give her vineyards from there and the Valley of Acre as a door of hope. And she will sing there as in the days of her youth, as in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt. It will come about in that day, declares the Lord, that you will call me Ishi and will no longer call me Bailey, for I will remove the names of Baals from her mouth and they will be mentioned by their names no more. In that day, I will also make a covenant for them with the beast of the field, the birds of the sky, and the creeping things on the ground, and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and will make them lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever. Yes, I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice and loving kindness and in compassion. And I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, faithfulness. And then you will know the Lord. It will come about in that day that I will respond, declares the Lord. I will respond to the heavens and they will respond to the earth. And the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine, and to the oil. And they will respond to Jezreel. I will sow her for myself in the land. I will also have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion. And I will say to those who were not my people, you are my people. And they will say, you are my God. Bear with me as I pray once more. Father, we've read the word. Now bless your servant this morning. Lord, give me the strength that I do not have to give your church the word. I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, my father, my advocate and my savior. Amen. I will allure her in verse 14. I will allure her. We're used, if you've read the confessions, if you've studied Reformed theology, like I know most of you are aware of Reformed theology, so you are aware of the call of God, that God calls a sinner to repentance. I think there's more here, though, because God says he uses a stronger Hebrew word, allure. Allure. I will allure her, God going about the business, making it his business to allure who? Apostate Israel and their many wicked deeds. I think the first half of chapter 2 kind of gives you a taste of the wickedness of Israel, and here God in the second half of the chapter says, oh, but I will allure her despite what she had done. Despite the rampant immorality and the idolatry, one would expect doom. And many of us, before we were converted, you could almost sense the doom that was upon you, the doom that pushed you to the cross. The cross that was given to me in my childhood, I had very much forsaken as a young man. I'm still a young man by many people's standards. No, I'm not going to look at anybody, but I'm still a young man. But when I was an even younger man, I spurned the teaching of the cross. It's weak. It's garbage. And so I pursued a life of sin. Many of you probably can relate to that. We pursued a life of sin. We pursued a life of idolatry and immorality. So we would expect God to doom us. They said, well, many people say, I would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven because they expect subconsciously, maybe to be punished by God. So Israel, not having done any good thing, but all of these bad things, you would expect them to be punished. And I know you can find places in scripture where Israel was indeed punished. But I think there's a great future meant for God's people in this passage, which is why I wanted to preach it this morning. Now, we've talked a little bit about the unconverted and the call of God on them and how God allures sinners and calls sinners and converts them and makes them clean and justifies them. But the same is true also for Christians, because it is it is very easy for us to begin to live a life of religion to where you wake up, you pray and you go about your day and you pay your bill and it becomes mechanical. It becomes the church becomes mechanical, maybe. I'm not speaking this for you. I'm speaking this of me. We're taking upon the role of an elder. You think, oh, he this is must begin to be super easy for them. No, it's in fact, it's not at all. You can easily slip into this rhythm of ministry where you dot your I's and cross your T's, perhaps, and you go to the services and you do your job. And yet the whole time you are forgetting your first love. And you might, well, that doesn't sound very sinful. Your kids seem moral. And this is true for many Christians. Is that really that sinful to become an adherent of mechanical religion? Yes, it is. We sing the song in Christ alone and we look at those words and we look at the words of the last hymn, which I wasn't sure I knew, but it turned out that I did. To be a Christian is to be one who comes before the living Christ, to be renewed, rejuvenated, reborn, made new every day, every day. And many people fall into a trap of taking letting themselves become complacent in religion. I know in my world, many reformed men, they cling to the doctrine like the doctrine is what saves them. And doctrine is important, brothers and sisters. I would not dare to speak against any of the great doctrines that are laid at my feet by giants of the faith who I cannot contend or compete with. But when doctrine becomes the main thing, you start to have problems. You start to become more mechanical. But we serve a living God, a living Christ who is calling us, even this morning, or this afternoon, pardon. calling us now to be renewed in our minds and to be focused on him alone. Have we not wandered, I say in my notes, have we not slipped? And yet God in Christ allures us to himself. The next part of the verse says he brings her into the wilderness. brings her into the wilderness, and you've got to think, he saves the Israelite people from the Egyptians, from slavery, and he brings them to paradise? He brings them to the land? No, he brings them to the wilderness. Why? Why bring somebody you've called, you've attracted, you've allured, why bring them to the wilderness? Deuteronomy 8. And verse two and three says, you shall remember all the way which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness these 40 years that he might humble you. testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. He humbled you and let you be hungry and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know that he might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Brothers and sisters, I believe that even say you're not an unbeliever, and let's say you're not even a backsliding Christian, when we then look at the grand scope of life, ask yourself the question, are we in paradise yet? No. In many ways, and I think it is biblically just, we are in the wilderness. To do what? To be humbled, to be chastened, to be taught, to be conformed to the image of Christ. You see, Jesus has called us, and he's not left us to wander aimlessly, but he has given us a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. He's given us the scriptures, and so let them be our guide in this. God deals kindly with his people, and this is our sanctification. It's not punishment. Although you could see the trials that come and you're like, why, how? Sanctification. Sanctification, conformity to Christ. And throughout the wilderness, we can read throughout, you know, the manna from heaven. He even gave them quail when they complained and they ate so much that they started to die of sickness. But God throughout the wilderness provided generously for his people as he provides for us today. Moses and Paul, Paul was converted and he went and kind of dwelt in obscurity for a while. If you read your New Testament in Moses, who was brought out of the palace of Pharaoh, learned as a shepherd, and you think, well, is his wilderness done? No, my friends, his wilderness had just gotten started because he spent another 40 with his people in their wilderness. Verse 15, God says, I will give her vineyards from there. Where is there? What is the verse reference? This is verse number 15. Then I will give her vineyards from there and the Valley of Acre as a door of hope. Do y'all know? I'm going to tell you, but do you know what the Valley of Acre is? The Valley of Achor is a lovely spot of real estate where, under Joshua's leadership, the Hebrews stoned Achan and all of his ill-begotten possessions and all of his stolen goods and all of his family. and piled rocks on top of them, and it was a marker for this. And here in Hosea, it says, the Valley of Achor as a door of hope. What does that mean? Can we draw something from this? Can we draw something from the story of Achan? And it seems very violent. But what were the children of Israel doing? They had just won this massive victory over Jericho, and they went to attack Ai, and Ai was tiny. And they're like, we have this. And so Ai beat them. They ran back, they huddled, and they found sin in the camp. And I think we can draw a line there to hear. God is calling the sinner, calling the churchmen back to zeal, calling whatever you want to apply in that spot. And then what? He's going to give her fruit. He's going to give her vineyards. He's going to use the Valley of Acre as a door of hope. He's going to take the sin of the believer and he's going to draw it out. He's going to sanctify them, sanctify them. The Lord will return the joy of his people. And what happens when God shows us great mercy? I don't know about you and I try not to make too much of a personal experience, but oftentimes when I have found great mercy in the Lord through repentance, oftentimes when I found great mercy in the Lord with repentance, what comes with that is a very powerful feeling of the presence of God. which elicits tears or extreme joy or this. They're fleeting things. But to be brought back into the joy of the Lord, to have your conscience scrubbed and your sin exposed, and not just exposed. He exposes a sin and it's so bad. It's so wrong. And yet He takes it from us. And He forgives us. And He makes us fruitful. and then will sing theirs in the days of her youth. as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. I can't help, and I may be wrong, and someone much smarter than me may come back and correct me, but we all came out of Egypt. If you get the illusion, a sinner who is saved is saved from Egypt. We're brought up out of Egypt. We're like the Israelite. We're pulled out of Egypt. We're brought into the wilderness. And now that joy that they had when they had plundered the Egyptians, When they received all the wealth and the riches and they escaped through the Red Sea and they were cruising, they were so happy and joyful. And then, of course, you know, it doesn't take long. Complaints start, different sin happens. But the Lord and repentance and showing mercy to his people, he will bring your joy back to the joy like you had when you were first in Christ. Now, that's a kind of a loose. So please, that's a loose line I'm I'm playing with there. I'm not trying to be loose with the scriptures, but I'm not going to be dogmatic. But that's what I see. The next big verse we have here, 16 and 16 and 17 are kind of connected. That you will call me Ishii and will no longer call me Bailey. See, Baal is Lord in the language. Baal is Lord in the language. And so calling someone Bailey is like calling them my Lord. But calling someone Ishii is like calling someone a wife, calling her husband my husband or my man. So it's different. It's not just my Lord. It's not just a word that may have been muddled in different idolatrous practices. One commentator, Matthew Henry, seems to think that the Israelites may have muddled the word Bailey or Bally or however you pronounce it in their worship of the biblical God of Yahweh. And Matthew Henry seems to think that there was some confusion there, but the Lord is saying, no, when I call the sinner back, when I allure this person back, when I when I allure my potential bride back. He's going to take that away from her, he's going to expunge it from her. Many young Christian men and women struggle with sin on a daily basis, and they think it is so strong in their life where they cannot escape these base feelings of corruption. But really, the problem is not so much that they are broken. We are all broken. The problem is that in their brokenness, they do not turn their full attention to the Lord and and their attention is divided elsewhere. When one's attention becomes focused on the Lord, there is really not much room for anything else, although it still comes. It still comes, sin will still knock. But yet when we are when we are focused on the love of Christ, when we are focused on his mercy, when he has shed his mercy on us and brought us brought us great repentance, it's hard to think about the trifling things of this world. The Bible, of course, we read this morning, tells us to not have anything to do with the world, the love of the world and those things. And I think for good reason. But the Lord will take these things out from us and he will put himself front and center. And in this passage only gets better. In that day, this is verse 18, in that day, I will make a covenant for them. Notice that the Lord, he's talking a whole lot in this passage. I will, I will make, I will uncover, I will allure, I will destroy, he says elsewhere. I will, I will, I will. God says, I will make a covenant for them. And in this covenant, this covenant that the Lord makes, that we do not have to help construct. He does not need our signature. He produces it. The sovereign God of all the universe produces this covenant and this covenant in this passage. He causes the earth, the creation to be at rest and peace with Israel, and then he says he breaks the bow of the surrounding enemies. He destroys the weapons of war that surround his small people. And if I were to make the direct comparison to us Christians today, well, are there many weapons around us? Are they aimed at us? I don't see them pointed at many other people. And I'm talking, of course, of the different schemes of the devil and the different strongholds he has in our nation. I don't have to list them. You all are quite aware, I'm sure. There's weapons of war all around us. If you're anything like me, I have failed miserably in my intake of information. I have failed miserably with my intake of information. I love to read. I love to read. I love, love, love to read. And then there's podcasts. And I love those too. Lots, tons, too much. And what happens when you get engrossed in too much information that is not scripture? It can start to have an effect on the way you view real things. So what do I mean? If we are not focusing on Christ and we're taking in too much of the world, then that gives Satan an avenue to poison our minds, to view the weapons arrayed against us as much bigger than what they really are. But you heard in the children's time this morning that God can take the most powerful living emperor of his time and arguably of many other times if you were to compare them with other kingdoms. And he made him a wild beast. He made him a wild beast. Dear brothers and sisters, we have no cause to fear. We have no cause to fear anything, really, except one. And that is the Lord. He is to be feared because he sees everything and he sees all. And this life is wilderness. And he knows that for us. He has something better for those who are in Christ. He has something vastly better than this life here. But he makes a covenant, he makes the creatures and creation to be at peace, and he makes the nations and the war and all of these dangerous things, he breaks them. And he allows his people, it says, to lie down in safety. The next statement we have is in verse 19, and I'll pair verse 19 and 20 together. I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me forever. The Lord is not a poor suitor. He comes bearing gifts we do not deserve. The Lord comes to save His people, just as He's coming for Israel. If Israel only knew before that if she would have just stayed faithful to the Lord God, that she would have been cared for, she would have been provided for both Physically and militaristically, she would have been cared for, but she left and she played the harlot. She went off into sin and gross immorality. And yet here, God, the God of all creation, is calling her back and he's sending a betrothal. He's sending a dowry almost. Of what? Righteousness and justice. Loving kindness and compassion. And just in case you thought he was only sending four things in verse 20, he says, and I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. His faithfulness, praise God, not ours, his faithfulness. And I say here that perhaps he was saving the best gift for last, although it's hard to rank them. Brothers and sisters, these prayer requests right here, because the Lord tells us if we pray according to his will, right, he will answer us. You want to know a surefire thing to pray for that will always be in the will of God? I think we can name a few right here. Righteousness and justice, loving kindness, compassion and faithfulness. Lord God, help me to live my life in a just manner. Help me to do justly. Lord, Help me to live righteously, Lord, I know that Jesus is righteousness covers me and I know that I'll stand before you cleansed in the blood of the lamb with the robe of righteousness bought for me on Calvary. And I know that I'm justified because of Christ. But Lord, that it I want more. I want my life to be holy. I want to be righteous and I do every time. Every time. I was having a rather good day, and then I've been, you know, it's one of those days where you wake up and you're praying, and the Lord is being so good to you, he's feeding you, and you're just communing with the Lord, and you're singing songs on the way to work, and you're doing all of these things, and even at work, meetings and stuff, it just doesn't even slow you down, you're just doing your work as unto the Lord, and then you get home and you lose your patience with your children. And you're like, where did that even come from? And my kids are kind of laughing at me. I want to be more righteous. I want to be more righteous. I don't I don't want to give any room, and of course, I'm not saying we'll attain perfection, but I'm just trying to illustrate the want in our hearts. Every believer. Do you not feel the ache for more of Jesus? Righteous. Has God not performed these things in your life? Can you not see where where maybe the man you are now is not the man you were 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago? The Lord has given you good things. The Lord has changed you. But is it enough? And I, dear friends, I would say no, not for me. Because I'm so weak. And it's like the farther you go and the more you go, the more you realize how much more you need the Lord. Should we not put these things on, these gifts? He talks about him betrothing us and bringing these things as gifts. Let's wear them. Let's pray for them. Let's seek to have more of them. Psalm 34, 8, I thought is a nice addition. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him. I think we need to utilize these gifts and pray for these gifts and share these gifts and pray for more and more of them. I really do. Verses 21 and 22, we have It will come about in that day that I will respond, declares the Lord. I will respond to the heavens, and they will respond to the earth, and the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine, and to the oil, and they will respond to Jezreel. The Lord, who is sovereign over the land, will make the heaven and the earth to open, causing growth and abundance. He's doing this for his people. And of course, this is very easy to see in an Old Testament context where they depended so much on crops and animals and growth and all of these things and rain. Rain's a big deal. Of course, Elijah prayed that there would be no rain and there wasn't rain. And so they didn't have those things. So you can kind of clearly see in the Old Testament context how that is. But how is that for us now? What will God do for his people now? And you might be thinking like, I seem to be jumping from them to us and I think it's good to do that. I think this is a clear picture of how the Lord and what the Lord does in the lives of Christians. We want to abound in the work of the Lord. We want to abound in fruitfulness. The only way to abound in fruitfulness is to live unto the Lord. to humble yourself before him, to prostrate ourselves before his holy word and to seek him in everything that we do. A people who honor the Lord will not lack. A land that honors the Lord will be abundant. A Christian who turns himself back to these things will, as I've said, abound. The last verse in this passage is 23, and it's a very famous verse because it's quoted in Romans. I will sow her for myself. In the land, I will have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion. And I will say to those who were not my people, you are my people. And they will say, you are my God. The Lord is King over the harvest. He is king over the Christian. He has sown us and he will grow us. He who has begun a good work in you will be faithful to complete it. He is Lord of the harvest of souls. He says he will have compassion. I want to read to us now the passage in Romans quickly. It's not a long passage. Romans 9, verses 22 through 26. What if God, although willing to demonstrate his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience, vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And he did so to make known the riches of his glory upon vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory. even us, whom he also called not from among Jews only, but also from Gentiles. As he says also in Hosea, I will call those who are not my people, my people, and her who was not beloved, beloved. And it shall be that in the place where it was said to them, you are not my people, there they shall be called sons of the living God. We, dear brothers and sisters who deserved nothing, we have deserved nothing. And yet Christ has given us. Everything. Anything that matters in this world is of Christ. There is nothing in this world. No material. No pursuit outside of Christ is worthwhile. We who deserve no mercy received great mercy and we who were no people became the people of God. But we see this image of the bridegroom and he's bringing gifts and he's going to lay these gifts on his people. But how and how did and how would and how could the Lord Most High secure our betrothal? How could he bestow upon us these bridal gifts and dear brothers and sisters, there is but one answer to that question. That is, he sent Jesus Christ. To die in our stead. He sent Jesus Christ to die in our stead and on that bloody cross, he finished the work. And then you think about history. You think about history for a moment and all the things that have happened in it, all the brutality, all the wars, all the pestilence, all the famines, all the conflict, the pain. Did I say pestilence? I meant to, maybe I said it twice, but it's happened more than twice. All of history. And you think of all the brutality of man and all the sinfulness of man. Think of your own sinfulness way back in the day. Think of your sinfulness from yesterday. And yet here's the Messiah. Arms full of gifts to us. Sometimes it is too much. And I don't believe we comprehend it fully. Of course, the Bible says that we we don't. We look into the mirror darkly. But this Messiah. That I believe is pointed to in this chapter. Came bearing gifts. And he has them for us now. If you are struggling with sin. If you are struggling with issues, remember that our confidence is not in ourselves, and that even though we are now armed with the truth and wisdom of Scripture, our confidence is still not in ourselves, but our confidence must be in Him who spared not His Son that we should be saved, so approach boldly the throne of grace and appeal and petition the Lord of all reality to hear your prayers and to answer them and to bring you through the wilderness to your heavenly home. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word. Maybe much more could be said. Father, but I pray it is effective in the hearts of these children, and I pray it was good food for those in attendance. Father, I pray that you bless the rest of the gathering today as we fellowship in Christ, and that you would be with your people, Lord, now and always. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen.