Sermon Tone Analysis

Inscription: Writing God’s Words on Our Hearts & Minds

Part 61: All or Nothing

Hosea

January 1, 2012

Scripture reading: Hosea 8:1-7

Minor LEAGUE prophets?

One of the jobs I had in college was concessions for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.

Never heard of them?

Not surprised, they were a minor league feeder team for the LA Dodgers.

If you a pretty good player, the Dodgers would draft you and send you to the Quakes.

If you were got good enough, they would send you up to the majors.

Today, we start a short series on the minor prophets, but that does mean they were the second string Bible writers.

It just means they wrote shorter books.

~* It’s like short stories verses long stories Tom Clancy verse Garrison Keillor.

After taking several months off, we are back in our Inscription series.

The title comes from the Biblical reference to “write God’s Word on our hearts.”

In this series, we are reading through the Bible and I have been preaching on topics from it.

It has been invaluable to me and has totally changed the way I understand God and the Bible.

There are calendars in your bulletins and I would encourage you to read with us.

These readings are shorter than in the past because I wanted to spend more time in these books.

~* Slight change: Now I am preaching ahead of the reading.

Prayer

A strange calling

Today we start with the first book of the Minor Prophets, Hosea.

It is certainly one of the most interesting stories in the OT: God told Hosea to make his life a living analogy for his relationship with Israel.

Israel had this habit of worshipping God because they were Israelites, and he was there national God, but then also worshiping the idols of the nations around them.

~* Back and forth they would go – kind of love God, then go love on a bunch of idols.

Q What would make a good illustration of that?

God told Hosea to go marry a hooker.

Hosea 1:1-3 The word of the LORD that came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and during the reign of Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel: 2 When the LORD began to speak through Hosea, the LORD said to him, “Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the LORD.” 3 So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

Or as “The Message” paraphrases it:

Hosea 1:2 (Message) The first time GOD spoke to Hosea he said: “Find a whore and marry her.

Make this whore the mother of your children.

And here’s why: This whole country has become a whorehouse, unfaithful to me, GOD.”

~* Marriage becomes a running analogy for God’s relationship with us throughout this book.

Now, whenever we read OT prophecy, we must be careful that we are accurately applying it.

There is a tendency to uncritically apply it to the modern church, and now we see that almost all Christian are compromisers

~* I don’t know about you, I’m not sacrificing kids to Molech.

I want us to look carefully to see what ways we are like Hosea’s audience and be warned.

The trouble with normal

I just finished the series on being Radically Normal and I tried to warn against the “radical” form of Christianity that removes everyday joy from faith.

~* I believe that it is a damnable heresy that separates God from joy; many people have been led astray by that heresy.

But reading through Hosea, I am forcibly reminded of just how wrong it is to be “normal.”

This is what I mean:

When I was a teenager, my family lived in Texas for five months while my dad was trained at an Air Force base.

I made friends with our neighbor, this Texan kid a year or two younger than me whose family was waiting to ship out to Germany.

I think his name was Bobby.

Even if it wasn’t, it fits.

Bobby and I loved playing Monopoly; we would literally play 6-7 games a day.

We got down to a science.

We didn’t even need to count out our roles; to this day I know where I will land by sight.

On day I asked Bobby if he was a Christian.

He said, “I reckon I am; Momma said that we are Americans, and that means we are Christians.”

That is normal Christianity; when your faith is more about your cultural or family identity than genuine and complete devotion to Christ.

Sure, you might be moral, you might be a really nice person, you might even pray and love God, but in the end, he is a component of your life, not the center.

A part or the whole

Q You’ve said the “Sinner’s Prayer,” but is that Biblical Christianity?

Q In the NT, Jesus told us what the greatest command was; What was it?

He was quoting from Deuteronomy:

Deuteronomy 6:5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

While they mean something different by heart than we do – they saw the heart as the seat of intellect, like we say mind.

But soul included emotions, the net effect is the same.

~* The point is that we are to love God with all of our mental, emotional, and physical ability.

There are two ways we can view our priorities:

1. God gets the biggest piece of the pie.

2. God is the pie.

Q Which one do you think is the most Biblical?

Q What does “all your heart, soul, and might” leave?

~* Nothing – all means all (Hebrew or English); the Bible doesn’t know anything about priorities – God is the only priority,

A Checklist?

It is normal to just give God a piece of the pie; the bigger the piece the better of a Christian you are.

~* What’s the problem with this?

It is a problem of devotion and faithfulness.

The analogy of marriage expresses it well:

Men have a tendency to segment their lives; they have their work life and their home life and their friend life.

This isn’t entirely bad – when we are at work, it is good to be able to focus all of your energy to the task at hand.

But what can happen is that our wives can feel like they are a checkbox on our “to do” list:

~* Get up and eat breakfast: Check.

~* Go to work, like a boss: Check.

~* Call wife on lunch break: Check.

~* Go home and play with the kids: Check.

~* Talk to the wife and have sex: Check.

For some reason this doesn’t leave your wife feeling deeply cherished, and suddenly something on your list isn’t on hers!

Q Is God just another thing on your check list?

Q Would your devotion to God be enough for your spouse or boy~/girlfriend?

It is very easy to make your relationship with God about the religious obligations.

Go to church, pay tithe, do good deeds.

But that alone is as meaningful as the customary good bye kiss.

All or nothing

In Hosea, Israel hadn’t rejected God; they were going through all the motions:

They kept the rituals, they were still going to church and tithing, but the problem was that they also had little mistress gods on the side.

(ESV) Hosea 6:6-7 6 For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

7 But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me.

~* If we don’t get him everything, he doesn’t want anything; with God it’s all or nothing.

Q Isn’t that a little bit unreasonable?

~* What if you decided that your faithfulness to your wife only extended to your time at home:

So long as you were faithful to your wife at home, you were faithful; what happened at work with the secretary or on the business trip didn’t matter.

~* Marriage means that your wife is the center of your affection, that she is the center of your devotion; that’s how God feels.

This is the normal way to be a Christian: Here is the God part of your life and you are faithful to him there.

But then you have the other parts of your life.