I want you to turn with me this
morning to the prophecy of Hosea, the sixth
chapter.
The sixth chapter of the prophecy of Hosea.
I was telling the folk in Jamaica, from
which island I have just come this last
Saturday with Mr. Wildish, that just over a
year ago I knew that I was facing
the possibility that my ministry was over and
that I would not again be able to
speak for the Lord in public.
It seemed as if the bottom had dropped
out of everything.
And at that time, when I was in
a nursing home, I was visited by one
whom you will all know, Dr. Martin Lloyd
-Jones, from Westminster Chapel.
If you want to buy a good book,
buy his books on the Sermon on the
Mount.
They're a masterpiece.
He happened to be speaking at the anniversary
services of my church, and he came along
to the nursing home to see me.
And he spoke to me, prayed for me,
I shall never forget how he knelt down
and laid hold of God for his healing
touch.
And in the course of speaking he said,
you know, I met a few years ago,
some years ago, a Welsh evangelist who had
the same trouble as you had.
Only much worse.
And he was laid aside from preaching and
from all work for two or three years.
I often heard him.
He was a fiery preacher.
But after he'd come back from his illness,
I went to hear him again, and again,
and again.
And I never could hear him after that
without wanting to weep, because Jesus Christ was
so absolutely real to him and through him.
The fire had all gone, but in place
of the fire there was a tenderness and
a love which spoke of the reality of
Christ.
Somehow that day a gleam of hope came
to me, and I said, Lord, do that
for me.
I shall never be able to speak again
in the same way as I did before.
But if only the tenderness of Christ can
get through, that's what matters.
And that's why in recent months I have
spent much time in this prophecy of Hosea,
which is the most tender, most loving, yet
most dreadful and most solemn of all the
prophets of the Old Testament.
We'll just read this chapter together.
Now, you would do me a good turn.
I wonder if you'd help me by reading
it to me.
Hosea, chapter 6.
I'm sure you've all got your Bibles.
It's a Bible hour, or you can borrow
one.
Hosea, chapter 6.
I've given you plenty of time to find
the place.
Are you ready?
Then go.
Lord, with thy word open before us, we
say, speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.
Speak just now some message to meet my
need, which thou only dost know.
Speak now through thy holy word, and make
me see some wonderful truth thou hast to
show to me.
For Jesus' sake, amen.
Verse 4.
O Ephraim, this is God speaking.
O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee?
Then missing out the next phrase.
For your goodness is as a morning cloud
and as the early dew.
It goeth away.
This prophecy is a most amazing revelation of
the struggle in the heart of God over
the soul of a nation.
As he fought to win this people in
surrender to himself.
Now at once you may say, God does
not deal with nations nowadays.
And therefore that cannot have any particular application
to us.
In a sense that is true.
But every nation has a soul.
Has a secret to its strength or to
its weakness.
And I suggest to you that the soul
of a nation is the church.
Is the body of people within that country
who have been redeemed by the blood of
Christ.
And who of whom the Lord Jesus would
say, ye are the light of the world.
I think back to my little island home
in Britain.
Fifty million people in it.
I read in the newspaper the day after
Christmas.
That in Britain during the Christmas week the
nation spent no less than three hundred million
pounds on intoxicating drinks.
That is about eight hundred and fifty million
dollars.
Fifty million people.
And if you count among them children and
those who are old you realize something of
what that means.
That's three hundred times more than is spent
in our country on missionary enterprise in a
year.
And as I thought of that with a
horror of it.
It's easier to stand in judgment.
But then I asked myself how much more
did Christian people spend in Christmas week.
On buying Christmas presents and exchanging Christmas greetings.
Than they do in missionary enterprise in the
whole year.
I believe there's an ache in the heart
of God over that little country.
And if I may say so too in
America.
I lived long enough here to recognize that
within this land there is a tremendous company
of believing godly people.
Whose hearts hunger for all that God has
for them.
But there is also a vast number of
nominal Christians who are heedless and indifferent to
the things of God.
And carry little of his burden upon their
hearts.
The struggle of God for the soul of
a nation.
And whose ear was given a humanly impossible
task.
If I may put in the picture of
the background for a moment.
You will remember perhaps that he prophesied he
preached in the northern kingdom of Israel.
And was a contemporary of Isaiah in the
kingdom of Judah in the south.
He was preaching to a nation which had
already rebelled against God.
They had revolted against his rule.
Of course they had not become pagan.
They had not become atheist.
They had set up a form of religion
which as nearly as possible was like the
real thing.
Which they had known when they were all
one nation with Judah.
Satan's masterpiece is not to turn out a
nation of atheists.
It is to turn out counterfeit to reality.
The devil has a motto.
And it is give them anything but Jesus.
Give them anything but the cross.
And the nearer he can get his counterfeit
to be like the real thing the better
is pleased.
And this was a nation of counterfeit religion.
With all the sacrifice and all the form
and all the outward ceremony.
That looked like reality but it lacked the
power to do the one thing essential.
And that was to bring men into fellowship
with Jehovah.
The one thing that an aching longing heart
desired was not provided for in that system
of religion.
And into that situation Hosea was called to
preach.
The nation had gone from bad to worse.
Its priesthood was corrupt therefore its people were
corrupt.
And that's always a principle.
If the pulpit is rotten the pew is
rotten.
No man can lead a congregation nearer to
God than he lives himself.
No man can raise a congregation to a
higher standard of life than that upon which
he lives.
A corrupt priesthood means a corrupt people.
And a minister not right with God means
a congregation not right with God.
A minister who is prayerless, busy, fuzzy, active
will produce a congregation which doesn't pray but
which works.
But is utterly ineffective for the kingdom.
And into that situation God sent Hosea.
What a hopeless task.
From the human angle he would be judged
by a standard of and would be reckoned
a complete failure.
A church can forgive a minister anything provided
he gets results.
But if he hasn't baptisms and if he
hasn't got conversions he's no good.
Pity the poor missionary.
Some who are the very cream of the
Christian church, I know, who've been in India
for a lifetime and haven't seen a single
convert.
Are they failures?
My friend what a false standard it is
to judge a ministry by success.
The only standard to judge a ministry is
by whether or not in the course of
a man's ministry that man himself becomes more
like the Lord Jesus.
More lovely in his character.
More gentle in his life.
And Hosea is sent into this situation to
preach.
To declare the word of God to that
people.
But there was a price to pay.
God couldn't give the man the honour of
such a strategic ministry as that unless he
was willing to pay a terrific price.
And you remember the story.
The first three chapters tell us.
Hosea, early in his ministry, was married.
At the command of God.
And there were three children to the marriage.
And then, tragedy broke into the home.
Goma, his wife, was unfaithful and left him.
He could have looked back upon that marriage
and said to him, said to himself, that's
the biggest disaster of my life but God
ordered it.
And the home broke up.
An all too familiar story.
But then something very strange and wonderful happened.
God said to Hosea, go and get her
back again.
And take her back to yourself.
And so he had to swallow his pride.
And he went down to the slave market
and bought her for half price.
Just how low she had sunk.
Half the price of a slave and a
day's rations of food.
She was just a prostitute, you see.
And he brought her back to his side,
to his wife, to be his wife once
more.
And out of that experience, Hosea learned that
the one who suffers most when a man
sins is the one who is sinned against,
is the God against whom he sins.
Hosea learned something of the suffering that came
from the sin of his wife in the
home.
And then he learned something more of the
tenderness and the love and the forgiving mercy
of God which would go to any lengths
to rescue a soul that had fallen.
Had he been sent to preach in that
situation, without that lesson, he would have thundered
hellfire at the whole lot of them.
He'd have told them in no uncertain sound
what he thought of that country.
But God didn't want him to do that.
The only hope for that country was that
they would understand what was the true character
of the heart of God.
God filled Hosea with love, with tenderness, with
sweetness, and yet with firmness.
And therefore he went to preach to that
people as the very voice of God for
the hour in which he lived.
My dear brethren and sisters, God has never
left himself without witnesses.
God has his man for this twentieth century,
his man for your town, for your church.
But he's got to pay a price.
And the Lord has to bring some of
us very, very low down before we learn
to pay it.
And Hosea began to preach to the people.
And you get something of the theme of
his message in the previous chapter.
Just glance at it one second.
Verse twelve.
Verse fourteen.
God speaks through his servant and says, Meet
them with disaster and with tragedy, the moth
and the lion.
Do you know anything about that in your
life?
Do you know anything about the hidden, unseen,
almost unnoticed, steady decay of spiritual experience, eating
away strength and life and vitality?
And do you know anything about the sudden
onslaught of some tragic circumstance and experience which
has come with some shattering blow upon your
life?
That's how God was going to deal with
this nation.
And then he said, I will go and
return to my place till they acknowledge their
offense and seek my face.
In their affliction they will seek me early.
I'll leave them alone, said God, until they
acknowledge their offense.
Until.
When God withdraws the sense of his presence
from us all, it is his last resort.
He doesn't do it willingly.
He doesn't want to deal with people that
way.
But if they won't learn any other way,
that's all he can do.
And when God withdraws the sense of his
presence, he doesn't withdraw his government.
A man or a woman are always in
God's hands in every circumstance, never out of
his sovereign control.
I will go and return unto my place
until.
Thank the Lord for that word, until.
The door for a return to the Lord
is wide open.
And no sooner had that word been uttered,
than there is sounded out by his ear
the great appeal from which our text is
taken.
Full of the promise of blessing.
God has been to you, he says, as
the moth.
He has been to you as the lion.
I trust that the Holy Spirit this morning
has applied that to your heart.
There's a hymn of John Newton's that I
don't like.
But if we were honest, I wonder if
we wouldn't sing it.
Really, that would be the song of our
hearts.
Oh, for a closer walk with God.
A calm and heavenly friend.
A light to shine along the road that
leads me to the land.
Where is the blessedness that once I knew
when first I saw the Lord?
The soul-refreshing view of Jesus and his
Word.
Where?
You'll go back to the day of your
conversion, can you do that?
I can.
Do you recall?
Oh, the simplicity of it, the sweetness of
it, the wonder of it, the thrill of
it.
Like Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, you gave
three leaps for joy.
The burden had snapped and fallen from your
back into the sepulcher, never to be seen
again.
And my word, you went round shouting hallelujah.
It was all so wonderful and Christ was
all so real.
My brother, my sister, is it like that
today?
Has it been like that with you?
Has God been dealing with you like the
moth?
And has he even dealt with you like
the lion?
And has he even taken the last step
and said, I will withdraw?
He never takes his Holy Spirit from us.
When we're born again, we have him.
But the consciousness of his presence and the
effectiveness of his power is gone.
And like a train, a mainline train running
along the line, and it shuts off the
power, it goes on for miles on its
own momentum.
And you've been going on for miles like
that.
Preaching, singing, talking, witnessing, speaking, serving, bearing testimony.
But oh God, how dead it's all been.
How barren.
And in your heart you know it.
And in that situation, Hosea made this plea.
Come, and I would make it with you.
Come, let us return unto the Lord.
For he hath torn and he will heal
us.
He hath smitten and he will bind us
up.
And suddenly, there breaks into that appeal.
It almost seems as if, just as if
God, as if Hosea in the activist preaching
is interrupted.
And heaven steps in.
While Hosea is yet talking.
And still appealing.
Let us return unto the Lord.
After two days he will revive us.
And the third day he will raise us
up.
And we shall live in his sight.
And God suddenly breaks in and says, Oh
Ephraim, what shall I do to thee?
Thy goodness is as a morning cloud.
As the early dew, it goeth away.
Here is an amazing, amazing text.
Amazing revelation.
It is the revelation of God in a
difficulty.
The struggle of God for the soul of
a nation.
The struggle of God for his dear child.
Let me examine with you this difficulty.
And then, let us ask ourselves the answer
to it.
What is this difficulty?
The more I think about it, the more
it staggers me.
I can understand a man saying, What must
I do to be saved?
I wish I had them say it more
often.
It is the revelation of God in a
difficulty.
The struggle of God for the soul of
a nation.
The struggle of God for his dear child.
Let me examine with you this difficulty.
And then, let us ask ourselves the answer
to it.
What is this difficulty?
The more I think about it, the more
it staggers me.
I can understand a man saying, What must
I do to be saved?
I wish I had them say it more
often.
But this is not a picture of a
man in difficulty because he can't find God.
It is a picture of God in difficulty
because he can't deal with a man.
Now, that's very arresting.
What does it mean?
Wherein lies the difficulty?
The answer is given.
And please note very carefully that the difficulty
does not lie with human sin and failure.
Oh, the whole of this precious book is
full of the story of that.
But sin never creates a difficulty to God.
It is an opportunity for him to display
his healing power.
As soon as faith and repentance are exercised,
and faith is placed in the divine remedy,
the blood of Jesus, God steps in to
save.
He's never failed to do that, never once.
Anyone who truly repents and truly believes, that
moment steps out of darkness into light.
Oh, sin is no difficulty.
Now, perhaps that word is just a word
of comfort to someone in this church this
morning.
Perhaps you labor under a sense of failure.
You imagine that it's all too big a
mess for God ever to come in and
clean up.
My dear friend, as I pass, I would
say to you today that our message of
that be your thinking is, though your sins
be as scarlet, they shall be white as
snow.
Though they be red like crimson, they shall
be as white as wool.
Sin is never God's difficulty.
Though the defeat and the bondage may have
gone on for years and may have gone
an awful long way, it can't go so
far as the power of the blood of
Jesus to save you from it.
And though the tragedy may have gone deep,
deep down to the depths of your soul,
the cross can go deeper.
Just let him have his way with you.
And in answer to your willingness, he's able.
Sin isn't God's difficulty.
Then what is God's difficulty?
Here it is.
Your goodness is as a morning cloud.
Not sin, but goodness.
That's the difficulty with God.
Now isn't that arresting?
Goodness as the morning cloud.
As the only dew which goeth away.
Beautiful.
Every blade of grass shining in the sun.
But the moment the sun comes up, it's
gone.
Never produces any harvest.
Never accomplishes anything permanent.
God's difficulty with the soul is not created
by its sinfulness, but by its goodness.
Now what is meant by this word goodness?
In the margin of the authorized version, you
will find mercy or kindness.
I am no Hebrew scholar, and I don't
know a word of it, and I don't
want to pose as one.
You can go a good long way with
a concordance, and it sounds quite impressive to
say that the Hebrew meaning is this.
But having disposed of any imagination that you
think I have any scholarly bent, I understand
that the root meaning of this word goodness
is, in the Hebrew, bending the neck.
Submission and goodness and kindness and mercy are
all the outcome of submission.
O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee?
For thy submission is like a morning cloud.
Do you see it?
God says, I will withdraw myself until they
acknowledge their offense and seek my face.
Then Hosea pleads with them to return, and
God breaks in.
Ah, Hosea, but that's the trouble with this
people.
They've come back to me so often, they've
returned so frequently, they're always doing it.
They've submitted so sincerely, but it's like a
morning cloud.
I've looked for something permanent, but it never
takes place.
And a way down in the southern country,
Isaiah was saying the same thing to Judah.
Listen, my beloved hath a vineyard in a
very fruitful hill.
He fenced it, gathered up the stone, planted
it with the choicest vine, built a tower
in the midst of it, and a winepress
therein.
Looked that it should bring forth grapes, and
it brought forth wild grapes.
What could have been done more to my
vineyard than I have not done in it?
Wherefore, when I asked that it should bring
forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes.
Now do you see God's difficulty?
I want to put it very clearly, very
simply to you.
Not my sins, which may bear like a
mountain, He can deal with them.
But my submission, which in all sincerity I
have given to Him, perhaps at Keswick Convention,
every year I've attended it.
And I've resolved, and I've determined, and I've
yielded, and I've consecrated myself, and it lasted
twenty-four hours.
Because I refused to give up the principle
upon which I lived my life.
I refused to admit that I was beaten.
I thought that I could still, with help
from reading my Bible, with help in prayer,
I could still live the Christian life.
I could still make myself a good Christian.
Polish up the flesh.
Improve it.
Refine it.
Sanctify it.
I will make myself live this Christian life,
and I'll come to Keswick and take all
the notes of sermons that I can ever
hear, and I'll seek to put them into
action, and I'll do my best.
And all you do, my friend, is to
try and make yourself, just think of it
with me, try and make yourself, who couldn't
even live an unconverted life to your own
satisfaction, that's why you turned to Jesus, try
and make yourself live a Christian life.
Hmm.
No wonder the psychiatrists are kept busy.
No wonder that many Christians have to live
with coffee and tranquilizing pills.
All the tensions in the heart that says,
I will be God.
There's a chorus that we sometimes sing in
the old country.
Perhaps you know it.
If my memory serves me rightly, it's so
long since I've sung it, but it goes
something like this.
Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in
me.
All his wondrous compassion and purity.
All thou spirit divine.
All my nature refined.
Huh.
What a hope.
If that chorus said, all thou spirit divine,
make all thy nature mine, then I could
go along with it.
My dear friend, Keswick does not teach, simply
because the New Testament does not teach, sinless
perfection.
Keswick teaches and the New Testament teaches sinful
corruption.
And the only goodness that you and I
will ever know is the power and life
of God, the Holy Ghost, replacing and taking
the place of the corruption of the flesh.
Oh, Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee
for thy goodness is as a morning cloud.
Course it is.
You've responded and surrendered and stood up and
hold your hands up and signed cards and
gone back to your church and you're determined
to live the life and make good and
I tell you, some of you, you're back
here in the same old mess as you
were before.
And I will withdraw myself, saith the Lord,
from all sense of my presence until we've
been so sincere with our determination to pray,
our determination to give, our determination to serve,
our determination to witness.
We bought books by the latest Keswick speakers
from the bookstore and they're half read and
half marked and they haven't been completed and
we left the sanctuary and left the convention
and went back into the rush and bustle
of business and home and we've never faced
this issue really in our lives at all.
That's God's difficulty.
It's expressed perhaps most, most searchingly in the
14th verse of the 7th chapter.
And they have not cried unto me with
their heart when they howled upon their beds.
They assemble themselves for corn and wine and
they rebel against me.
There it is.
Oh yes, we can do this.
We go back and howl upon our beds.
Howl at the mess we've made and the
failures we've been and the resolutions we've failed
to carry through.
But we haven't turned to the Lord and
cried to him and we've come again for
corn and wine at another Keswick convention and
yet in our heart basically is a great
big realm of rebellion against God.
My doctor told me I wanted to speak
for 20 minutes and to keep quiet.
I'm not doing very well this morning.
I have one more minute to go.
Let me say to you because I must
say this and we'll develop it more clearly
in the week.
What's God's answer to all this?
What's the solution?
Well, here it is.
Let me read to you the opening verses
as they appear in the revised version.
Come, let us return unto Jehovah.
For he hath torn and he will heal
us.
He hath smitten and he will bind us
up.
After two days will he revive us.
On the third day he will raise us
up and we shall live before him.
Let us know.
Let us follow on to know.
Jehovah.
Notice this word.
Let us.
Let us return.
Let us know.
Let us follow on to know.
Verse 6.
The knowledge of God is more than burnt
offering.
David said, Lord, unite my heart to fear
thy name.
The Lord is saying to you this morning,
I can deal with your sin.
But I cannot, cannot deal with you as
long as you insist on maintaining the place
of sovereignty, the place of control.
As long as you say self can do
it, I can make it with God's help.
One minute you swept off your feet by
emotion and the next minute you become as
cold as steel.
Look at the language of this people at
the end of the prophecy.
And with this I must close.
Chapter 14, verse 4.
I will heal their backsliding.
I will love them freely for my anger
is turned away from him.
I will be as the dew unto Israel.
He shall grow as the lily and cast
forth his fruits as Lebanon.
His branches shall spread and his beauty shall
be as the olive tree and his smell
as Lebanon.
They that dwell under his shadow shall return.
They shall revive as the corn and grow
as the vine.
The scent thereof shall be as the wine
of Ephraim.
Ephraim shall say, what have I any more
to do with idols?
God says, I've heard him.
I've observed him.
I'm like a green, like a green fir
tree from me.
Where is thy fruit found?
My friend, listen.
The only good thing about a Christian is
Jesus.
Have you made that discovery?
I would close, I think, by reading you
the last verse of this prophecy.
Who is wise and he shall understand these
things.
Prudent and he shall know them.
For the ways of the Lord are right
and the just shall walk in them.
But the transgressors shall fall therein.
Oh, what shall I do unto thee?
Thy goodness is like a morning cloud.
I wonder if in this closing moment, before
we bow in prayer, you would realize that
your struggle and defeat and failure have all
been because you've refused to forsake your belief
in your own goodness.
Will you get to the place of despair
in it this morning?
The place where you say, Lord, I can
never try again.
I just give up.
Praise the Lord.
That's the place of victory.
For then the goodness of Jesus will replace
that which is of yourself, which is like
the morning cloud.