-Transcript-
00:36 Amen. Welcome to the program. Thank you for joining me.
00:42 Pastor Clark Covington here. We are looking today at seeking the Lord. Do you feel far off from God? Do you know others that say they just don’t, quote, feel God in their life? Now we don’t serve God by feelings.
00:57 We don’t worship God by just our feelings. But at the same time, when I hear someone say that, being in the ministry, I’ll often ask a question. Are you seeking Him? In which I’ll get a blank look often.
01:10 And then I’ll elaborate and say, are you reading the Bible? Are you praying without ceasing? Are you meditating on His Word? Are you saturating your life in godly music, godly preaching, and so forth?
01:26 Are you creating an environment where He would want to show up, where He would be welcome? Or are you grieving the Holy Spirit? Are you living double-minded? Are you living carnally? Are you living in the world? Are you trying to have one foot in, one foot out? Are you being friends with the world?
01:46 Are you listening to worldly music, watching worldly movies, hanging out with worldly friends, having worldly idols? And I know that that’s kind of a churchy answer, but think about it. If you are seeking God, right, He’s more likely to show up than if you are not. And if you are living within the world, you are grieving the Lord.
02:13 You’re grieving the Holy Spirit. And in the Bible, it clearly says that God hears the prayers of the righteous. Well, who are the righteous? Those that are living for Him, Amen. The righteous are those that have accepted Christ as Savior, and then Christ’s righteousness is imputed upon them.
02:30 And their sin debt has been given to Christ, and then He nailed it to His cross on Calvary. And as He died the worst death that anyone has ever died on the cross at Calvary, and He was buried three days in the ground, and three days represents, in the Jewish culture, a full death. There is no question that individual is dead.
02:48 And then Christ, of course we know He wasn’t dead, but was risen again on that third day, and walked the earth 40 days and 40 nights, and was seen by over 500, and ascended up to heaven, and is at the right hand of the Father to this day, Amen. When Christ did that for us, we’re saved, and we take on His righteousness when we believe on that, Amen.
03:12 So He’s already done it, it’s past tense, but when we believe on it, we’re saved. And once we’re saved, we have the Holy Spirit living within us. And the Bible commands us not to grieve the Holy Spirit.
03:24 Well, how would you grieve the Holy Spirit? You’d be living in the world. And the opposite, I always talk to our church about, how do you enrich the Holy Spirit?
03:37 How do you enliven the Holy Spirit? How do you feed the Holy Spirit? You know, you hear preachers talking about feeding on the Word, or feeding on Scripture. How do you feed the Holy Spirit?
03:44 With the Word, with Scripture, with things of God, with godly time, with meditation of godly things, studying the Scriptures, with serving God in some way, with getting out of yourself, with taking up your cross, and living for Him and not the world.
03:59 And when that happens, all of a sudden, a closeness with God will appear. Not because of anything that you did, but it is God’s program in His way, that we should have closeness with Him as we seek Him. Our text verse today, Hosea 10:12.
04:17 So to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy, break up your fallow ground, for it is time toseek the Lord, till He come and reign righteousness upon you. Hosea 10:12. So to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, till He come and reign righteousness upon you.
04:43 Now, let’s take a look at this verse. It’s an agricultural reference, is it not? Sowing, what is sowing? That’s planting seeds, scattering seed. So to yourselves in righteousness.
04:58 So live in righteousness, plant seeds of righteousness in your life. As I’ve described through the introduction here, as we live for God righteously, and we know that we don’t contain any righteousness on our own. The Bible says that none are righteous, not one.
05:12 Amen. So the Bible also says that we’ve all sinned, we’ve all fallen short. So we know that our righteousness doesn’t come from us, but from God.
05:22 So we sow to ourselves righteousness by living as Christ commanded us, by understanding that Christ died for us, and was buried, and was risen again for us, and believing in that, and on Christ Jesus, in the beautiful gospel message that is outlined in 1 Corinthians 15: 1-4. And then as we get close to Christ, we become like that bride of Christ, the Bible describes, one that is close and loving.
05:52 You know, if you think about this, if you are a woman, you’re a bride, and you have a bridegroom, you have someone you’re going to marry, amen, are you not close to that individual? Are you not closer to that individual than any other individual? I think you would be. So we sow to ourselves in righteousness, we live as Christ would live, we turn to God, we get close to him as we would our spouse, but even closer.
06:20 And then it says here in Hosea 10:12, we will reap mercy. Why will we reap mercy? Because it’s God’s mercy that He’s forgiven us of our sins and our trespasses, as we’ve accepted His free gift of salvation. It’s His mercy that is applied to us.
06:37 It’s nothing, again, that we have done. And his mercy will bring him close to us. That’s his grace, right? He comes close to us, not because we are worthy of coming close to.
06:48 Contrary, we are not. But because of what Christ did for us, and because of our faith, the Bible says that we are justified by faith. Because of our faith, we are shown mercy from God, and He will show up in our lives.
07:06 It says here to break up your fallow ground. You know, what is fallow ground? It’s ground or soil, which has been left unplanted for a period of time. In other words, fallow land is land left to rest and regenerate.
07:23 That’s one definition. Another, a field or several fields are taken out of crop rotation for a specific time, usually one to five years, depending on the crop, according to GardenKnowHow.com. So think about this. Fallow ground is ground that has been resting.
07:40 It’s ground that’s been unplanted. It’s ground that is rested and regenerated and ready to go. Well, what is Christ Jesus to us, if not the regeneration? Amen.
07:53 See, because when we were born, we were born to Adam. Amen. Even though you say, well, I was born to Chuck and Sally.
08:03 Well, okay, but Chuck and Sally, if you follow their history, or anyone else’s history, it all leads back to Adam and Eve, does it not? Adam and Eve, who are they? Well, Adam was the first man that God put on this earth. Amen. Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden.
08:19 And some say, well, Eve sinned first. It doesn’t matter. Adam is the head of the house.
08:25 So Eve sinned, Adam sinned, but Adam’s gonna take responsibility for sure. And he is called the first Adam. And as he sinned, and as sin entered the world, man was cast away from the garden.
08:34 Sin entered the picture, death entered the picture. Amen. And they were no longer in that garden.
08:41 And here we have this other garden reference telling us to break up that fallow ground and to regenerate. And what that means to regenerate means when we’re saved by the blood of Christ, we are born again, we are regenerated. We’ve been generated once, the old Adam, we’re born again to the second Adam, the last Adam, that’s Christ Jesus.
08:59 We are made like Christ. Our journey on this earth after we’re saved is to become more Christ-like each day. I heard some great preaching last night at a revival meeting.
09:10 Brother Jerry Stavinsky talking about the idea of trials and tribulations out of the book of James, building patience and perseverance. And this idea of patience not just being like, oh, you’re happy to wait a long time, but patience being that you’re formed in the fire to become something precious for the Lord, something golden for the Lord. Amen.
09:33 It was a beautiful message. And it goes right along with this. We are regenerated in Christ.
09:40 And so we are to seek the Lord. We are to seek Him till He comes and reigns righteousness upon us. Amen.
09:49 So as we seek Him, He will see us seeking Him in the ways that He has outlined, right? And He will reign righteousness upon us. I mean, think about this. Many people say, okay, I’m gonna seek the Lord.
10:00 I’m gonna just go feed the homeless. And I’m gonna pat myself on the back. I’m gonna go on social media and put all these pictures on there and say, hey, I fed the homeless.
10:08 Look at me. You know, that may not be seeking God. It certainly isn’t.
10:12 The Bible would say that you already have your reward. We are to seek the Lord quietly in our prayer closet, in our time, in our efforts, in all our ways. We are to seek Him.
10:26 We are to read His word, do things that aren’t gonna bring any accolades or any benefit to you or any status or any pride. No, we are to seek God humbly. We are to pray when no one’s watching.
10:39 We are to study when no one’s watching. We are to seek Him with all our heart, minds, and souls. And when we do that, eventually, we will have that reign of righteousness upon us.
10:50 We will have God’s righteousness rain down on us. We’ll have a closeness with God. We’ll be really good.
10:58 We won’t have any issues. Now, of course, you may have problems here or there, but spiritually, you will be close with God like most will not. It’s time to seek the Lord.
11:08 But if we have these instructions, we have these directives, how do we actually mine that fallow ground? How do we actually sow those seeds to get a harvest from God? Think about it. You know, it’s not easy. And this week on KJV Cafe, on the rest of the episodes, I’m gonna focus on methods that we can use to seek God earnestly and to find Him in our everyday lives.
11:34 Because I’ve preached a lot about, read the Bible, pray, read the Bible, pray. And I believe that is God’s program for our lives. At the same time, this world is so wicked, and we live in this world, and people in this world are so wicked, that we’re constantly being pulled away from this idea of read the Bible and pray.
11:53 In an instant gratification world, a world where our cell phone’s always buzzing and dinging and all these other things, it’s very difficult to say, okay, I’m just going to read the Bible and pray. And so I’ve come up with strategies here, by the helping of the Holy Spirit, that we will discuss this week on how we can read the Bible and pray without even thinking about it in some regards, without tripping over ourselves, without disappointing ourselves. Amen? Because in the end, in the end here, to seek the Lord, it starts with a focus on Him, making Him a priority.
12:28 Amen. Look at Hosea here, 10:12, our text verse. This is an action verse here. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy.
12:39 These are actions, right? You’re planting the seeds, you’re reaping the harvest, you’re breaking up that fallow ground. My wife and I borrowed a tiller from my brother-in-law one time, and we broke up that ground, and I’ll be honest with you, in our backyard, we broke it up. I don’t think we ever grew anything in that garden, but we broke that land up, and it wasn’t easy to break up.
13:01 It was not easy. It was hard work, Amen. It took all day just to break up a section of that ground. I don’t know if it’s the red clay North Carolina dirt, but this ground was hard to break up, and this is a big old machine, and we were trying to get that ground ready for a harvest.
13:17 Certainly it was fallow, certainly it had plenty time to regenerate, and it was ready, and we broke it up, and it was hard work, and I imagine, again, to follow that through, if we knew what we were doing, and we were able to plant the right crop and so forth, we would have reaped a great harvest, and that’s what God is getting at through Hosea here. He’s telling us, if you go through these hard efforts of going ahead and planting that precious seed, sowing that seed of righteousness, seeking Him in all your ways, if you go through that, and God will see the context in which you live, He’ll see the temptations that face you, the snares, the problems, and He will bless you as you go through it. He will give you the strength.
13:56 The Bible says, when I am weak, He is made strong, Amen. And He will bless you, and He will get you through it, and you will reap a great harvest. Now, for time’s sake, I’ve got to stop here, but I promise you, you’ll want to hear the rest of these messages as we dive into practical tactics to get close to God.
14:14 Thank you for listening.Take care. God bless and Amen.