Hosea 10:12 Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.
“Break up your fallow ground.” In this context, the Lord is referring to breaking up the ground overrun with weeds and thorns creating a hardness to produce righteous fruit.
A hard heart cannot love, and often cannot even receive it. A hard heart will block relationship with God and with others. Whatever the cause; anger, woundedness, bitterness, unforgiveness, the result will be a superficiality in relationship, an inability to empathize, and a corruption of your motivations. You will become manipulative, deceitful, proud, and unresponsive. God’s message, His word to you will be difficult to hear and you will resist it. Like a layer of rock under the shallow soil, where the rain cannot penetrate, love and truth will fail to penetrate your heart and affect your actions. Thus, a hard heart is deadly, because sin is petrified there, and the wages of sin is death.
How do you break up fallow ground? How do you change a hardened heart? You start with your will. You make a choice. You decide. Your decision is to soften, in spite of the way you feel, the things you remember, or have chosen to forget. Your decision is called “repentance”, a changing of the mind, a turning of the will, in the opposite direction. The power of the will to repent is astounding because it opens the door for God to heal and transform your heart; to rain His love upon you and remove bitterness, unforgiveness, anger, and hatred or any other sin that is hardening your heart. Do you want to love? Do you want to be loved? But your heart is hard? Try repentance. Test God’s power and will to heal and change you. But you must be willing to mourn. ” Blessed are them that mourn.” Repentance will open you to the rain of tears so that the pain and bitterness can pour out of you. But you will be amazed at what happens with your relationships. Love will enter and remain in your life; God’s love and love with others too.
Millions have tried it; repentance works. Make it a lifestyle, and you will live and walk in love.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]For centuries in Ethiopia, there have lived a people we now know as the Falashas. They kept all sorts of Biblical traditions and call themselves Beta Yisrael (House of Israel). As experts began to study the matter, it became clear that these were descendants of the Jewish people who came to Africa in ancient times and intermarried. Unbeknownst to many, a percentage of them became believers in Jesus over the years. Jesus (or Yeshua, as they called Him) became a part of their identity as Jewish people. Many Falashan Jews worshipped Jesus as their Messiah and continued to practice Jewish tradition.
So often in our walks with the Lord, we become focused on what we can see, what we can hear and what we can sense in the physical realm. Like that young man, we focus on the enemy’s attacks around and about us. At times we can get so focused on our physical circumstances that we forget that the Lord has already provided for us the victory!
Why is it that some believers seem to go much deeper in their walk with God than others? I believe it has to do with a desire to pursue God and not to stop until they feel His very presence in their lives. These believers decide not to settle for anything less than a growing, vibrant relationship with God, and God honors that desire for those who seek it.
This pivotal passage of scripture, Isaiah 52 and continuing into Isaiah 53, profiles a suffering servant whom the nation of Israel would not recognize. The spiritual leaders of Yeshua’s (Jesus) day were blinded to the messianic passages which pointed to the messiah’s role as a humble servant and bearer of sins.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of California Los Angeles wanted to find out, “if you had to choose between more time and more money, what would it be?” While they found most respondents answered, “more money”, they also found that those who preferred “more time” were generally happier! When I read this article, it reminded me of a story, that I’d like to share.
The Lord spoke to Moses, who led the children of Israel out of Egypt to be desperately cornered with the Red sea before them and Pharaoh’s chariots advancing upon them from behind. Overwhelmed with terror they cry out to Moses, “It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” Having just miraculously escaped from the miserable life of slavery, and only beginning their new life of freedom, the children of Israel were faced with the most dire threat to their existence.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve begun a series of devotions based on the Exodus wanderings of the Children of Israel, and their tragic mistakes which we can learn from and avoid. One powerful influence common to their failures was fear.