Quickly to my rescue

Every year I read through the Bible. Right now I am reading Hosea, written by that prophet who was told by God to illustrate the unfaithfulness of His people by marrying a harlot. Hosea did what God told him to do.

I started thinking of the things God has asked me to do, none of them even close to being that difficult. Then my mind wandered from the text for a few minutes and I began feeling heavy for all the times I have disobeyed Him. I feel as if I didn’t teach my family as I should have, nor interceded for them nearly as much as I ought.

Then I read Hosea 4:6: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.”

Only someone with wayward kids would know the effect that verse slammed on me. With a lump of sorrow for a past I cannot change, I turned to my devotional guide and discovered that the reading for today is the same as yesterday based on Isaiah 44:3, “For I will pour water on him who is thirsty, and floods on the dry ground; I will pour My Spirit on your descendants, and My blessing on your offspring.”

The first verse from Hosea is what God can do against those who disobey Him. I know that is true, yet immediately the enemy began telling me all was lost. Because I failed, God would never bless me or my family. My situation is hopeless. Yet very quickly, the God who can do all things did not let that hopelessness take hold. He immediately gave me the second verse to remind me that when I am deficient, when I fail and cannot do anything the way I should, He is able to do all that I long for and He can bless whoever He wants to bless.

The reading from the devotional in Ears from Harvested Sheaves blesses me also. With a bit of editing to personalize it (and because it is written in a very wordy manner), here is what it says:

How often does my soul, born and taught of God, feel that I am “dry ground!” I desire to be adorned with every grace of the Spirit within and with every good and godly fruit without. There is nothing too holy, too heavenly, too spiritual, or too gracious but that I long to experience and produce it in my life. But I know I cannot by any exertion of my own produce this fruitfulness. Just as a barren field cannot convert itself into a fruitful garden without being tilled by human hand or without rain from the sky, I know the barrenness produced by my own exertions.
Yet the Lord knows the desire of my heart and my mourning over this barrenness. He gives me this sweet and gracious promise, “I will pour floods upon the dry ground.”
A partial shower would not be enough; dry ground quickly absorbs a few drops of summer rain. Floods must come, either from the skies or from the streams of that “river which makes glad the city of God” to produce this mighty change. These floods are the promises poured into my soul along with the love of God shed abroad in my heart.

God speaks to me with reassurance that when my heart is not fearful or defensive but instead honest and contrite, Christ will manifest Himself and the power of His atoning blood in my life. From Him and from His Word come an inflow of grace and truth that washes away the guilt and crud of sin and flows like a river of peace into my heart.

Not only that, my family is not under His curse. He is powerful and able to pour out His Spirit on them as well, doing in their lives that which they are far too barren to do for themselves.