TIME TO SEEK THE LORD

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 – Hosea 10:12.

“Hosea lived at a time when the world was crumbling around him. Israel had just gone through one of the richest and most luxurious chapters of its history. Men had wasted themselves in godless living, with the result that the wrath of God had begun to fall upon Israel. The world was divided into two armed camps: Assyria, squared off against Egypt, with Israel in between.
God summoned Hosea to call a nation to repent, that they might not be crushed, but cleansed. Listen to the pungence of the text: “It is time to seek the Lord!” That was the great message God gave to the great four who were close contemporaries: Amos, Joel, Isaiah, and also Hosea! Giant men of God whom the Lord used to preach to a decadent world.

If the luxury that soured into license in Israel brought the wrath of God… (we) do well to listen…Wise is the nation of men who read history and repent…

But, why should men seek the Lord? What specifics are there? The first: The brevity of life. Most of us live as though the world were all there is. We behave as though there were no accounting, nor a hereafter for which we ought to prepare.

The Bible affirms that life is brief. James 4:14 says: “It is a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” And, the Apostle Peter, in chapter 1, verse 24, of his first letter says: “All the flesh (of man) is as grass…and the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.”

Our world greets aging with cosmetics, and decks it with colourful camouflage to disguise the withering of the years…No matter how extravagantly we expend ourselves in life, or how carefully we protect our health, the Bible says: “It is appointed unto man once to die…” We need to seek the Lord because life, itself, slips through our fingers.

With the shortness of life comes the second reason to seek the Lord: …Jesus once said that “The fields are white unto harvest,” implying that great possibilities were at our fingertips to do tremendous things for God… but, harvest not gathered at the ripening is lost! He was warning that those opportunities would not always be present. We need to seize the moment, and make it count for God!

Men who do not seek the Lord are not sensitive to the spirit’s voice…caught in the confusion of the immediate, they lose both eye and ear for the eternal!”