The best of intentions

Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unploughed ground, for it is time to seek the Lord
Hosea 10:12

One month into the new year and our resolutions and best intentions are probably already beginning to fall by the wayside as the pressures of day-to-day life take their toll on us. My own resolution to exercise instead of taking a lunch break every day failed in the first week of the year, although I have managed since then to get back on track!

Through Hosea God was speaking to a people whose hearts were not for the things of God, urging them back to him. As I was preparing for a recent evening sermon on 1 Corinthians 13, that famous passage about love, I was struck by a commentator who said that our emotions reveal our values and beliefs. As I pondered this I started to wonder what my emotions said of what I value and believe. What is my emotional response to people and situations – is it always a response of love that reflects their intrinsic worth in God’s eyes? Or do I find myself irritated or angry by something they have said or done? As I thought about it I realised that in some instances my responses were good, but with a moment of honesty I realised that I also had some poor responses. I wonder what you realise about yourself as you notice your emotional response to people and situations?

To put this in Hosea terms, when we find ourselves not responding in love it is an indicator of hard unploughed ground in our hearts. We cannot reap the fruit of unfailing love because there is hard unploughed ground. Yet the call is to break up the hard unploughed ground and to sow for ourselves righteousness, reaping the fruit of unfailing love.

Whatever your pledges were as you entered 2015, one thing God is asking of each of us is to break up the hard unploughed ground in our hearts – the selfishness, individualism, envy and so on. Ploughing is hard work and takes time, but God’s call is clear. Then we need to ask God to sow his love afresh in our hearts as we chose to put aside the things that harden our hearts so that he can grow his love in us. As we do this we will reap the fruit of unfailing love as our emotional response to people and situations changes, reflecting God’s love into the lives of others, bringing light into their lives, and introducing them to the God who loves them so very much.

Let us pledge to make 2015 the year when our hearts are ploughed and entirely yielded to God and his purposes so that we can reap the fruit of unfailing love as we seek him.