Good evening, let's turn if you
would to the book of Hosea chapter 10 Isaiah Jeremiah Ezekiel Hosea
Daniel Hosea We're going to look at a portion
of one verse of Scripture tonight as subject to my message tonight. Hosea 10, verse 12. We'll read
the whole verse. 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." This verse where it says, for it is time to seek
the Lord, this struck me. And in reading about it, many
of the old writers said it's high time to seek the Lord. But
they said you could also read it, it's high pastime to seek
the Lord. And so what we read here and
what it is saying is, first, we're giving a reproof and a
warning to the house of Israel. And secondly, we're also given
words of wisdom that it's time to seek the Lord. The implication
being that He's not being sought and this is danger. If you would,
turn back a page to chapter 8 of Hosea. We'll start in verse 13
here. Well, let's start in verse 11.
Because Ephraim has made many altars to sin, altars shall be
unto him to sin. I have written to him the great
things of my law, but they were counted as a strange thing. They
sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of my offerings and eat it, but
the Lord accepteth them not. Now will he remember their iniquity
and visit their sins, and they shall return to Egypt. For Israel
hath forgotten his Maker." You see the danger of when you forget
something, when you've forgotten your Maker, you don't seek after
Him. Go down into verse 1, chapter 9. Rejoice not, O Israel, for
joy is other people. For thou hast gone a-whoring
from thy God, and hast loved reward upon every corn floor."
So here, this gone a-whoring, Israel's left its God and gone
after anything common. On every corn floor, it doesn't
mean anything, holds no value, so he's forgotten God and sought
into other things. Now in verse 9 of Chapter nine,
they have deeply corrupted themselves and as in the days of Gibeah,
therefore he will remember their iniquity. He will visit their
sins. Verse 10, I found Israel like
grapes in the wilderness. I saw your fathers as the first
ripe and the fig tree it hurt first time, but they went to
Baal Peor and separated themselves unto that shame and their abominations
were according as they loved. So you see here, Israel has not
only left his maker and forgot him, but it's gone after that
which the Lord says is abominable before him. And it turns out
that that's what they really loved. That's what they sought
after and put in a high place. And in verse 1 of chapter 10,
Israel, you're an empty vine. he bringeth forth fruit unto
himself." So, can we, each of us, honestly say in that which
we do, are we... Are we serving the way we serve
unto the Lord or are we really serving the desires and the desires
of my flesh and my own heart? So you see, Israel seared my
heart in reading that because when I look at what I do and
what I say, is there really a motive in it in any capacity other than
serving myself in some way? And to be honest, there's not.
I can be honest and say that. So the Lord's Word is powerful.
It cuts to the heart, divides us under soul and spirit. These
things are truth. Whether we like to hear them
or not, it's still the truth. And God's will is not going to
be opposed or thwarted. All He is is holy, true, and
right. And He does His own will and
none will stand against Him. And in Hosea 10, verse 10 of
chapter 10, based on all these things we just read, this is
the Lord God speaking, and He says, It is in my desire that
I should chastise them, and the people shall be gathered against
them, and they shall bind themselves into two furrows. So you see,
can this be said of us? Would the Lord God be right in
saying, I'm going to chastise me? You, would he be right in
doing that? Would he be right in wiping me
out for my sin? Nobody else considered just,
you examine yourself, your own sin, would the Lord be right
in punishing you for just your sin and nobody else? Well, keep
reading. And Ephraim is as an heifer that
is taught, and loveth to tread out the corn. So Ephraim knows
he's got the bucket of corn around his neck when he's plowing, and
he eats the sweet corn, he's got a good life. So he's saying,
but I passed over upon her fair neck, and I'll make Ephraim to
ride. Judah shall plow and Jacob shall
break up his clods." So what he's doing is giving a picture
of plowing a field here. So you've got Ephraim, he's saying,
no longer are you going to tread along and eat the sweet corn
and have this easy life. You're going to go into the field
and you're going to drag a plow through the earth. Saying that
he's going to, you know, this great chastisement upon him. And then Jacob, he's saying,
Jacob, you're going to break up the clods. Judah's going to
plow, Ephraim's going to have to be ridden, and then Jacob
is going to break up the clods of the earth after it's already
been tilled up. So if you've ever tried to walk
through a field after it's been plowed, there's big clods and
you try to step and it's really hard to walk. But still, you
have to break up all those clods before you're able to use that
good ground because you can't plant good seed. and the clods
in the ground aren't broken down, but yet someone has to do it
and he's putting this chastisement upon Ephraim, Judah, and Jacob,
tribes of Israel. So we're giving a warning and
words of wisdom to turn and to repent and to seek the Lord.
It's time to seek the Lord. So one thing that struck me as
I was preparing this message You're only gonna seek what you
have to find. See, you're not gonna seek after
it if you're just told to do it. You're only gonna seek that
which you must have, that which you must find. And what is it
that I'm to seek the Lord for? And I've got five points to my
message tonight. First, we seek to the Lord for
the forgiveness of sins. Secondly, for life, the quickening
of the Holy Spirit. Third, His presence. fourth,
his will, and fifth, to abolish my false refuges. So first, we're
gonna deal with seeking unto the Lord for the forgiveness
of sins. But what about joy, peace, love,
assurance, all the fruits of the spirit, all the things that
when we look at the many people in this world who would call
themselves religious, these are the things that they seek after.
They seek after these outward, earthly things that you and I
can see and experience, but what about those things? Well, we
do need all those things, but without the forgiveness of sins,
all those things are meaningless. I must have my sins forgiven.
You see, because my sins are what separate me from God. My
sins are what require payment. Payment must be done to have
justice. Now we live in a day where foreclosure
is a word that we all know and understand with what we're seeing
in our economy and the housing market. If I can't pay, I'll
just start over. So that debt's now gone because
I can't pay for it. Well, there's no foreclosure
and there's no bankruptcy with God. You see, He requires payment
down to the last mite for every sin and every trespass and every
iniquity that's committed against Him. And there's no way that
we can ever pay that through anything that we can do. So I
need forgiveness because sinning is what I do. It's what I commit
because it's really what I am. It's what's in my heart. It's
my nature. I'm corrupt, and all I do is
sin. This is what we call the flesh.
I'm a servant of sin. Scripture says that man drinketh
iniquity like the water. All of which, those who sin,
whose nature is sin, and who commit sin, who are guilty before
God, they'll stand before the judgment seat of God, and they'll
be found guilty for their sins. And there's no more glory left
in me at that point. When you stand, we may think,
you know, ourselves to be something in and amongst each other here,
but there'll be one day when I am brought to a reality of
standing before God, I'm going to have to answer for what my
sins are. So I must have the forgiveness of these sins because
I can't stand before God. My only hope is the sinner's
hope in Scripture. And it turns out The sinner's
hope is the only hope. There is no other hope. And that
hope is that his name is Jesus, for he shall save his people
from their sins. Not the Jesus who did his part.
Unless I do my part to act on what he did for me, then I'll
accept that offer and it'll work and then I'll be forgiven. That's
not, that's another Jesus. I'm speaking of the Lord Jesus,
the Christ, the son of the living God, as he's revealed in the
scripture. I'm to seek him for the forgiveness
of sins. Ephesians 1.7 says, in whom we
have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according
to the riches of his grace. So you see this forgiveness of
sins is not just an act. The forgiveness of sins is found
in whom? The forgiveness of sins is found
in Christ and what he did. So salvation is not a what, but
a who. And in seeking the Lord for forgiveness
of sins, we confess and we believe in the substitutionary death
of Christ. We have redemption through his
blood. His death signified sin. The wages of sin is death. That's
the only way he could have died is sin had to be present. Well,
we knew that he never committed sin, but the sin of all those
whom he stood for in eternity, whom the Father gave him, those
became what he was found guilty of, and it actually became his
sin. In 2 Corinthians 5.21, scripture says, he hath made him, God the
Father hath made Christ, to be sin for us, us being the elect,
all those who were in Christ, who knew no sin. This was the
transferal of guilt. So the illustration that we look
in this substitute is the priest when he put his hands on the
head of the sacrifice. He transferred all the sins,
all the guilt, all the iniquity of Israel onto that sacrifice.
And when that sacrifice was slaughtered, God was appeased with that sacrifice
for sin. And so this is what went on for
years and years and years, all the slaying of bulls and goats. But when Christ was slain, there
was no more need for any more sacrifice because it was a much
more excellent sacrifice that God was satisfied with. If Christ
died for sins, they are no more. He paid for the sins of his people.
So if I come and you have a debt, let's say you go buy a car. and
when you go to the car place you say I want this car and then
they say okay let's walk you in the finance office and then
you give them all your information and they figure out everything
about you and you get a loan. So you have a loan in your name
and then you start paying on it. This is a debt that you owe
and if you don't pay your debt they're going to come get your
car or take something else from you to pay for that car. But
what happens, let's say, if you have a rich relative or someone
bestows kindness upon you and eventually pays that debt off
for you. Say, I'm going to do something
nice for you and now that's gone. And then you decide to say, well,
you know, I know you said it's a zero balance and I know they
paid it off. I'm going to get on here and check and just make
sure that I really don't owe anymore. Well, I got to the point
where I paid off a car once and I knew I made my last payment. But in the back of my mind, I
kept sitting there thinking, well what if there was like a
penny that I didn't pay or a dollar I didn't pay and then all these
charges are going to rack up and then it started going through
my mind like three months later and I think I'm going to owe
a thousand dollars, it's going to hurt my credit, all this stuff.
So then I log into my computer and I can't get in there. I can't
get into the account. Every time I log into the account
it says no account. So you see It's not just that
Christ paid for your sins where you had this debt up to a zero
balance. And then everybody knows you
had that debt, but you're at zero balance, so you don't owe
anything. But we can look at you and know you had that debt
at one point. So you see, there's no account.
Because when Christ paid for sins, it never happened. You're
not guilty. It's not just that you're acquitted
of it and can't be found punishable. It's not guilty. There is no
account. So I have nothing to feel guilty
about before God if Christ paid for my sins and stood for me. And this is the foolishness of
preaching a Jesus who partly says either He did or He didn't.
There's nothing left over. This is my justification that
I will be found not guilty because Christ bled and died for me and
all those whom were in His Son. It is time to seek the Lord for
the forgiveness of sins. We must have this. And secondly,
it is time to seek the Lord for life. for quickening power. This only comes from the Holy
Spirit. And remember, you only seek what
you really need. So, who really needs life? Who needs this quickening power?
Well, not everybody does, or everyone would seek it. But as
we read this morning, I thought it was great that the passage
that Todd preached from, where he talked about the blind, and
the lame, and the lepers, and the dead, and the deaf. All these
people can't provide for themselves. You see, they can't see. I can't
see the word. I have to receive my sight to
do that. The lame man, he can't walk. Lepers, they have to be
cleansed. The deaf can't hear. And the
sad part is we say we only seek what we need to find, but what
about the man who's dead? who's dead, he can't even get
to the point where he's going to say, I'm going to seek unto
the Lord. Well, there's help for those
that can't seek Him too, because when he came to Lazarus, he said,
Lazarus, come forth. You see, Lazarus had no ability
to decide to ask the Lord to come help him. The Lord came
to where he was. Lazarus was not seeking Him to
come to do anything for him at that point, because he was dead.
How much power or choice did Lazarus have when he came forth. Could he have laid there and
said, no thank you, I'll just stay right where I am. I'm going
to stay here. I don't want to live any longer. It was tough
enough and I had enough. He did not. He had no choice.
When the Lord said live, he lived. He opened his eyes. He sat up.
This was a command from God and he had to respond. He had no
choice but to live. The dead was made alive. This
is the power of the Holy Spirit. When the Lord God spoke to Ezekiel
in the Valley of the Dry Bones, He said, Son of man, can these
bones live? Well, in looking at them, just
a valley full of dry, dead bones as they're old, He said the valley
was very dry. So we know that they've been
there a long time. He says, O Lord God, thou knowest. The next thing
He said to Ezekiel was, prophesy, preach to them. Thus saith the
Lord God, behold, I shall cause breath to enter into you, and
you shall live. So you see, this is the act.
This is how God acts on the dead. This is the quickening power
of the Holy Spirit. He says, I will, and you shall. He tells you to live, you're
gonna live. The other thing I saw from this, when he asked Ezekiel,
said, a man can these bones live? When we look at them from the
outside, it certainly does not appear that they can. And this
struck me. I ask the Lord to do this for
me and for everyone. When we look at someone else
and say, well, they can't be a believer, they don't attend
church enough, or they don't act a certain way. When we look
at somebody, we don't know. We don't know from the outside.
You look at me, you might see somebody and say, he's got nothing
in him. Nothing that God would ever have
anything to do with him. We don't know, but yet we have a God who
is able to take the most dead, dry bones with no life in them
and make it a trophy for his grace. We seek unto the Lord for life
because we're spiritually dead. There's nothing in us that has
the ability or desire to seek unto God. He has to do something
for us. We have to be quickened, and
that's done through the preaching of the gospel. No man by himself
just instantly starts studying and is acted upon. The Lord does
this through the preaching of the gospel. We see that just
through the example he gave us in the scripture. He told Ezekiel
to prophesy, which means, and this is the means, preaching,
by which God operates on a man. If you'll turn back to Ezekiel
chapter 36, you'll see that. Ezekiel 36, 25. Then will I sprinkle clean water
upon you and you shall be clean from all your filthiness and
from all your idols will I cleanse you. This sprinkling of the clean
water is being washed in the blood of Christ. This is the
forgiveness of sins. And he says in verse 26, a new
heart also will I give you And a new spirit will I put within
you, and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you a heart of flesh, and I will put my spirit
within you." This new heart, this new spirit is the quickening
of the Holy Spirit. This is the new man, the new
man Christ in us. It's what wasn't there before
that he had to put there. And what are the results of this
new man? What are the results of this
quickening power of the Holy Spirit? Keep reading. I'll put
my spirit within you, and I'll cause you to walk in my statutes,
and you shall keep my judgments, and you shall do them. That's
the work of the Holy Spirit. You see, without the Holy Spirit,
without the quickening regenerative power of it, none of those other
things would happen. You won't choose those things.
But he says, and even if we won't, I'll make you, I'll cause you
to, because my spirit's in you. And that's how his spirit is. When the Holy Spirit calls, you
have no choice but to live. Well, how do I know if I've heard
the call? How do I know if I've been touched
by the Holy Spirit? How can I really know? Well,
I don't know. But I can tell you something
that I do know regarding those who have, because I can't speak
for you. Blind men receive their sight. Their eyes have been opened
to the word of God. You've read passages before,
maybe they don't mean anything, but yet the Lord gives you something,
another time you see it, another time you read it. Lay men walked. He makes me willing to serve
God, to walk in his ways and not mine. Deaf men hear. You may have heard the message
before, but then something clicks and you hear something that you
didn't before and you say, what was that? You know, you may have
sat for years underneath the preaching of the gospel even,
but yet at some moment it clicks with you that, oh, that's the
Holy Spirit. The dead are made alive. Something's
different. It's Christ's Spirit dwelling
in me. I've seen and I've heard my Lord through His word. And
I believe and I'm sure that if I'm saved, it's only by His grace
and it's only by His mercy. Where I didn't do anything and
He did it all. He saved me, just an unworthy sinner. I'm a trophy
of His grace. And that's the only way that
I'll ever have a part in the kingdom of God. And I'm satisfied
to leave it right there. My life is hid in Christ. As
He lives, so do I. And I'm seeking unto the Lord
for life. So we've sought unto the Lord for the forgiveness
of sins, we've sought unto the Lord for life, and the third
point is we're seeking unto the Lord for His presence. Now there's
no one that ever came into contact with the Lord who wasn't changed.
So you see the woman reached out and she just touched the
hem of his garment and all her disease went away. You've got
those, you know, He healed the leper. He gave the blind men
sight and cleansed lepers. So these people were just in
contact through the Lord, His presence. Something's changed.
Zacchaeus, the Lord didn't tell him to do anything. He just says,
come down, I've got to be at your house today. And Zacchaeus
said, Lord, if I've defrauded anyone, I'm going to give them
back all their money and I'm going to give half of what I
own to the temple. So the Lord didn't tell him anything.
So what happened? This is the Lord's presence.
I'm going to give you a few things about His presence. His presence,
it uplifts the broken-hearted, the broken-hearted over sin.
You see, His presence says, there's no work to be done. All has been
forgiven. There's nothing I have to have
to be broken-hearted about because, you see, if He's forgiven it
all, it's put away. His presence gives life and faith
to the lost. He said, I'm the vine, you're
the branches. And he that bideth in me, and
I in him, bringeth forth much fruit. And without me, you can
do nothing." You see, He is my life. His presence is what restores
my soul and gives me life. And without Him, I can do nothing.
I can have everything I've got up to this point, and if the
Lord leads me, I'm left with nothing. That's why He's the
vine and we're the branches. Our life is found in the vine.
His presence resists the proud. You see, because pride exalts
self, and there's only room for one on the throne in heaven.
His presence exalts the poor and needy, and His presence is
precious to those who know Him. It can't be without Him. You
see, when the Lord withdraws His presence, the first thing
your presence cries out to is, I've got to get back to Him.
I've got to have His presence. A disconcerting thing, I think,
is having seen the Lord and experienced His presence when it's taken
away. That's truly when, you know, we think descriptions on
TV, you know, hell, you know, is this burning like a fire?
I don't know if there's fire or not. But it's certainly the Lord's
presence is not there. And that enough, after having
seen the Master's face, that in itself, having that withdrawal
would be a torment to someone who'd seen His face. His presence
is an oasis in the desert when found. You see, everything about
an oasis is opposite to what a desert is. That's why Paul
said, all that I can for gain, I count as a loss for the knowledge
of ecstasy of Christ. It's other, it's not what is
supposed to be there, but yet when the Lord does something
with it, it becomes all that's important. We seek the Lord's
presence in public worship. There's no power and there's
no regeneration without it. That's why we pray when these
men get up here and read and they ask for the Lord's presence,
for his spirit to be here. Without that, it's just words. It can do nothing for you. But
if the Lord's presence is here, he said, where two or three are
gathered in my name, I'll be in the midst of them. For his
glory, for his honor, and for his praise. That's what worship
is. We seek the Lord's presence in our private worship. In prayer,
where I commune the issues of my heart to the Lord, the only
one who can understand. I have confidence in Him to provide
what I need. In my private worship, where
I study the Scriptures. You see, if He doesn't reveal
what's in the Scripture to me, it's just me making stuff up.
And that's not going to do me or anyone that hears me any good.
He has to reveal the scripture to me or it's just words, you
see, and it won't come without His presence. There may be days,
there may be moments where we feel especially touched by His
presence. We're so full of joy, so full of contentment, so full
of assurance, we feel like we couldn't be closer at that moment
when you feel touched by His presence. But then there's also
times when He withdraws His presence. and I believe just sharing something
about me. I remember when I felt like,
you know, the process of, you know, coming to believe the gospel,
I would see, you know, I knew growing up, you know, in a gospel
church what, you know, what, you know, these things were true,
but I didn't feel them here in my heart. And I knew them up
here, but I didn't feel them here. And I knew that I would
watch men pray and say how much they needed Christ, how much
they needed the Lord. And I knew that was true here,
but I didn't feel it here. And I asked the Lord to, Lord,
make me feel the way they do. I want to feel a need for Christ.
And I found that all He did is He just closed my ears. He closed
my eyes. I couldn't see. I couldn't, I'd
sit here. I didn't hear anything. And then
I couldn't see Him in the Word, I'd try to study, I'd try to
pray, I didn't feel like I could commune with God. And He showed
me that through, just through that trial, that experience of
that, how much, how quickly I am dead, apart from His presence,
and how much I need Christ, how much I need His presence, or
else I can't worship, I can't pray, I can't do anything. And
so He exposed to me how weak I really am. And that was quite
a trial, but I wouldn't trade the experience for having felt
the need for his presence. So we're to seek the Lord for
his presence. And fourthly, we're to seek the
Lord for his will. First, to be done. Christ did
in the garden. He said, not my will, but thine
be done. Why? First, because it's what's
best, even if I don't understand why. And there's oftentimes,
most of the time, I don't understand why, but yet we pray the Lord's
will be done. He said, My thoughts are not
your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways. For as the heavens
are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your
ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts. You see, what I think,
the way things should go, is not necessarily what's best for
me, because I can't see the end result. I can't see what the
Lord's doing. But yet, He has a purpose and
He has a plan. And if I'm one of his people,
we know that all things work together for good to them that
love God, who are the called people according to his purpose. And his purpose is his will.
The Lord's prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven. So we're to seek the Lord for
his will to be done, and we're also to seek the Lord's will
to be made manifest to us. Who hath known the mind of the
Lord? We certainly take a lot of shots at it, but we speculate
in vain and speculate very wrong most of the time. There's much
that we don't know, and there's many things that we cannot understand.
We may have problems in our homes, in our families. We have sickness. We've had a lot of people that
have been sick in this church. Some sickness that's a sickness
they get better from, some people the sickness that takes their
life. You have a loss of a job, you have trouble paying your
bills. We think, you know, why are things the way they are?
These are all questions that we all have living in this life,
but we're not owed an answer. But yet, God's still on the throne,
even if I don't have an answer, executing all of his pre-appointed
purposes that were purposed in himself. And in seeking the Lord's
will, I must seek His will to be done, and that He might be
pleased to make it manifest. You see, I don't want to act
hastily, and I don't want to act without the Lord's counsel.
Whenever I endeavor in anything, I'm to pray for the Lord. Lord,
please guide me. Lord, give me direction. We're
to ask for direction. We're to ask for guidance. So
there's two parts of this. To ask for direction. The second
part is to wait. And the waiting part is the hardest
portion. It's easy to ask, it's hard to
wait. His timeline most often does not coincide with mine.
So if we're to seek the Lord, back in this Hosea chapter 10
and verse 12, it says, for it is time to seek the Lord till
he come. You see, that's the waiting part.
We have to wait till he come and rain righteousness upon you.
We're to wait on the Lord. Proverbs 20, 22 says, say not
thou, I shall recompense evil, or I'm going to repay evil. Something's
been done to me. I'm going to get back to make
it even. But wait on the Lord, he shall
save thee. We're to wait on the Lord in
all things, in the little things, in the big things. The Lord will
give direction if he's in it. And my fifth and last point is
we're to seek the Lord to abolish all my false refuges. And we're
full of them. And it's going to be different
for every person. But my false refuges regarding my salvation,
so full of doubt, full of unbelief, but I'm saved by Christ's faith.
I'm not saved whether I doubt or whether I don't believe one
moment versus another. We're saved by the faith of Christ,
not my faith. Feeling more or less the elect of God based on
how strong or weak my faith is that day, I'm elect by God, not
by my faith that day. Take comfort in that. We're going
to go through moments and difficulties where we're going to be... We still got this flesh here.
Even though we have the new spirit of Christ, the man in us, we
got this flesh and we're going to waver from day to day. But
yet, I'm elect by God and I'm saved by Christ's faith. So,
not how I feel that day or even if I felt more secure in it,
it doesn't make me any more or less saved. thinking or feeling that if I
were a believer, I wouldn't do this or wouldn't do that. Well,
if the Lord will give me grace to get through this, I won't
do that again. You do it again. You're still in sinful flesh.
There's no excuse for sin, but thank God He paid all my sins.
And not up to just when I believe. So there's part of you that thinks
that, well, You know, you come to the knowledge, you come, you
believe, you confess Christ in baptism, and then there's always
that, I speak from my own experience, I guess, after I was baptized,
you know, somehow, then, like, you have some searing commission
of sin that you realize and you think, Part of you thought, well,
maybe this would have been over with, but it's not. You know,
we're in this life still and it's still going to happen. But
the longer we go, the more we've been a part of understanding
the gospel and believing, the more our sin is exposed and the
more we're aware of it. And we just weren't as aware
of it before. It's not that we're sinning more, we're just more
aware of it. Abolish my false refuges in taking comfort in
my church. I'm thankful for this place.
I'm thankful for a faithful pastor. I'm thankful for this building
that we have. We have plenty of room to sit
here. We're not, you know, I talked to a man this week that talked
about growing up in Russia saying that, you know, religion was
illegal and you go to jail for doing certain things. You know,
we don't have to deal with that here. I'm thankful for that. But if
God removes his candlestick, the Lord delivered me from this
place. What if God allowed a false prophet to come in here? And
what if I was sitting here? I don't want my refuge to be
in this place or a building. My salvation is in Christ. It's
not in a creed, it's not in a denomination, it's not in a building or even
a relationship. We're to seek the Lord to burn
all of our bridges, all of our false refuges to be destroyed.
Salvation is of, by, and through and in Christ. And in seeking
the Lord, I'm to ask, believing that I'll receive what I've asked
for. Deuteronomy 4.29 says, But if from thence thou shalt seek
the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with
thy heart, with all of thy heart and with all of thy soul. So
it's time to seek the Lord for forgiveness of sin, for life,
for his presence, for his will, and to remove all my false refuges.
And I'll close with a verse from the last verse of Psalm 119. David said, I've gone astray
like a lost sheep. Seek thy servant, for I do not
forget thy commandments. Lord, seek me. I know you tell
me in your word, it's time to seek the Lord, but Lord, if you
don't seek me and do something for me, I'll never do it. So
we're to pray, Lord, seek me, Lord, and give me the grace and
give every heart and soul in here the grace to seek the Lord.
Let's bow our heads in prayer.