The Hard Path To A Soft Heart

REFERENCE:  Hosea 10:12 I said, ‘Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you.’

Observation: This simple verse gives us several keys to living the life God wants us to live:
1. Live right and we will love people and they will love us. Sometimes we forget that our moral compromises not only mess up our own lives, they tend to alienate the people around us. Right now Tiger Woods is discovering, in a very painful way, how unrightousness can destroy love.
2. Break up the hard ground of our hearts. Living in brokenness is key to seeking and finding the Lord. No one wants to feel "broken up" inside, but it is that softening, plowing up of the hard crust that is constantly being built around our hearts that brings us back to our first love for God. Instead of resisting God's attempts at breaking our hard hearts, we should embrace it, no matter how much it hurts.
3. Seeking the Lord, looking to know Him intimately, is a real key to living righteously. "As we with unveiled faces (nothing between us and God--eye to eye) all contemplate the Lord's glory, we are changed from glory to glory." When we give ourselves to seeing Him for who He really is, focusing on His love and glory and grace, we become like the God we see--we become "God-ly".

Application/Confession: I hate the process of plowing up the hard ground of my heart. It hurts. It exposes stuff I don't want to expose. But it is what God is up to and it is key to knowing God and being able to live in righteousness.

PRAYER: Lord, I don't really want to live in brokenness and vulnerability--but that is what you ask me to do. So, I will submit. It many not be easy but you have called us all to a life of sacrifice and valuing brokenness and weakness. I will embrace it--after all, You did.