As Surely As…Our Confidence in Revival

Hosea 6: 1-3; 10:12
September 17, 2005
Rev. Curtis J. Young

Hosea 6: 1-3

1 "Come, let us return to the LORD. 
  He has torn us to pieces 
  but he will heal us; 
  he has injured us 
  but he will bind up our wounds. 
 2 After two days he will revive us; 
  on the third day he will restore us, 
  that we may live in his presence. 
 3 Let us acknowledge the LORD; 
  let us press on to acknowledge him. 
  As surely as the sun rises, 
  he will appear; 
  he will come to us like the winter
   rains, 
  like the spring rains that water the 
   earth."

Hosea 10:12

12 Sow for yourselves righteousness, 
  reap the fruit of unfailing love, 
  and break up your unplowed ground; 
  for it is time to seek the LORD, 
  until he comes 
  and showers righteousness on you.

This morning as we continue to think about revival, that we through prayer would seek an outpouring of God’s Holy Spirit the likes of which you and I have never seen, I want us to face two questions square on.

The first is: Why? Where does this urging come from? Is it the preacher? Am I trying to place you on an emotional roller coaster? Is this some desperate attempt to inflate you with false hope? 

Who is responsible for this? If we are not sure of the answer, there is no point in pursuing revival, because it is not of faith. If the answer is some well meaning Christian, you are being misled. Revival is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a visitation from God. The matter is entirely in His hands. “Who has become His counselor?”

God, the Holy Spirit, is responsible for creating and fueling the desire for revival, and for urging our prayers for it, by His extravagant promises. 

Last week we read, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
 
Today, Hosea says, “Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.” 

“Let us press on…” Here is the language of relentless, determined pursuit, fueled by the most extravagant assurance from God. 

“Let us press on…” This is the verb used of Laban pursuing Jacob for seven days until he caught him (Genesis 31:33); of Pharaoh’s chariots pursuing the Israelites to the edge of the Red Sea and into the parted waters (Exodus 14:23). 

In Lamentations, Jeremiah wrote, “Our pursuers were swifter than eagles in the sky; they chased us over the mountains (4:19)… Those who pursue us are at our heels; we are weary and find no rest.” (5:50)

“Let us press on…” This is the language of the hunter, of the soul that will not be satisfied until it has overtaken its prey. 

Who is this prey? The Lord Himself! The Lord bids us to pursue Him -- as the text says repeatedly -- to know him, to know Him personally, to know Him as the One who dwells in us and with us, to feel the fire of His holiness.

Eight times in his prophecy, Hosea named this the need of the hour. The first occurrence was back in chapter 4, verse 6: “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you.” 

There is no thought of mere intellectual knowledge here, but of knowledge beyond any sort of formalism, intellectual or ceremonial. The knowledge in view here is the result of drawing nearer, much nearer to God, of making this our passion till He blesses us with Himself.

“As surely as the sun rises, he will appear. Like the winter rains and the springs rains, which are never in doubt, He will water the earth.”

Seventy-seven times, you read “as surely as” in the Old Testament, most often as part of “As surely as the Lord lives”. It is a form of oath; there is no stronger way to express certainty.

You trust the sun to rise, don’t you? When the weatherman comes on the TV and says, “Sunrise will be at 7:05 AM tomorrow”, you don’t doubt it, do you? Or do you doubt it will rain this October or next March? Of course not! You count on these things. 

Those precious life-giving showers that fell in Israel became the principal metaphor of the prophets when speaking of the certainty and effects of visitations by the Holy Spirit. 

To this day, when we speak of the Spirit, Scripture tutors us to use watery language. It teaches us to speak of being baptized in the Spirit and filled with the Spirit, of the Spirit being poured out or raining down.

The marvel to me is that this sprang from the Old Testament period, when the Spirit was so little given relative to today. The Scripture sprang from the prophets by the Spirit!

So here we have the language of the relentless, determined pursuit of God, fueled by His own extravagant assurance. This urging comes from God.

Yet here is a second question. Is it really for us to embrace? Things were bad, very bad in Israel. They needed to humble themselves and pray. 

Hosea wrote of being torn to pieces, of being injured. What does that mean? During the last half of the eighth century, within the space of twenty-five years, Israel had six kings. 

Four were assassins who had murdered their predecessors to gain the throne. One was a political prisoner of a foreign power. Only one was succeeded by his son. Assyria attacked at will. Baal worship was so common that Baal and the Lord were identified as the same God. The nation had become so corrupt spiritually that Hosea was commanded to marry a prostitute to symbolize the relationship between the Lord and his people.

Must things be that bad before we press on to acknowledge the Lord? Is rampant evil the precondition for revival? Must the pendulum be swung so far in one direction before it can swing far in the other? Is that how revival works?

To think in these terms utterly misses the point. It trivializes what revival is. Revival is not a sociological swing of the pendulum, a collective human reaction to excess. Revival is not about how bad things are; it is about how much God loves His people. 

He loves you and would have you know Him in the fullness of His love – as Paul put it – “that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

This is God’s love we are talking about, holy love, love that overwhelms and purges and restores and heals. In Hosea this is so powerfully expressed. 

From Hosea 2 (16, 19, 20), “‘And it shall be in that day,’ says the Lord, ‘that you will call Me ‘My Husband’, And no longer call Me ‘My Master’…I will betroth you to Me forever…I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. 

From Hosea 11 (1-3, 8, 9): "When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son…It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms…How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel?...My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused…For I am God, and not man— the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath. 

Finally, from Hosea 14:4, “I will love them freely.”

Revival is not about how bad things are, it is about how much God loves His people. That’s why Hosea could write with such assurance, “but he will heal us…but he will bind up our wounds.

Hosea knew that nothing, absolutely nothing can keep God from loving His people. Verse 2 literally reads, "He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him.”

Some understand this referring to the healing and binding up of wounds that are promised in verse 1. That could be, but the prophet, I think, is building on verse 1 rather than restating it, pressing on rather than holding back. He was speaking of God raising the dead.

Come to the end of the message of this prophet, and you find anchored there the verse that shaped Paul’s words proclaiming the certain triumph of the resurrection (13:14): “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction?”

Not even death can keep God from loving His people! That was Hosea’s point. While it may be debated whether our verse 2 is a prophecy of Christ rising on the third day, there is no question that it anticipates His rising, and no wonder that the early church should have seized upon it as fulfilled in Christ.

What, then, does this say to us about revival? If God makes our greatest enemy His enemy and promises to destroy death in order to love us forever, if He strips the corruption of death of its power in order that we may forever know Him in His glory, then why would we hesitate for a moment to pursue the knowledge of Him now, to ask Him to rain down upon us, to be poured out in this generation, when it is in His heart to do so much more?

Let us press on to acknowledge Him. For what reason? To solve some problem we have, to bolster some weakness we feel, to have some experience we may talk about for years afterward? No, but to glorify and enjoy Him who promises, “I will love them freely”.

We pray because prayer is God’s appointed means for receiving blessings. It is not an effort to get God to give what He may be unwilling to give. It begins, as Jesus tutors us, with the recognition of who God is in relation to His people. He is “our Father”, who loves and only loves us, whose every promise is “yes and amen” in Christ.

God encourages us to pray not to work some will into Him that was not there before. Not at all. When God encourages and goads us to pray for a visitation from His Spirit, He is simply encouraging us to lay hold of what is already in His heart to do.

As Puritan John Love put it, the Christian by praying “hopes in what God has determined in His own grace to do; and in his prayer he looks for the out-breaking of this.”

The Scripture says no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” apart from the Holy Spirit. In the same way, no one can pray for revival, except he or she is convinced by the Spirit to do so. In this, you not only join with other brothers and sisters in Christ who pray similarly, you share in the intercession of Jesus Himself. As the Lord leads, the Spirit directs.