- 9am – Tuesday, online only
- 2/28/24 – Learning Lab for Intercessory Prayer 6pm, 12 Bassett Street PVD
- 2/28/24 – Heart Worship & Prayer Service 7pm, 12 Bassett Street PVD
“Sow righteousness for yourselves, 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 his righteousness on you.” – Hosea 10:12
PRAYER GUIDE
Hosea 10:12-13 contains one of the most succinct and profound strategies for spiritual renewal. There are four aspects to this strategy. First, Hosea tells Israel to “sow righteousness” in order to “reap the fruit of God’s hesed, his unfailing love and mercy.” God is looking for a people to sow righteousness before they reap revival. In other words, revival is always preceded by acts of faith and repentance among his people. God is looking for our initiative. James 4 tells us the same thing, “draw near to God and he will draw near to you.”
Over the past few weeks at Sanctuary Church in Providence, we have begun to sense a groundswell of confession and repentance for sin. This is, in itself, a work of the Holy Spirit. It is God’s kindness that leads us to repentance. And yet, when we respond in obedience to the Spirit – confessing sin, turning away from it, and walking in the light…God honors these acts of righteousness as seeds sown in the ground. They will produce a harvest of unfailing love.
The second aspect of Hosea’s divine strategy for revival preparation is to “break up your unplowed ground.” An agricultural society would immediately understand the importance of plowing. Left by itself, ground becomes hard over time. It forms a crust that tends to shed the rains. It solidifies into something akin to concrete – making it hard for seeds to find their way deep into the soil, or to germinate, or to send down roots, or to push up shoots through the ground. The soil must be prepared. It must be turned over with a sharp object, with a plow. And this requires effort. But without this effort, the ground will be unfruitful…no matter how much rain falls upon it.
In the same way, there are places in our hearts and lives that become hard over time. The habits of sin, the patterns of the flesh harden us. If we want to bear fruit in a time of revival, the soil of our hearts and lives must be tilled, broken up. Our routines must be broken up. Our hearts must be broken. If we want to see a breakthrough of God’s Kingdom, if we want to see renewal, we must surrender the habits and patterns and ways of life that have not led us into renewal in the past. These past few weeks, God has been asking many of us to give up social media, alcohol, our evening Netflix routines, and all the other ways we numb ourselves and take the edge off of life…trusting and asking him to meet us in those fallow areas of our lives. Let’s keep going.
Third, Hosea pushes us into urgency. “For it is time,” he tells us, “to seek the Lord until he comes and rains his righteousness upon us.” There are moments of opportunity. There are windows of possibility in redemption history. It is possible to miss a move of God. Jesus wept over Jerusalem in Luke 19, because she did not recognize the hour of her visitation. Repent, Jesus tells us, for the time has come and the Kingdom has come near. Many believe we are living adjacent to one of these kairos moments. After five long decades of decline, many are sensing that the moment has come for the church in America and New England to be revived. The question is…will we recognize the moment? Will we realize that the time is now, and begin seeking the Lord? Or will we continue with life as usual, and let the God moment pass us by?
The final part of the strategy is contained in one word: “until.” Hosea calls his people to seek the Lord until he comes. As one preacher says: “we till until the ‘til.” We till the ground of our hearts and lives in prayer, we seek the Lord until he moves. Until is a word that implies holy determination. We will stop. We won’t move on. We won’t settle for what we’ve known or gotten used to. We are convinced there is more to God and His Kingdom than we’ve experienced. We won’t change the channel on what God’s doing…until He does it.
PRAYER PROMPTS
- Pray for yourself, your family, the church and the Big Church
- Where is God calling you and his people to sow righteousness? Pray into that.
- Where is God calling you and his people to break up the hard ground? The fallow ground in hearts and lives? Pray into that.
- Pray for a fresh urgency to seek the Lord.
- Pray for a determination to settle for nothing less than the return of normal, vital Christianity. The kind of Christianity we see manifest in every season of revival and renweal.
In Our Time 