Desires and Demands | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

Last week we started a series of messages that we're calling the prophetic anthology.

And what it is is it's the six major themes of the 12 minor prophets.

Okay, the 12 minor prophets are the last 12 books of the Old Testament.

It's the book of Hosea through the book of Malachi.

And when you hear minor prophets, it doesn't mean that they're lesser prophets.

It's not saying they're insignificant compared to the major prophets.

It's just saying their books are shorter, they're more concise, but they're every bit as important as Isaiah or Jeremiah.

When you look at the books together, you do find these six themes emerge.

And so that's what we're going to have as our topic for the next few weeks.

Today, what I want to do is I want to talk to you about their common theme of idolatry.

Some of you, if you've been around for the last few months, you're like, didn't we just talk about this?

Like we just did a message on this.

If you remember the series we just did called Perfect Anger, we looked at how God's anger is portrayed in the Bible and what we need to know about it.

And we took one couple weeks and we talked about what makes God angry.

And one of the things that we see that makes God angry in the Bible is idols and idolatry.

And we've talked about this a number of times, but I think I have something fresh to share with you that I think will help us to really be able to contextualize this.

When you talk about idolatry, it can be easy to disconnect because it feels like, especially when you're talking about like 8th century BC idolatry, it just feels like there's such a historical distance between how we live now and what the world was then.

And to imagine, you know, people that long ago bowing down to statues and worshiping them, it just almost feels archaic.

But the reality is when you look at it psychologically and you look at idolatry and how someone gets there, um, I am convinced we have as every bit as big of an idol problem now as they did then.

Uh at the time, they were in an agricultural society and they had these graven images.

And our stuff now might be digital and we might be a little more sophisticated in some ways, but I'm convinced that the same psychological traps that led people into idolatry, then I think there's no cultural distance.

I think there's no historic distance.

I think we are right in the same spot that they were at that point, and today I want to explain what I mean by that.

Um, okay, so if you think about how someone is drawn into idolatry, um, the way that happens is when reasonable human needs, uh, needs that we have that are reasonable become compulsions or uh they're they become exploited.

Okay, so we have certain needs that are totally reasonable, but they're corruptible.

So I'm gonna talk you through four of them real quick.

The first is a desire or a need for power.

Now, power is not bad to think of it in its purest sense.

In its purest sense, it's agency.

It's the idea that you have the power to act.

It's that you can have responsibility.

You think about as a child, you know, as they get older, you start to give them some decision making because you you want them to know that they're capable.

And you give them some responsibility so they can work through, you know, trial and error, but to see themselves as a capable person.

I can make decisions, I can act, I can take on responsibility, I can have agency.

Another one is pleasure.

And pleasure is not a bad thing, okay?

We did not make ourselves.

God created us with all of these nerves and with all of these senses, to have a sensory experience in life, right?

We have taste, see, smell, sound, touch, okay?

All through all of our senses, we have beautiful experiences, and at its best, it gives us a taste of delight.

If you've ever eaten something so good, and you're like, oh, you guys gotta try this, you gotta try this.

They're like, Oh, I don't even like that.

No, no, no, you gotta come on, you gotta try this one.

Next thing you know, the whole table ate your food.

You know what I mean?

You're like, bring me another one, okay, bring another one.

There, there's something about you have those experiences, it's part of the quality of life.

This is not a bad thing.

If you go back to the garden, right?

He says, eat of the fruit of the trees, it tastes great.

You're supposed to have some of that.

Have you ever gone to a place that your eye is taking in something so beautiful?

Uh, you see a beautiful mountainscape and you take out your phone and you take a picture because you want to capture it forever.

You're like, I don't want to lose this, and I want to share it with people.

And you get back and you bust the phone out, and they're like, Oh, that's so beautiful.

You know, and you're like, the picture didn't do it justice.

It didn't do it justice.

You're almost like, I want to take you there.

I want you to see it.

I don't want you to miss it.

So through our senses, we're supposed to have an appropriate level of pleasure and delight.

It's a good thing.

Uh, another is peace.

Peace.

I I could write a few words here.

Um, uh, one is I'll write stability.

In other words, things being in order.

Feels nice to have things in order.

I would I could put the word rest in there, but we all need some rest.

We all need some peace.

I I don't know about you.

Uh the older I get, you know, I apparently I'm unk now, and I'm at an old head or whatever.

But the older I get, the more I value peace.

When I was young, I did not value peace that much.

In fact, I thought peace was for weak people who had no ambition.

You know, everything you want's uphill.

It's all on the other side of your comfort zone.

And as I get older, I'm like, you know, I like it quiet sometimes, you know.

I have about a 25-minute drive in, and you know what I you know what I listen to on my way in?

Nothing.

Okay, air.

Okay.

I just have a little bit of peace in my life.

And peace is good to have some stability in your life.

It's an appropriate desire.

And the last one is connection.

Connection.

Okay, when you think of um you when you think of connection, okay, we we think about community.

Uh we think about the idea of giving and receiving love.

We think about the idea of having a place and a people to belong to, belonging.

Okay, this is this is totally good.

The problem is, these things that are reasonable human desires are corruptible.

And I'm gonna tell you how they become corrupted.

When we have these reasonable desires, at some point in life, something happens that lets you know that when it comes to these things, you are vulnerable.

You are vulnerable.

These make us aware of our vulnerability.

In other words, I had power and agency, and at some point I lost my innocence, and someone overpowered me.

Okay, they overpowered me.

And they might have overpowered me uh physically.

Okay, I might have been physically overpowered, they might have overpowered you financially, they took advantage of you.

Maybe they took advantage of your trust for them.

And in some way, I go from agency to now being powerless, or maybe you were helpless in a situation.

So now my vulnerability, I become very aware of it.

Um, when it comes to pleasure, again, at its best, it's it it is uh uh delight, okay, but this it ultimately pleasure can become corrupted.

And when it becomes corrupted, okay, it it can actually uh is when we experience deprivation.

Depravation.

Dang it.

I start spelling words I can't remember how to spell.

Who knows how to spell deprivation?

Huh?

Just use your imagination.

Deprivation.

This is so embarrassing.

It happens every time.

They were there complimenting me between the service.

They're like, dude, you're a good speller and you have nice handwriting, and then I bring up deprivation.

All right, this isn't good.

Okay, so you get the idea.

I don't know if that's supposed to be an E or an A, but you know what deprivation is.

Where were you a minute ago?

Speaking of vulnerability, right?

Deprivation.

Is that right?

Okay.

Huh?

There's an E in here?

Yeah, I know.

I tried to wedge it in there.

Yeah, it's this won't be on, this ain't going online, I can tell you that.

We'll be using first service this week.

Okay.

Where was I?

Okay, um pleasure at some point becomes deprivation, or worse, it becomes pain.

Right?

I experience pain.

Instead of feeling pleasure, I'm actually hurt, my body's hurting.

This is one of the places, again, our vulnerability, it's going to hit you.

It's just a matter of how and when.

It doesn't matter how much money you have, it doesn't matter how big your portfolio is, it doesn't matter how much influence you have, at some point, even aging itself will will absolutely show you your vulnerability.

Because you could have all the money in the world and your body is gonna start to break down.

So our insecurity, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

We become aware of our vulnerability, and now I experience again in pleasure, I experience deprivation.

Peace, again, we think of it as stability, and and at some point you have anxiety.

You have anxiety or you have chaos that enters your world, okay, and it throws you for a loop.

Same with again, connection at its best, uh, its belonging.

At some point, somebody leaves you, or you experience loneliness and isolation, right?

So they either walked out on me, they left me, they died.

Some something happens and I feel alone, completely alone.

Okay, so when this happens now, this vulnerability is exposed.

What do we do?

What do we do?

Because now, okay, I'm in the process of this becoming corrupted, and this happens because my vulnerability creates fear, and that fear turns reasonable desires into demands.

And what I do is I take the bull by the horns.

So now, because I've been overpowered, it's not about agency, it becomes about control.

And so now I try to control all outcomes and I try to control people, and anything that's important to me, I try to control it.

I become a control freak.

Pleasure, again, if I go through deprivation or pain, it goes beyond just having it in moderation to where it's delight, and now it becomes indulgence.

It becomes indulgence.

And this is again what you might learn the hard way, which is the sensory experience that we have, the appetites that we have are designed to be maximized the pleasure in moderation.

If you try to overdo it, you don't, more is not more, it actually more becomes less, and you blow the appetite out and make it less capable of experiencing appropriate pleasure.

We talked about this years ago, the the uh law of diminishing marginal utility, which is essentially that can best be described through donuts.

Okay, you eat one donut, it's awesome.

You have two donuts, it's not quite as it's not double awesome.

It's just a second donut.

By the time you get to the sixth donut, you're barfinged up donuts, right?

You're done, you fall off a steep cliff.

Nobody ever ate six donuts and was like, this is awesome.

You eat the six donuts, six is the number of the devil.

Like you eat six donuts, you're like, get me out of here.

Like, I don't ever want another donut.

Like you're swearing off of donuts, these are nasty.

It goes from it, it's not six times better, it falls off a steep cliff.

So when it comes to our appetites, when you over-indulge the appetite, it's not twice as awesome or 10x awesome.

It actually gets to where you have to work that much harder just to feel normal.

You end up in addiction.

So the idea that pleasure, when when I deal with pain or deprivation, sometimes I over-index that pleasure and actually I end up doing damage because I took the bull by the horns and now I'm I'm living in overindulgence.

Peace, okay, at its best is stability, but when it's uh taken away, I now escape.

Looking for an escape to escape reality.

I have so much chaos in my life, I have so much anxiety in my life, I just want to get away.

I might do that through a substance or through an activity or something that will just make me forget about reality.

Instead of dealing with the thing I need to deal with, I'm just trying to get away.

And then connection, again, at its best is belonging.

But when we experience isolation or being alone or being abandoned, sometimes it turns into codependence.

I'm just gonna write code D because I have no clue how to spell dependent.

All right, so codependence, okay?

And what is codependence?

This is where uh then relationships, um, instead of being free and healthy, what they end up being is you smother people.

You smother people because you're so afraid people leave.

Even your acts of generosity have a selfish undertone because I'm gonna, I need to be needed by you, and I I've got to, you gotta pay attention to me all the time.

This is where you start to go, you know, you see one broken relationship after another, you're the common denominator, but the narrative is always that they left me, but you smothered all of them.

You smothered all of them.

So now you have an appetite that's been overblown for connection because I'm afraid of being alone, and so now I look for codependent relationships.

This is what's how we mess the thing up.

By the way, you're not disgusting, you're a human being.

You started with very reasonable desires, but those desires, when you realize that you're vulnerable, that fear now, that fear turns reasonable desires into demands.

Now enter theology.

Okay?

How do I deal with all of this in a relationship with God?

If you look at God in the Old Testament, in the Torah, God initiates a relationship with the nation, the people of Israel, and initiates a relationship in the wilderness with them, and there is, it portrays a wedding ceremony.

In other words, we're going, I'm going to give you my unfailing love and commitment, for better or for worse.

In sickness and in health.

I'm with you, I'm committed to you.

We're going to be in a loving, agape, healthy relationship.

And they, it's not all like sunshine and roses.

In other words, it's not all just power, pleasure, peace, and connection.

They actually go through pain and suffering and struggle.

God meets them in the wilderness, um, he meets their needs, but at times they get sick of the food that he provides.

I don't want this manna anymore.

At least back in Egypt, we could eat, you know, we had meat we could eat.

Like, you know, they struggled and suffered, but God was with them.

And so it's a picture of a marriage where it's not perfect, but we're together.

Intimacy.

We know one another.

He says, don't have any other gods into this, don't make any graven images and don't buy into the theologies of the surrounding nations because what they'll offer you is a lie, but the lie will be seductive because you know that you're vulnerable, and these gods like Baal and Asherah and Dagon and whoever else, these gods will offer you the type of marriage that's like two people who are not intimately connected.

We don't, it's not because we love each other, it's because we want to take from each other.

So I give you what you want, you give me what what I want.

And so it's it's like one of those marriages where let's say he's super wealthy, rich, has all kinds of money, and she's young and beautiful, and so he wants her for you know what she can do in the bedroom, and he she wants him for that he can buy her whatever she wants, and so they get married.

Not because they want to go like actually know each other, it's not what we can give, it's what I can get.

So I'm willing to give a little bit so I can get what I want, what I really want.

And by the way, bad news, my man, if you go bankrupt, I'm out.

I'll be finding someone else who can give me what I really want.

And by the way, once you get to a place where there's somebody that can give me better than you can, I'll trade you in for a new model.

So it's one of those that that's what Baal offers.

Yahweh offers a real relationship that doesn't just shield you from the difficult parts of life.

There's nowhere in the Bible that says if you are faithful to God that you'll never end up in the wilderness, that you'll never suffer, that you'll never struggle, that you'll never go through hard times, that you'll never be frustrated.

Uh the you see every Bible character that they have momentes of agency and times of deprivation.

In fact, the apostle Paul says, he says, hey, I've learned the secret.

He says, Um, I've learned with a full belly or empty belly.

He says, I've learned, I've had a lot, I've had a little, I've been broke, I've been well, I've had it all.

He says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.

That Christ enters with me into every single season.

So the the seductive sales pitch of the idols are that you could have a sugar daddy in heaven who will simply just give you what you want, and what Yahweh offers is a husband in a covenant, in a relationship, and we're gonna go through, we're gonna go through the full human experience.

We're gonna have our heart broken, we're gonna go through suffering and pain, we're gonna, we're actually gonna understand our vulnerability, and I will not leave you, and I will not forsake you.

I will give you my presence, I will give you my faithfulness, and I will give you my formation in every season.

So this is why he says, make no graven images.

Well, here's what happens.

The children of Israel, when they went from being nomads to settling in the land, now they're agriculturalists, and the people who were already there, the Canaanites, who were agriculturalists, essentially said, if you're gonna be an agriculturalist, you need to understand not only how to do agriculture, but you need to understand agricultural theology.

So their agricultural theology brought Baal into the mix, Baal and Asherah.

So here's how they what they believed.

Again, we're talking 8th century BC, what they believed about the agriculture.

You have Baal, who's the god of the storms, and you have Asherah, who's the goddess of fertility.

So what they believed was that the way that the land was fertilized, okay, was they they believed what was it was called sympathetic magic, which is essentially what's happening in the cosmos is a reflection of what's happening here on earth.

So what they believed was that the way that the land was fertilized was that Baal and Asherah would be intimate, okay, would have intercourse in the cosmos, and then it was through that act that now the land is impregnated, and now the land produces a harvest.

And this is why when you hear crazy weird things like temple prostitution, and you're like, where would that, like, how would they even come to that?

That's it feels like just pure debauchery.

But what they believed was that, again, sympathetic magic.

If if we at the temple perform the same act that they need to perform in the heavens, we will stimulate the gods here on earth to do this thing in heaven.

So much of it, maybe I'm sure for some people it was pure debauchery, but for a lot of them it was pure survival.

This was, this is what we have to do to get Baal and Asherah to do what we need them to do, because we have a six-week window here where we need rain so that the seed will germinate and produce, so my baby doesn't starve.

So that so that we survive, so that we have something to sell.

Okay, so this became, again, a theology that as now they they move into this area, this is being told to them, and so what you have now with the children of Israel is what's called syncretism.

In other words, they didn't throw Yahweh out, they didn't wake up one day and go, you know what, no more Yahweh.

In their minds, Yahweh was fine for our national identity.

This is the God of our ancestors.

He's fine because, you know, I think he keeps our enemies off of us for military security.

But if we're gonna prosper economically, if our financial portfolios are going to be successful, we're going to need to appease Baal.

And so this they they have what's called a process of syncretism.

They didn't see it as disloyalty to God, they saw it as common sense.

Uh, syncretism, here's the definition of it it's the blending of true worship of God with competing beliefs, values, practices, or idols in a way that compromises covenant faithfulness.

All right, this is really interesting.

So in the 70s, I think it was 1975, 76, archaeologists pull this huge jar, it's like a uh vase out of the ground, which would have been a vase that would contain olive oil.

So in these olive oil vases, normally there's like a ledger on the olive oil to keep track of who paid what for the olive oil.

But on this vase, it says to Yahweh and his asherah.

Okay, so essentially what it's saying is thank you for this olive oil.

Yahweh and your girlfriend or wife, Asherah.

In other words, taking a syncretized view of that Yahweh, instead of Baal and Asherah, some of them had come up with, hey, no, it's Yahweh and Asherah that are are, you know, um, you know, in heaven, and then and then now it turns into the harvest.

Okay, they're being intimate in heaven, and this is this is how the fertility of the land.

So that that's one piece of evidence.

There's tons of evidence of this syncretism that takes place.

Now enter Hosea.

Okay, so Hosea comes in, and Hosea the prophet is being called to disrupt the status quo.

And what he ultimately calls out is he calls out idolatry as adultery.

Okay, idolatry as adultery.

And God essentially speaks through Hosea in what's called a sign act.

A sign act is like it's like a human demonstration.

It's like the what reality is an illustration of something bigger.

He's like a living illustration.

And so it says in Hosea 1.2, it said, When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, Go marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife, this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.

And then it says in Hosea 2, 5, it says, She said, I will go after my lovers who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink.

So what it's describing here is again the vulnerability of reasonable human needs, and saying that she didn't believe that Yahweh was enough, that God was enough to provide what she needed.

I need to go to these other lovers to get my needs met.

And so what's what he's describing here would be like a woman who marries a guy, and it's like, he's a good guy, my parents like him, you can take him home to mom and dad.

He's gonna be a good father to my kids, nice, stable home.

So we're gonna marry him.

But you know, I I want more pleasure and power and you know, all this stuff.

I want more control and more indulgence.

And so she's got this husband at home that she kind of comes home to ultimately, but she has this guy on the side who makes her feel sexy.

And this guy on the side who who uh his he has he's good in bed.

And then she's got this guy, and he's the he's the boss, and so she sleeps with her boss because he gives her promotion and she's able to you know achieve her her uh career goals by sleeping with her boss.

And then she's got this other guy over here who's really wealthy, and he just buys her luxury goods and he showers her with gifts, and then she comes home to her husband.

It's her syncretism, okay.

I'm going to all the I'm adding all these theologies, okay, to try to get the best that life has to offer, avoid the worst of the human experience, and Yahweh's not giving that to me.

It's too much work to go home and for us to try to, you know, actually know each other.

I would rather it just be transactional.

And so so now he's adding all the, she's adding all these different um people.

It says in uh verse uh 8.

So Hosea 2.8 says, she has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and the oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold, which they use for Baal.

He's going, you you think you bought the lie of Baal.

You allowed your vulnerability and your fear to corrupt a reasonable desire, turning reasonable desires into theological demands.

And you insisted on a framework that does not exist.

And in so doing, you gave Baal credit for the ecosystem.

And I created the ecosystem.

It was actually me the whole time that was blessing you, and then you got those blessings and you gave them to Baal.

Verse 13, it says, She burned incense to the Baal.

She decked herself out and dolled herself up with rings and jewelry and went after her lovers, but me she forgot, declares the Lord.

Verse 14.

I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.

There I will give her back her vineyards and will make the valley of Acor.

Acor means the valley of distress or trouble, um, the valley of struggle.

I will make the valley of struggle a door of hope.

There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the days she came up out of Egypt.

So what God is saying is, look, we got married in the wilderness.

We got married in the wilderness.

It was about love.

It was about knowing each other, it was about faithfulness and not forsaking one another.

And finding, of course, we're gonna find struggle and challenge, but we're gonna have the appropriate power, pleasure, peace, it's agency, it's shalom, it's what God intended from the garden.

And we're gonna we're gonna do this, but but somehow through this journey of fear, we ended up with indulgence and control and escape and codependency.

And this thing got out of hand, and he goes, I'm gonna take you back to the wilderness to hit the reset button.

Here's the reality.

When reasonable desires have become demands, and you get to the place where power isn't just agency, it is a demand for control.

The reality is the best thing for you is the last thing you want.

You demand more control, but what you need is less control.

What you need is to learn how to let go.

But when you demand control, often you'll go from person to person, theology to theology.

If God doesn't give me what I want, what I demand, I'll leave him and walk away in a second because he didn't, the sugar daddy didn't give me my sugar, didn't give me what I wanted.

And the reality is a person who is a control freak, they need to face the reality.

You're not in control.

You are not in control.

You can try to control all the outcomes, you can't do it.

You can try to control other people, you're only warping your relationships.

Life is getting worse.

You want control so bad, it's the last thing you need.

Somebody needs to yank the thing out of your hand and make you deal with your lack of control so that you can actually get back to a healthy place.

When someone is in overindulgence addiction mode, they crave and they crave and they crave.

And the last thing they need is somebody to enable them and give them more of what they crave.

You need to have it taken away from you.

Go to the wilderness so you can hit a reset button.

Somebody who keeps smothering people in relationships and goes from one codependent relationship to another is terrified of being alone, and the very thing they need is solitude.

They need to actually have something stripped away.

And guess what?

That hurts and it's painful, but it's covenant, it's God giving you what you need, not what you crave.

Trying to get you to a healthy place.

Baal will keep you addicted.

Baal will keep you giving you what you crave to keep you addicted.

God, who is the lover of your soul, will take you to the wilderness and hit the reset button.

So God says to Hosea, you're gonna be a, you're gonna be a you're gonna perform a sign act, everybody's gonna see you.

And it says in Hosea 3:1, the Hosea says, The Lord said to me, Go show your love to your wife again.

Hosea 3:1

Though she's loved by another man and is an adulteress.

Lover as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods.

Have you ever had a friend who was just getting done dirty in a relationship?

Just getting done dirty.

And it's it's like painful.

And the person at this point has so lost respect for them.

They're playing in their face.

Everybody knows it.

They've got this person on the side and that person on the side, and they go over here for thrills, and they go over here for promotion, they go over here for luxury, and and and everybody knows it, and and and he knows it or she knows it.

And you're like, you look like a fool.

What are you doing, man?

How long are you gonna do this?

How long are you gonna let this dude play in your face before you finally walk away for the last time?

How many times are you gonna let her run around with this guy?

Everybody's seen it, everybody knows it.

What are you doing?

The whole community's aware.

You look like a fool.

How long are you gonna let this happen?

And this is exactly what happens to Hosea.

Hosea's out in the community, everybody's like, this guy's a fool.

And when the oracle hits and the mirror is flipped around, all these people who think he's a fool now realize that this is a sign act.

It's a picture of God's faithfulness to them.

That actually God is Hosea, and we are the promiscuous person who keeps syncretizing, syncretizing, syncretizing.

Yeah, I go sacrifice, I come home to Baal or I come home to Yahweh, but yeah, I go out with a little bail here and there because I've because he he meets a psychological need for me.

And so when the mirror's flipped around, now the oracle comes to them and they realize, they realize, they see a picture of their theology, of what they believed, and ultimately of their spiritual adultery.

So before we get up out of here, let's uh let's have the courage to turn the mirror on ourselves.

I I said earlier, you know, C.S.

Lewis, our our our buddy, right, he said, don't fall into chronological snobbery, which is thinking that because it's so old, you know, we've come so far.

I'm here to tell you, I don't believe we've come any further in the last 2800 years.

I think the psychological demands are the same.

And I think we tend to bring other theologies into the covenant bed.

And I think the deception, like it was for them in 800 BC, was they continue to make sacrifices in the name of Yahweh.

See, the question is not, do you believe in God?

Because we can be singing songs about God and Jesus and have Baal on our minds.

The question is not, do you believe in God?

The question is not, do you have a cross or do you sing about the cross?

The question is, what other lovers do you bring into the covenant bed?

The question is, what do you turn to when your needs feel threatened?

When your peace is threatened, where do you go?

When your provision is threatened, what do you trust most?

When your connection is threatened, what do you chase after?

When your power is threatened, what do you grab for?

When your pleasure is threatened, what do you demand?

And that's where the real God of your life is revealed.

Here's what I want us to take a moment to think about.

I want us to allow, I want to encourage you to allow God to draw you back into the wilderness and to hit the reset button and to give you a full view of what could be syncretism for you and I.

And syncretism in our world takes on all different shapes and sizes.

We bring lovers into bed like money, nationalism, politics, capitalism, prosperity theology, the American dream, status, scarcity, security, influence, platforms, ideologies, values of our subcultures.

I want you to allow the Lord to bring you back to the wilderness and to show you where syncretism may be making a fool out of you.

Maybe you thought it wasn't that big of a deal, but where it showed you that God wasn't enough for you.

I need these other things that my my vulnerability has led to a fear that's taken reasonable desires and turned them into demands that have caused me to force a theology on God that's more transactional than covenant.

We get a beautiful glimpse of what I believe is a mature covenant relationship with God through the Apostle Paul in Philippians 3.

He says, I want to know Christ.

I want to know Christ, he says, in the power of his resurrection and in the fellowship of his suffering, becoming like him in his death, and so to somehow attain resurrection from the dead.

What he's saying is, I don't just want a God who will just have a transactional, give me the best of the human experience and shield me from the worst, and I'll never have to suffer and struggle.

Friend, I want to encourage you, if that's your theological framework, you need to give it up now because it's not on the table.

That's not being offered to you by God.

And anybody that's offering it to you is offering you a Baal or an Asherah, an idol.

That's not what's being offered.

You're being offered a God that will not leave you or forsake you, give you unfailing love, faithfulness, and will use every situation for formation.

That's what you that's what's being offered.

Take it or leave it.

Take it or leave it.

And I want to I want to take a moment and allow the Lord to take us back to the wilderness to deepen our understanding of Him and to be aware of any syncretism that may be happening in our lives where our reasonable desires have turned into demands.

Let's pray.

Lord, we come to you in the name of Jesus and we thank you for the way that you speak through the prophet Hosea just as powerfully now as you did then.

Sometimes it's lost on us, we miss how the human heart is still battling some of the same things.

And Lord, just because we've traded an agricultural society for a digital society, doesn't mean that we don't have these same needs and cravings.

Lord, I pray that you would, like it says in Hosea 3, woo us back, draw us back to the desert, to the wilderness, and speak to us with tenderness.

In a way that doesn't break our spirit, but helps us to reset.

So easy as life goes on to just slowly drift and to look up and go, what have I become?

What happened to my values?

What happened to my perspective?

Lord, we know that years gone by don't necessarily guarantee maturity.

In fact, sometimes we're spiraling further.

We have to go back and reclaim.

So just like you took them back to the wilderness and reminded them of the origin, do the same with us.

Help us to become aware of these things that may be blind, we may be missing, blind to, misdiagnosing.

Lord, I pray that you would help us as the body of Christ to grow in this together, to deepen our understanding of you, to not sing in your name with Baal on our minds, to know the real you and to grow in depth and maturity.

To know you in the power of your resurrection and the fellowship of your suffering.

We love you and praise you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.