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Ploughing the road



Hosea 10:12

Sow for yourselves righteousness;

    reap steadfast love;

    break up your fallow ground,

for it is time to seek the Lord,

    that he may come and rain righteousness upon you.

 

Thought for the day – What God wants

We used to live in Kent and across the road from our estate was an open field that lay fallow for a large part of the time we were there. It was peaceful and easy to walk on. And fallow ground feels restful, even a bit virtuous. Nothing's wrong, nothing's growing, nothing needs fixing. Almost sounds like some of our churches.

 

But that is not an image Hosea presents. Fallow ground isn't peaceful or restful ground, here it's hardened ground. It's the heart that has stopped expecting anything. And the prophet's word is blunt: break it up. Get the plough out. It's time. And ploughing is difficult. Ploughing tears things up and breaks things down. Nobody breaks up hard soil gently.

 

John Wesley was well acquainted with God breaking down things. In 1739, at Bristol, he wrote that he'd always been so tied to order and decency that saving souls outside a church felt almost sinful. Then he stood on a hillside and preached in the open air. His carefully kept field had been broken open, and what grew from it was a movement.

 

I want us to hear what Hosea promises, though. We sow righteousness, but we reap steadfast love. We don't get back what we put in. We get more. And the rain isn't ours to produce. God comes and rains righteousness down. Our part is simply to be ploughed ground, open and ready, and to John Wesley that would be a means of grace.

So, where's your fallow ground? Which part of your faith has gone quiet, safe, and a bit hard? It may be a prayer you stopped praying, or a person you stopped forgiving.

It is time. God is asking you to start ploughing. Not someday, now. 

 

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

 

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

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