the Third Week after Easter
Click here to join the effort!
Daily Devotionals
Our Daily Homily - Volume 3
Hosea 10:12—Break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord.
The fallow ground.—There is a great deal of fallow ground in our hearts and lives; it has borne no crops of righteousness. Weeds have covered the unfruitful acres with their rank growth, and have scattered their thistledown into other lots. The rain has fallen and the man has shone in vain. In some cases our daily business life—in other cases our social life—is a blank, so far as religious usefulness is concerned. God gets no revenue from these barren fallow tracts. But the prophet bids us ascertain what they are, and break up the hard, caked surface by ploughshare and spade.
Breaking up the clods.—In his great sermon on this text, Finney exhorts to break up the fallow ground by the payment of neglected debts; the putting aside of evil habits; the righting of old wrongs; the forgiveness of old injuries.
It is time to seek the Lord.—The days are passing over us so rapidly, and we shall be at the end before we are well aware. "It is high time to awake out of sleep;... the night is far past, the day is at hand." May not the time past suffice us to have been barren and unfruitful; and shall we not make the best of the time which remains?
He will come and rain.—What a glorious promise! He will come and rain down righteousness. It is parallel to the words of the psalm: "Righteousness hath looked down from heaven." It is certain that righteousness will never spring up in the furrows of our souls unless it has come down to us from the heart of God. In us are only the dark, bare, liveless clods, lying open in their need: in Him all that is pure, and holy, and righteous—but God waits to rain it down in plentiful showers.
