What Does God Want from Me?

4th Sunday in Lent, 3/30/14
Hosea 5:15-6:3


What Does God Want from Me?
I. He wants you to admit your guilt.
II. He wants you to appreciate his gracious love.


Expectations. We all have them. No matter how young or old we are. We have expectations about the trivial, such as we expect the outdoor temperature to remain above freezing tonight. We have expectations about life-changing events, such as meeting the right person with whom we’ll spend the rest of our lives, finding an employment situation that’s a good fit, or counting on the treatment plan to give the results your doctor intends. We expect to be able to count on the people we love, to enjoy a dinner at our favorite restaurant, to watch our team in victory, to get the majority of our NCAA basketball tournament bracket correct.

But those things don’t always happen. People let us down, even the people we love. In spite of our best efforts, we don’t always attain the results we were counting on. We were expecting certain opportunities to come our way, but they didn’t. We expected to be told the truth, but once again they lied to us. We expected to be able to enjoy ourselves, but our experience was far less than that.

Expectations. I hope it doesn’t surprise you when I say that our God has them, too. He expects that his love for us will cause us to love him in return. He expects that we’ll listen to his word and obey him. He expects that his people will give him what he’s looking for.

But therein lies the problem. Throughout sinful history, God’s people have failed to give God what he expects. And that’s due to one of two things: either they know exactly what he wants but refuse to give it to him, or they think they know what he wants but they’re mistaken. But in both cases the result is the same: our God is disappointed, and, when his patience with us runs out, he is filled with righteous anger. And that’s never a good environment for us.

So, let’s spend some time this morning reviewing God’s expectations for his people at the time of Hosea his prophet and how his people responded. And let’s apply that situation to ourselves by asking, “What does God want from me?” May his Holy Spirit reveal the answers and strengthen our faith so that we respond properly to our God.

Part I.

There are many situations in life that are exasperating. If you made a top 10 list of those situations, what would you include? Would dodging responsibility be one of them? If you think about it, it’s far too common. You can’t listen to what’s going on in our community and in our world before you run into it. There are times when it makes me want to scream, “Look, this is your life. This is your problem. The buck stops with you. Stop trying to talk around it. No more excuses. This is on you. Now own up to it!” How often do you feel the same way?

Imagine how often the holy, all-knowing God feels that way. I can only guess how often, since he doesn’t tell me in his word, but it seems likely that he’s been feeling that way ever since the fall into sin. Think about it. In love he approaches Adam and then Eve to get them to own up to what they had done and what do they do? They fail to accept responsibility. They pass the buck. They blame each other. And that’s still the reaction he gets from sinners today.

It even happened with his special Old Testament people—the Children of Israel. He had high expectations for them—and rightly so. He had given them every advantage. He had revealed himself to them like he had done to no other nation. He had provided for them, guided them, and blessed them as he had done for no other people. He had sent them countless prophets to share his word with them. That wasn’t happening anywhere else on earth. And what did he get in return? In Hosea’s day the Children of Israel were barely distinguishable from the gross heathen nations around them. They even refused to listen to the Lord any longer.

So listen to what God did. These words are from the verse right before our text begins, “I will be like a lion to Ephraim [that’s his name for the northern kingdom of the Jews], like a great lion to Judah [that’s the southern kingdom of the Jews]. I will tear them to pieces and go away. I will carry them off, with no one to rescue them.” The Lord did that through the Assyrians. The Assyrians eventually destroyed the Northern Kingdom. They came within an inch of destroying the Southern Kingdom during the reign of godly king Hezekiah. Generation after generation of Jews lived under constant political strife along with civil and international warfare. And what did God do about it?

He says in the opening words of our text, “Then I will go back to my place.” He left them alone. He did nothing. He didn’t stop the enemies of his people. He lifted his protective hand.

He plainly states why, “Until they admit their guilt. And they will seek my face; in their misery they will earnestly seek me.” He wants to drive them back to him. He wants them to stop shifting the blame for their situation. He wants them to recognize the truth. He wants them to state the truth. “Our lives are a mess because of what we have done. We have not listened to you. We have deliberately disobeyed you. We have not acted as your children. We are guilty.” There you have it. There’s the first answer to our question

What does God want from me? He wants you to admit your guilt.

It has to be exasperating for our God to hear our words and to listen in on our thoughts when we rationalize our sinful decisions and choices. It sounds something like this, “Well, this is the only choice I have. This is the situation God put me in and now this is what I need to do to get out of it no matter what God says.” Or he listens to our excuses, “Well, I’m only human.” Or, “This is the way things are in our modern world. God needs to understand that.” Or, he hears our justifications, “This is what will end my pain. This is what will make me happy.” We should be thankful that our God doesn’t tear us to pieces. He knows what we’ve done. He doesn’t want to hear anything other than, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” That’s owning up. That’s accepting responsibility. Don’t make your God wait too long to hear it from you.

Part II.

I spoke a few minutes ago about a list of exasperating situations. Here’s another one: people telling you what they think you want to hear.

That’s exactly God’s experience here with his people. Listen to their hollow words, “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. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence. 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.”

There’s a grain of truth to what they said. The Lord’s history with his people was filled with the acts they mentioned. Indeed, countless times he had rescued them. He had healed them. He had forgiven them over and over again. What they stated was certainly true.

But they were dead wrong in thinking it would happen again in this situation simply because that was the way the Lord had acted in the past. Recall what the Lord wanted from them. He wanted them to admit their guilt. Did you hear a single word of admission of guilt in those words? I sure didn’t. They spoke about acknowledging the Lord, but that’s it. The Lord was looking for them to bare their sinful hearts to him, but what does he get? Just some pious-sounding verbiage from people who are sorry that their outward circumstance isn’t pleasurable. But not one word of guilt. There was no dedication to the Lord in their words or in their hearts.

This situation shouts for us to understand what God wants from us. He wants us to recognize that we are the objects of his mercy. He doesn’t blast us as we deserve. He doesn’t glare at us with a hairy divine eye and then unleash his fury against us. He doesn’t level his divine judgment against us with every sinful infraction.

Instead, his mercies are new every day. Great is his faithfulness. We are the recipients of his gracious love. He has made us his children by faith in Jesus. At our baptisms he placed his name on us. He called us his own. He did that to shower his love on us, not his holy justice. He shares his saving word with us. He sacrificed his one and only Son for us. He gives us his Son’s very body and blood in the Lord’s Supper to assure us of his eternal love for us and the daily forgiveness he extends to us. He does all this so that we can share in his glory eternally. He’s done it all, for us.

So, what does God want from me? He wants you to appreciate his gracious love.

In this season of Lent we speak about our Savior’s passion. By that we mean the account of his suffering and dying for us. He took on eternal hell for us so that we could live with him. He did that out of his great love for us. No one can possibly love you more than Jesus does. Don’t let that love go unnoticed, unrequited. No doubt you’ve heard of couples who renew their wedding vows. This Lenten season renew your vows to your Lord. Ask yourself each day what you’re going to do to reflect Christ’s love to others. That’s what God wants from you—to appreciate his gracious love. Amen.