This Is Your Soul on Sin

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Transcript:

Well, go ahead and turn with me, if you would, to Hosea chapter 7. Hosea chapter 7. We’re going to look at a few verses tonight from where we left off last week and I don’t feel like I got through last week.

I was very tempted to come back and preach the same message over just because I felt like I rushed the points but either I just repeat the same thing over or well anyway we’re just going to go on from there. How many of you remember how many of you remember the commercial from back, I guess, in the 80s and 90s, when I was just a kid, of the woman with the, don’t laugh at me just because I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I saw that. Anyway, how many of you remember the commercial from back then where the woman came, I guess, into her kitchen?

I don’t remember everything about the commercial, but she came into her kitchen with an egg and she said, this is your brain. You remember that commercial? I guess I am the only one.

Some of you, okay. Some of you remember that commercial. She came with the egg, and she said, this is your brain. This is my brain.

And she took a frying pan, and she just slaughtered the egg in the most violent way possible with that pan, and said, this is your brain on drugs. And I don’t know, if I went back and watched it on YouTube today, it probably wasn’t that bad, but I kind of, in my mind, I kind of remember her taking the pan and just banging it over and over. I don’t remember if that’s how it happened or not.

The commercial made a huge impact on me. It’s tough to say. I don’t know how you would even get any empirical scientific data on how effective it was because you don’t know who was going to do drugs anyway in the first place, but was dissuaded by that commercial. I was not inclined toward that sort of thing anyway, but I remember that commercial, and I remembered that commercial growing up, and it had a big impact on me because I saw that to be true in a few cases when I saw people who used drugs and they were suddenly different from how they were before.

A lot of people, it messed them up. A lot of people, it changed them and not for the better. Well, folks, sin is a lot like those drugs.

As a matter of fact, there’s a word in Galatians, I believe, when Paul is writing about the fruits of the spirit and the fruits of the flesh. And there’s a word in there that I believe is translated witchcraft, but the Greek word is pharmakeia, which means any kind of mind-altering substance. Now, that was part of their witchcraft, but there’s definitely a tie in there.

And folks, just like those drugs are destructive, the egg could be your brain and the frying pan your brain on drugs, or it could be a picture for us tonight. This is your soul, and this is your soul on sin, because sin is just as destructive to our souls as that frying pan was to that egg. And that’s kind of the picture I got.

I laughed. There was a man on the Internet talking about it was Saturday night, and now it’s time to find a passage of Scripture to go with the sermon he’d spent all week preparing. That’s backwards.

I don’t do that, or try not to do that. Rather, as I was reading this passage, that was the image that kept coming to mind as God talked through Hosea to the people of Israel about the seriousness of their sin. And we left off last week in verse 8 of chapter 7.

And he says here, Ephraim, he’s addressing the northern kingdom. I can’t remember who’s here on any given Sunday night, especially when we get a few weeks down the road. So if I’m repeating myself to you, I’m sorry.

There may be others who haven’t heard that. In terms of Ephraim, Ephraim was one of the northern tribes of the kingdom of Israel, and they were one of the leading tribes at times. And so when he says here Ephraim, God is in a different way just addressing the nation of Israel.

In a similar way to if they’re talking on the news and they say the response out of Washington today was such and such. Well, they’re not saying the people of Washington, D. C.

, spontaneously took to the streets and all said in unison, no new taxes or whatever it is they would say. They’re saying the United States government or representing the United States as a whole. Just like they’ll say, such and such was said from Westminster.

That’s where Parliament sits in the United Kingdom, is in the Palace of Westminster. And so there’s a pattern, not only in the Bible, but in our speech as well, of using a part to denote the whole. And so when he says Ephraim, he’s not specifically saying that one tribe, Ephraim, you’re in big trouble and the other nine are off the hook.

He’s addressing Israel as a whole. And he says, Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people. That was not a good thing where Ephraim was out among the people and he was being personable and sociable.

He’s talking about the nation of Israel had gone and despite everything God had told them, had intermarried with the pagan countries around them. I feel like I talk a whole lot about this here lately because it seems like everywhere I turn in the Old Testament, whether I’m preaching on Hosea, whether I’m preaching on Nehemiah, whether we’re talking about something else, it seems like God was always telling them, do not intermarry with those countries. And the reason being, you’ll pick up their religious habits.

And we see that all the time, even in our own world. Can’t tell you how many people that I’ve talked to who say, yeah, I don’t really have a strong inclination toward church or religious things. And it goes back to a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times, they had one parent who was Baptist, one parent who was Catholic, And they grew up in a confused household.

And the confusion can spread. There was confusion introduced into the households when they began to marry into these pagan tribes. Because the men of Israel would take pagan wives and they would whisper sweet pagan nothings to the men.

And the next thing you know, there are idols all throughout Israel. And that’s just the way it happened. It wasn’t that God hated the other tribes.

It wasn’t that God said they were racially inferior or anything like that. It was to protect the worship and the heart of the nation. Because God said, if you begin to marry into these people, they will begin to convert you, not the other way around.

And so he says here, Ephraim, Israel, has mixed himself among the people, even though God said not to. He says, Ephraim is a cake not turned. Now on the surface, that does not appear to be the best insult that you’ve ever heard.

You call somebody a cake not turned, they’re probably just going to give you a blank stare. But to these people, that meant something. You see, they had the habit in their culture or the technique in their culture, I guess.

And in a lot of places across Asia, I’m told they still do this to this day, that when they’re baking these cakes or bread, they will heat the hearth of the fireplace, get the brick or the rock, whatever it is, of the hearth hot, and then they will put the cake on there and they’ll cover it with ashes or something. I can’t imagine wanting to put ashes in your food, so maybe ashes are not the right word. but they’ll put some kind of covering on there to keep the heat in, and the bottom side will bake from the heat of the hearth.

Well, if they come in and turn it partway through, then you’ve got the doughy side now on the bottom again getting cooked. We see the same thing kind of with pancakes. If they leave the bread, if they leave the cake on the hearth and never turn it, what happens?

The bottom gets burnt, and the top doesn’t get cooked. Just like if you leave a pancake on the fire. The bottom gets burnt and the top part, it may cook eventually.

I mean, if you leave it on there long enough, it may cook, but it’s not going to cook right. And the pancake’s going to be useless. The bread for them was useless.

I looked at this at first and thought, okay, it’s a picture of them being burned. Maybe God’s talking about hellfire here. No, God’s talking about their uselessness because they were so undone by sin.

They were rendered useless by sin. He says, strangers have devoured his strength and he knoweth it not. Now the countries around them as they became more entangled with them and their sinful practices, Israel became weaker as a result.

Israel a lot of times depended on their military might instead of their own. King of Assyria, come protect me. Pharaoh, protect me.

All of these things. And they didn’t strengthen themselves, but on top of that, a lot of times they would have to pay tribute to other countries. They would have to send them gifts.

They would have to do various things that were draining their economy, were draining their budget, and the whole nation as a result became weaker. and the people didn’t even seem to realize it because as far as they were concerned, they had everything they ever wanted. They had every pleasure they ever wanted and didn’t realize that their strength was being zapped from them.

Or sapped, I guess, is the right word. We always said growing up your strength, it zapped your strength, but that doesn’t make sense. It sapped their strength.

It drew it away from them. Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not. Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth it not.

This is one of the few examples I’ve ever seen in the Bible of gray hair being talked of negatively. Usually, the Bible talks about the, I believe it is, the white hairs being a crown of glory. And so it should be.

Amen? Not from anybody. So it should be.

I mean, it speaks of wisdom and speaks of life experience and something that should be honored, quite frankly, a lot more than it is in our culture, in our youth-obsessed culture. But here he says their gray hairs are here and there upon him and he knoweth it not. Because there’s also, though there’s supposed to be wisdom that comes with the graying of the hair and of the aging, there’s also a decline in strength ultimately.

And these are not my words, but the words of a commentator. Don’t be mad at me. Be mad at John Gill and Adam Clark and they’re dead, so they don’t care if you’re mad at them.

But they talk about when the first gray hairs start to appear, that that’s a sign that the peak has passed. Well, I’ve started to see a few gray hairs since we had Benjamin. Actually, I’ve got a few.

Not very many, but I said, I’ll call this one Christian. I’ll call this one Benjamin. I’ll call this one Madeline.

I told somebody, I’ll call this east side. No, I’m teasing. I’m teasing.

But why do people panic when they see their first gray hair? Because they think, okay, we’ve passed a tipping point. Well, it doesn’t have to be that way.

But for them, they had passed a tipping point and they were on the downward slide and they didn’t even realize it because they were so wrapped up in not what was going on in their country, not what they were supposed to be doing, but they were all wrapped up in, as the book of Judges says, every man doing what was right in his own eyes. And that’s not peculiar to the book of Judges. And the pride of Israel testifieth to his face, and they do not return to the Lord their God, nor seek him for all this.

They’re saying the realization that their nation was weakening, the realization that their nation was past its prime, the realization that their nation was quickly approaching a point of ruin, if they were paying attention, should have driven them to seek God, to realize something is wrong here. And we see from time to time in our own country this same thing going on where problems rise up in our nation that, you know what, we didn’t have 100 years ago, that we didn’t have 50 years ago. I say all the time, Western civilization peaked in the 50s, and we’re slowly sliding back into the dark ages.

But there are problems that we didn’t have 50 years ago or 100 years ago, and you would think if we were paying attention collectively, they would be a wake-up call to us that something has gone wrong, and what has gone terribly wrong in our country and in Western civilization as a whole is the abandonment of biblical values where they used to exist. Now I can’t say Western civilization has ever been completely Christian, but there was an adherence to biblical values that used to be there, and to the extent it was there, it’s rapidly fading if it’s not gone already. And yet our civilization and our country don’t see it because we’re so wrapped up in every man doing what’s right in his own eyes. Our minds are so scrambled by sin that we don’t see that that very sin is what’s leading to our decline.

They were in the same condition. could not see that the very sin that was causing their decline and these points of decline should have been a wake-up call to them that they needed to reverse the trend, quit the sin, quit the indulgence, and seek God instead. Instead, they thought, we’ll just enjoy more sin.

We’ll just keep going the direction we’re going. It doesn’t matter if we go to hell as long as we enjoy the ride until we get there. And the pride of Israel testifies to his face.

They were prideful. They were not willing to seek God in spite of all that was going wrong around them. Ephraim, again Israel, also is like a silly dove without heart.

They call to Egypt. They call to Assyria. And the picture here, ladies and gentlemen, is of a bird that just flits from one spot to another.

And then over here and then over there and never lights in any one place for too long. He says Israel in their heart was like that. Israel was like a silly dove.

Not just a dove, because birds flutter all over and fly from place to place anyway, but a silly dove. Something wrong with this dove. It can’t stay in any one place too long.

Can’t figure out where it’s supposed to go. And so it would fly from Egypt, and it would fly to Assyria. Folks, the dove of Israel flew everywhere but to God.

God had promised them time and time again that if they would walk with Him, He would be their God and they would be His people. And inherent in that is the promise that he would oversee them, that he would care for them, that his providence would watch over them. And yet in times of trouble, we see in the Old Testament, in the books of Kings and Chronicles, where they tried to make, instead of trusting in God, they tried to make alliances with these pagan countries.

And they said, oh, king of Assyria, please protect us from whoever. But then who’s going to protect them from the king of Assyria? The Pharaoh?

Well, then what happens when they need protection from Pharaoh? And the country as a whole had no direction. They should have gone in one direction and sought God, sought God’s will and sought God’s protection, and yet they flitted around like a silly dove, never lighting any one place for too long.

When they shall go, I will spread my net upon them. I will bring them down as the fowls of heaven. I will chastise them as their congregation hath heard.

And so God said, eventually this dove is going to be caught in a net. And it’s not because I’ve abandoned them, and so the Babylonians and the Assyrians are going to come and just take them over because they want to, God says, I’m going to allow it to happen. I’m going to deliver them into this net.

He says, I will chastise them. I will discipline them. I will punish them as their congregation hath heard.

They were well aware of God’s law and God’s prophecies that had been spoken to them as a nation for all these years. They knew where God stood on the issues and they knew where they were headed. They knew what kind of trouble they were headed into if they continued to disregard what God said.

Yet they did it anyway. Verse 13 says, Woe unto them, for they have fled from me. Destruction unto them.

That’s pretty self-explanatory, I think. Because they have transgressed against me, though I have redeemed them, yet they have spoken lies against me. The problem wasn’t just in the fact that they had sinned because they would come back and ask forgiveness of sins.

The problem was when they would demonstrate that they had not truly repented. And God knew they had not repented. He redeemed them and they spoke lies against him.

And they have not cried unto me with their heart when they howled upon their beds. So they howled on their beds. They laid down and they wailed and cried and moaned, God, please save us.

But he said, they were not crying out to me with their hearts. It was a show. They were crocodile tears.

He said, Israel has not, their heart toward me is as cold as it has been. They assembled themselves for corn and wine and they rebel against me. They sought, folks, they sought God’s hand without God’s face.

They sought God’s blessings without seeking God’s will. And they rebelled against Him. Though I have bound and strengthened their arms, yet do they imagine mischief against me.

Though He’s made it clear over the centuries that God is the one who has bound Israel when they needed discipline, and He’s strengthened them, still they imagine mischief. That phrase, imagine mischief, is interesting. It doesn’t just say they commit mischief, but it sounds to me, It sounds from the reading of it as though they would, almost like they would lie awake at night and scheme about what more evil could they do.

They returned, but not to the Most High. And they would come back outwardly, they would come back maybe even to his temple and seek him, but it was only outward because they weren’t really returning to the Most High, to God. They are like a deceitful bow.

Their princes shall fall by the sword for the rage of their tongue, and this shall be their derision in the land of Egypt. And he says, so because of their deceitfulness, because of the rage of their tongue, because they had cried out against God instead of cried out to God, because they’d sinned against Him and refused to be corrected, because of all these reasons, he says, their princes would fall by the sword and they would be laughed at in Egypt. They would be laughed at by the pagan world.

Folks, this to me is maybe as vivid a picture as any in the Bible of what sin does to a person, what sin does to a nation, to a civilization, to just bring people down. And sin is often treated as something that we can flirt with, something we can play around with. And I’ll just play with the fire a little bit, but not enough to burn me.

And folks, the Bible says, can a man take fire in his bosom and his clothes not be burned? Where is the line? Folks, if we’re asking ourselves, where is the line?

How much sin can I really do? We’ve got problems before we even get near the line. Because in the heart, we shouldn’t be concerned with how close can I get to the line before I fall off the edge.

We should be concerned with how far away from this line can I get and be pleasing to God. Sin is destructive. And sin will draw us in.

And sin will lead us to do things we never imagined possible. Sin will take us to depths of depravity we never thought we would go to. It will make it harder for us to find our way back than we thought it would be.

And just like I said, this passage reminded me of the drug commercial. The utter devastation to a life that they were indicating when they smashed that egg is the same kind of utter devastation that I see when God talks about sin. And just a few things to share with you tonight about what sin does to us, what sin does to the human soul when we indulge in it that I want to share with you. We’ve left off at verse 16.

We’re actually going to, we’ve read through forward. Now we’re going to go backwards. No, we’re not going to read through the whole thing backwards, but the steps are in here backwards, or the points are in here backwards, I think, maybe from.

. . Well, they’re all bad, but they go from bad to worse as you go backwards.

First of all, sin confuses us. Remember, he talks about the silly dove. That dove was disoriented, had no direction.

Do I go to Assyria? Do I go to Egypt? Do I go here?

Do I go there? Seeking somebody to help, seeking somebody to point it in the right direction, seeking shelter from somewhere, and yet never lighting in one place for any length of time. When what the dove should have gone, what the dove should have done, was to go in one direction and fly as fast as it could toward God.

But folks, when we get in the throes of sin, we can find ourselves confused and disoriented to where good people who know better, good people who know better, do things they know they shouldn’t do. And I think we all, if we’re careless, get to that point at times where we know we shouldn’t do things, but also we see it in big destructive ways. when people make life decisions that they know are wrong, that they know God is not in, that God has spoken against, and yet they think, surely this has got to be the way to go.

That is the epitome of spiritual confusion. When I say confusion, I don’t mean they don’t know any better. I mean the point where wickedness has gotten us so twisted up where we can’t see our way out.

And folks, that’s what sin does to a person. To this nation, it made them like a silly dove when all they had to do was seek God. Instead, they flitted around seeking help from Pharaoh and from the king of Assyria and all these other places.

The answer was right there in front of them. Just turn back to God. And they knew that was the answer because they’d been told so by the prophets and yet they could not see the way out.

And folks, sin is dangerous to us and sin is dangerous to our soul because if we get into it a little bit, pretty soon we’re in waste deep. Pretty soon we’re in neck deep and we can’t find our way out. I’m not telling you that we can be, that we can attain sinless perfection in this lifetime.

We can’t. The Bible’s clear on that. And I’m not telling you that if you mess up and sin, it’s all over for you, but don’t wallow in it.

Folks, when we realize we’ve sinned against God, when we’re convicted in our spirit that we’ve sinned against God, we need to go to Him immediately and deal with the sin before confusion sets in. Sin confuses us. Second of all, sin weakens us.

Sin weakens us. You realize that? There are people who talk about, well, I was powerless to resist the temptation.

Folks, when you get right down to it, we’re all on our own powerless to resist temptation. It’s only by the power of the Holy Spirit that we resist temptation. But you can also wander so far from where you’re supposed to be that you don’t even hear.

I’m not saying that God abandons us, but the Bible does talk about the conscience being seared as with a hot iron. You ever burned your hand on a hot iron? It hurts for a little while, but then you touch something else and you can’t really feel it because those nerves are deadened.

Folks, we can get to a point where we’ve ignored God’s warning so long that we don’t hear the voice shouting to us or calling to us. We find ourselves powerless to resist. He says, these strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not. Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not.

The Bible talks in Galatians in the same passage I referenced earlier where he talks about the fruits of the Spirit and the fruits of the flesh. It talks in there about not fulfilling the lusts of the flesh. It talks about walking in the Spirit.

And I’ve given you the example before of the two dogs in the fight and which one is going to win. It’s the one you feed. You remember me telling you that?

It’s an example that was given to me a long time ago. You’ve got two dogs and you’re preparing them for a dog fight. And no, I’m not in favor of dog fighting.

But you’re preparing them for a dog fight, and you keep them in separate cages for a couple months, and one of them you feed the best dog food every day, and the other one you may throw a bread crust every now and then. When you finally let them loose at the end of a couple months and they’re to go fight each other, which one is going to win? It’s the dog you feed.

Well, which one is going to be stronger in our lives, the flesh or the spirit? It’s the one we feed. It’s why God tells us to walk in the spirit and not fulfill the lust of the flesh.

Sin weakens us, and the deeper we get into it, the harder time we have fighting our way back out. See, they had gone so far into the mindset of every man doing what was right in his own eyes, they didn’t even see that their strength was going. Sin weakens us.

And third of all, sin renders us useless. Sin renders us useless. Of the three, this is probably the most frightening to me.

Because I want to be useful to God. I tell my wife periodically that the one thing I want out of life is ultimately the one thing I want out of life is to be able to say at the end, I made God proud of me. Now folks, I know I’m a sinner and I don’t deserve God’s acceptance, but as one of His children, not by birth, not by the will of man, but to those who believe gave He the power to be called the sons of God.

As one of His children, I want my Father to be proud of me. And the idea of being so mired in sin that we can be useless, like this cake that’s burnt on one side and raw on the other. It’s not bread, it’s not dough, it’s neither.

It’s just gross. As a result of sin and wallowing in sin and remaining in sin, we can become useless to God. How many Christian men and women have had their testimonies ruined, ruined in the eyes of the world because they’ve wandered far enough away from God?

How many people, because of sin in their lives, instead of dealing with God, have just given up on doing anything for Him? Ladies and gentlemen, if anything frightens me, it’s the idea of becoming useless to God. Sin is destructive and can render something useless.

I was back there looking. Brother James had to holler at me about the microphone. I didn’t see it.

I wasn’t back there playing games on my Kindle. I was looking at a passage in Jeremiah. I believe it’s Jeremiah 19 where God tells Jeremiah to go take some clay pots and take them out to the priests and shatter them in front of the priests and to tell the people, this is what God’s judgment is, that these pots represent you.

And because of sin, the ultimate result of sin is that these pots are going to be shattered and you can’t put them back together. And a pot that’s shattered that won’t hold water is useless. I was looking downstairs for some way to give you an example of this.

And we don’t have any clay pots down there, and we don’t have any glassware that I thought the ladies would appreciate me smashing. But we’ve got this cup. We’ve got this styrofoam cup.

What’s the purpose of it? Hold liquids. Okay, I thought somebody said hold water, and I was going to say not here.

It’s to hold coffee. In this church, it’s to hold coffee. That’s its purpose.

That’s its use, is to hold liquids, as Brother Ted said. and yet sin is destructive and sin comes along and I’m going to try not to cut my fingers off here because then I’ll be useless too. And sin can come along and it can tear up the pot and the cup and reduce it to shards.

Somebody tell me, how much liquid will this hold? None at all. What’s it good for then?

Throw away. And the Bible even says that we’re the salt of the earth and that if a salt loses its savor, Folks, he’s talking about Christians. If a salt becomes unsalty, what’s it good for?

Nothing but to be thrown out. And as Jesus says, to be trampled on by people’s feet. We can become useless through sin.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not to say that God can’t restore things. But folks, I’d rather just not become useless in the first place as a believer.

Now, the fact is that as human beings, all of us have become like this cup. Through the destructive power of sin, we’ve all been torn into little shards and we’re of no use, really, for our intended purpose, which was to love God wholeheartedly and worship Him, to be in fellowship with Him and to have a relationship with Him. And we’ve become worthless.

We’ve become useless because of sin. When sin severed that relationship between man and God, we’ve become useless for our intended purpose. And folks, as believers, we can become worthless if we allow ourselves to get mired in sin.

But God can repair things, even that are made worthless. As non-believers, before we come to Christ, we’re worthless for our intended purpose, which is to, as I said, to worship God, have a relationship with Him, love Him wholeheartedly. We can’t do that.

And we can’t have the relationship with God because of our sin. And yet God is able to put the pieces back together. The pot can’t reassemble itself on its own.

The cup can’t reassemble itself on its own. The potter can put the pot back together.