Grace (in Hosea?)

I have a lot of weight on my heart and it feels as though it's being pressed and stomped on. Does that sound like a high school bitter breakup song lyric? Heh, it doesn't intend to. At the moment I have to just make a decision to let things be or to get my hands dirty, actively war against my sin of omission, and obey. I'm seeing just the reality of life all around me and the implications and the urgency of the time right now as it is and I feel the Holy Spirit going "Come on, get in on this. Obey, not to quench guilt, but lead you to life."

I constantly go back and forth in my walk with being the licentious guy or the legalist. One minute I have a hard time believing God would love this sinner and the next second I think "Why wouldn't God love me?" One second I'm the tax collector and sinner, the outcast, and the next I'm the pharisee manipulating the Bible to exalt myself. It's a funny thing where God's placed me right now ... Baylor University that is. In the end, my prayer would be what God the Holy Spirit revealed to me yesterday.

I've been reading Hosea lately ... Ya the book in the Bible where God starts off chapter one by calling everyone "whores" and continues the theme throughout, firstly by telling Hosea to "take a wife of whoredom" who would later be found to be Gomer haha. Oh, and then when they had children, God told them to name the children: Jezreel, No Mercy, and Not my People ... This is the book I just finished looking at the other day and somehow I saw the grace of Christ upon reading this:

11 Because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning,
they have become to him altars for sinning.
12 Were I to write for him my laws by the ten thousands,
they would be regarded as a strange thing.
13 As for my sacrificial offerings,
they sacrifice meat and eat it,
but the Lord does not accept them.
Now he will remember their iniquity
and punish their sins;
they shall return to Egypt.
14 For Israel has forgotten his Maker
and built palaces,
and Judah has multiplied fortified cities;
so I will send a fire upon his cities,
and it shall devour her strongholds.
-Hosea 8:11-14

At this point, I'm thinking ... what the freak man? What kinda grace is that? I'm at a point where my sin is literally ever before me. I'm beginning to see sin in such a way that transcends me. Like, I'm seeing the same sin dwelling within me that I've seen for years in my dad and in some ways in my brother too. I'm beginning to feel the effects of this disease in me and the more I look at myself and reflect on what thoughts I actually think during the day, it's not really a stretch for me to be able to relate to verse 11. I testify to my struggle with believing and trust in grace as the tax collector at the moment, as the sinner at the moment; the guy who sins and sins and sins and feels like an altar for sinning. So what is my hope? And the grace I saw in that text is the last part where it goes "Judah has multiplied fortified cities; so I will send a fire upon his cities, and it should devour her strongholds." Right now I have a hard time believing my peers will get me when I say this, but I built a crapload of fortified cities. When God the Holy Spirit is convicting me of sin and pleading me to turn from it and instead turn to Christ, my response is to do the easy thing: read my Bible more, spark emotions of guilt, listen to another sermon, blog about justification by grace alone (...heh...sorta kidding), etc. The reason this text gives me hope and gratitude is because I know that Jesus will not let me off easy like that.

So my prayer right now is to walk in the reality of what God showed me yesterday afternoon ... that if you take away and burn down all the little fortresses of theology and Bible knowledge and "service" I try to hide behind, that if you destroy all the puny thrones I try to take my seat upon, all I'm left with is me ... sinner Jonathan Lau, naked and exposed in the wilderness and wasteland of my own sin; starved, thirsty, broken, scarred, enslaved and unable to free himself; hopelessly in need of saving. And it's here that I see so clearly why my only hope is that cross upon which my Savior died ... Because in that moment Christ cried out "It is finished" I hear the Holy Spirit bidding me to believe that my iniquity was crushed with him and a life of righteousness has been made alive in Him. This is how God the Holy Spirit showed me grace. Thanks Hosea.