To Know The Lord

Scripture Reading

If you have your Bible with you and you turn to Hosea chapter six, we'll be reading the entire chapter this evening. Hear now the holy and infallible word of God.

Come, let us return to the Lord. For he has torn us, that he may heal us. He has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days, he will revive us. On the third day, he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord. His going out is sure as the dawn. He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.

What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away. Therefore, I have hewn them by the prophets. I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

But like Adam, they transgressed the covenant. There they dealt faithlessly with me. Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood. As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together. They murder on the way to Shechem. They commit villainy. In the house of Israel, I have seen a horrible thing. Ephraim's whoredom is there. Israel is defiled. For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed.

The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God will stand forever. You may be seated.

Sermon Introduction

There is a kind of mercy that we gladly receive, and there's also a type of mercy that sometimes we want to resist. We welcome the mercy that relieves our pain, that restores our comfort, that gives us what we ask. But what about the mercy that confronts our sin? This is often what Hosea is dealing with, a mercy that confronts our sin.

What about the mercy that tears down the things which we have placed our confidence in? What about the mercy that refuses to leave us where we are? C.S. Lewis often explored this unsettling truth that God's love is not simply a desire to make us comfortable. God intends to make us holy. His love is not content to leave us clinging to lesser things when He has called us to Himself.

We might prefer a God who makes our lives easier without asking much of us. We want forgiveness without repentance, comfort without correction, mercy without the painful exposure of our sins. But what if the things we ask God to preserve are the very things keeping us from Him? What if a comfort in our life is actually keeping us from the Lord? What if something that we crave in our life has become more important than holiness? What if God's refusal to give us what we want is, in fact, an expression of His mercy? That's the kind of mercy that we encounter in Hosea, and particularly here in chapter six. At the end of chapter five last week, we saw that the Lord announced judgment against His people.

They have sought help from Assyria, but Assyria cannot heal them. Their false refuges had failed, and they must face the God that they had abandoned. Chapter six opens with what sounds like a beautiful confession when we were reading it: "Come, let us return to the Lord. For he has torn us that he may heal us; he has struck us down and he will bind us up."

It's beginning to sound like words of comfort. If you remember at the end of Hosea chapter five, he says He is like a lion. We had several metaphors in Hosea chapter five. We had dry rot. We had moth, that God was going to eat away the things that they were finding false comfort and refuge in, and it ended with that imagery of a lion that tears, like a young lion that does not tire.

The Lord has torn them. The Lord has struck them down, and yet the people recognize that the Lord Himself is the one who can heal them. But as the passage continues, God exposes the shallowness of their response. Their love is like morning dew. Their religious observance cannot cover their unfaithfulness.

Like morning dew that comes on the grass and is wet, the sun comes and dries it up rather quickly. They want the Lord to heal them, but they're acting like they don't know Him, in the same way that they ran asking for the king of Assyria to heal them. So this is the question before us this evening: Do we know the Lord as He has revealed Himself, or have we fashioned a God who just gives us what we want?

To Know the Lord Is to Know Severe Mercy

To know the Lord is to know His severe mercy, His steadfast love, and our own transgressions. Those are our three points this evening that you can find outlined for you in the back of your bulletin. Let's begin with: to know the Lord is to know a severe mercy. Verse one says, "Come, let us return to the Lord. For he has torn us that he may heal us. He has struck us down and he will bind us up."

I reminded you at the end of Hosea chapter five, we get that imagery of the Lord like a lion who is coming to tear. Why? Because they have turned away from Him. They have sought help from the nations instead of trusting the Lord. They have looked everywhere for deliverance except the God who has redeemed them. Assyria cannot heal them. No political alliance can save them from God's judgment. In Hosea chapter one, we even read that Assyria's bow will be shattered. Their confidence can't be in some army. It can't be in some political power.

Now the people say, "Come, let us return to the Lord." This God who is seeking His covenant people in a loving relationship. There's something right about this response. They recognize that the Lord Himself is the one they need. But notice how they describe Him: "He has torn us that he may heal us; he has struck us down that he will bind us up."

This is a difficult kind of mercy to receive. Think about the mercy of a doctor. What's a doctor's vow? It's to do no harm. What if they need to break the bone so that they can set it properly that it might heal? Does a doctor violate their vow to do no harm if they need to break the bone? We generally want a God who heals us but without confronting us. We don't want any of the pain. Think of physical therapy, if you've ever had physical therapy after breaking a bone. There's pain in the muscles relearning after resting, just wanting a comfort. But the Lord's mercy is not always gentle in the ways that we might expect. Sometimes His mercy comes through a painful exposure of sin.

Sometimes He takes away the things that we've trusted. Sometimes He allows our false refuges to fail, as we looked at last week. And God's mercy can be severe because our sin is serious. All of the prophet Hosea's ministry is showing how serious the sin is taken. And even in how serious He takes the sin, we see again and again that it's like they've gone off and had an affair. It's scandalous. Israel's abandoned the Lord. They've looked to foreign powers for protection, and now the Lord is tearing down the security they have sought to build. His judgment is real, and it has a purpose. He's confronting His people with the truth about themselves and exposing their need of Him.

We must understand this about God's mercy. He does not always give us what we want simply because we want it. We might want relief from our circumstance, and what we might actually need is repentance. We may want God to restore our comfort when He's still busy exposing our idols that actually keep us from Him. We may ask Him to remove our suffering when what we need to do is actually to stop trusting in ourselves.

We must not presume that every painful circumstance is a punishment for a particular sin. Scripture is clear on that. But Scripture also teaches that God disciplines His children because He loves them, and we see that here with Israel. He confronts their sin through His Word. He refuses to be reduced to a servant of their desires, like a genie in a lamp. The Lord loves us too much to affirm everything we want. His purpose is not merely to make our lives comfortable. His purpose is to bring us into fellowship with Himself, to restore us, and to make us holy, and that we can call a severe mercy.

Then we see in verse two: "After two days He will revive us, and on the third day He will raise us up that we may live before Him." And this is poetic language expressing the confidence in the Lord's restoration. Israel hopes that the Lord will not leave them under judgment forever but will revive them, bring them back into His presence that they might live before Him. They do not merely want relief from suffering. They need to be restored to the God that they've abandoned.

Salvation is not merely the removal of guilt or the escape of judgment. It is reconciliation with God Himself. We are forgiven so that we might belong to Him, that we might know Him, that we might love Him, that we might live in fellowship with Him. And verse three gives us this call: "Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord."

We are to press on to know Him. And where can we know Him, church? Through His Word, through prayer, through worship, through obedience. But we must understand what it means to know Him. It is not enough to have ideas about God. Remember what James says to the church: "Even the demons believe and shudder." We must know the God who has made us for Himself, that we might rest in Him.

We do not get to decide that God must be merciful in a way that ignores our sin, or loving in a way that never confronts us. That's not love. Even last week in our liturgy, we read 1 Corinthians 13, that great passage on love, and what is one of the things that we read? "Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing." So oftentimes the way that we actually interact with love is we don't actually confront sin. We let love cover sin. Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing. We cannot fashion a God who fits our preferences and then claim to know the Lord. He has revealed Himself as He truly is: holy and righteous, merciful and gracious, faithful to His promises, and just in His judgments.

And we see His character most clearly in Jesus Christ. At the cross, we see both the severity of our sin and the greatness of God's mercy. God does not pretend that our sin does not matter. His justice is not set aside at the cross. The judgment we deserve is answered. His Son bears it in our place so that sinners might be forgiven and reconciled to God.

The cross confronts our expectations. We might want a Savior who affirms us without changing us, forgiveness without calling us to repentance, promises of eternal life without calling us to pick up our crosses and to follow Him. But the Christ revealed in Scripture calls us to deny ourselves as we follow Him. Hosea's message for Israel is similar. So when the Lord exposes their sin, when He confronts their self-sufficiency, He does not cease to be merciful. His confronting of it is a severe mercy. His correction may be one of the ways that He is showing mercy to them. To know the Lord is to know His mercy. He does not simply give us what we want. That is not God's mercy. God's mercy brings us back to Himself. If we have truly come to know such mercy, our lives will be changed. This is where we get taken by the prophet Hosea in the following verses.

To Know the Lord Is to Know Steadfast Love

To know the Lord is to know His steadfast love.

It is to know God's character. Verse four begins with this searching question: "What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah?" The Lord knows His people. They have spoken of returning to Him, but their confession has not been accompanied with enduring faithfulness. He continues: "Your love is like a morning cloud." Like the dew that goes early away before the sunrise, grass covered in droplets, everything glistening. But as the sun rises, that dew disappears. What was there at daybreak is gone by mid-morning. That's what Israel's love is like at this particular moment. They speak of returning to the Lord. They acknowledge that He can heal them. They encourage one another even to know the Lord. But their devotion does not endure. Their love evaporates. It disappears. They want the Lord's steadfast love without demonstrating any love in return.

We can recognize this danger in our own lives. We hear the Word of God, we recognize a sin that needs to be put to death, a relationship that needs attention, or a duty that we've neglected, and sometimes the moment just passes. I've had several people over the last 12 years working in PCA churches where there's a moment where they might send a text message and it's at like 2:00 or 3:00 AM. And there's a particular sin that the Spirit's put on their heart in such a way that they're like, "I recognize that I need help." They text at 2:00 or 3:00 AM. I get up at a reasonable time, like 7:00 AM. I'm not up at 2:00 or 3:00. And I text them back and they're like, "Oh, never mind." Where I got the text, "Hey, I really need to talk." Never mind. It's like dew. It's like dew that pops up for a moment and by mid-morning it's gone. Sometimes we resolve to change, we resolve to repent.

Remember a couple weeks ago, we talked about that repentance, true repentance, is not just the turning away from sin, but is turning to God. It's returning to knowing Him. But the moment passes. There's a moment of desire sometimes, like dew on the grass, where there's a desire to turn from the sin, and then nothing. That's the moment that Israel is in: a confusing of conviction and repentance, of emotion with the fruit that comes with repentance. The problem is not that those who follow the Lord struggle. We all stumble. We all need renewed repentance. The problem is when devotion remains shallow and never bears that fruit of repentance in that turning from and that turning to.

When you think back on your own repentance, if you've been a Christian a year, 10 years, 50 years, when you think back on your repentance, there are probably moments in your life where you might look back and go, "My repentance looked like dew. It would come in these little spurts." Maybe even, "Oh, I can finally manage this sin. I think I finally have it under control," and maybe you put your guard down. Several weeks ago, as we've been going through the book of Peter in the morning, we read even of the sin that wages war against us. It's almost like you kind of made peace with that sin sometimes, is what we talked about, and sometimes it's that you forget that there's an enemy there, and that sin comes creeping back in.

Here's what we keep seeing in verse five: "Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets. I have slain them by the words of my mouth." God has not remained silent. God has sent His prophets to confront His people. Their words cut through Israel's excuses, expose their sins, and announce the judgment. His Word is profitable for teaching, for rebuke, and correction, for training in righteousness. It's one of the reasons He gives us His Word. Yet God has not simply abandoned them to their hypocrisy. He has spoken. He has warned them. He has exposed their sins. This is one of the reasons, even in our liturgy, that we have the reading of the law before the confession. Why do we read the law before our confession? This morning it was from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5. That we might actually be convicted of our sin is one of the uses of the law, that we might actually be more aware of our sin through God's Word. God says through the prophet Hosea that's why He sent the prophets. We'd often prefer a word that reassures us without disrupting us. We'd often rather hear something comforting rather than correcting. It's gonna be okay. How often is that even the truth, where we downgrade from something that we might clearly name in somebody else? Think about in the Sermon on the Mount when Christ talks about the log and the speck, where we might go, "Oh, that is so clearly sin that is just all over my brother or sister." Oh, what happened to me, my sin? That was just an accident. That was an unfortunate reality that happened.

But if we're wandering from the Lord, we need Him to tell us the truth, and where He does that is in His Word. His Word cuts through our self-deception because we need more than reassurance. We need repentance and restoration. So then we come to verse six: "For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings."

That might strike your ear odd, especially if you've been reading a lot in Leviticus lately. God is not condemning the sacrificial system that He put into place. "For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice?" There's an awful lot of rules that God has given for how those sacrifices are to be given. What He's doing there, similar to in Psalm 51, is a condemning of the attempt to substitute religious observance for covenant faithfulness. In Hosea chapter five, we saw last week that one of the things they were doing was bringing their livestock for sacrifices, and one of the rebukes is that God wasn't going to take it. Their hearts were not engaging in the worship that the sacrifices were meant to facilitate. God is saying, "I want your heart."

Israel was willing to offer sacrifices while wanting to remain completely unchanged. They wanted the benefits of belonging to the Lord, His protection, but without any devotion to Him. The word translated steadfast love is the Hebrew word hesed, and it speaks of a loyal, faithful, covenant love. This is the love that God has shown His people. It's the love that He calls them to demonstrate towards Him and one another. Knowing God is more than just an intellectual familiarity. It means living in fellowship with Him, trusting Him, loving Him, and walking in His ways. Jesus, in Matthew chapter nine and 12, quotes Hosea 6:6 as He's confronting the religious leaders who are zealous about the outward observance but fail to show mercy. They're living as God's people visibly. They're doing the right thing in the wrong way. They're not showing God's character, His mercy. They know the rules, but they do not understand the heart of the God who gave them. And that is a warning that we can be theologically precise and yet be unchanged by the God that our theology is about. We can be zealous about worship and careless in how we treat our neighbors. We can defend the truth while failing to display the love that that truth produces with gentleness and respect, as we saw this morning. We can use our religious faithfulness to congratulate ourselves like the Pharisees. We look at things we do, the doctrines we affirm, the duties we fulfill, and we begin to believe that these things might even make us righteous.

But God desires more than outward conformity. He desires steadfast love flowing from the heart. He desires love. God does not merely tell us to become more loving and leave us to our own resources, though. That is the good news. He first shows us what that steadfast love looks like. He remains faithful to His covenant promises even when His people are unfaithful. Here we are midway through the book of Hosea. What is the prevailing picture? The prophet who goes and marries a prostitute named Gomer. It is the picture of God's people, and Hosea, the husband, that remains faithful and loving, desiring to restore. Our love is not the foundation of God's love for us. His love is the foundation of our love for Him. As 1 John says, "We love because He first loved us." Our love does not purchase God's acceptance. We are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and that grace that saves us does not leave us unchanged. His love continues to transform us.

The question is not whether or not you've ever been moved by a sermon or stirred by a hymn or convicted from the Word of God. The question is whether or not you are being shaped by the God that you worship. Is your knowledge of His Word producing obedience? Is your confidence in His mercy making you more merciful? Is your profession of faith accompanied by a growing hatred of sin and a growing love for righteousness? The church father Augustine put it this way: "To love the things that God loves and to hate the things that God hates." Israel's love was like the morning dew. It appeared, but it did not endure. To know the Lord is not to merely know that He is loving. It is to know that His steadfast love is true, and that by grace, we begin to reflect it. We become more like our Father.

To Know the Lord Is to Know Your Transgressions

This leads us to my third point: to know the Lord is to know your transgressions.

In verse seven we read, "But like Adam, they transgressed the covenant. There they dealt faithlessly with me." Sin is not simply a collection of isolated mistakes. It is a rebellion against the God to whom we belong. It is our failure to give Him the love, trust, worship, and obedience that He deserves. The pattern reaches back all the way to the beginning: Adam, who transgressed the covenant. Adam received God's command in the garden, and he broke it. Israel received God's law and repeatedly transgressed it. And we too have failed to love God with our whole hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Romans 5 explains that through one man's disobedience, sin entered the world, and death through sin.

We belong to a fallen humanity that needs righteousness and life that only comes through that second Adam, Jesus Christ. Our problem cannot be solved by adding more religious activity to an unchanged heart. We cannot erase our guilt by attending more services or offering more prayers or becoming more knowledgeable about the Bible. We need redemption. Yes, God moves through the reading of His Word, through His ordinary means of grace that He gives us, but first and foremost, we need redemption that only He brings, that His Word does not return empty and void. And in that, He gives us an awareness of our sin, that we actually see it, that we see our need of redemption, that we're actually lost. And He sends His Spirit into us to cry out, "Abba, Father."

Hosea in verse nine continues: "As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together. They murder on the way to Shechem; they commit villainy." Stop and consider how shocking this accusation is. These are not pagan priests serving false gods. These are the priests of the Lord, the men appointed by God to lead the people in worship, to teach His laws, to represent His holiness before His people. And what does God call them? What have they become? Robbers, murderers, villains. I can't think of anything worse you could call a priest. The men who should have been shepherds have become predators. Entrusted with the holy things of God, they've joined themselves with wickedness. The very people appointed to lead Israel towards the Lord are participating in the very rebellion. The horror is not simply that there is wickedness in Israel. The horror is that wickedness has taken up residence among those who even minister in the name of God. This is not uncommon as we read the prophets.

In Ezekiel 34, the Lord condemns the shepherds of Israel, the priests, for feeding themselves, for fattening themselves rather than for feeding the flock. They use their position for their own advantage while the sheep suffer. But God promises something there. As even we talk about His character in His mercy and in His steadfast love, what is it that we see when there's an awareness of this transgression? The promise in Ezekiel 34 is: "I myself will come and shepherd my flock." God promises that He Himself will come to seek His sheep, to gather His sheep, to bind His sheep, to care for His sheep. This binding and tearing that we even begin with in verse one, we see in the other prophets, a promise that points us to Christ.

Consider the contrast. Israel's priests prey on the people. Jesus Himself gives Himself for the people. They use their position for their own advantage, and He takes the form of a servant. He is the faithful priest. The priests bring harm to the flock, and He lays down His life for His sheep. And there's an even more sobering contrast here. The priests who should have led God's people in righteousness were guilty of villainy, and the righteous Son of God was treated as a villain, crucified between two robbers. When Jesus was crucified, He's numbered with the transgressors, He's condemned alongside the criminals, and the innocent one was treated as guilty while the guilty world stood by and watched.

Do you see the horror of your sin? That's what Hosea chapter six is getting at, that we would see the horror of our sin. The corruption Hosea exposes among Israel's priests is a scandal. It's the same fallen world that rejected the Son of God. Human beings can take the things of God into their hands and use them to serve themselves, twisting the very gifts that He gives: His Word, even His sacraments, twisting them to fit their own vision. And yet here is the glory of the gospel, that Christ was not a villain, but He willingly stood in the place of villains for you. He was innocent, but He bore the judgment of the guilty. He was faithful where we have been faithless, righteous where we have been corrupt, and obedient where we have rebelled.

The priests of Hosea's day reveal how desperately God's people need a faithful priest and shepherd. Jesus Christ is both that priest and shepherd. He does not exploit His people for Himself. He gives Himself to save them. This is the warning to anybody entrusted with spiritual leadership, to, as an under-shepherd, serve as Christ served. We must never assume that our place in the church or theological knowledge or religious reputation guarantees a right heart before God.

In verse 10, we keep going, it says: "In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing." This is God's people, His treasured possession, what we even see in the Scriptures called the apple of His eye. In the house of Israel, I have seen a horrible thing. God sees what is happening among His people. Their outward religious life cannot conceal their inward corruption. And it's easy to hear a passage like this and think about somebody else, like the log and the speck: the religious hypocrite, the corrupt leader that you see in a post on Twitter, the person whose profession of faith is contradicted by their conduct week in and week out. But God's Word is not meant to give us ammunition for condemning others while leaving ourselves untouched.

To take a moment and talk about that log and the speck: if I came in here tonight in my Genevan gown, it would be hidden under my shirt, but if I had spaghetti for dinner and my shirt was just covered in spaghetti, to the extent that there's even a meatball hanging out on my shoulder, and you had a little bit of a coffee spill on your shirt, and I went, "You slob. You slob. You absolute slob. What are you doing? Change your shirt." "Pastor John, there's a meatball on your shoulder." That's why I wear the gown. It hides everything. You would look at me like I was crazy. We don't come to the Word of God so that we might find ammunition to rebuke brothers and sisters. We come even looking to be exposed.

His mercy might be severe even in what it shows us. There are times that His mercy, His rebuke, His making us more aware of our transgressions—there are moments that it might feel like a scalpel of a surgeon, narrow and surgical. There are times that it might feel like a spiritual sledgehammer hitting you in the chest. Both are good. Both are wonderful, severe mercies to become more aware of our sin and more aware of His love. And so we don't go about looking for everybody else's spaghetti. We do come alongside one another to teach, rebuke, correct, and train in righteousness. We do bring that Word, but notice that attitude in the log and speck in the Sermon on the Mount, that you might first actually examine yourself. 'Cause what do you actually do then? Hey, I know I'm an absolute mess, and I am covered in spaghetti, and there's a meatball on my shoulder. I know that I am a sinner, and I know a God who has shown steadfast love and mercy generation after generation. And I want you to know that too, even if it's just a coffee spill on your shirt.

There is a joy that we can have in the Lord through His Word where we become more aware of our sin. So the question is not if you can identify the transgressions of others. We read in our passage some priests that would be really bad at that. They're robbers and villains and hypocrites. The question is whether or not can you name your own transgressions? Can you take them to the Lord? Can you bring them to His Word even that you might learn how to mortify, how to fight those sins? Do you recognize other people's pride, selfishness, and impatience, and lack of mercy that they might have, or do you see it in yourself and say, "Woe is me, a man of unclean lips"? How often do we have the excuses ready for our own sin but no excuses ready for someone else's sin? How often we want God's comfort without His correction, His promises without His commands, His mercy without repentance. Do we want God as He has revealed Himself, or do we want a God that just leaves us undisturbed?

Here in Hosea, we see the God that is willing to disturb us, to come in to be reconciled with His people. To know the Lord is to stand before Him as He has revealed Himself. To allow His Word to tell us the truth about ourselves, not the truth we might prefer, not the version of ourselves that we clean up and want to present, and not a comparison with someone else's sin that we might look at and say, "They have spaghetti on their shirt."

His law exposes our sin. His Word strips away our excuses. And the more clearly we see His holiness, the more clearly we recognize how desperate we are in the need of His grace. God does not allow us to remain comfortable in our self-deception. That's what we see here in Hosea 6. They were comfortable in their self-deception, and God is not willing to leave them there. And church, He is not willing to leave you there either. Even as He sends His Spirit to you that intercedes with groanings too deep for words, He is not leaving you there.

In verse 11, we see this: "For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed when I restore the fortunes of my people." A harvest is appointed. The time of reckoning will come. Judah will not escape the judgment simply because it belongs to the covenant people. Yet there's this hope of restoration, that God has not abandoned His purposes, that He is going to redeem His people for Himself, for He is holy, He judges sin, He is merciful, and He restores His people.

Our hope is not that our love has been always steadfast or our religious performance can become impressive. Our hope is that in Jesus Christ, our sins might be exposed, that we would trust Him in faith for our salvation, that by the working of His Holy Spirit, we would more and more reflect the image of the new man. To know the Lord is to begin to know your transgressions, to think honestly about your sin, to abandon your excuses and to flee to Christ, to turn from your sin and turn to the God who made you.

So what does it mean to know the Lord? It means knowing His severe mercy, not as we imagine mercy, that it must always be comfortable. He loves us too much to leave us in our sin. It means knowing His steadfast love, not merely as an attribute to affirm, but as the grace of a God who is going to transform us, that we might love Him more and love our neighbors more. And it means knowing our transgressions, not by comparing ourselves with others or trusting religious performance, but by allowing God's Word to expose us and to drive us to our Savior.

Closing Prayer

Let us pray.

Father, Lord, we do thank You for the words and ministry of the prophet Hosea. We give You thanks that You are a God who does not give us mercy that we think we deserve, but mercy and grace that is unmerited, a mercy and grace even that can be uncomfortable, that can call us to repentance. Lord, we thank You for Your love that You have shown us. Lord, as we read in Your Word, that You do not desire sacrifice, but steadfast love, we know that You are worthy of worship and praise, but that You desire the heart. Help us to have hearts that do not bring false burnt offerings, but a genuine love, lives of living sacrifice. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.