The Wheel

"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?" Galatians 1:10

There is a picture I cannot get out of my head, and it is a hamster on a wheel.

The wheel is going. The little legs are moving. There is real effort in it, real exertion, real sweat if hamsters sweat, and if you were to measure the distance covered you would find that it is genuinely impressive. Mile after mile after mile.

And he is exactly where he started.

That is the approval carrot, and I have run on that wheel most of my life. You think you are going somewhere. You feel the motion. You can point to the effort as proof that something is happening, and effort does feel like progress, especially to a man who has always been able to work harder than the people around him.

But the carrot is hung from the wheel. It moves when you move. That is the design.

And so you get the promotion and the line shifts. You get the compliment and it lasts an afternoon. You get the approval you were sure would settle it, and by Wednesday your stomach is tight again and you are not entirely sure why, and if you are honest you already know what you are going to do about it.

You are going to run.

Here is what I want you to notice. Nobody put you on the wheel. That is the part that is hard to say out loud. The wheel is in your cage and you get on it every morning because the running feels like living, and stopping feels like dying, and you have never once tried to find out whether it is.

What would happen if you stepped off?

Not permanently. Just today.

The Ring in Your Nose

"The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe." Proverbs 29:25

The fear of man is a snare, and I want you to sit with what a snare actually is, because we hear the word and think of something small. A snare is not a warning. A snare is a trap, and a trap has one purpose, which is to hold you where you are so that something else can decide what happens next.

But there is a commentary that goes further than that. It says the snare in this verse is not only a trap but a lead. Like a ring through the nose.

That is why you see rings in the noses of bulls. It is not decoration. It is control. An animal that could break a man in half is walked wherever you want it to go, by a ring in the softest part of its face, and it goes, because the alternative hurts more.

Fearing what other people think of you is that ring.

And this is what fools us, because it does not feel like a trap. It feels like a carrot. It feels like something good is out ahead of us and we are almost there, and if we just get a little more approval, a little more of their good opinion, we will finally be able to rest. So we lean forward. We take another step. We keep our head down and we go where we are led.

The carrot is the disguise. The ring is the mechanism.

And you will not feel it. That is the whole point of it. Nobody who is being led by the nose feels the ring. They only feel the pull, and they call it ambition, and they call it service, and sometimes they even call it love.

So here is the only question that gets to the bottom of it.

Who has been walking you around?

The Cry Underneath

“Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” Galatians 4:6

We have made the word Father formal. We set it at the front of our prayers, in the voice we use when other people can hear us. Our Father, who art in heaven. It is a good word and a true one, but somewhere along the way we starched it.

Paul does not use that word. He reaches past Greek altogether and takes an Aramaic word out of a kitchen. Abba. It is what a small child says. It does not mean Father. It means Daddy.

And notice who is saying it. Not you. Read the verse again. God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. The cry is not something you generate. It is not a warmth you have to produce on Sunday morning by trying harder or singing louder. The Spirit of the Son is the one crying, and he is doing it inside you, and what he is saying is Daddy.

Which means the question was never whether you can feel it. The question is whether you can hear it.

Because something can sit on top of that cry. Something can be loud enough in your chest that the voice underneath does not get through. Not sin, necessarily. Usually it is an idol, and usually it is a good thing that has grown a mouth. It talks constantly. It asks for your hours and your worry and your endless small sacrifices, and it talks straight over the quiet voice saying Daddy, I love you.

You are not being asked to manufacture affection for God. You have been adopted. Your inheritance has been signed over to you. The cry is already in you, and it has been for longer than you know.

Sit still somewhere this week, long enough to hear what is saying it.

Feeding on Ashes

“He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray.” Isaiah 44:20

Isaiah watches a man walk out to the woods and cut down a tree. He carries it home. Half of it he burns. He warms himself at the fire and says, ah, I am warm. He bakes his bread over it, roasts his meat, and eats until he is full. Then he takes what is left of the same tree, the other half, and he shapes it, and he bows down to it, and he says, deliver me, for you are my god.

The strange part is not that he worships. The strange part is that he watched himself make it.

You will not be tempted by a wooden idol. But you will be tempted by something you built with your own hands and then knelt to. A reputation you assembled. A political certainty you carved. A family you love so much that you have quietly begun asking it to save you. A retirement account. A rightness. A routine. You watched yourself make it. You remember the labor. And still you find yourself asking it for deliverance.

Isaiah says the man feeds on ashes, and that is the exact accounting. An idol does not starve you all at once. It feeds you. It gives you something real. Ash has substance, it fills the mouth, and you can go a long way on it before you notice that nothing in it is keeping you alive.

But here is the line that should stop you where you stand. No one stops to think. No one has the knowledge or the discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. He does not ask the question. Not because he could not answer it. Because he never asks it.

So ask it.

What is the thing you are asking to deliver you? And do you remember making it?

They Will Eat and Not Have Enough

"They shall eat, but not have enough; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the LORD to cherish whoredom." Hosea 4:10

They will eat but never have enough.

That is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about the human heart, and God says it about people who are getting exactly what they went after. This is not a verse about deprivation. They are eating. They are getting the thing. And it is doing nothing.

Charles Darwin said near the end of his life that he was not the least afraid to die, and in the same season he wrote to a friend that he had very little satisfaction in life. He had spent himself on work he believed was useful, and by his own account he arrived at the end of it hollow.

This is why people with everything come to the end of their years and say, I accumulated it all, and I am still empty.

Here is what I think is happening, and I got it from Paul and I cannot shake it. The works of the flesh are not primarily about wickedness. They are about emptiness. Free and faithful love is motivated by the joy of sharing the fullness we have in Christ. But the works of the flesh are motivated by the desire to fill an emptiness.

And that is why the appetite never closes. You cannot fill a hole with the wrong substance. You can only keep pouring.

For some of us it is religion, and we use the law itself to do it. We serve, we attend, we perform, and we are as empty as anybody at the bar. For others it is the obvious things, the booze, the screen, the relationship that brings no honor to Christ. It does not matter which. Paul says it is enslaved to one desire after another in its effort to fill an emptiness which only Christ can fill.

Oswald Chambers wrote that the springs of love are in God, not in us.

Not in us. That is the whole diagnosis in four words.

So the question is not why you are still hungry.

The question is what you have been eating.

My Wool, My Linen

"She said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.'" Hosea 2:5

Listen to how Gomer talks.

My wool. My linen. My olive oil. My drink.

Say it out loud a few times and you will hear the whole problem, because the problem is not in the nouns. The problem is in the pronoun. Every single one of those things was given to her. She did not spin the wool. She did not press the oil. Somebody provided all of it, and she has stood in the middle of that provision and called it hers, and then walked out the door to go find people who might give her more of it.

She has completely forgotten who provided in the first place. And having forgotten, she is now chasing after men who can give her exactly what she already had.

That is not a story about a woman in the eighth century before Christ. That is Tuesday.

How quickly do we forget who is really providing. How fast do we run after the next thing, the next relationship, the next status symbol, forgetting the faithful love that has been there the whole time, quietly stocking the shelves.

I do not think the forgetting is usually dramatic either. I do not think anybody wakes up and decides to be ungrateful. I think it happens the way a house gets cluttered, which is one thing at a time, none of them decisive.

And then one day you look around at a life that was handed to you, and everything in it has your name on it.

My health. My family. My gifts. My church. My work.

And God, who gave every bit of it, is standing in the doorway of a house he furnished, listening to a person he loves say the word my.

Raisin Cakes

"Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins." Hosea 3:1

Raisin cakes.

It seems like a strange detail to put in a verse about spiritual adultery, and the first time it catches you it almost sounds funny. Is God suddenly against baked goods?

No. In that culture raisin cakes were a status symbol. They were the imported thing, the expensive thing, the thing you set out on the table when you wanted the neighbors to know you were doing well. They were the Mercedes in the driveway. They were the newest phone on the table at lunch, screen up, so it can be seen.

And God says, they turn to other gods, and they love the cakes of raisins.

He puts those two things in the same sentence on purpose.

We want the idol to be dramatic. We want it to be a carved thing on a shelf, something obviously wicked, something we would never do. And God says no. Sometimes the thing that pulls a heart away from me is not evil at all. It is nice. It is a small luxury. It is a signal. It is the raisin cake.

That is what makes it dangerous. Nobody repents of dessert.

The idol is almost never the thing itself. It is what the thing tells you about yourself. It is the story the raisin cake tells about the person who can afford it, and that story is very quiet, and it does not feel like worship, and it is worship.

And here is the terrible mercy in the verse. God does not stop loving her over it. He says go again. Love a woman who is loved by another man.

He knows exactly what she left him for.

He knows it was raisin cakes.

He sends the prophet anyway.

Go, Marry Her

"When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, 'Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.'" Hosea 1:2

God tells Moses to go free the captives. God tells Abraham to leave and go to a land I will show you.

And then God comes to Hosea.

I want you to marry a prostitute.

I think I would have asked for more time to pray that one through. I think I would have gone back and said, Lord, I want to make sure I heard you, because there is nothing holy about what I think you just said. And he says, yes, Hosea. She is a prostitute. Her name is Gomer.

Not Mary. Not Sarah. Gomer.

Imagine the whispers at the market. Did you hear about Hosea, the prophet, the man of God? He is getting married. And you will never believe who.

But here is what is incredible about it. God is not asking Hosea to make a strange life decision. God is asking Hosea to live out a prophecy. Every painful moment, every whisper behind his back, every betrayal that is coming, all of it is going to paint a picture. A living picture of how God feels about his people. Of how much he loves them, even when they run.

So they marry. They have three children. Life is happening.

And then one morning Hosea wakes up and she is gone. He searches the house. He checks the yard. He walks up and down the street. Nothing.

And now the prophet is a single father with three children, and if you have ever been a single parent you know the days are hard and the nights are worse. And the whispers around town are not helping. I knew it would not work. What was he thinking.

We read Hosea as a book about Israel, and it is. But God did not send Israel a memo. He sent them a man, with a wrecked house and a broken heart, and he said, look at him. That is me.

Before you ever read a word about your idols, read that.

The God you left is not indifferent about it.