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Hosea chapter 6, I'm going to read verses 1 through 3.

! 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 water the earth.

May God add a blessing to the reading of his word. Would you please be seated? Many sports fans, especially baseball fans, will probably remember March 18, 2005, as the day of Major League Baseball's reckoning.

If you'll recall on that day, Major League Baseball stars like Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Rafael Palmeiro were called by the House Government Reform Committee in Washington, D.C. to give testimony about the use of steroids and performance enhancing drugs in the sport.

And if you remember, it was a disaster. It was a disaster for baseball. Mark McGuire cried the whole time while he dodged questions about his use of steroids.

Sammy Sosa all of a sudden pretended as if he could not speak or understand English. But it was Rafael Palmeiro who stuck out to me the most that day.

Now, many of you probably aren't aware or don't remember who that player was. Rafael Palmeiro came up with the Chicago Cubs, and he was a skinny, soft-hitting first baseman.

But then he was traded or signed by the Texas Rangers. I can't remember what. But while he was there, he really beefed up, and he became one of the most prolific home run hitters in Major League Baseball.

And at this point in time, when he gave his testimony, he was playing for the Baltimore Orioles, which is my favorite team. So I was really interested to hear what one of my favorite players had to say about all of this.

And so if you remember, when it came his time to make his statement to that committee, he looked at the committee chairman. He pointed his finger at him, and if you remember, he said this.

Let me start by telling you this. I have never used steroids, period. It was a pretty convincing statement.

He pointed his finger at the guy, and he said very convincingly, and I wanted to believe him, that he was telling the truth, that he wasn't cheating. Then later on, later on that same year, in fact, five months after he gave this testimony, Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for steroid use.

Now, I'm not Sherlock Holmes, I'm no detective, but it seems to me that if you go to Congress and you testify to them that you've never used steroids before, and then you leave from that place and you proceed to use steroids for the very first time, as he would want us to believe, that chances are, most likely, you were using steroids the entire time.

And that when you went there and you gave that testimony, you were lying. Once word got out that he had tested positive for steroids and would be suspended by Major League Baseball, Rafael Palmeiro issued a lengthy apology.

And I want to read to you the end of what he said. He concluded it by saying this. That was his apology.

That was his conclusion. So I share that with you because his apology there is a classic example of someone who wasn't truly sorry for what they did, but was sorry that they got caught for what they did.

In the wake of the numerous public confessions by fallen politicians and fallen sports figures and business executives, Susan Weiss Bauer wrote a book, and she titled it The Art of the Public Grovel.

In it, she offers a helpful definition that exposes the difference between those who are sorry for getting caught versus those who are truly sorry for what they did.

She identifies it as the difference between an apology and a confession. And this is what she wrote. She wrote, an apology is an expression of regret.

A confession is an admission of fault. While an apology, she says, addresses an audience, a confession implies an interchange that will be manifested in outward action.

So you see, there's a difference. The Bible, being the Word of God, obviously explains this difference even better for us. The Bible says that there is a difference between worldly sorrow and godly sorrow.

And so this is the main idea for this morning's message that I want you to see. That godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation, but worldly sorrow only brings death.

Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation, but worldly sorrow only brings death. Now that might sound harsh to hear, but let me explain.

If there ever was a church in the history of the world that I would not, would not have wanted to pastor, it was the church in Corinth.

That church had problems. Those people were problematic. They were that church, you know. Everybody knows that church in the community who has all of those problems?

That was the church at Corinth. And so sometime after writing 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul received a disturbing report about the Corinthian church from his protege Timothy.

So Paul made a visit to them. And that visit did not go very well. And so he went back to Ephesus, and there he wrote what is called a severe letter. He calls it the severe letter to them.

That's not 2 Corinthians. It's a letter between those two writings. And in that letter, Paul confronts them. And in that letter, he, or in 2 Corinthians, I should say, 7, 8 through 10, he talks about that letter, and he talks about that difference between worldly sorrow and godly sorrow, which leads to repentance.

Let's look at that. He talks about the difference. 2 Corinthians 7, 8 through 10. For even if I made you grieve with my letter, I do not regret it. Though I did regret it, for I see that that letter grieved you, though only for a while.

As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting. For you felt a godly grief, a godly sorrow, so that you suffered no loss through us.

For godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. Worldly sorrow is often produced when a person realizes the consequences of their actions and then wishes that they could avoid the consequences for those actions that they committed.

They are upset, and they grieve thinking of what their deeds have produced, fearing the consequences, but never truly really being sorry for what they did in the first place.

In contrast to that, godly sorrow brings about repentance. That is a heartfelt desire to change, not because you were caught, but because you realized that you've sinned against God who is holy.

So then godly sorrow seeks to change the believer that offended God instead of merely seeking to avoid consequences. And so here in Hosea chapter 6, verses 1 through 3, Hosea, we see here, is pleading for his people to repent.

Their only hope he presents to them is to turn back to God. But if you remember earlier in that prophecy in chapter 5, verse 4, Hosea described that the people were unable to turn to God.

However, here in verses 1 through 3 of chapter 6, Hosea expresses a hope that that is not God's final word on the subject. He hoped that a spiritual awakening would come to his people.

Though Israel had sunk deeply into sin, Hosea had not given up hope on them. Just as the Apostle Paul had not given up hope on that Corinthian church. Just as we today are not to give up hope on our church or the church.

Just as we are not today to give up hope on the community in which God has put us to shine our lights brightly for him. So Hosea there, for us, models a behavior that we should copy.

And we saw it through his persistent love for his wife, no matter what she did to him, no matter the numerous adulteries that she committed against him, he continued to pursue her because he loved her.

God is like that too. God is persisting with Israel, no matter how deeply entrenched in sin that they may be.

So the prediction of Hosea 5, verse 15, I will return again to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face in their distress, earnestly seek me, is now transposed into Hosea's plea in chapter 6, verses 1 through 3, for Israel to repent and to return to the Lord.

To not merely express a worldly sorrow over the consequences that they'll face for their sin, but to truly repent, to seek God's forgiveness.

That they might be restored. That they might be saved from the judgment that was to come. Like Hosea, we are called by God to preach a message of repentance too.

We are to warn people about the consequences of their sin. We are to plead with people to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

And when we do that, it will mean that we will have uncomfortable conversations. We live today in an overly sensitive culture.

Where in us doing this, we will be perceived by our culture as being insensitive. Being mean. You're going to tell people that they're going to suffer in hell forever?

That's not very nice. They'll tell us. But, isn't it worse? Isn't it worse for us to say nothing at all?

Especially when we have God's word here for us, and we know what the word of God says about the consequences of sin, the reality of hell? Well, so we, like Hosea, must call people to repent.

But, we can't make people repent. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. We aren't able to save anybody just as nobody was able to save us, just as nobody is able to save themselves from their sins.

But, we have been tasked by our Lord with a mission to go and to call people to turn to Him. Let's look at a couple of those passages.

Matthew 28, 18-20, the Great Commission. Jesus came and said to them, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.

And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. So, we are to go and make disciples. How are we supposed to do that?

Well, Paul shows us in Romans 10, 14-15, where there he says, How then will they, the unbeliever, how will they call on Him whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.

So, the teaching that I hope to unfold to you today is this, that godly sorrow is good. Godly sorrow is good.

And in order to unfold that truth, I'll make three points about this passage that we've read. That godly sorrow is good. That godly sorrow produces repentance. That godly sorrow leads to salvation.

So, first of all, in verse 1, we see that godly sorrow is good. There, again, Hosea talks about the Lord tearing them apart and healing them.

Hosea talks about the Lord striking them down and then binding them up so that they might live before him. So, Hosea says here that God has torn you, but his purpose in doing so isn't to ridicule you, but so that you might be healed by him.

There's a point to this. This is a paradox, isn't it? The one who produces the pain is also the one who brings the healing for that pain.

So, I thought, how can I best explain this? And so, I was thinking about my gallbladder surgery that I had back in June. And if you've ever had your gallbladder removed, you know that prior to having it removed, it's very intense pain.

It's terrible. And so, thankfully for me, I have connections with people over across the street at the hospital. Katie and Morgan who were here this morning, they were there removing my gallbladder during that time.

So, I'm thankful for my church family. They've seen parts of me that none of the rest of you hopefully will ever see. But all that to say is that to get to the gallbladder, they had to inflict pain upon me.

And apparently, I bleed a lot. So, they had to cut me open. They had to cut open my body to get to the greater pain in order to take it out. Then afterwards, I had to heal.

You know, those scars had to heal. There was a lot of discomfort. But eventually, that pain that they inflicted upon me brought healing to my body.

You understand? So, that's what's going on here. And we see from God's word that godly sorrow is to sin what pain is to disease. We all experience brokenness within ourselves.

We all perceive brokenness within our world that things are not as they should be. That pain that we feel internally, that we see externally, is the result of the curse of sin.

The pain should cause us to run to the only solution where we can receive healing, the cure, who is Jesus Christ, the Lord.

But instead, too often, unbelievers especially, will turn to a host of other things to try to cure what ails them. You name it.

All different kinds of things. So when we share the good news of Jesus Christ, we aren't merely suggesting that Jesus is a good option for hurting people to consider.

You know, we don't go and evangelize and say, hey, have you tried Jesus Christ? Maybe, just maybe, he's what you're looking for. No, we are stating as a matter of fact that Jesus Christ is the way.

He is the truth. He is the life. He is the only one who is able to cure our sins. He is the only one who is able to take those away from us, having died for our sins in our place.

You know, our culture often tells us that to feel guilty feelings and to feel ashamed are unhealthy or harmful to us. They can be sometimes, but not all the time.

But people being told that, you know, you shouldn't feel that way. They try to medicate. They try to do all different kinds of things to try to get those feelings to go away. But again, none of those things is able to bring the salvation that they are in desperate need of.

Only the gospel is able to do that. Only the Holy Spirit of God speaking through us to dying people enabling them to believe the words we speak is able to do that.

So instead of running from the guilt we feel, we need to address it. We need to do business with God. If that's the case for you, you've got business to do with God so that we can progress in our Christ-likeness.

And instead also of running away from situations where someone else is expressing sorrow, especially if they are an unbeliever, instead of trying to avoid that situation or run away from that situation, what we need to do is enter into that situation.

Speaking for God, speaking the truth, sharing the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. Back in my church in Leavenworth, I had a woman who came all the time.

If the church doors were open, she was there. An elderly woman, she was married, but her son, or her husband, I should say, never came to church with her. Never came. She was in really bad health towards the end of her life.

She had a lot of heart issues, and so the first time I met her husband was visiting her in the hospital. And so we got to talking for a while, and he got to asking about the church.

He's like, well, you know, Pastor Mike, I've never been to a church service where I didn't fall asleep during the sermon. And so I said, well, I can't tell you that that's not going to be the case for me, but, you know, we would love to have you come anyways. And so he would come, you know, sporadically.

We'd see him maybe three times, five times a year. Then, one day, he was out working on his property, and he just passed out.

Just passed out. He was unresponsive. And so the paramedics run out there. They had to bring him to the hospital. People, the doctors thought he had had some kind of stroke. He had bleeding in his brain.

They couldn't identify what the source was, so when I saw him in the hospital, he was hooked up to all these monitors all over his head. They had to shave his head, and they had all these things hooked up to him. And, you know, he joked about it.

He joked about the situation. You know, we kind of laughed, and I visited with him, and I, you know, said I was there to pray for him. And then, all of a sudden, I'll never forget, I was there by his bedside.

His wife was across the room on the couch. And he turned, and he looked at me. And I'll never forget his eyes, because he was terrified.

terrified. Terrified. And all of a sudden, he entered the conversation, whatever we were talking about. I don't remember, but he looked at me and said, Pastor Mike, I'm afraid.

I'm afraid that I'm going to die, and I've done a lot of bad things. And I'm afraid I'm going to die and spend the rest of my life in hell. people. And so, in that moment, unless you've been in a moment like that before, it's hard to explain, but you just kind of get tunnel vision.

You know that right now, what you are dealing with has implications for all of eternity. And I don't even remember really what I said to him, but I know I shared the gospel with him, and I know I was asking him questions.

Do you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? And he said, yes. Yes, I do. And when he did, he started crying, and his wife hopped up out of her seat on the couch. She ran over to his side, and she just grabbed his arm and was bawling.

Bawling. You know why? Because I knew that she had been praying for him for years. For years she'd been praying that her husband would experience this kind of sorrow that would lead to repentance.

And you know what? They never figured out what caused the bleeding on his brain. They never figured out what caused him to be in that situation. He eventually got better, and about a month or two later, he was baptized in our church.

And you know, I told him, Alan, you know what I think happened to you? Is that God put you in a place where he got your attention. He got your attention, and you were able to come to grips with the reality of your sin and your need for a Savior.

So godly sorrow is good. When you see somebody going through a situation like that, don't avoid it. be there. Pray.

Be willing to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them. Secondly, godly sorrow produces repentance. This is why it's so good is because it produces repentance.

Verse 2, after two days, he will revive us. On the third day, he will raise us up that we may live before him. So here, Hosea is using the language of resurrection.

resurrection. Israel's condition wasn't just that they were spiritually sick, but that they were spiritually dead. They needed to be resurrected. And then obviously, this being a prophetic book, it alludes to the eventual death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord, who would be the author of our salvation.

But in using this time span, I believe that Hosea is using it to reveal to the people, hey, listen, this will not take nearly as long as you think that it will. That God is ready to forgive you if you will turn to him.

They don't have to perform some kind of great task. They don't have to take the ring to Mordor to throw it into the fires of Mount Doom to destroy their sin.

Jesus Christ has done that. All they've got to do is turn back to God. And here's the thing for us. We can do nothing. We can bring nothing to God.

God, the only thing we can bring to him is our sin. That's it. And Acts 2, if you remember, the Holy Spirit had descended on the day of Pentecost.

He'd filled the apostles and they were preaching out in the streets. They were sharing the gospel in all these different languages and people were hearing the good news of Jesus Christ coming from them and a large crowd gathered around in Jerusalem that day.

And if you remember, Peter got up and he preached the gospel to them. And in his sermon, the sermon that they heard, people were hearing it and they were cut to the heart.

They were convicted. What's amazing is that it's these same people who just days before were shouting and chanting and crying for Jesus to be crucified. They've changed now.

They've heard the preaching of the gospel. They're experiencing this godly sorrow. Now let's pick up in Acts chapter 2, verses 37 through 38. Now when they heard this, when they heard the gospel that Jesus was preaching, they were cut to the heart.

They were convicted. And Peter and the rest of the apostles said, brothers, or they asked them, brothers, what shall we do? The crowd was asking, what shall we do with this sorrow? And Peter said to them, repent.

Be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.

So you see, to repent in relation to salvation is to change your mind in regard to sin in Jesus Christ, just as these people's minds were changed.

Repentance involves recognizing that you have thought wrongly about sin, about Jesus, about God, and what he has done. Repentance also involves thinking rightly then about God, thinking rightly about sin, thinking rightly about salvation and holiness and the need to be obedient to God and his will.

So godly sorrow is good because it produces repentance. Godly sorrow is good because it leads to salvation. It leads to salvation. So Hosea here pleads with them, pleads with them.

Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord. His going out is as sure as the dawn. He will come. If we repent, he will come and he will shower us with springs that water the earth.

He will cleanse us. Hosea could not force these people to repent, we've got to understand. He pleads, that's his hope, that's his prayer, but he could not force them to press on to know the Lord on his own.

And so the rest of chapter 6 reveals that. As much as he pleaded, as much as he hoped, that he could not force their conversions. The Bible says that no one can repent and come to God unless God draws that person to himself.

Here are the words of Jesus in John 6, 44. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.

So here's our responsibility. We plead. We plead with people to repent. But we know that ultimately we cannot force anyone to do that.

That that's the job of the Holy Spirit, not our job. So this is our responsibility. We are like the farmer in the parable that Jesus tells in Mark 4.

Our job is to take the seed, which is the gospel. And wherever we go, we spread the seed. We spread the seed with our words. We spread the seed with the way that we live, in our places of work, in our community.

When you're at Walmart and the line is long and you just want to get out of there, thank God for self-checkout, right? Wherever you're at, you are spreading seed.

Wherever God would have your feet to go, that is your mission field, and you are spreading the good news of Jesus Christ. And once you've done that, you know what else you do? You go home and you go to sleep.

And overnight, who causes the growth? Who causes the seed to take root? Who causes that plant to grow and to flourish? It's God, not us.

Certainly we have a responsibility to help one another grow in Christlikeness, but ultimately this is the work of God, not us. So understand that your responsibility is just to be a seed thrower.

Secondly, I want you to also understand this. Two things. I want to close with two application points. Be willing to cause godly sorrow. Be willing to cause godly sorrow.

Now again, I'm not suggesting that we seek to force conversions. We're going to play an invitation hymn, but we're only going to sing that verse one time, right?

I promise you it bothers me. I'm not going to be down here and say, hey, we're going to play that invitation hymn until somebody comes forward. We're not leaving. We're not trying to force responses.

Do you understand what I'm saying? That is not our responsibility. What I'm suggesting and what the Bible is saying is that we be willing to cause godly sorrow the way that Hosea has, the way that Paul has, the way that other people have in the Bible.

that we point out the reality of sin and its consequences. That we be willing to go to our brother or sister in Christ when we see that they are struggling in sin.

When they're struggling with their walk in the Lord or they're going to do something or make a decision that is going to be terrible for them and their family and the church. And we're willing to go to them and we're willing to speak the truth to them, but we do so in a loving way.

hoping for restoration. So we must be willing to cause godly sorrow. Second, we must be willing to receive godly sorrow.

Put yourself in the position of Israel. You get this stern warning from Hosea. It's a rebuke from God and a call to repentance out of an expression of love.

How would you respond? Would you be defensive? Pointing the finger at everybody else's flaws? Well, you think I'm bad. Listen. Look at everybody else.

I'm only doing what they're doing or what I'm doing isn't as bad as what they're doing. How would you respond? Or would you listen and be moved to sorrow that leads to repentance and results in life?

Thank you.