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The God who tears his prostitute people

Just listened to a wonderful sermon from our friend Robin Weekes who opened the Word for us at the Re:Fresh Conference last year.

Robin Weekes preaching from Hosea 5:1-6:3

It's not always a good thing to analyse a sermon but I was really struck by a bunch of things that make this sermon so good:

  1. His aim - just listen to the prayer at the beginning - is for us to come to the Word and see and savour Christ. He knows that all Scripture is a portrait of Christ, he expects to find Him in Hosea 5 and he does and that is who he preaches.
  2. It's pure gospel. Cross and Resurrection. Crystal clear. Not forced on the passage but springing from it. Christ crucified and risen according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15).
  3. It's a great example of prophetic preaching - killing and making alive (Jeremiah 1:10).
  4. We see here the personal nature of sin - not just lawbreaking but spiritual adultery. So salvation and repentance are not about a system but about a person.
  5. It's a great example of using powerful language - lions tearing their prey and prostitution and resurrection - and it's not just rhetoric it's straight out of the text.
  6. And it's a good example of seeing a passage through the lens of one verse.
Having said that be warned it is a very English sermon preached to very English congregation. The illustrations and allusions (like the 1970s TV series 'Dad's Army') don't always communicate too well in our East African context. But that's just a challenge for us to take Hosea and look for Christ and proclaim Him carefully, clearly, cuttingly in our context.

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