“Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord, that He may come and rain righteousness upon you.”
– Hosea 10:12
Oh, is there not so much to meditate on in this one verse? Just read it slowly. Think about all this imagery. “Sow for yourselves righteousness.” Don’t you want to sow that today in your life? Righteousness to live in ways that are right and good and just and pleasing to God and good for others. “Sow righteousness for yourselves; reap steadfast love.” Who doesn’t want to reap steadfast love? Yes, God, sign me up. I want to reap steadfast love.
Then Verse 12 says, “Break up your fallow ground for it is the time to seek the Lord.” What a picture. Break up the hard ground any way in our hearts that is hard and others’ hearts. “For it’s the time to seek the Lord, that He may come and rain righteousness upon you.” Oh, what a picture of ground softened, ready to receive rain and bear fruit. Don’t you want that to be your heart before God every day, not a hard heart before Him, but a soft heart before God? It’s broken up. Break up the fallow ground so that God might come and rain righteousness on you. And think, isn’t this good to pray for our hearts and our lives, and to pray for others’ hearts and others’ lives?
Hosea 10:12 Calls Us to Live Righteously
Oh, let’s pray according to this verse. God, we want to sow righteousness. We want to reap steadfast love in our lives. We pray this over our families, over our churches. God, we pray for righteousness and steadfast love. And God, we pray for our hearts, that You would soften our hearts before You, that we would not have hard hearts before You, that our hearts would be soft before You, that we would be humble and contrite in spirit, trembling at Your Word like Isaiah 66 tells us is honoring and pleasing to You. You esteem the one who’s humble and contrite in heart like that. God, we pray for that in our own hearts, for a willingness and an openness to hear from You, to obey You, to do anything and everything You’re calling us to do.
God, we pray for soft, humble hearts, that You might come and rain righteousness on us. Do it, God. Rain righteousness on me, on every one of us who’s praying this right now, and we pray this for others. God, I think about people in all of our lives who seem to have hard hearts before You, some who profess to be followers of Jesus but whose hearts seem so hard. God, please soften their hearts. We pray for unbelieving friends and coworkers and neighbors and family members. God, we pray that You would break up the fallow ground of their hearts, that You would soften their hearts, that they might hear the good news of Your love in Jesus and receive Your love. Rain righteousness down on them, we pray, oh God.
Hosea 10:12 Leads Us to Pray for Moor of Sri Lanka
And we pray this for people, groups around the world, for the Moor of Sri Lanka, half a million of them, this Muslim people group, among whom there are little to no known believers right now. God, we pray, break up the fallow ground. Please God, by Your Spirit of the Moor in Sri Lanka, cause the gospel to go to them and rain righteousness on the Moor of Sri Lanka. God, we intercede for them. We pray for that today based on Your Word, all of this based on Your Word in Hosea 10:12, which we love. We love Your Word, and we love praying according to it. So we ask these things according to Your Word to us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
David Platt serves as a Lead Pastor for McLean Bible Church. He is also the Founder of Radical, an organization that makes Jesus known among the nations.
David received his B.A. from the University of Georgia and M.Div., Th.M., and Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Some of his published works include Radical, Radical Together, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Don’t Hold Back, and How to Read the Bible.
He lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area with his wife and children.
