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Do you love your dull heart? Do you delight in the distance you feel from God, content to sit in your seat, silent and estranged, while the Father's table sits open and waiting?

Part one named the ache. This message asks the harder question: do you actually want to be healed of it? Michael returns to Hosea 14:4 to show us a God who heals gently, without lecture, without rebuke, because His anger turned away from us before we ever turned back to Him. He grounds this in the cross, where Christ bore the full wrath that was ours, so that when God disciplines the wandering believer now, it is the discipline of a Father who chases the one He loves, not the wrath of a Judge settling accounts. Using the physical process of healing, a wound plugged, cleansed, and restored, he shows how the Spirit does the same work in a hardened, callused heart.

He identifies three ways the Spirit brings this healing: a gracious invitation to return, spoken plainly and without condition; a longing planted in the heart for the Lord's fellowship that no husk of this world can satisfy; and the remembrance of the gospel itself, the wrath He bore, the pit He pulled us from, the grace that saved us and must save us still. The answer to backsliding is never a resolution to try harder. It is a fresh look at the cross. Michael closes by asking, plainly, whether we will come like the lost sheep crying to be found, or remain silent in the seat, and he leaves no room to pretend that question does not matter.

In This Episode

• Am I actually content with the distance I feel from God, and what does that contentment say about me?
• Why does God's discipline of a wandering believer never carry His anger or wrath?
• What does the Spirit actually do to heal a hardened, calloused heart?
• Is repenting the same as promising God I will try harder from now on?
• Why must remembering the gospel, and not renewed effort, be the cure for a wandering heart?

The question was never whether God is willing to heal you. That question is settled. The only question left is whether you will let the Shepherd find you.