# Burroughs on Hosea 4:4



## Wayne (Apr 5, 2010)

If I had to sell all my books save one besides my Bible, Jeremiah Burroughs' _Exposition on the Prophecy of Hosea_ would probably be that last volume held back. Tough call on which forum to place this in, but it fits well here under Spiritual Warfare.
This is a difficult lesson here that Burroughs deals with. I know I have need to hear this. To receive admonition as a blessing from God--not so easy, is it?

Hosea 4:4 _Yet let no man strive, nor reprove another; for thy people are as they that strive with the priest._



> _Obs._ 1. Sin cannot be got from men without striving. Such is the perverseness of men's hearts, that they take fast hold of deceit, Jer. viii. 5, and you cannot get them away without striving; like men in a frenzy, you cannot get them off from that which will injure them without struggling with them. When you admonish and reprove men for sin, you must expect beforehand that they will bless God for you; at first you may be hardly used; What! you come to judge us? as they said to Lot, "Who made you a ruler? So you generally receive very ill language from men at first when they are reproved, yet be not discouraged, they may bless God for you afterwards, they may say as David unto Abigail, "Blessed be God, and blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou for thy counsel."
> 
> _Obs._ 2. Even private men, (as implied in the former note,) so long as there is any hope, should strive with their brethren, by way of admonition and reprehension, to bring them from their sin. We must not say, Are we our brother's keepers? that is the language of a Cain. There is much striving and contending one with another for our own ends; oh that there were more striving and contending for God and his glory! It is a sign that the glory of God and the souls of our brethren are not precious in our eyes, when we can so strive and contend to have our own wills, and though God loses his glory, and our brother's soul is like to perish, we cannot strive and contend there, not even those of us that are full of strife otherwise.
> 
> ...



As we used to say in the '60s, "Heavy!" Where are the preachers like that today?


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## py3ak (Apr 5, 2010)

Can I admonish you to forget the sixties? 

I was thinking about this recently, that sometimes being willing to rebuke someone means being willing to withstand a hot temper, because there are people who blow up at first, and then when they settle down come and apologize and take the rebuke to heart; but withstanding that initial blast of temper isn't easy. Observation 1 shows that Burroughs expected to make people mad, and that he expected to tolerate what they said and did while mad. That's not an easy attitude to have, because it's easy to say "He's only going to get mad if I tell him about that" and either reject him as unworthy of our reproof, or conclude that it's not worth the hassle.


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