One Cattle Gate

There is a man out our way who drives an extra nine miles a day, and has for two years, to avoid one cattle gate.

I want you to picture the geography, because the geography is the sermon. The county road runs east and then it forks, and the left fork goes down past the Hollis place and through a gate you have to get out and open, and then it is a mile and a half to town. That is the way everybody goes. That is the way he went for eleven years, and he could have opened that gate in the dark in the rain and often did.

The right fork goes up and around, follows the ridge, comes back down the far side, and puts you into town from the north. Nine miles and change. Nine miles each way when he has to come back. Two years of that is a truck's worth of fuel and a great deal of a man's life spent watching the same ridge go by.

He has a reason. He will not tell you the reason, but he has one, and it happened at the Hollis place, and he was the one it happened because of.

Now here is what I want you to notice. Nobody at the Hollis place has any idea he is doing this. Not one soul. The gate is a gate. It gets opened forty times a day by people hauling hay and by the propane truck and by a girl who is learning to drive and who has to get out and open it and then get back in and then get out again. There is nothing on that gate. No sign, no chain, no charge.

But in his head there is a booth beside it. And in the booth there is somebody who is going to want something from him before he goes through, and he has never worked out exactly what, which is why he has never been able to bring it. So he pays nine miles instead, every single day, because nine miles is a price he knows how to pay.

A toll you invent is the most expensive kind there is. The real ones you pay once and go through.

That is you, taking the ridge road.

You have organized a whole life around not going through one gate. Not because somebody stood there and charged you. Because you decided, some evening two years ago, that going back that way would cost something, and rather than find out what, you started paying in miles.

He put the word freely right in the sentence

Hosea has been carrying a hard message for a long stretch of chapters. Then it turns, near the end, and God says this. Read the last word of the middle clause slowly, because a man could drive nine miles a day for two years for want of that one word.

I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him.Hosea 14:4

Freely. Not cheaply. Not eventually. Freely, which in plain speech means without a charge attached, given because the giver wanted to and not because the receiver came up with something.

You are loved on those terms right now, on the ridge road, mid journey, with the gate still unopened. That is not me being generous with somebody else's money: Hosea 14:4 says freely in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can walk that into a chest that has been budgeting for two years.

I have been a long time in country where people are proud, and I will tell you what I have watched happen over and over. A man will accept help he can pay back a hundred times before he will accept help he cannot. The free thing is harder than the priced thing, every time. So when God says freely, He is not making it easier on us. He is making it impossible on us, on purpose, because a thing you cannot pay for is the only thing you cannot lose by running out of money.

And look at what He heals. Backsliding. Not the fall itself, but the sliding: the slow going back, the gradual, the two years. That is the very thing you have been avoiding the gate over, and He names it as the thing He is healing rather than the thing He is charging for.

You have not been assessed and you are not being invoiced, which is written into the verse and not into my opinion of you, with the Spirit of God able to make that settle where two years of arguing with yourself never did.

Then the last clause, and it is the one people skip. Mine anger is turned away from him. Turned away. Past tense, done, before the man in the verse has done anything at all in the chapter. The direction of God on this matter was settled before your turn, not because of it.

Which means the booth is empty. It always was. It is not that somebody was in it and has now gone. Nobody was ever in it, and you have been paying nine miles a day to a booth with nobody in it.

You are free to take the left fork this evening, and that is Hosea 14:4 talking rather than a nice thought about country roads, with the Holy Spirit making it a real option in your hands and not a doctrine you agree with from the ridge.