Even though they call me their God and claim that they are my people and that they know me, they have rejected what is good. Because of this their enemies will pursue them. – Hosea 8:2-3 GNT

Amazing how I can live my life without talking to God and the moment I am in trouble, in my mind, we become best friends. My prayer talk even sounds like it. I say all the right words.

It is no wonder God rejects this kind of prayer that shows my hypocrisy. I reject everything about God, everything about following Him, every desire to glorify Him in my life, I rarely – if ever – pick up my Bible to read it, my vocal chords have not sung a worship song, I have no fear of God and I have no respect for anything that is good, just and right.

“In a time of some judgment, calamity, or pressing affliction; the heart is then taken up with thoughts and contrivances of flying from the present troubles, fears, and dangers. This, as a convinced person concludes, is to be done only by relinquishment of sin, which gains peace with God. It is the anger of God in every affliction that galls a convinced person. To be quit of this, men resolve at such times against their sins. Sin shall never more have any place in them; they will never again give up themselves to the service of it. Accordingly, sin is quiet, stirs not, seems to be mortified; not, indeed, that it hath received any one wound, but merely because the soul hath possessed its faculties, whereby it should exert itself, with thoughts inconsistent with the motions thereof; which, when they are laid aside, sin returns again to its former life and vigour” (pp. 26–27). “The true and acceptable principles of mortification shall be . . . insisted on . . . [namely] hatred of sin as sin, not only as galling or disquieting. . . . Now, it is certain that that which I speak of proceeds from self-love. Thou settest thyself with all diligence and earnestness to mortify such a lust or sin; what is the reason of it? It disquiets thee, it hath taken away thy peace, it fills thy heart with sorrow, and trouble, and fear; thou hast no rest because of it” – John Owen