December 17

“They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7)

Whenever I hear a young man talking in a flippant way about sowing his wild oats, I don’t laugh. I feel more like crying, because I know he is going to make his grey-haired mother reap in tears ; he is going to make his wife reap in shame; he is going to make his old father and his innocent children reap with him. Only ten or fifteen or twenty years will pass before he will have to reap his wild oats; no man has ever sowed them without having to reap them. Sow the wind and you reap the whirlwind.