RECONCILED – REDEEMED – RESTRICTED – RESTORED…a prophetic picture of God’s constant and unchanging love for the people of Israel…and for each one of us too.

Read Hosea 3: 1-4

This is pretty amazing stuff. We return to the story of Hosea and his unfaithful wife, Gomer. By this time she seems to be in a whole lot of trouble…for some reason she has sold herself into slavery. God instructs Hosea be reconciled to her, to redeem her and to have her back in his home as his wife. When she comes home a restriction is placed on her…she is to abstain from sex for a while; maybe like an addict she needs to be removed from the thing that has enslaved her mind and attitudes – a sort of spiritual detox – before she can be whole again. This is not conditional love…it’s about healing and restoration for the relationship.

RECONCILED – REDEEMED – RESTRICTED – RESTORED…a prophetic picture of God’s constant and unchanging love for the people of Israel. God promises they too can be reconciled to God, that he will redeem them from exile, a time when their lives will be restricted by the absence of king, temple, priesthood and religious practices and they will long to be restored to their relationship with God as his people.

And it’s also a picture of what Jesus has done for the people that make up his church, redeeming them from slavery to a sinful life and restoring them to a full relationship with the God who loves them.

Is there someone you need to be reconciled to, someone to whom you need to show the same restoring love that Jesus showed to you?

Ask God to help you to love that person. Ask what that ‘love’ might look like. Consider the possible cost of loving that person in the way God wants you to.

If it’s possible, take the first steps towards renewing the connection and restoring the relationship.

After the harsh words at the beginning of chapter 2, these are tender words.

They reminded me of a song I used to sing in concerts, written by singer/songwriter Julie Miller

“You knew the way to my heart,
I had a good defence but you tore it all apart.
You knew, you knew the way to my heart.

There were other lovers, knocking at my door,
You were like no other I had known before.
When nobody else could touch me, nobody else could see
Your compassion reached the deepest part of me.”

I have experienced the compassion of God for the rebel and the runaway.

I first became a follower of Jesus when I was about 10 years old. I didn’t come from a church-going family. How, even at such a young age, I was attracted to Jesus and saw my need for a relationship with him, is another story.

In my early twenties I quite deliberately chose to stop living as a follower of Jesus, and to take back control of my life and do my own thing. The causes of this reversal were several and complicated…over a period of time relationships, unanswered prayer and a sense that God really had no interest in me, all added up until the burden of trying to live something I no longer really believed and serving a God I no longer trusted became to much, and I just walked away.

However, God, who it turns out is very reluctant to lose anyone and who, it seems, often lets us live through things for our good refused to walk away from me.

Chance encounters with old friends who also followed Jesus, friends who refused to judge me and continued to show God’s love to me. Talking with a friend at college who was searching for God and who, despite my best efforts to make them cautious, still went ahead and gave their life to Jesus. Eventually, one day I walked back into the church where I first started to grow as a follower of Jesus, was welcomed back with tears and much joy and, later, made my peace with God.

At the end of my time away from God, I had discovered that doubt is OK, and my trust in God was stronger than ever before, even when I failed to understand the way God works and why he does the things he does in the way he does.

In the end, God knew the way to my heart, and I knew that nothing else in life could replace the relationship I had with him.

In Hosea, God reminds Israel of his love for them. He talks of leading them into the desert (which happened later when they went into a time of Exile)…and of course, many years before, it was in the desert, after God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, that their relationship with him was forged. He reminds them that they have exchanged his love for slavery to other gods, who are like slave masters to them (the name of the god who they have been worshipping, Baal, means “master”). He woos them and invites them to fall in love with him all over again.

Because of my own experience of God’s unrelenting compassion, that prophecy really resonates with me.

Has your relationship with God cooled off, or got off track? It’s often not something that happens suddenly, but rather it happens because of creeping neglect on our part to grow the relationship. Maybe we stop spending time with God every day in prayer and the scriptures. Maybe something happens that causes us to doubt God or to lose our trust in him, and instead of taking it to God we allow it to fester and make us bitter.

Take a long, honest look at yourself. If you truly value your relationship with God, do all you can to put things right. God hasn’t stopped loving you!

Sometimes it’s in the times we feel abandoned, our times of darkness, despair and desperation as we face the consequences of things we’ve done, that we are able to see most clearly…

Read Hosea 2: 2-8

These are harsh words.

Time has passed. Gomer has moved out, abandoning her husband and her children. Verses 2-5 read like an ancient bill of divorce, removing the ex-wife’s right to food, protection, shelter, even clothing. After all, she seems to be getting all these things from the “other lovers” she’s run off to anyway. The prophet reminds us that this is a picture of Israel’s relationship with God. They have long-since forgotten that all they have and are comes from God, the one who has cared for them and provided for them.

God may have been abandoned but he will not give up on his love for Israel. It seems that God will prevent Israel from pursuing the relationships with other nations and the idols that have taken his place. She too will know what it feels like to be abandoned. It’s at that moment that she realises. “I might as well return…”

I hear echoes of this story in a story Jesus told about a Lost Son. Partied out, abandoned by his good-time friends and down in the muck of the pigsty, the Bible says he, ‘came to his senses’ and started the journey back to home, father and a celebration.

This story is my story and your story. We were far from God, living for ourselves when he came looking for us. God came to us in the times when we had lost enough faith in our own ability to fix things for us to be open-hearted to our need of him. He didn’t come to rebuke, but to rescue us and restore our lost relationship with him.

Maybe you’ve never taken the step of coming back to the God who loves you. Maybe you don’t really know that much about Jesus’ rescue mission to planet Earth which made it possible. Take time during this week to talk to someone you know who is a follower of Jesus that you trust. Talk to God…ask him to show himself to you in a fresh way and tell him that you want to know and follow him.

Or perhaps you know that although you used to have a really close relationship with God you have moved further and further away. Now is the time to put things right. Talk to God, tell him that you’re sorry you spoiled the relationship and that you want to become God’s close friend again. You’ll find God has been with you all along, waiting longingly for this moment, and will hurry to meet you and restore your relationship with him.

And in both cases, the Bible says there’ll be a huge celebration in heaven.