Year 6, Day 204: Hosea 2-3

Theological Commentary: Click Here

Discipleship Focus: Challenge

• Challenge: God does not merely wish us to be in relationship with Him as we are.  He challenges us to grow, stretch, and transform as we take on the mantle of being His representatives to this world.

Want to hear a challenging situation?  Imagine that you are Hosea.  You’ve been asked to marry a prostitute.  You’ve done it.  You’ve even had kids with her and named them horrible names.  The next thing you know, she’s off living her old life with other men.  Instead of God allowing you to file for divorce as the wife has abandoned you, He tells you to go and get her back.  The real kicker is that you have to buy her back, not just take her back.

Talk about challenging!  I am not sure that I would have been able to rise up to the challenge.  As we’ve talked about obedience much lately, I think it is fair to say that if I did rise to the challenge, it would only be through a sense of obedience that I did.  However, because Hosea was able to rise up to the challenge of God, we get access to a great teaching from God.

We rebel from God.  We run after many false gods.  God desires us to be His, but we throw ourselves into the beds of other masters.  Many times we do this in our life.  Yet each time, God comes back to rescue us.  In fact, God turned around and paid a price to take us back from our foreign gods.  He sent His Son as the price.

Hosea was challenged to do the unthinkable.  Because of the challenge – and his ability to rise to the challenge, we can see an incredible truth about ourselves and our relationship with God.  God often uses challenge to reveal His truth in our life and the lives of people around us.

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