The Bottom Line

Posted on January 18, 2017 | Leave a comment

Hosea 9:8 “I appointed the prophets to guard my people, but the people have blocked them at every turn and publicly declared their hatred, even in the Temple of the Lord.

10 “O Israel, how well I remember those first delightful days when I led you through the wilderness! How refreshing was your love! How satisfying, like the early figs of summer in their first season!,…

This is the bottom line: a faithful prophet and an unfaithful wife have become an object lesson for us. God is determined.  He will be our guard.  He will not let us self-destruct without a fight.

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Sacrifice of Words

Posted on January 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

Hosea 6: excerpts from v.1-3
He will heal us
He will bind up our wounds
He will restore us that we may live in his presence
Let us acknowledge the Lord;
Let us press on to acknowledge him.
He will appear
He will come to us

6:4 Your love is like the morning mist, like the early dew that disappears…6 For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.

7:13 Woe to them, because they have strayed from me! Destruction to them, because they have rebelled against me! I long to redeem them
but they speak about me falsely. 14 They do not cry out to me from their hearts but wail on their beds.

8:2 Israel cries out to me, ‘Our God, we acknowledge you!’ 3 But Israel has rejected what is good…5b How long will they be incapable of purity?…

I’m glad I’m reading Hosea knowing that God is going to provide the answer for us in Jesus. It’s hard to read of the disconnect between what God required and what “those” people were willing to give. Still the point of reading this book or any other of the Bible is to consider what possible difference it makes for life today.

Look at the statements pulled from the first part of Chapter 6. Don’t they sound like faith? The reality is they’re only a sacrifice of words. The next two chapters are a frustrated God calling them on it. Isn’t it interesting that God looks at those same statements that sound so good and adds “but they speak about me falsely?” The truth is God pays attention to the words we offer him and their connection to the what he sees in our heart.

There’s sort of a cart before the horse idea here that’s really important to remember. Acknowledging God with words before our hearts are connected to them won’t get us anywhere. We’re fooling ourselves if we think words are all it takes to convince God we’re putting him first and willing to move forward with him in the lead.

TLB Hosea 6:6 I don’t want your sacrifices—I want your love; I don’t want your offerings—I want you to know me.

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Posted in Hosea, Sunday

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Priority

Posted on January 11, 2017 | Leave a comment

Hosea 4:1 Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land…”6…my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge…14…a people without understanding will come to ruin!
Hosea 5:”… I will carry them off, with no one to rescue them.
15 Then I will return to my lair until they have borne their guilt and seek my face—in their misery they will earnestly seek me.”

There’s no way to avoid the message in Chapters 4 and 5. They’re heading for trouble. The Israelites did not lack information. They lacked making what they knew about God their priority. The charges that the Lord says are their downfall seem like a Cause and Effect story to me. The Cause?..”lack of knowledge.” The Effect? “…no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land.”

That repeated “no” the prophet uses is a record of proof for us today that information about God doesn’t automatically convert to knowledge and understanding. Information is good but it’s really just ideas to consider, it doesn’t save us. Hosea reminds us of the most important of our priorities…to earnestly seek the Lord that can save us.

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“R”

Posted on January 8, 2017 | Leave a comment

I’ve paid almost no attention to the “minor” prophets in the Bible but it’s time for a change. Certainly change is a major theme in the book of Hosea. It’s a strange story that reads like an “R” rated soap opera.

Hosea 1:2 When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.”…

Hosea 2:10 So now I will expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers; no one will take her out of my hands…14 “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her…17 I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked…21 “In that day I will respond,” declares the Lord—“I will respond to the skies and they will respond to the earth; 22 and the earth will respond to the grain, the new wine and the olive oil,..

Hosea 3:1 The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites….” 5 Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last.

I’m sure there are deep symbolic meanings in all the details of this story but I’m going for the cliff notes for these first 3 chapters.
1. God does not ignore broken relationships with generations of faithless people no matter how bad the realities are.
2. Those who exploit the provision of God will be exposed so all can see but even then God will not let them go.  He will respond because of his love for what he has created.
3. “The Lord said to me, Go, show your love…”…”They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last.”

God’s plan has always been that “R” can become Restored.

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“By” Faith

Posted on January 4, 2017 | Leave a comment

Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for…13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.

Oswald Chambers said “Believe God is always the God you know Him to be when you are nearest to Him.” The mystery of living by faith is how easy it is to forget that.  Sometimes circumstances seem more real than faith

Hebrews 11 is called the “By Faith” chapter. The real life stories of those notable “ancients,” elsewhere in the Bible, tell us the human side of their lives as well. They were not perfect. Their circumstances were very real. Faith was just as mysterious, and the evidence just as elusive, for them as it is for us today and yet they were commended for it. Why?

Twenty one times Hebrews 11 gives us the simple answer to what makes “living by faith” a reality that works even today for our lives. It’s all summed up in that one small preposition, “By.” That little word is the agent of change that makes possible a faith that impacts what we’re able do.  Remembering our most intimate moments with God is what makes living “by faith” something that’s more real than circumstances.  That’s commendable.

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Happy New Year – The First Day

Posted on January 1, 2017 | Leave a comment

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

This first day of 2017 reminded me of that long-ago first day in Genesis when out of “the empty darkness” God created the dependable cycle of days and nights we still live by.

The first light of this first day is dependable evidence of the bottom line of what God created so long ago; an essential difference between yesterday and today.  That cycle held the promise of brand new days that could separate what was from what could be.

“In the beginning God…said…“Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good…and there was morning—the first day.”…the first day of a year of brand new days, 2017.

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Carry On

Posted on December 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

The observance of Advent and Christmas has served it’s purpose. The darkness of night was lit up with the special lights we hung. We heard the annual music of bells being rung outside many stores. Those once-a-year cookies were both the taste and the aroma of the season.

It’s complete, but it’s not over.

Everything around us in that season was designed [by God] to reawaken our physical senses. Once again we’ve been stimulated by the external celebration to see for ourselves whether the fullness of these words from Mark 12:30 can become real in us: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The season is complete, but it’s not over.

These words from I Timothy 3:16 are our challenge now to carry on: “Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.”

We’ve moved beyond the external stimulation of this Christmas season and that long-ago story of God’s intervention to restore “our” broken world. Now it’s become personal; can Jesus, the Christ, restore “my” broken world?

It’s not over, it’s just beginning.

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Believe

Posted on December 25, 2016 | Leave a comment

believe

“Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?” Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
John 6:28-29

img_1140 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government
will be on his shoulders. And he will be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6

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Temple

Posted on December 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

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“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.  From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.  God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.  ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’…

Acts 17:24-28

Don’t be fooled into believing any details of the birth of Jesus were God’s last ditch effort to provide a place for him because there was no room in the inn. That stable and food trough became the sacred space, the temple, where the needs of the people and the holiness of God finally came together.

“God did this so that they [we] would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him…” This is the reality of temple building and Advent; it’s not a blueprint of a grand structure that will save us.  It’s God’s intervention into our daily lives that fills a sacred space within us where our needs and his holiness can finally come together.

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. I Cor 6:19

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Second Chance

Posted on December 18, 2016 | Leave a comment

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44b…If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45 So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being;” the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. 46 The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.
1 Corinthians 15

Remember this saying? You never get a second chance to make a first impression? Our first impression of life happened when God picked up a handful of dust and “The first man Adam became a living being.” It was a dramatic miracle of life that became a dramatic loss when broken and banished became “natural.” Fast forward to a much later time; a world filled with people who carried that same first impression of loss. “The spiritual did not come first, but the natural.”

God placed The Advent in that cradle long ago as a sign of faith in his creation and to reveal his plan to restore the miracle of that first creation. A baby would show the reality that new life is dependent on time, growth and nurture. This baby, “the last Adam, a life-giving spirit” would be our second chance to overcome that first impression of broken and banished…”and after that the spiritual.”

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Posted in 1 Corinthians, Advent, Sunday

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