SPRING FLING
Falling in love with Jesus is not just a fling. It’s time to grow in Christ!
March 27th, 2023
HAPPY EVER AFTER
Hosea 3:1-3, ‘Then God ordered me, “Start all over: Love your wife again, your wife who’s in bed with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife. Love her the way I, God, love the Israelite people, even as they flirt and party with every god that takes their fancy.” I did it. I paid good money to get her back. It cost me the price of a slave. Then I told her, “From now on you’re living with me. No more whoring, no more sleeping around. You’re living with me and I’m living with you.”
God’s love for me is like a ‘Happy Ever After’ tale, a sordid love story. We find me frolicking and galivanting around with anything that offers a fix, in love with myself and my badness. My adulterous ways lead me to clandestine rendezvous with everything other than the Lover of my soul, anything alternative than what is pure and good and righteous. It doesn’t matter if it is a person or a thing. I chose everything over the Holy God Who breathed life into my dry bones.
I can’t see Him yet because I am too busy seeing the world and all the glamour it dangles before me. When my soul becomes empty and torn, I choose to saturate it and mend it with what might make it feel better; only to feel more desolate still. I have given myself away to people and things never intended to hold me and fill me. I am looking for solutions, for answers, pieces to a puzzle I will never find. All the while, the hope and what is missing and lacking is right before me. I am blinded by all the world has to offer; so detached and distracted, wandering.
I think eventually, sooner or later, most everyone comes to the end of themselves. Our seams unravel and we come undone, laid bare, broken and barren. It is then a Holy God steps in and purchases us back from what tantalized us and stole us away. The price for my head is really only shekels, but He comes in and pays the ultimate cost, as if I am worthy of that, as if I am worth it. He paid everything to buy me back, to redeem my life from the snare I got caught in. I have lived a lifelong affair with all things other than God, and yet He brings me to Him as if I am pure white, like a bride. He woos me to Him; patiently He has waited for me to come to Him and to sense my overwhelming need for Him. Out of all things I have flirted with, He has lingered—the God of the universe longing for me. He took me back, time and again; time and again I let Him down.
I am so grateful this God chose me. Out of all people in the world, He chose me.
Oh, wait a minute…He chose you too! He chose us both! And He waited. For both of us to come to our senses and choose Him too!
Hosea 6:1-3, ‘Come on, let’s go back to God. He hurt us, but he’ll heal us. He hit us hard, but he’ll put us right again. In a couple of days, we’ll feel better. By the third day he’ll have made us brand-new, alive and on our feet, fit to face him. We’re ready to study God, eager for God-knowledge. As sure as dawn breaks, so sure is his daily arrival. He comes as rain comes, as spring rain refreshing the ground.’ (MSG)
Isaiah 55:10-11, ‘”As the snow and rain that fall from heaven do not return until they have accomplished their purpose, soaking the earth and causing it to sprout with new life, providing seed to sow and bread to eat, so also will be the Word that I speak; it does not return to Me unfulfilled. My Word performs My purpose and fulfills the mission I sent it to accomplish.”’ (TPT)
