I am a harlot.
I cannot settle for one.
I have found true love and I continue to thrust myself at cheap substitutes.
I know what it is to mistake the lust in their eyes for love.
There is One who offers all that my soul longs for, but I refuse to stay in His embrace.
My tarnished reputation has been washed clean, but still I take on the cloak of shame and regret and refuse my new identity.
I live like an orphan, a harlot, though I’ve been called a daughter, a treasure.
I am Gomer- the harlot that God tells Hosea to marry,
I’m rescued from a life of sin and a path of destruction by One who I could never deserve, but I won’t stay.
I run back to my sin.
I choose my burdens over his grace.
Again and again I fail Him.
Psalm 18:19 He rescued me because He delighted in me.
My redemption comes not in the reality that my Love exists, but that He chases me with a grace beyond my imagination, that He stepped down and became man, that He is God with us.
Every time I have walked away, He could have let me go, but He wants me.
He chooses me.
He rescues me.
He doesn’t want me just to return.
He doesn’t want me back so He can have some cosmic control over my life.
He wants me to want to come back.
He wants me to recklessly abandon the life I’ve known and chase after Him, to worship Him.
That’s the beauty of our God, He has every right to demand our worship and our love, but He doesn’t. He wants us to want to worship Him and He will wait with a patient grace until we can.
He will wait through our brokenness, through our sin and through our shame until we willingly return and choose Him.
Dear friend, choose Him, run to Him. I believe Satan gets his greatest pleasure when he convinces Christ’s beloved that they are too far gone to pursue Christ and be loved by Him.
In this one twist of value, He cripples the influence of multitudes of Christians.
You are not too far gone.
No matter how many times you fail, God is there.
He steps down into our mess again and, like Hosea, pays a great cost to regain what is already rightfully His.
He gave His all for you and He’d do it over and over again.
The God of the universe became flesh to walk among us and buy us back out of bondage.
If that’s not a Christmas miracle, I don’t know what is.
Hosea 11:9 For I am God, and not a man- the Holy One among you.