April 8, 2001
"for in you the fatherless find compassion."
"I will heal their waywardness and love them freely,
Hosea 14:3b-4a
A friend shared some passages in Hosea with me to help me get a greater understanding of God's love and his desire for our lives... after reading through them the things about God that stand out in my mind are his incredible tenderness and compassion and his pure desire for growth in our lives. God doesn't want anything FROM us - he only wants things FOR us. A theme I see consistently in the scriptures is that although God always deals with our sin, it doesn't matter how we get to the low or broken places in life... he will still heal us. He says of Israel that he will heal their waywardness, that is their tendency or inclination to drift away from him, it's their sin - their problem but it's God's heart to heal it! He not only desires to but does in fact love us freely... it's not about who they (or we) are, whether they (or we) deserve his love.. he loves freely! That is something that we can count on, we can be absolutely assured of! He goes on in the remainder of this chapter to describe the growth he has planned for them.. I love to think that God, the author of creativity, thinks about how our growth will be, what he will do to make us better, different, more beautiful than ever before... he talks of helping them build deeper roots and as a result they will flourish like the strongest and most beautiful of trees! That is what God wants and does in our lives even now... as we hold onto him he helps us to build those deeper roots that cause us to grow and flourish so that we become beautiful, stronger, valuable and can provide shade, or refreshment, for others.
The knowledge that in God the fatherless find compassion is probably the thing that touches my heart most deeply. Many of us are without the right understanding of a father for many different reasons - death, absent fathers, abusive relationships, fathers who had no knowledge of how to be what God called them to be... God promises us that in him, we will find the comfort, love, security, tenderness and everything else that he designed for us to learn from our physical fathers. He will meet those needs in us! I have seen over the years that as I have held tightly to God and his word he has helped me build a correct understanding of who he is and how he loves me!