Shameless Love

The day Hosea found Gomer living as a prostitute, she was dressed like one. Her hair was wild and her nails were not manicured. Her face tired and wet with tears. She stood alone on the slave table in the marketplace. Men of ill-repute were probably jeering about her and talking obscenely. But not Hosea; he was reaching in his pockets for money to buy her.

"Then said the LORD unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine. So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley:
And I said unto her, Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for another man: so will I also be for thee." Hosea 3:1-3

Despite her seeming insatiable desire for sin, he bought her back. She had committed the deepest kind of betryal and in return, he spills out his deepest committment to her.

I have been angry with Hosea and Gomer's story more than once because I can't imagine love with a depth like that. Yet, I must acknowledge I've been shown that love. And so have you.

We are the one that want what we want, at the cost of others. We are the ones that shirk our duties for pleasure. We are the ones that have betrayed His confidence and abused His mercy. We are the ones that lapse back into a mentality that Christ had brought us out of. We are the ones that have needed perfect mercy to cover our shameless pasts.

So He does what others won't do. He mends us and restores us, knowing we will never fully know the depth of His love. He will buy us back, show us love and promise us a future with Him.

This is one crazy love story.

"He brought me to the banqueting house and his banner over me was love."
-Song of Solomon 2:4

True love is a high and holy principle, altogether different in character from that love which is awakened by impulse and which suddenly dies when severely tested."

~Ellen G. White

"Not called!" did you say? "Not heard the call," I think you should say. Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father's house and bid their brothers and sisters, and servants and masters not to come there. And then look Christ in the face, whose mercy you have professed to obey, and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world.

William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army