Sixty Second Sermon – Hosea: feel like God

On Sunday 1 July 2018, Graham Nicholls, Director of Affinity, offered this Sixty Second Sermon on the BBC Radio Sussex and BBC Radio Surrey Sunday Breakfast programmes:

How would feel if someone you had rescued, provided for, protected, loved… if they spurned that love and threw it back in your face.

How does God feel about us?

In the Old Testament book of Hosea we get an insight into how bad we can be – but we also get a most amazing insight into the heart of God.

Hosea lives out the experience of God: he marries an unfaithful woman who chases other lovers. But he woos her back and loves her despite her unfaithfulness.

Just like God does with us.

God wants us to feel the intensity of his justifiable outrage and anguish; to feel something of the heart of God as he sees our sin; and to feel the shame, and how much we need a Saviour.

But at the same time, God uses this book to show us the loving heart of God – that he does not delight to condemn but wants people to return to him so much that he goes after them and shows them reckless love through Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.

That’s the God we have experienced.

That’s the God we want to tell people about.