SERMON: Happy Valentines Gomer?
TITLE: "HAPPY VALENTINES GOMER" - - - - - TOPIC: GOD'S RIDICULOUS LOVE - - - - - - CONTEXT: Hosea 1:1-10 - - - - - - INTRODUCTION: - - - - The Jerry Springer web site displays the kind of topics he had been wallowing in lately. Some of the program titles read like this one: “Surprise, I’m Cheating.” The caption describes the show this way: “Angela will tell her longtime boyfriend that she’s been cheating on him and now she’s pregnant! Despite all this, she’s confident he’ll stay with her.” August 29: “Give Back My Lover — Will claims to love his fiancé, but he has some bad news for her. He’s been cheating… and now his mistress is pregnant!” Another – “Shocking Confessions! — Savaria broke up with her fiancé because she wanted to date his sister!” Another one: “Prostitution Sex Scandals — Lisa has secretly been working as an escort to help pay for her wedding. She likes her new job and she’s here today to tell her fiancé all about it!” - - - Well, you get the idea. And those were the ones I could talk about in public. Actually, I was surprised to see how closely the topics of all those shows paralleled the story of Hosea. The book of Hosea would have fit right in to the Jerry Springer setting. The show could have been called: “I Married A Prostitute.” The byline would go something like this: “Clergyman’s wife cheats on him. His children belong to three other men. After selling herself to everyone in town, Gomer ends up as a slave. Her husband, Hosea, eventually buys her back for $12.50. He claims that he knew she would be unfaithful to him in the beginning, but God told him to marry her. God also told him to buy her out of slavery and love her again.” - - - - - - - - - TRANSITIONAL STATEMENT: - People, I now greet you this valentines - " Happy Valentines Gomer"! - - - - 1. GETTING YOUR ATTENTION - - - The book of Hosea is the most shocking book in the Old Testament. Few people can imagine what it would be like to be married to a woman like Gomer. She had no inner moral compass — no restraints. You could never trust her. You would know that she was always looking for some excitement. You would see her invite the attentions of other men and then deny it vehemently. The ability to make a commitment would never be a part of her character. She would disappear for days at a time and you would not know where she was. She would cruelly mock you and you would be the laughingstock of the town. She was full of immmorality. - - - It has happened to other people besides Hosea, but Hosea went into the relationship with his eyes wide open. He knew what kind of woman she was, but God had ASKED him to marry her; and he willingly did so, in spite of the enormous pain it would bring into his life. Sometimes God gave a prophet like Hosea words to speak to the people of Israel and Judah. He would give them words warning of impending judgment so they could be spared by giving up their sin and following God again. At other times he would give them words of love in an attempt to win back the affections of his people. He would remind them of all his love had done for them and tell them how much he wanted them to come back home to him. But sometimes words failed and God had to resort to a different kind of communication. He would give the prophet a message to act out. The Prophet’s actions would be a living drama playing out the message of God in a dramatic way. He told Isaiah to remove his clothes, except for a loin cloth, and walk around as a living picture of the horrors of war and exile. He asked Ezekiel to lay on his side and eat a starvation diet which he would cook over animal dung — depicting the horrors of war inflicted on the people, which would come if they did not repent of their sins. He asked Amos to hold up a plumb line to show the people how out of balance their lives were. - - - - There were many of these prophetic plays which took place, but none were as painful as when God asked Hosea to marry Gomer. Why did God ask him to do something like this? It was an ongoing drama of God’s marriage to unfaithful Israel. As people saw Gomer, a woman with no moral sense, becoming more vulgar and diseased every year, they remembered that she was the prophet’s wife and he had married her knowing that she would be unfaithful. They would ultimately get the message that there was a parallel between Hosea’s relationship to Gomer and God’s relationship to them. They were to be married to God, but they were unfaithful to him and loved many other gods, sins. vices, lusts etc. What was the message of this drama? We could preach on the incredible obedience of Hosea, but on valentines, we'll aim for another topic. It was threefold. Has God truly got your attention? What is needed to get your attention? (would you like me to do the same as Isaiah, loin cloth?- yell - makes faces - dance...) - - - - 2. UNREASONABLE LOVE - - - The first message from the life of Hosea is: God’s love is unreasonable. Who can explain love? If love always made sense it would not be love. It does not always respond to logic. The thing that God had asked Hosea to do did not make sense. But then, God’s love for Israel did not make sense either. The question of the book is not why God would ask Hosea to marry Gomer, but why God would marry Israel. Why would God commit himself to a group of people he knew would not be faithful to him? It doesn’t make sense. If God was going to make a commitment to a nation why wouldn’t he choose a nation he knew would be faithful? Why wouldn’t he choose people who would be grateful for his love and thankful for his blessings? Why wouldn’t he select those who would be inclined to follow his laws and appreciate the wisdom of his ways? - - - - - According our way of thinking, God is unreasonable. We would choose to love someone who loved us. We would look for someone we thought would be faithful to us. But God chose the cast of the Jerry Springer show. Listen to this outrageous, unreasonable verse from the Bible: “If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself” 2 TIMOTHY 2:13. When God enters into a covenant of love with us, the covenant does not depend on our faithfulness, but on the faithfulness of God. - - - We keep thinking that God only loves good people, but God loves sinners. He pursues them like he asked Hosea to pursue Gomer. In his pain he goes looking for them. He is betrayed but he longs for them. When they become enslaved by their sins, he buys them back. The Bible describes our predicament: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one” ROMANS 3:10-12. How righteous are you? But in spite of that, God did something completely irrational — he loved us and sought for a way to buy us out of our slavery to sin. That is why the Bible can say, “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19-20. - - - Ian Pitt-Watson tells the story of his little girl. When Rosemary, my youngest child, was three, she was given a little rag doll, who quickly became an inseparable companion. She had other toys that were intrinsically far more valuable, but none that she loved like she loved the rag doll. Soon the rag doll became more and more rag and less and less doll. It also became more and more dirty. If you tried to clean the rag doll, it became more ragged still. And if you didn’t try to clean the rag doll, it became dirtier still. The sensible thing to do was to trash the rag doll. But that was unthinkable for anyone who loved my child. If you loved Rosemary, you loved the rag doll — it was part of the package.” It doesn’t make sense, but God loves dirty, ragged sinners, and you can’t separate him from them any more than you could separate Rosemary from her rag doll. To God loving Him is to love people. Will you let God love you despite your guilt or/and shame? Will you love people the same way He loves them?- - - - ////Part 2? 3. TOUGH LOVE - - But a second message that the life of Hosea teaches us is: God’s love is tough love. Hosea never minimized the nature of the wrong Gomer had done to him. The pain was real and raw. Sin still has consequences, even for Christians! His love had been betrayed. He did not gloss over the situation. He took it seriously. And when Gomer insisted on being unfaithful to him, he let her go. He understood that it was to her own detriment. He knew what was ahead of her. She no longer wanted anything to do with him, so she would no longer have his help. She was on her own. It was what she wanted, but she could not see the mistreatment she would suffer. She would be used and abused. She would be called names by those who were supposed to love her. She would be beaten and treated like an animal. There would be many things that Hosea could not protect her from since she had run away from him. She would learn the lessons of life the hard way, & live out the consequences of her poor choices. As Hosea would later write about people like her: “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind” HOSEA 8:7. - - In the 2nd chapter of Hosea, God describes what he will do to his unfaithful people: Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now’” HOSEA 2:6-7. As with Gomer, many times we have to learn the hard way that God’s way is the best way. We waste our lives and our love on many other things until we have been abused long enough that we say, “I will go back to my God, for then I was better off than before.” - - We read earlier in 2 TIMOTHY 2:13“If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself” , but the verse before reads this: 2TIMOTHY 2:12 "...if we deny [him], he also will deny us: !!!! - - - Please..don"t reap the whirlwind! We are not the master of our own fate, or the captain of our soul. There is another who claims that right, Our Creator. And to fail to recognize that God is the master of the world, and your fate as well, or worse, to rebel against the true Captain of your soul, is to do so at your own peril. If you do so, God will give you your own way, but you will not like it. His love is a tough love. Let me save a hard lesson (YELL) - DON'T SIN!! Do you need to repent? Is His tough love getting through? - - - - - 4. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE - - - The third message that the book of Hosea is giving us is: God’s love is unconditional. We often give up on people. Some even write others off, or count them as dead, when their love or trust has been betrayed. But God is different. - - - In chapter three, Gomer’s sin has worn her out, and now she is stripped and being sold as a slave on an auction block. None of her former beauty remains. Perhaps she is diseased. It may be that she is being sold by a house of prostitution, or a slave owner who no longer finds her desirable. Whatever the case, Hosea does the unthinkable. He buys her for himself. The price was very low — less than half an ounce of silver and some barley, a grain inferior to wheat. It was half the price a female slave would normally bring. Apparently, she was not worth much to anyone at this point, and they were just glad to get rid of her. In the beginning she was a beautiful woman. The name Gomer means “perfect,” possibly a reference to her appearance and desirability. But now her beauty is gone — ruined through hard living, and no one will have her except one man, the one she has treated the worst, took for granted the most. Hosea will make her his wife again, a living symbol of God’s unconditional love for faithless Israel. The Lord said to Hosea,“Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress.Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites” HOSEA 3:1. - - - It would have been one thing for Hosea to excuse a foolish, even sinful mistake by his wife, but even after he confronted her she continued brazenly in her sin. She flaunted it. She mocked him and forgot everything he had ever done for her. But God told him to buy her back out of slavery. God asked him to do this because it is what God does. Hosea was acting like God. We are called to act like God, we"ve been empowered to do so, it is proof of our adoption! God’s love is unconditional. So why would we want to go away from God? Why would we want to run from him? The answer is that it is part of who we are, in this cursed fleah and our selfish choices of comfort and lust. It is our nature to run from God, and thank God, it is God’s nature to pursue us — even when we are at our worst. You can never run so far that you outrun God’s love for you. No matter what you have done, no matter where you have been, he wants you and sees you as his beloved BRIDE. God doesn’t throw us on the garbage heap when we fail. You have the Lord. He is your father, and you are his creation. In his eyes you have never been anything but innocent and beautiful! God’s love is ridiculous! We see ourselves as we are, but he sees us for what we can become. The apostle Paul asks this amazing question: “Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?” ROMANS 2:4. That is the way God’s ridiculous love works. His kindness leads us to come home. Our Text says, ROMANS 5:8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. - - But remember, tough love comes in your unrepentence, and that is really a hard, hard way to learn and dangerous for your soul! - - - You have been unfaithful to our heavenly Valentine. You may have wandered far away. You may have disgraced yourself. Perhaps you think that it is too late, or that what you have done cannot be forgiven. When you repent, you'll find his arms open! Listen and hear Him say "Happy Valentines (Gomer)"! Will you return the valentine? In every part of your life?
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