Everyday Truth with Kurt Skelly

Hosea 2:10-17

When people stubbornly pursue satisfaction in their sinful choices, trite temptations, and empty idols, God uses various means to get their attention. At times, he removes physical blessings. Other times, he takes the joy of sinful pleasure away. At the extreme, He allows a place of utter emptiness and desertion. But it’s in that place that His presence, His love, and His offer of hope greatly abound.

Hosea 2:6-9

Two ways that God gets our attention when we persistently pursue our temptations: (1) He makes them less accessible and satisfying. Our efforts to pursue them increase, but our achieving them and being satisfied by them decreases. (2) He removes His own blessings of protection and provision so that we can learn how truly fruitless life is without His involvement.

Nehemiah 4

from the series "When God Interrupts Your Life"

Hosea 2:2-5

Each person is responsible in some part for the group’s behavior. Even if an individual does not participate in the sin, he has a responsibility to call it out in some measure. God speaks to the people of Israel to call out and condemn the immoral group identity that Israel had embraced.

Hosea 1:8-2:1

Hosea’s children were given names by God, and those names each represented the sad condition of God’s people: Jezreel—God’s people will be scattered. Lo-Ruhamah—there will be no more mercy. Lo-Ammi—you are not my people. YET, God’s promise to them was that He would bring gathering from the scattering, mercy to replace the judgment, and belonging to replace the abandoning!

Hosea 1:6-8

Economic prosperity and good health are not necessarily a product of obedience; in fact, God often allows very wicked people to enjoy both. The underserved blessings of God should incentivize loving and obedient submission to Him. Israel did not understand this in spite of the radical ways God showed them.

Hosea 1:3-5

In modern days, baby names typically don’t have any more significance than that they sounded good to the parents. Not so in the Bible. Names were indicators of a parent’s desired character for his child, or were a testimony to a family member, or (as in the case of Hosea’s son) a prediction by God of something that was to come. The person with that name was a living prophecy of the Word of God!

Hosea 1:1-2

The book of Hosea is a book with maximum shock value. Not only does God communicate through Hosea’s words a very powerful message to Israel, but also He communicates an even more powerful message through Hosea’s life. Hosea’s family becomes the ultimate example of the unfaithfulness of God’s people and the amazing love of God for them.

Romans 16:25-27

Romans 16:21-24