You know when uh the story is told about a guy who went to college and very proudly he shared among his friends that he found the love of his life after dating someone for only two weeks. They celebrated their love by writing promises to each other on paper plates at a picnic table which was captured on iPhones and posted on Instagram and received tons of likes and became a viral sensation in their campus was so charming, so creative. And two months later, both the paper plates and their relationship were in the trash. And no one posted that on Instagram. You know, that's the kind of love our culture often celebrates. Short-term, convenient, and fragile. You know, it's a love that depends on staying entertained or satisfied. You know, Oscar Wild, the poet, once wrote, "The very essence of romance is uncertainty." That might be fine for Hollywood scripts or Hallmark movies, but when uncertainty defines love, it can't carry the weight of a life, a marriage, its challenges, or a soul. you know Eric from who's a humanistic philosopher uh these philosophies are all decided at the top level and they trickle down to common use this is what he says he wrote a book called the art of loving he's not a Christian he's a he's a humanist he says in that still he says immature love says I love you because I need you mature love says I need you because I love you. You know even the mature love in Fr's humanistic worldview is still selfeoriented but the covenantal love that we are going to talk about and see from God's word today is Christ oriented and God glorifying. know we came back from a fantastic retreat at Zephr Point and Pastor Kim Lee um led us to really experiencing God's love in in that beautiful setting and he gave us this painting of uh Richard Rembrandt uh who drew the prodigal son's story which depicts the father embracing the prodigal son with two of his palms which are drawn differently. We're going to frame one of that and post it in our fellowship hall. And one palm of the father's hand shows the tender, loving nature of his love and the other palm demonstrating his stern, firm, protective aspect. I think it was a beautiful imagery to get us to think about what does God's love really look like. You know the passage we read today can be called the old testament corollery of the prodigal son. Here we don't have a prodigal son but we have a prodigal nation and this prodigal nation is depicted as a prodigal wife. You know, sometimes when we think of love, we have a very warm and fuzzy image of love that we then extrapolate to God and think that's how God loves us too. You know, some tend to make one palm of God bigger than the other. Either he is all loving and not firm or he is all firm and not loving. You know, I love this quote by CS Lewis. CS Lewis writes, "You ask for a loving God, you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked. This God is not a senile benevalence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way. is not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests. He says, "But this God, but the consuming fire himself, the love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work, and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sections. God's love, if we want to understand what it is, I think the passage we read today has one of the most emotionally charged, intense outpouring of God describing to us his love in such vivid imagery and passion that is unparalleled in the rest of scripture. And he is since it is such a passionate expression of his love. He wants to choose the messenger who is going to communicate this to feel what he feels. So he makes this prophet whom he calls Hosim to go and marry someone who will not love him, who will constantly go after other people breaching the covenant of marriage, who will have children who are going to be born to him. And God is going to give them names that graphically describe what he feels about this prodigal nation. The relationship between Hosia and Goomer was intentional. It was painful. It was hard. But there was no other way for God to express what he feels about you and me than to let one of his own prophets go through that so he can communicate it with the same intensity and passion so we can probably get it. So before we go into this text you know we are doing this series of walk through the Bible know we've covered um the pentetuke um some wisdom literature and we are uh we looked at the large prophets and now we called we're looking at the minor prophets. There's nothing minor about these prophets except that the books are small but just a little word uh on how do we study prophetic books. You know, one of the very basic fundamental hermeneutical principle how to read the Bible. You know, we tell our Sunday school children is this five W's and one edge, right? Who wrote the book? When did they write the book? Where did they write the book? Why did they write the book? For whom did they write the book? So, that's something that you want to apply to any of the prophetic books you study. So, who wrote this book? A little background. And and I wanted to add a clause about who are prophets whether they are minor or major prophets. I think our understanding of prophets uh is sometimes distorted. We we tend to think of prophets as those whom God uses to proclaim future or forelling uh or just forthilling. But prophets hold a very very significant role in God's redemptive plan for human history. Prophets were God's ambassadors or enforcers of his covenantal promises to his people of Israel. Prophets were God sent by God to remind the people of God of the covenant of God. The covenant that they are either breaking or the covenant that is inviting. That's a fundamental definition of prophecy of prophets. And and here we have the prophet Hosea, like I said, is asked to marry Goomemer, who's totally not faithful to him in marriage. And he writes this uh during one of Israel's kings. I think it's Jerobom's dynasty. It's called the last golden age of Israel where they had peace and prosperity. They they they are exiled. They live in the promised land. They have God has blessed them in this land flowing with milk and honey and yet they have forgotten him. He wants why he writes this is he wants them to understand what true and how powerful the covenantal love of God is and how fake or unfulfilling or unsatisfying all aspects of worldly love and and for whom he is writing and this is why we picked this chapter if you read all the 12 chapters of the book of Hosea you can see he's kind of writing this to three eras in Old Testament history. He's writing to the founding fathers of the nation of Israel, how they were when God picked them. He's writing uh also reflecting on the things that happened when they were exiled and for 40 years they were living in the desert. And he's also writing reflecting on the things that have happened now that they have entered the promised land, the land flowing with milk and honey because there's a repetitive pattern that has been happening and as we have seen all from the beginning till now and not just for the nation of Israel the same patterns of behavior that were there in this chosen people is something you and I exhibit in our lives even today. And therefore that makes this highly relevant for us. There are three things we are going to look at from this chapter. The first is God's passionate call to return. Second is his his rebuke challenging them and telling them of the consequence for not returning. And third is his covenantal compassion and love for those who return. It's called to return consequence for not returning. Covenantal compassion and love for those who return. So it's called to return. Chapter one describes the actual historic marriage between Hosia and Goomer and the fallout of that, the children that were born and the names that were given. And now here is God's prophecy through Hosea. The first three verses Hosea chapter 2:es 2-5 describe God's call to return. It starts by saying, it's such a very complicated passage. It says, "Plead with your mother, plead for she is not my wife and I am not her husband." The way that God is beginning his call for return is not like in what other cases might seem very cold or or very authoritative where God just gives a prophecy to a prophet and tells him to just go say these words. Here we see God is pleading through the children of a marriage that has broken like this. That will hit hard, isn't it? When a marriage is broken, the ones who are most impacted more than the individual partners are the children. So he wants Israel to feel the weightiness of this and draws you and I also to imagine if this were to happen to us and what our children will go through. So he's pleading to his children. He's telling the children your mother has left me. I'm not a husband anymore. It's a divorce language. Divorce was not very uh established in Old Testament. But what God is saying is your mother has left me. She is making this relationship look like a divorced relationship. What is important to note here is God is not saying I have left your mother. He says she has left me. Because God's covenantal love never ever leaves us. We are the ones who keep leaving him and running after other things all the time. And since a side note is since our marriages reflect God's covenant with this bride, I remember being to a marriage conference early on and and and the couple who spoke there um said that they encourage and counsel couples who come to them to never use the word divorce in their marriage, even in their worst fight. That's a forbidden word because when you use that word, it may or may not anger your spouse, but it will anger God because you're treating you're threatening to break a covenant you made in the presence of a covenant with God. That's just a side note for us. and and he pleads through the children first. But this is more like a courtroom where God is pictured initially as the complainant. He's complaining. He's leaving uh Levying all his complaints to the children. Then he becomes the prosecutor and then he becomes the police or the enforcer and then he becomes the magistrate himself. He's just shifting through all these different roles as he proclaims this proclamation and he throws in tons of vivid imagery. That's why this is so emotionally charged. Maybe some of you even cringed as we read through some of those words which are describing very passionate graphic detail that even disturbs and makes you uncomfortable to show what is going on right here between God and his people. And and in this calling he is also telling that he is going to make her like a newborn helpless baby. Naked, no shelter, no covering, no protection, vulnerable. And a baby that is left without clothes out in the open. You know what will happen to that baby? It will die. And secondly, after the baby imagery, he says, "If you're going to leave me and go, your life is you're going to make yourself vulnerable like a helpless baby." Second, he says, he shifts to another imagery of that of a land that is parched and all thirsty and all cracked up. And there is a significance to it. We'll come to that in a in a while. He also flees through accusation against his children. He says you children you were born in this relationship and sadly he accuses them too because they have followed their mother is what it looks like and that's what happens. You think when you have a marital conflict that it only impacts you individually. When you make unwise choices as individuals in a marriage through your words or actions your children are watching. your children are absorbing. They will learn this and it'll be so hard for them to unlearn it as they will carry it as baggage into their marriages. But finally he zeros in on the reason she left him. He talks about that in verse five. The second part says, "For she said, I will go after my lovers who gave me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink." What are these things? Food, clothing, shelter. Basic necessities for our human life. This is what a husband, any husband ought to provide in any marriage relationship, in any culture at any time. And God indeed was providing these abundantly in this relationship. But she was not satisfied. the prodigal nation. This wife, the prodigal wife, still ran away, stubbornly rebelling and wanting to get these exact same things that was given to her in abundance from somewhere else because the grass is always greener on the other side, isn't it? And so we move to our second point. God then unleashes what are the consequences for not returning. There are three consequences or three judgments God proclaims through Hosea and they are easily identifiable because all three of them start with the word therefore and that's the clue to see what are these three judgments. The first two judgments, judgments or consequences are so harsh and and so scary. The last consequence or judgment is completely unanticipated, shocking and beyond imagination. So let's look at the first consequence, the terrifying judgment. Verse six to 8 says, "Therefore I will hedge her up, hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers, but not overtake them, and she shall seek them, but shall not find them." Then shall she say, "I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now." And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine and the oil and who lavished on her silver and gold which they used for ba. You know, he shifts the imagery in this first judgment describing the prodigal nation or the prodigal wife metaphorically likening them to a wild animal that has been hedged in with fences and thorns so that this animal cannot move. What God was describing was looking back at redemptive history and tracing this pattern and proclaiming at this point in history to the nation of Israel what is going to unleash and happen going forward says you're going to be hedged in and in fact it did happen when the Azerian Empire came in by Tiglet Pilgar III. They were hedged in. They could run nowhere, hide nowhere and they were captured and that is what was a threat. It was not an empty threat to them. They lost the very thing they went after the grain, the wine, the oil. We will look at that shortly again. And he reveals another level or layer of the problem. And they not only went after it to other lovers, he said they used the blessings he gave to serve or worship the you see when your life is very comfortable when you live in a place like Silicon Valley which is also geographically and topographically very similar to the nation of Israel. Because it is here that if if Israel was the land flowing with milk and honey, this was the land where literally there was gold and gold rush and green revolution and and and and technological revolution and life is most comfortable here right where we are than anywhere else in the world. So when we tend to live in a very prosperous situation which also becomes a challenging situation, our philosophy of life becomes very reductionistic. You know their philosophy of life became so small. Rather than believing in a big God who saved them and took care of them and all their needs, providing mana in the wilderness for them, shelter through cloud and fire and protecting against enemies and eventually establishing them in this land flowing with milk and honey. that life philosophy reduced to bare necessities and they started going after other easier or more accessible sources that they thought could provide these they forgot the giver they forgot the source of their blessing you know the god Baal is called a god of fertility it's called the god of rain and thunder the fertility in in agricultural economies which was the case uh with the people of Egypt really dependent on the land and rain. There was more rain, there were more crops and and you get a better profit and you make more money. It's as simple as that. So they literally thought this this god Baal, the god of rain and thunder, they thought he's a god who actually makes the land fertile through rain. when he senses rain, it makes the land fertile like how a sperm fertilizes an egg. It was also charged a little bit emotional uh passionately. So, and for going to this bale seemed so much easier for them. It was easier to go to a God who is just onedimensional and promises to give you what you want easily. Isn't it? All this God says is and all what any gods tell that we tend to like is if you come to me I'll make your life prosperous. And they started living completely forgetting their history, forgetting their past, forgetting the bigness of the God and the love of this God and just started to live for them. There is this phrase, I don't recall who said this, the question, do we live to work or do we work to live? Do we live to work or do we work to live? Think about that. God has given us life to live in worship of him and to count our work as an expression of worship. He has not called us to make work the absolute and to live to serve our work. You know, Silicon Valley goes through highs and lows, ups and downs. There's always a disruptive tech uh technology and there is always a terrible economic downturn. It's a sinocidal curve of going up and down. Then when the economy turns or such shifts happen, it's easy to forget we have a big God and turn to the next God who we can see and think that he or that is what is going to save us. You know this God can be your manager. He can be your company. He can be your school. It can be your test scores or accomplishment. Anyone or anything who you tend to put your trust in for your food, clothing, and shelter. End of the day, that's what it is, isn't it? We all want. These are the modernday bales. And what was worse for this nation was they were taking everything that God gives, it says they even God even gave them silver and gold. This was only a land flowing with milk and honey. There was no gold mines like we have here in California that they could dig and get gold. Their trade was surplus. So they could sell and make profit and buy gold and silver. They were so affluent. But even that they surrendered and yielded to these false gods and veils. What it basically means is that in order to survive in in in in such situations they gave their best time, efforts and life to this God thinking this God is who is going to save them. And Yahweh is telling bad news guys they will not save you. Your life will only get more miserable. So my dear friends let us think for a minute who is the real God that we actually worship. You know here is a quote an anonymous quote which says if you will not have God for your God in the day of prosperity you shall not have him in the day of adversity. Let me repeat. If you'll not have God for your God in the day of prosperity you shall not have him in the day of adversity. That's the summon essence of what God is telling them. That's the second consequence, the second judgment. Verse nine, the second, therefore, if you read your Bibles, it says, "Therefore, I will take back my grain in its time and my wine in its season, and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness. Now I will uncover her lwdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts. And I will lay waste her wines and her fig trees of which she shed. These are my wages which my lovers had given me. I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them. And I will punish her for the feast days of Baales when she burned offerings to them and adorned herself with her ring and jewelry and went after her lovers and forgot me, declares the Lord. You can rephrase this entire text in our contemporary life by switching who or what you have replaced God with. And it will make perfect sense. If we thought our God is our boss or our company or our school or our own ability or our own accomplishments in my project that is going great that is what is going to make my life great. God sees bad news. I will take them away. I will. You will be exiled. When you are going to be exiled, you know what that means? He's not talking of a smooth employment, H1B, immigration into this country which will give you a six-digit salary. Exile means you lose your home, you lose your clothes, you lose everything you have built, your gardens, your artifacts, your pictures, your favorite things in life, everything is gone. And you're going to be exiled, taken to a place that you don't know, to a people who you don't know, to a culture you don't understand, and serve under someone or something. If you think I can prevent being laid off by fearing these men or companies, you know how it works in Silicon Valley. They will let you go at the drop of a hat. That can be your exile. If you think my grades are great and I'm going to get into this best school and this top 10 in this world and that's going to my make my life secure, God can take that off too at any time. Or if you think finding this spouse who is going to be the dream spouse and would make my life happy, God can mess with that as well. He says you're going to lose everything. Three things he says you're going to lose. First is you're going to lose your grain, wool, and flax, basic necessities. Second, you're going to lose your social life. you know, things you would do to have fun, feasts, new moons, uh, uproot it to a new place. Third, he says, you're going to lose whatever it was you built that you thought was great. They will be left to go waste. All your accomplishments, your your medals, your awards, the products you built, etc. may just disappear or worse, others will benefit from them. whatever they worshiped, you know, the feast days or bales when she burned offerings to them by spending 90 to 100 hours or more a week with no time for God or his word or fellowship or church forgetting God. Whatever you built, he says he'll just destroy. He can destroy it. You know, when I went back um for my reunion with my professor in Germany um few months ago, uh it was wonderful to connect with my fellow friends and colleagues and also see how some of the things that we had worked together uh were being put to use especially during COVID as a diagnostic device and all of that. But there was this one um uh scientific area. I spent one year working the hardest in my life and developing and advancing some knowledge on that field which as a group they completely killed it. They they gave it a burial and uh they were joking. One of my colleagues even called himself as the president of the fan club that killed that technology. It looked funny, but I inside I felt a little sad, said, "Dad, I I I spent like a year killing myself coming up with that and publishing a paper and and you guys hate it, you know, but that's something God is saying is going to happen." And it did in exile. They lost everything. And just when you think it can't get any worse after these two judgments and when you read the word therefore you're expecting an escalation that's going to go even more terrible and bigger and devastating. You are in for a huge surprise. This third consequence that God unleashes on them is not divine judgment or anger or wrath. It's the consequence of unimaginable covenantal compassion and love for those who return. What a surprise. It's a completely unexpected ending. It's I I would say even more graphic and more beautiful than the story of the prodigal son. Chapter 2 verse4 he says therefore again behold I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her and there I will give her vineyards and make the valley of acre a door of hope and there she shall answer as in the days of her youth as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. There are several things in these last few verses that are so beautiful that give us a sneak peek into what consists in the covenantal love of God. What does this covenantal love of God do? Yes. So far he showed us the left hand of God. his strong fierce jealous loyal love for us that will go to whatever extent to shake us up to pick us up to to awaken us to reality to show us hey that's the false bail that was never your god I was your god and now he shows Rembrandt's other hand the tender hand the loving compassionate hand of god and what does this covenantal love do. He says it does some wonderful things. First, he gives a gives a hint of why did God make this shift? When did the switching of hands happen or when did he start bringing his loving hand forward? The clue is in verse seven in the second part when it says, "Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now." Sounds familiar this words like the prodigal son. Oh, it was so better in my father's house that even the servants were fed and taken care of better. Which is better? Let me ask you this. the prodigal son story between a father and his long lost son or this hosia story of a husband pursuing his wife and restarting marriage. I tend to go between both. Now, the prodigal son story is of course more famous, more beautiful, but I think they're kind of either comparable or I would even say this is a little more passionate than that because in the prodigal son story, the father is standing and waiting because the son is gone and squandered his life away. You know in a young adults group our young adults group leader shared an exciting insight saying how God was even working when he allowed all those painful things in their life. But here you actually see God is doing that. Here the husband is not just standing and waiting for this wife to come back. He's unleashing all these consequences, messing up their life, taking away things to waken them to reality of his love. And not just that, unlike the father who is standing and waiting here in this case, the husband goes for his lover. The verses that we read, the three words that he uses in this passage that we just read, verse 14 says, "I will allure her. I will bring her. I will speak tenderly to her. I will give her vineyards going after, pursuing, seeking all because she decided to return. The word return is the key word. Return implies you're driving in one direction and you realized there is a problem and you turn back to go back. That's the the biblical word for that is repentance. Says when we return, when we decide to turn back, when we have realized we are awakened from our spiritual sloth and slumber, he doesn't wait. He comes to first begin this relationship like it were new. This is like the first time you remember your spouse seeing you. He wants to bring back that chemistry, that first love again. He doesn't just simply say as we read in Revelations, return to your first love. He is running to reignite that first love in that relationship. That's what the covenantal love of God does. The word allure is a word used. It describes seducing someone. bring to make her commit and speak tenderly and give vineyards is is just replenishing everything that was lost and and he says I will make the valley of Acre a place of hope. You know what happened in the valley of Achre? Anyone remembers in the Old Testament this was after Jericho wall was broken and Achen took and hid the things that he was supposed to bring and he was destroyed. The whole judgment was passed in the valley of acre. It was a place of judgment and fear. God says I will change the place of judgment and fear into one of hope and love. And then he says I will make her new like she just came out of Egypt. He goes back, "Remember when you just came out of the exile? All the great things, extravagant things I did, splitting the Red Sea, being as a cloud of fire and protecting you and doing amazing things. I'm going to woo you back into a relationship with me, doing the same things. You will call me my husband and not my bail." He says, "I'm going to do shower all these aspects of my love so you will by your own heart now want to pursue me alone as your first love. And I'm not going to stop with that." He says, "I'm going to make a new covenant." And that's the beautiful part of this verse 18. And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from land, and will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in steadfast love and mercy. I will betro you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord. Three times again he uses the word I will bet with you. When something is repeated three times it communicates intensity, intentionality and persistence. three times. He says, "I'm not only going to come and pick you up and and and allure you and speak tenderly to you and and and give you a total makeover and make you like my new bride. I'm going to make a new covenant with you. And that covenant is going to be united and be part of this betroal." And this is bigger and wider. This is now it's it's a little looking to the future of what's going to happen. This is now not just going to be this people whom he call. This is going to be from people from all nations and all languages and all countries anywhere and everywhere. And how is this going to happen? What is this covenantal love look like? And this is at the end he gives the crux or what are the ingredients of God's covenantal love. First of all the ingredients of his covenantal love are he says I will betro you to me forever. There is permanence. This is unilateral unconditional and can never ever be broken. Covenantal love of God is a permanent love unlike our fragile love. Secondly, this covenantal love doesn't happen in a vacuum or some cozy boozy feeling. It says, "I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord." You know the components of God's covenantal love. What are the various components of God's covenantal love? The quality of the love is permanence forever. But the individual components of the love involve righteousness, justice, love, and mercy and faithfulness. You know, for there to be established a covenantal love, this there was a breach in the relationship. Someone messed up. Not God, but his people. It is us who always mess up. God can't just simply come and say, "It's all okay. Let's just get into a huddle and and have a loving relationship." The righteousness and the demands of God's love need to be met somehow. And this is where God moves in this prophecy from being an accuser to being the victim himself. He says, "I'm going to take your place. Yes, you walked away from me in unrighteousness. Maybe you deserve eternal separation and punishment and hell, but I love you so much. I am not going to let that happen. I'm going to come and take your place to fulfill the righteousness of God, the righteous demands of the law. That's what is an in essential ingredient of the covenantal love of God so that it can satisfy the justice of God that was preached and violated. And what is going to flow out of this is a steadfast love casteth grace and mercy all the days of your life. and I'm going to be faithful no matter what. And then says, you shall know the Lord. The word know is the same word that is used in Hebrew when it look uh when you look at the book of Genesis where it says Abraham knew Sarah and she gave birth to her son Isaac. It's a very intimate aspect of knowledge just not an intellectual lesson. Now he says finally I got your heart. When you experience this covenantal love, when you know what it took for me to come back for you to die on the cross to satisfy God's justice to reestablish his righteousness and make you as my new bride and do everything that is needed so that you can taste my love forever and ever. Now your heart will be changed. Now you will love me forever and ever. Jiper in his book knowing God which I make as essential read for everyone who goes through communion or baptism classes. He says uh God's love is not a vague diffused goodwill toward everybody in general. We hear the word God loves everybody. says it's not a vague diffused goodwill toward everybody in general and nobody in particular. God's love he says is an exercise of his goodness toward individual sinners. And Augustine, early church father in his confessions chapter 7 paraphrased says this. God loves each of us as if there were only one of us and all we need to do is just to return to him. So my dear friends, as we close, may I ask, who or what is your first love today? If it is your work or your career or academics or achievements, remember they are false loves and they will fail you. Stop giving your life to them. Return return to your true love by loving God. He will make you as a new bride. It's okay if you feel I'm so messed up. I'm broken. I've failed. I feel terrible. I'm unfaithful. I don't fit to be loved. No. That is not true. He will make you as a new bride. Says he will love on you like those first days and you will never want to return back to them. In Hosea 12, I think verse one or two, he says, "Out of Egypt, I will call my son." He says, "I'm going to call you out of just like I called you out of Egypt and dated you and and and established this covenantal love relationship with you, I'm going to do it all over again. But ultimately Hosea 12 was a prophecy. The true and better nation of Israel became identified by Jesus Christ himself. He says to fulfill the prophecy out of Egypt I will call my son. If you remember in the New Testament is where his parents take him take Jesus as a baby to Egypt because Herod was killing all the babies and he comes back. Jesus is now identifying himself with all the fallen people of this nation of Israel and you and me. He's the true and better Israel in that sense. And he is now our way to receive this covenantal love of God. So identify and dethrone your bails. What competes with God for your deepest trust, your career or relationships or comfort? Name it. Repent. return and replace it with practices that will reenter you on Christ's love. Or if you are feeling hedged in with nowhere to turn or run and and you feel like God has locked you in in a hedge of thorns when God blocks your paths or strips away an idol, don't fight him. See it as an act of mercy meant to turn your heart back. And thirdly, live as the Christ betrothed bride of Christ where your identity is secure. You are his forever. Live with the joy and gratitude of one loved with such a rich glorious otherworldly covenantal love. Remember Rembrandt's fargo. One firm hand, one gentle. God's covenantal love both confronts and restores. Today he calls us, "Return if you have wondered, repent if you have trusted in false loves, and rejoice if you've been restored, for you are his forever." The valley of acre that you may be in today, your place of trouble, your place of fear can become your door of hope if you will return to the God whose love never lets you go. Shall we pray?