Back to the Basics: Saved to Love

 October 4 2026

Hosea 13:1-6, 14:1-7

         On July 10, 2013, a storm front rushed upon our county producing straight line winds close to ninety miles per hour. It was these winds which uprooted the giant oak tree which sat on the corner of our property sending it crashing down upon our home. This tree was over one hundred feet tall and it was estimated to weigh ninety tons so the destruction to our home was extensive. Fortunately, I was the only one home at the time, so we are forever grateful that our family was spared. Yet from that day until the tenth of Christmas our family found ourselves without a permanent residence. In order to begin rebuilding our home we first had to remove from the destruction all that we wanted to save. This meant that we had to carry out of our home the accumulation of twenty plus years of living. So out of this emptying out of our home of all that we could carry, we discovered something positive out of all that seemed so negative. You see, after we carried load after load out of the house, we began to ask ourselves a simple but important question, “What are we saving this for?” What quickly became clear was the fact that whatever came out of our home had to end up somewhere. If what was in our hands was worth saving then we put that into storage, but if we looked at what we carried out and shook our heads at what was in our hands then into the dumpster it went. The result is that we learned just how important it is to keep asking this question, “What are we saving this for?” anytime we find ourselves in our basement junk room.

         As I thought about this lesson of asking ourselves just why we are saving the stuff that we accumulate, I could not but help but connect this same question with our salvation. I mean, have you ever wondered why God has saved us? We so often think of what our salvation means to us, that God saved us from death so that we might have eternal life with him, yet we don’t often consider the reason God has for saving us. What prompted me to ponder just what was the purpose for God giving to us our salvation is something recorded in the thirteenth chapter of Hosea that we read today. There in the fourth verse we hear God say this, “There is no other savior besides me.” Now the reason why this verse stuck out to me is that there are some people, even those who follow Jesus, who balk at this idea that there is just one God and he alone has the power to save us. There are those who take exception with the words Jesus himself spoke in the fourteenth chapter of the gospel of John where Jesus tells us, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” Yet what Jesus is saying here is the very same truth we heard in the thirteenth chapter of Hosea, that there is no savior except the one, true, living God. 

         When we stop to consider just why this claim is true, that there is only one who can save us, and this one is the one, true, living God, the reason why this statement can be defended is found in the reason why God has decided to save us. Quite often we merely believe that our salvation is just so that we might have eternal life, yet there is more to our salvation than just an everlasting life in heaven. The answer as to why God has saved us, and why it is that he alone is the one who saves, is found by returning to what we learned about the basics of being in a relationship with God. As we have learned in the past several weeks, the basic building block is simply that God loves us. Everything we need to know about our relationship builds from this foundational idea. Then we also learned that God communicates to us, sharing his deepest longings with us, hoping that we might hear hm and respond with obedience. What God communicates to us is that he faithfully loves us, as proven to us through the giving of his own dear Son upon the cross as an act of greatest love. Through this unwavering love of our God we can know the truth about our identity which is that we are the beloved of God. Now when we enter into a relationship with God what we find is that we are unable to faithfully love God as he first has loved us. We miss the mark of his glorious love, what is called in scripture, the act of sinning. Yet all is not lost because God in his great love, forgives our failures so that our failures do not prove to be fatal. Through the costly love given to us at the cross where the blood of Jesus was shed, our sins were covered over so that now we can find our security here in the love of God. So in knowing how wonderful the love of God really is we find that the fear which used to dominate our lives, is now thrown out of our hearts. No longer are we a slave to fear to be controlled by the evil one. Now because of the mercy shown to us, we can come to the realization that God’s desire is that we live before him. We have faith that God is both able and willing to give us a life beyond the death that we justly deserve. So, we must also conclude that God is the one who has given us this life we now live, and he has done so all so that we might forever live before him in a relationship of love. It is through this faith that we have in God that we now are found righteous because as God desires us to live before him in a relationship of live he likewise also desires every person to live before him in the very same relationship. This tempers how we live life with each other.

         All of this leads us to the very purpose for God deciding to save us, and the answer, not surprisingly is love. God saves us in order that we might live a life of faithful love shown to all people, even those who oppose us and hate us. This truth is found,  first in the thirteenth chapter of John, the thirty-fourth verse, where Jesus tells us this, “A new commandment I give to you. That you love one another in the same manner as I have loved you, you also must love one another.” These were not just mere words that Jesus spoke because on the very next day after he gave this commandment, Jesus took up his cross and allowed his body to be broken and his blood to be poured out as a demonstration of his great love for us, the standard of love we are called to love one another. To understand more fully the extensive nature of this commandment, we must read what John writes in his first letter to his churches, as found in the second chapter, “…this is a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. The one who says that he is in the light yet hates someone is in the darkness….and walks in the darkness.”  Now just in case we have not made the connection as to how this pertains to our salvation, we must also consider what John writes in the third chapter of this same letter. There we read this, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love one another.” John goes on to explain his reasoning using the very teaching of Jesus found in the fifth chapter of Matthew, when he writes this, “The person who does not love remains in death. Everyone who hates someone is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in them.” Now when I read these words I can not help but be astonished. So often when we speak about salvation in the church we never explain that this is to affect the way we live with all we meet and live life with. I know this to be true because the place where I have experienced the most hatred toward myself is within the churches where I have served. If what John writes is true then I must wonder whether all those who attended those churches really do have eternal life living within them. So we must allow the truth we read here to convict us, and reconsider just what it means for us to be saved.

         You see, God’s purpose for saving us is so that we might love with the same faithful love that God first loved us. This is how we bear his image throughout creation. Just as we can say that God is love we must also believe that one day we will also say that humanity is love. This is why the one, true, living God who loves us with an always faithful love can be said to be our only savior for only he alone holds out what seems like an impossible standard, a world where hate no longer is found. False gods are always lesser gods because they allow hatred to remain. Only our God seeks to eradicate hatred from humanity by saving us so that we might love just as he first loved us. 

         Now as wonderful as it is to consider a world where hatred no longer exists, such an idea is, at the same time, somewhat terrifying. I mean, just think about how easy it is to hate others. If we are honest about ourselves, we know just how quickly hatred can take ahold of us. Knowing how vulnerable we are to hate others means that we must be very intentional in our loving of all those around us. In the fourteenth chapter of Hosea, we read that when hatred begins to well up in us we must, in that moment, return to God. Before him we remember that he will forgive us anytime we confess our failure. And we must remember that God forgives our failure through the costly love showed to us there upon the cross. So to return to God is to return to the cross, for as John writes in his first letter, the third chapter, “By this we have come to know what love is for there Jesus laid down his life on our behalf.” Once we know the love of God then we no longer will live out of fear, but instead we will have faith that in this love we find the certainty of our life before God. So, no longer will we be concerned with self-preservation, worrying how we will protect our life because we now have the certainty that our life is secure. We know that we forever stand in the destination God has always planned for us to stand, there before him, whether that is here in this world or the next.

         We then discover a deeper understanding of our relationship with God, as written in the third verse of the fourteenth chapter Hosea. There we read this, “For in you the orphan finds compassion.” Paul echoes this same idea in the eighth chapter of Romans, “…you have received the Spirit of adoption and by him we cry out, Abba, Father.” Through the love of God, we are to now know that we belong in the family of God. This is why, when we stand at the cross, we are to not only know the love of God but we are to also know what John further writes in the third chapter of his first letter, where he tells us, “And we are obligated to lay down our live for all people.” You see, when we know God as our Heavenly Father then we must know that as his children we must love others in the same manner as Jesus. This is why the commandment of Jesus must also be understood as being what is written in the ninth chapter of Luke, “If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow me.” If we say that we are followers of Jesus then we must also ask ourselves just how are we doing with this whole making life not about us, and carrying our cross, every day, not just the days we feel like doing so?

         You see, belonging to the family of God means that we will join in the family business of offering ourselves so that life might be more abundant in the world. We must learn from Jesus who tells us in the fifth chapter of John, “My Father has been working all this time and so I too must work.”  And further he adds, “The Son can do nothing on his own but he only does what he sees the Father doing for whatever the Father is doing the Son does likewise.” Now to understand what we are to do we have to know just what it is that our Heavenly Father has always been busy doing. We find our answer in the fifteenth verse of the fifty-seventh chapter of Isaiah, “For thus says the one high and lifted up, the one who dwells forever, the one whose name is holy, “I dwell and holy place but I also am found with the people who are crushed and who have little life left in them. I am there with them to give life to the ones whose life is almost gone, and to give life to the hearts of those who are crushed.” So, where we find our Heavenly Father at work is there among the suffering and hurting people of this world who have withstood the worst of the hatred from those who live in darkness. Jesus went to all those who suffered in this world, those oppressed by the broken and the brokenness of this world and he offered them life. Yet he did more than this because he himself became one crushed by those who lived in darkness, one whose life was taken from him, when he offered himself up as the spotless lamb upon the cross. As children of our Heavenly Father, we to are called to take up our cross daily which means that we are to ask, and seek and knock on the doors of homes, in order to find those who are crushed, those who suffer and those for whom life seems lost, for right there is where we find our Heavenly Father at work. When we find our Father at work then we work with him giving life and restoring what has become broken at the hands of those who live in darkness. 

         Yet this is not all of what is meant when Jesus tells us to carry our cross. You see when we live in the light of the love of God our actions will cause those who live in the darkness to realize just where they stand in relation to God. As we hear in the third chapter of the gospel of John, “And this is the judgment that the light has come into the world, and people love the darkness rather than the light for their deeds are evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and they will not come to the light lest their deeds be exposed as being done apart from God.” When God is found to be working there among the people who are broken, those whose life is uncertain, then all the powerful people who use and abuse people will discover that God is not with them, in fact they will know that they live in direct opposition to God. This judgment will cause them to hate the people who live in the light of the new age where faithful love is found, not just in the actions of God, but also in the actions of those who call themselves his children. This is the very hatred of those who cried, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”, when Pontus Pilate decided the fate of Jesus. Jesus took up his cross even for those who hated him, laying down his life instead of taking their life. Through the blood he shed, those with hatred in their hearts knew the certainty behind the declaration of Jesus who cried from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” So, people will hate us because we live in the light, the light that exposes the truth that God is not with them. When this hate comes against us we also must forgive them just as Jesus first forgave us. We offer all those who hate us the gift of costly love because God has first given to us a gift of costly love in the death of Jesus. To all those who hate us we share the gift that has already been given to us, the gift of life given by the God who loves us.

         It is through the carrying of our cross that we work out our salvation. The importance of carrying our cross every day is so that we every day we continue to love never giving ourselves an opportunity to hate anyone. So as strange as it might sound, carrying our cross is a life-giving exercise for it keeps us from the hatred which holds us in death. This importance of being actively loving others is again found in the third chapter of the first letter of John, where we hear this, “Whoever has the worlds goods, and sees someone in need and closes their heart against that person, tell me how does the love of God abide in them?” Little children we must not love with word or speech, but in actions and truth.” You see, being in a relationship with God is more than saying some faith confession or sinner’s prayer. It is only when we actively carry our cross, day by day, can we honestly say that we are in a love relationship with God! To his glory! Amen!

Back to The Basics: A Certainty That Produces Righteousness

 September 27 2026

Hosea 10:1-13

         This year the baby of our family, our son Matt, will be celebrating his thirtieth birthday. I have never felt so old in all my life. People will often tell you that children grow up too fast, yet I can not believe how fast those thirty years have flown by. Matt is somewhat special to us because he was our surprise child. You see, we had our nice little family all planned out. We had our first child, Elizabeth and then right on cue about two years later along came our second child Sarah, just as we had planned it all out. We even built our house with three bedrooms, so that each child would have their own space. And then along came Matt, and suddenly we realized that what we had planned was not what God had planned, surprise, surprise. Now even though Matt was not planned or expected he nonetheless was always loved. And now thirty years later we can not imagine our family without him. He is our reminder that all of our children, planned or not, are special gifts given to us by God. 

         Now, when Jennifer and I say that we believe that our children are gifts given to us by God, this is, in all actuality, a statement of faith. You see, faith is the certainty that the very reason any of us exist and have life is solely because God desires us to be here. This is the conclusion we must realize as being the truth when we consider the basic truths that we know about God. It might have come as a surprise that we have been looking at the basics of being in a relationship with God for several weeks, yet we have not spoken about faith. What we will discover today is that faith is a realization that comes when we stand back and consider all that we know about God’s love for us. As we have said from the beginning of this series entitled, “Back to the Basics”, the foundational building block of our relationship is that God loves us. God’s love is so certain and unchanging that we can even go so far as to say that God is love for this is his very nature. The second truth we know about God is that God communicates with us, those he created to bear his likeness. God desires that we know that he only wants the very best for all of us. The Bible is the conversation God has with those willing to listen and to respond to him. The third truth that builds from these first two ideas is the truth that we can know about ourselves as being the beloved of God. God faithfully loves us so that we can forever know ourselves as being those who are the focus of the love of God. This truth found in the unfailing love of God for us is our true identity. Now even though God is always and forever faithful in his love for us, we as his people do not respond with a faithful love of our own. All of us have sinned, missing the mark of responding to the love of God with the same faithfulness God shows to us. So, we must depend on the faithfulness of God to cover over our failure, through the gift of the costly love shown to us at the cross. The very blood of Christ was necessary to covered over our sin. Through what God has done for us upon the cross we come to know just how deep, how wide, how long and how high is this tremendous love that God has for each of us. Fear no longer dominates us when the love of God finds a home in us. We know that the love of God is the mercy that triumphs over the judgment and condemnation that were rightfully ours. In this way we are set free from being enslaved by the evil one, no longer bound to failure.

         We discovered the importance of knowing God last week in a passage from the fourth chapter of the first letter of John. Yet, what is also in this same passage is something else that we are to have when we become aware of the love God has for us as demonstrated there upon the cross. The passage from First John, the fourth chapter, the sixteenth verse, tells us this, “We have come to know and have faith in the love that God has for us.” So not only must we know the love that God has for us, but we also must now have faith in our hearts where once there was fear. Knowing the love of God throws fear out of our hearts so that now in its place we might have a certainty in our life that is ours though the love of God. 

         When it comes to our relationship with God, there is nothing more basic to that relationship than faith yet on the other hand, there is also perhaps nothing more misunderstood than this concept called faith. For some who follow Christ, faith means simply that we now have something certain in our life, but faith is in all actuality a certainty about a fundamental aspect about our life. There is no better place to begin to understand what is meant by faith than the fourth chapter of Romans. There, Paul uses the example of Abraham, who Paul teaches us should be the very father of our faith. In the seventeenth verse of this fourth chapter of Romans, we hear Paul tell us that Abraham, our father, “…before the presence of God, this faith of Abraham is a faith that believes God gives life to the dead and calls into being the ones who do not exist.”  You see, Abraham and his wife Sarah wished to have a child to be their legacy, yet they were incredibly old, far past child-bearing age. This is exactly how God wanted them to be so that Abraham and Sarah would understand that their becoming parents was solely the work of his hand and nothing else. In fact, even though Abraham and Sarah were quite old when they first met God, God nonetheless made them wait another twenty years before they were ready to believe in what only God would do. What God had to do was to being them to conclude was that their child would exist because of the desire of God and not because of any desire they had to have a child. You see, God was teaching them something very fundamental not just about their own child but about every child and that is that all people exist solely because God desired them to exist.

          Faith then is what links God’s love to our life. This is the realization we are to come to when we stand back and mull over what we know about the love of God. What the mercy of God proves to us is that God wants us to live with him. The judgment of God was just to condemn us to death because fear dominates us which is the very slavery of sin. But God in his love, through the mercy he shows to us, gives to us not condemnation, but a life beyond this certain death. Faith as Abraham discovered is the certainty that our God can indeed give life to the dead. Not only does God have the power to give life to the dead, but he also wants to give life to the dead; this is the certainty we realize when we know the love of God. God desires that we live before him as those who receive his faithful love and then return this same love back to him. So, through knowing the love of God we can also know the certainty that we exist and have life solely through the power of God. 

         Our faith then, changes the way that we live in the world. The biggest transformation is that when we have this certainty about life then God declares that we are righteous in his eyes. Again, from the fourth chapter of Romans, Paul, quoting from the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, tells us, this, “If Abraham was made righteous by anything he had done, he would have something to boast about but not before God. For what does scripture say, “And Abraham had faith and God considered him to be righteous.” Now to understand what Paul is teaching us here we must first understand what is meant by this idea of righteousness. Righteousness throughout scriptures means that we as the people of God will make right and good judgments in our dealings with others. What God calls us to do is to consider just how our faith affects the decisions we make in our dealings with others. Well, if we believe that God desires that we live before him to receive his love and then respond to him in love, then we must also believe that this is the very same way God is with everyone else. Every person is someone that God wished to exist because they exist through his power. This means that everyone is someone who has been someone God has loved even before they were born. This is the meaning behind what Paul tells us in the eighth chapter of Romans when he says that we were predestined to become like Christ. God had a destination for all those he causes to exist, even before they have life, and that place where God desired for all to live is there before him in a relationship of faithful love just as Jesus demonstrated to us. 

         Now if this is the truth which the love of God causes us to realize, then it is not difficult for us to see how such an understanding tempers how we live with others. The people in our life are not there primarily to serve us and our needs. The people in our life are not commodities to be used and then discarded. No, they are people who exist because God desires to be in a relationship of mutual love with them. So, we must be careful to communicate to all that we meet that God indeed loves them. This means that they need to know the love of God. When we know the basic idea that knowing the love of God throws fear out of our life, then we will be opposing this idea if we cause others to be afraid. Instead, we should look to do what we can to help others to not be afraid and when others wonder why we do so, we can tell them that this is what knowing the love of God has done for us. For others to discover the love of God through us is the ultimate goal of our righteous behavior.

         We have had to think long and hard about the basics we have learned about being in a relationship with God so that we realize just what such a relationship is to produce when we live life with the people around us. You see, the people in the days of Hosea the prophet forgot the truths that their forefather Abraham once knew. They no longer had faith as Abraham once had. Without such a faith, the people no longer lived in awe of the God who had given them life. The abundance that their land produced was not used to help those in need. No, all that their fertile fields produced was people who worshipped false gods all so that they might have even more than they already had. The people were never satisfied because they no longer knew the God who loved them, so they lived in fear believing that if they just had a little more then their anxiety and worry might no longer plague them. 

         Without knowing God and the love he had for them, then not only did they lose their faith in him, but they also became people who could not be trusted. Hosea writes that the people of his day uttered mere words without any intention of doing what they had promised. They were those who made empty promises which resulted in worthless covenants. The judgments they made were just like the poisonous weeds which would spring up when they plowed their fields, quickly made and deadly to those those who came under them. So, God told his people that they would be carried away to a foreign nation. They and the idols they worshipped would soon become the property of the Assyrian king. All the altars and shrines they erected to worship their false gods would become overrun with thorns and thistles. On that day when their wicked ways ended, Hosea tells his people that they will cry out for the mountains to cover them and plead for the hills to fall on them. This is the same warning Jesus would repeat in his day for those who refused to listen to his plea for peacemaking. So, when the day of destruction came for the people in Hosea’s day, they would find themselves crying out for the mountains and hills to cover over them so that they would not have to face their destruction.

         Now none of what is written here sounds very much like the love of God, yet what God states he is doing by allowing other nations to sweep down on his people and take them into exile is that he is disciplining them. As we learn in the twelfth chapter of Hebrews, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant but later, those trained by such discipline find that it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. You see, God had warned his people before they ever set foot in the land he had promised to them that they would forsake his ways, and then he would allow the nations to scatter them far from their home. Yet God would do so for a particularly important reason, as we hear at the beginning of the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy. There we hear Moses tell the people of God that when they find themselves in the nations where the Lord your God has driven them, then if they, “…return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you, and do so with all of your heart and mind, then the Lord will restore your fortunes and have mercy upon you…” Just as we have previously learned, the judgement of God is never the final word of God. God always holds out his mercy. The people of God would find mercy when God placed them in a situation of great fear called the exile. You see, in times of great uncertainty we are to recall how when we knew the love of God this is when our hearts cast out their fear. In the certainty that we have that God desires that we live before him in a relationship of love we know that we can once again turn back to God. This is where the discipline of God is to bring us, to return to God with our whole hearts, ready to be cleansed of fear, and our whole life, ready to live in love before him.

         The hope of God is that his people would once again turn and seek him. This is why God is certain that one day his people would live as he created them to live. God knew that when his people would seek him, then he could again cleanse their hearts of fear and restore their lives so that they could once again live before him in love. When this would happen God would cause right judgments to rain down upon his people. Instead of sowing their fields for an ever-greater harvest to chase away their ever-nagging fears and anxieties, his people would sow for themselves righteousness. His people would once again have the certainty that all people have life because of the love of God and are therefore people created to know the love of God which casts our fear. They would then use their abundance to eradicate the fears and anxieties plaguing the lives of the people around them. To those who were afraid of going hungry, food would be given. To those afraid their well would run dry, water would be shared. To those who feared the cold, clothes and shelter would be offered. And to those who were sick and afraid, they would find that people would. come and sit with them so they would not have to face their fear alone. In this way the righteousness of God’s people would result in a shared life of steadfast love that would be known by all. Such is a certainty when we live by the certainty found by our faith in God. To him be the glory!