Saturday Reading: Hosea 6:1-3
Key Verse: Hosea 6:2
2 After two days He will bring us to life; in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.
Devotion:
There are many who will come to know Christ and yet will go a wandering off into the world and be side-tracked for quite a while. When we see such people we should be reminding them of God’s faithfulness and justness. God has promised us that we will be safe with Him from the time that we believe that Christ is our Saviour; that means that if we do get tempted away and fall into other ways of life for a while, we are still safe in God’s hands. We may well be out of favour as we continue to disobey Him, but He will never let us go.
When your friends run off and do other things instead of being with you, you begin to wonder if they are indeed your friends. We tend to get upset by people saying that they are our friends and not acting like it. We may well even go as far as rejecting them whilst they are away from us. But that is something that God will never do... He may well let us trip up and fall just so that we can see how far we have wandered off into the world, but He will always be waiting there patiently for us to return.
The Jews are God’s chosen people – just like we choose who should be our friends at first, God chose the Hebrews. When we choose friends we like to be friends to them and expect them to be friends with us. We also show others that they are our friends by what we do with and for them. Others may also see how upset we get when our friends seemingly desert us... It does not exclude others from being our friends and it does not mean that we have no time for others. Similarly, God does not have restrictions; He would rather that we all be His friends so that He can look after us all that way that He wants to!
Points to Ponder:
How do you treat your friends?
How do you treat God?
