WHEN GOD USES A MAN

• DAY 328
• FAITH FILE: HOSEA
• SCRIPTURES: Hosea 1:2-3

When the LORD began to speak by Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea: “Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry and children of harlotry, for the land has committed great harlotry by departing from the LORD.” So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

What would you do if God gave you this kind of instruction? I mean, your life has to be totally surrendered to God to even consider obeying this instruction. Picture the reality of this for a moment. God asked him to marry a harlot. A prostitute!!! This means that he took a woman that almost every man had been with. His family probably knew that she was a hustler, they’d seen her on the streets. His fellow prophets probably wondered why a man of God would pick a whore for a wife, definitely, he was sleeping with her in secret and she must be pregnant. How about his friends and parents? How do you explain to people that God asked you to marry a prostitute? What of the personal embarrassment of having her as a wife?

To make matters worse she did not stop her harlotry after married. As a matter of fact, God asked him to marry her for that very reason. He wanted to show Israel how they are treating Him. Really God? You’re putting me through all this to make a point to people who do not even love you enough to stay faithful to you. This is enough to erroneously call God wicked. But that’s not all.

Yield

His children too were for signs and wonders in Isreal. Not the signs you think. Did it not even cross his mind to wonder about the paternity of these children born by a harlot of a wife? Oh, and every time the wife went to sell herself to men, God would send him to go buy her back, bring her home, and love her. This is a man who loves God, a faithful man by all accounts, you would think that God will give him the best wife ever, but not so. And Hosea never argues, complains, debates, blames or questions God. He obeyed.

Often, we pray, “Oh Lord, use me for your glory, I want to be used by you.” But deep down in our hearts, we have ideas of how He should use us. You can’t control how God will use your life. His using might lead to the cross, to being stoned to death, or to marrying a prostitute. It’s up to Him. What’s up to you is to surrender to Him.

This may have been tough for Hosea, yet it is a depiction of the lengths God will go to redeem us. God was using Hosea as a love letter to Israel. God was telling Israel that they were harlots but He still loved them and He would choose them and always come for them. The thing that hurt him was the salvation of a whole nation. Do you know the pruning God did in the lives of the men of God you call great? Because of their yielding, men were transformed. Will you be willing to let God use you?

Shalom.