Bible: Come, Let Us Return...

In order to understand my relationship with God, you gotta first and foremost understand the passage God continually brings me to. To give you the full context of the my favorite verse (Hosea 6:1), I'll give you the chunk of passage.

5:14 For I will be like a lion to Ephraim
   And like a young lion to the house of Judah
   I, even I, will tear to pieces and go away,
   I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver.
5:15 I will go away and return to My place
   Until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face;
   In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me.
6:1 "Come, let us return to the LORD
   For He has torn us, but He will heal us;
   He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.
6:2 "He will revive us after two days;
   He will raise us up on the third day,
   That we may live before Him.
6:3 "So let us know, let us press on to know the LORD
   His going forth is as certain as the dawn;
   And He will come to us like the rain,
   Like the spring rain watering the earth."
Hosea 5:14 - 6:3

So the first section (Chapter 5), God is rebuking Israel for basically her prostituting herself out to other idols, sin (I'm sure you all know the story, but just a quick recap). Once chapter 6 rolls around, Israel responds to God's rebuking.

I first found this Scripture back in my senior year of high school, I was going through a rough time, and someone I had talked to shared Shane & Shane with me. He explained how he love the analogy of Hosea, and one of their songs on their Psalms album, "Hosea" (yeah, silly huh?) is written after this portion of Scripture, basically word-for-word. You can even listen to it on YouTube, but unnecessay. Anywho, after he had shared this song with me, I absolutely fell in love with it a few days later when my life drastically shifted. This portion of Scripture has come up so many times throughout my life: when I was betrayed, when I made horrible decisions, when I left for college, etc. Ultimately, it reminds me of God's faithfulness and length of grace, I even almost got it tattooed around my forearm a couple weeks ago so that I would never forget this passage (not that I could).

I am in love with the analogy of God tearing us apart, simply to bring us back to Him. When we become so far gone, God is not just there waiting for us to come back to Him when we feel like it. We ARE His people, His sheep, and when we go astray, sometimes He has to rip us to shreds to get us on the right track: "He has torn us, but He will heal us (6:1)." That's part of His grace. His grace doesn't let us do what we want but entails Him leading us back to Him by shifting our lifes. He shreds us to pieces to get down to the core of our being, ripping away all the layers of idolatry that we build up, so that He can get who we are in our core to remember Him, His faithfulness, and His promise. Our job is to place our faith and trust in Him, to "press on to know the Lord (6:3)." Countless times, God has stripped away all my distractions in order to get my to refocus on him.

So even today, as I look over this Scripture for the hundredth time, it still seems like the first: impacting me every single time, reminding me of His faithfulness in the past, and leading me to trusting Him with the future.