The Wheel

"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?" Galatians 1:10

There is a picture I cannot get out of my head, and it is a hamster on a wheel.

The wheel is going. The little legs are moving. There is real effort in it, real exertion, real sweat if hamsters sweat, and if you were to measure the distance covered you would find that it is genuinely impressive. Mile after mile after mile.

And he is exactly where he started.

That is the approval carrot, and I have run on that wheel most of my life. You think you are going somewhere. You feel the motion. You can point to the effort as proof that something is happening, and effort does feel like progress, especially to a man who has always been able to work harder than the people around him.

But the carrot is hung from the wheel. It moves when you move. That is the design.

And so you get the promotion and the line shifts. You get the compliment and it lasts an afternoon. You get the approval you were sure would settle it, and by Wednesday your stomach is tight again and you are not entirely sure why, and if you are honest you already know what you are going to do about it.

You are going to run.

Here is what I want you to notice. Nobody put you on the wheel. That is the part that is hard to say out loud. The wheel is in your cage and you get on it every morning because the running feels like living, and stopping feels like dying, and you have never once tried to find out whether it is.

What would happen if you stepped off?

Not permanently. Just today.

Servants or Slaves

"Am I now trying to win the approval of human beings, or of God? Or am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ." Galatians 1:10

Paul is writing to people who had abandoned a gospel of grace and gone back to a gospel of performance, and in the middle of that argument he stops and asks a question that has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the heart. Whose approval am I working for.

And he does not leave it hanging. He gives you the two choices and he makes them plain, and I have come to believe they are the only two there are.

You will either be a servant of God, or you will be a slave to the opinions of other people.

Notice that both of those words involve someone else holding your life. Neither of them is autonomy. There is no third door where you finally become free and self-sufficient and beholden to nobody, because that person does not exist and never has. You were made to be held. The only question is by whom.

And I want to be honest that this is a hard choice, and I am tired of hearing it presented as an easy one. Because for most of us, long before Christ ever broke into the hardness of our hearts and began to warm them with his grace, we had already spent decades living for the approval of others. It is the water we learned to swim in. It is the first language we ever spoke. It is entirely possible to live today, and tomorrow, and every day after that, constantly calculating what other people think of us, constantly managing how we are perceived, constantly working to keep a good standing with a room.

And to call it faithfulness.

Paul says that if he were still doing that, he would not be a servant of Christ. Not that he would be a worse one. That he would not be one.

That sentence should cost us something.

The Ring in Your Nose

"The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe." Proverbs 29:25

The fear of man is a snare, and I want you to sit with what a snare actually is, because we hear the word and think of something small. A snare is not a warning. A snare is a trap, and a trap has one purpose, which is to hold you where you are so that something else can decide what happens next.

But there is a commentary that goes further than that. It says the snare in this verse is not only a trap but a lead. Like a ring through the nose.

That is why you see rings in the noses of bulls. It is not decoration. It is control. An animal that could break a man in half is walked wherever you want it to go, by a ring in the softest part of its face, and it goes, because the alternative hurts more.

Fearing what other people think of you is that ring.

And this is what fools us, because it does not feel like a trap. It feels like a carrot. It feels like something good is out ahead of us and we are almost there, and if we just get a little more approval, a little more of their good opinion, we will finally be able to rest. So we lean forward. We take another step. We keep our head down and we go where we are led.

The carrot is the disguise. The ring is the mechanism.

And you will not feel it. That is the whole point of it. Nobody who is being led by the nose feels the ring. They only feel the pull, and they call it ambition, and they call it service, and sometimes they even call it love.

So here is the only question that gets to the bottom of it.

Who has been walking you around?

The Cry Underneath

“Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” Galatians 4:6

We have made the word Father formal. We set it at the front of our prayers, in the voice we use when other people can hear us. Our Father, who art in heaven. It is a good word and a true one, but somewhere along the way we starched it.

Paul does not use that word. He reaches past Greek altogether and takes an Aramaic word out of a kitchen. Abba. It is what a small child says. It does not mean Father. It means Daddy.

And notice who is saying it. Not you. Read the verse again. God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. The cry is not something you generate. It is not a warmth you have to produce on Sunday morning by trying harder or singing louder. The Spirit of the Son is the one crying, and he is doing it inside you, and what he is saying is Daddy.

Which means the question was never whether you can feel it. The question is whether you can hear it.

Because something can sit on top of that cry. Something can be loud enough in your chest that the voice underneath does not get through. Not sin, necessarily. Usually it is an idol, and usually it is a good thing that has grown a mouth. It talks constantly. It asks for your hours and your worry and your endless small sacrifices, and it talks straight over the quiet voice saying Daddy, I love you.

You are not being asked to manufacture affection for God. You have been adopted. Your inheritance has been signed over to you. The cry is already in you, and it has been for longer than you know.

Sit still somewhere this week, long enough to hear what is saying it.

Feeding on Ashes

“He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray.” Isaiah 44:20

Isaiah watches a man walk out to the woods and cut down a tree. He carries it home. Half of it he burns. He warms himself at the fire and says, ah, I am warm. He bakes his bread over it, roasts his meat, and eats until he is full. Then he takes what is left of the same tree, the other half, and he shapes it, and he bows down to it, and he says, deliver me, for you are my god.

The strange part is not that he worships. The strange part is that he watched himself make it.

You will not be tempted by a wooden idol. But you will be tempted by something you built with your own hands and then knelt to. A reputation you assembled. A political certainty you carved. A family you love so much that you have quietly begun asking it to save you. A retirement account. A rightness. A routine. You watched yourself make it. You remember the labor. And still you find yourself asking it for deliverance.

Isaiah says the man feeds on ashes, and that is the exact accounting. An idol does not starve you all at once. It feeds you. It gives you something real. Ash has substance, it fills the mouth, and you can go a long way on it before you notice that nothing in it is keeping you alive.

But here is the line that should stop you where you stand. No one stops to think. No one has the knowledge or the discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. He does not ask the question. Not because he could not answer it. Because he never asks it.

So ask it.

What is the thing you are asking to deliver you? And do you remember making it?

The Second Oxygen

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” Deuteronomy 6:4

Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, and you have water. You can drink it and live. Add one more oxygen and you have hydrogen peroxide. Drink that and it will take you apart from the inside. The elements did not change. The arrangement did.

That is what unsettles me about our faith. We are rarely wrong about the ingredients. We say Father, Son, Spirit. We say sin, we say grace. Ask almost anyone in the room and they will hand the words back to you correctly. But the words are not the thing. What matters is how they are combined, and whether we have quietly added a second oxygen.

Grace, held together with the Father who loves you, makes a life. Grace held next to a small view of sin makes permission. The same word. A different arrangement. Holiness, held together with grace, makes a saint. Holiness held next to fear makes a Pharisee, and Pharisees are built entirely out of true things.

You do not usually go wrong by believing something false. You go wrong by holding true things in a combination that will not carry life.

Which is why Moses does not begin with a list. He begins with an arrangement. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Before anything else, God is not an assortment of parts. He is one. Not a Father you go to for comfort, and a Judge you avoid, and a Spirit you call on when you are desperate. One. And the love he asks for is not divided either. All your heart, all your soul, all your strength. Not a portion set aside for him and the rest arranged around other loves.

That is the confession. It is also the only combination that yields water.

So look at what you actually believe today. Not the words, you have those. The arrangement. What have you set beside grace? What is sitting next to the Father’s love in your chest, so that it cannot be all his?

You may not be far off at all. You may only be one oxygen away.

I Will Freely Love Them

"I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them." Hosea 14:4

I will love them freely.

Freely means without cost or payment. It means given as a gift. When Jesus sends the disciples out and tells them to heal the sick and cleanse the lepers, he tells them they received freely, so give freely, and he means do not put a price on it. When Paul says we are justified freely by his grace, he means there is no invoice.

And it also means willingly. Spontaneously. Without being compelled. David says he will freely sacrifice, and what he means is that nobody made him do it. There is no obligation in the room.

To love freely, there has to be freedom.

Which brings me to the phrase I wish we would bury, and I mean bury it in the church first. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

It sounds like brotherly love. It sounds like unity. It is faithlessness with good manners. Because the moment that motto gets into the heart of a church, it requires obedience without love, and it turns a relationship into a transaction, and a transaction always has terms. Which means it can always be breached. And when it is breached, either side now has the right to leave, or to withhold, or to be cruel.

That is not love. That is bondage with a friendly face.

And most of us are running this arrangement with God and do not know it. Jesus, I come to church, I give, I serve, I have done my part. And I am not being blessed right now. So you are not doing yours.

Listen to me. The transaction already happened. It happened between Christ and the Father, and the debt was paid, and you were not a party to it.

There is nothing left to negotiate.

He is not going to love you more if you produce, and he is not going to love you less if you fail.

He said he would love you freely.

Let him.

I Will Allure Her

"Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her." Hosea 2:14

Allure is not a word we use much, and when we do we usually mean something a little dishonest. A lure is what you put on a hook.

That is not this.

The allurement here is not to trick. It is a persuasion that radically suggests a different option than the one we are living. It says, would you be willing to consider something else. Would you be willing to see my goodness as greater than whatever it is you love more than me.

And notice the mechanism, because it is the strangest part of the verse. He does not corner her. He does not expose her. He brings her into the wilderness and speaks tenderly.

Faithful love never forces itself on anybody.

Think of the two on the Emmaus road. They are walking away from Jerusalem, away from their group, away from everything, and they are doing it after two separate testimonies came back and told them the tomb was empty. They heard the women. They sent the men. And they walked away anyway.

And Jesus comes alongside them and hides their eyes and just walks.

He had every reason to boast. He had just defeated death. He could have said, what is wrong with you, you had two witnesses. Instead he listens. He asks questions. He opens the Scriptures and shows them how the whole thing has been pointing at him the entire time, and he lets them not know it is him.

He never once pushes them to see him.

He walks in the direction they are already going.

I have wondered whether he does that all the way. Whether he walks the ones who are turning away as far as they will go, still speaking tenderly, still offering the other option, right up to the gate.

Their hearts burned first. The recognition came second.

He is not going to force you.

He is going to walk with you until something burns.

Go, Again

"Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress." Hosea 3:1

It is one thing to love someone who comes crawling back and asks for forgiveness.

It is another thing entirely to go and find them.

To make the first move when they are the one who hurt you. To settle a debt you did not create. To walk out the door and go looking for a person who left you, and who is not sorry, and who is currently in another man's house.

That is hard. Everything in me wants to say, it is not my fault. I did not leave. I stayed with the kids.

And God says, go again.

I learned something early in ministry that has cost me more than almost anything else I know, and it is this. You can tell who is more spiritual in an argument. Not by who is right. By who, in humility, makes the first move toward reconciliation. It is the person who sees more value in the relationship than in the verdict.

That is Jesus. He was never wrong in a single argument in his life, and he was always the first one seeking reconciliation. Always. He does not wait at the far end of repentance with his arms crossed. He comes down the road.

And this is where the story turns from being about our unfaithfulness to being about his character, because at this point in the book Gomer has done nothing to earn a second look. There is no scene where she comes to her senses. God says go, and he says love her, and he says love her the way I love Israel, though they turn to other gods.

Though. Not after. Though.

I call it radical love. God pursues us to redeem the relationship even when we are the ones who walked away, chasing loves that never loved us back.

You do not have to fix it first.

He is already coming.

They Will Eat and Not Have Enough

"They shall eat, but not have enough; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the LORD to cherish whoredom." Hosea 4:10

They will eat but never have enough.

That is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about the human heart, and God says it about people who are getting exactly what they went after. This is not a verse about deprivation. They are eating. They are getting the thing. And it is doing nothing.

Charles Darwin said near the end of his life that he was not the least afraid to die, and in the same season he wrote to a friend that he had very little satisfaction in life. He had spent himself on work he believed was useful, and by his own account he arrived at the end of it hollow.

This is why people with everything come to the end of their years and say, I accumulated it all, and I am still empty.

Here is what I think is happening, and I got it from Paul and I cannot shake it. The works of the flesh are not primarily about wickedness. They are about emptiness. Free and faithful love is motivated by the joy of sharing the fullness we have in Christ. But the works of the flesh are motivated by the desire to fill an emptiness.

And that is why the appetite never closes. You cannot fill a hole with the wrong substance. You can only keep pouring.

For some of us it is religion, and we use the law itself to do it. We serve, we attend, we perform, and we are as empty as anybody at the bar. For others it is the obvious things, the booze, the screen, the relationship that brings no honor to Christ. It does not matter which. Paul says it is enslaved to one desire after another in its effort to fill an emptiness which only Christ can fill.

Oswald Chambers wrote that the springs of love are in God, not in us.

Not in us. That is the whole diagnosis in four words.

So the question is not why you are still hungry.

The question is what you have been eating.

My Wool, My Linen

"She said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.'" Hosea 2:5

Listen to how Gomer talks.

My wool. My linen. My olive oil. My drink.

Say it out loud a few times and you will hear the whole problem, because the problem is not in the nouns. The problem is in the pronoun. Every single one of those things was given to her. She did not spin the wool. She did not press the oil. Somebody provided all of it, and she has stood in the middle of that provision and called it hers, and then walked out the door to go find people who might give her more of it.

She has completely forgotten who provided in the first place. And having forgotten, she is now chasing after men who can give her exactly what she already had.

That is not a story about a woman in the eighth century before Christ. That is Tuesday.

How quickly do we forget who is really providing. How fast do we run after the next thing, the next relationship, the next status symbol, forgetting the faithful love that has been there the whole time, quietly stocking the shelves.

I do not think the forgetting is usually dramatic either. I do not think anybody wakes up and decides to be ungrateful. I think it happens the way a house gets cluttered, which is one thing at a time, none of them decisive.

And then one day you look around at a life that was handed to you, and everything in it has your name on it.

My health. My family. My gifts. My church. My work.

And God, who gave every bit of it, is standing in the doorway of a house he furnished, listening to a person he loves say the word my.

Raisin Cakes

"Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins." Hosea 3:1

Raisin cakes.

It seems like a strange detail to put in a verse about spiritual adultery, and the first time it catches you it almost sounds funny. Is God suddenly against baked goods?

No. In that culture raisin cakes were a status symbol. They were the imported thing, the expensive thing, the thing you set out on the table when you wanted the neighbors to know you were doing well. They were the Mercedes in the driveway. They were the newest phone on the table at lunch, screen up, so it can be seen.

And God says, they turn to other gods, and they love the cakes of raisins.

He puts those two things in the same sentence on purpose.

We want the idol to be dramatic. We want it to be a carved thing on a shelf, something obviously wicked, something we would never do. And God says no. Sometimes the thing that pulls a heart away from me is not evil at all. It is nice. It is a small luxury. It is a signal. It is the raisin cake.

That is what makes it dangerous. Nobody repents of dessert.

The idol is almost never the thing itself. It is what the thing tells you about yourself. It is the story the raisin cake tells about the person who can afford it, and that story is very quiet, and it does not feel like worship, and it is worship.

And here is the terrible mercy in the verse. God does not stop loving her over it. He says go again. Love a woman who is loved by another man.

He knows exactly what she left him for.

He knows it was raisin cakes.

He sends the prophet anyway.

Go, Marry Her

"When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, 'Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.'" Hosea 1:2

God tells Moses to go free the captives. God tells Abraham to leave and go to a land I will show you.

And then God comes to Hosea.

I want you to marry a prostitute.

I think I would have asked for more time to pray that one through. I think I would have gone back and said, Lord, I want to make sure I heard you, because there is nothing holy about what I think you just said. And he says, yes, Hosea. She is a prostitute. Her name is Gomer.

Not Mary. Not Sarah. Gomer.

Imagine the whispers at the market. Did you hear about Hosea, the prophet, the man of God? He is getting married. And you will never believe who.

But here is what is incredible about it. God is not asking Hosea to make a strange life decision. God is asking Hosea to live out a prophecy. Every painful moment, every whisper behind his back, every betrayal that is coming, all of it is going to paint a picture. A living picture of how God feels about his people. Of how much he loves them, even when they run.

So they marry. They have three children. Life is happening.

And then one morning Hosea wakes up and she is gone. He searches the house. He checks the yard. He walks up and down the street. Nothing.

And now the prophet is a single father with three children, and if you have ever been a single parent you know the days are hard and the nights are worse. And the whispers around town are not helping. I knew it would not work. What was he thinking.

We read Hosea as a book about Israel, and it is. But God did not send Israel a memo. He sent them a man, with a wrecked house and a broken heart, and he said, look at him. That is me.

Before you ever read a word about your idols, read that.

The God you left is not indifferent about it.

Ready or Not

"You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the LORD." Jeremiah 29:13-14

Three things came clear while I was praying through Jeremiah, and they came in this order. Not for disaster. Look for me. I will be found by you.

And what filled my heart when I read them was not a doctrine. It was hide and seek with my kids. Little feet scampering across hardwood. The perfect hiding spot, which is never as perfect as they think. And then that moment when you call out, here I come, ready or not.

They always give themselves away. That is the part I keep turning over. The giggle from behind the curtain, the foot sticking out from under the blanket. They are not trying to win. They want to be found. Everything in them is straining toward the moment you pull the door open and say, there you are.

Young children love being found. It is not until we get older that we make it harder to be found.

Somewhere along the way the game changes. We learn to hide better. We learn to hold still and hold our breath and let the footsteps pass by. We learn that being found might cost us something, and so we get very, very good at not being found, and we call it privacy, and we call it strength, and we call it managing.

And then we wonder why God feels far away.

Maybe hide and seek was never meant to be won. Maybe it was always about bringing us together.

He says, I will be found by you. He does not say, I will find you and drag you out. He says he will be found. He is not hunting. He is seeking a person who wants to be discovered.

So here is the year. Here is the whole thing, and everything else that follows is a footnote to it. God is not looking for you the way a man looks for lost keys. He is looking for you the way a father looks for a child who is dying to be found.

The question is not whether he is seeking.

The question is whether you still want to be found.