Come and join me every wednesday and sunday for the sunday school lesson

 

God Wants Us TO REPENT

May 31 – Return to Love and Justice 
 

Bible Lesson: Hosea 11:1, 2, 7-10 (KJV) ; Hosea 12:1, 2, 6-14 (KJV) 


Key verse: Hosea 12:6 (KJV) - "Therefore turn thou to thy God: keep mercy and judgment, and wait on thy God continually."

(Pop-up references come from The New Living Translation courtesy of Reftagger.com)


What shall we learn from this lesson:   As a child, how many times did we had an opportunity to stop doing something wrong but chose to continue, only to suffer the resulting consequences of punishment? After receiving such punishment we should have learned a valuable lesson as a child—doing wrong is not a good idea!

In a Christian home, this lesson is one of the most desired lessons parents want their children to learn. Unfortunately, even after growing up and being old enough to have Medicare and Social Security benefits, we still have not completely learned the lesson. 

We never stop sinning. We may have grown enough spiritually to know that we are still doing some wrong things but we are driven by worldly forces directed at us by Satan himself to deviate from what we know is godly and how the Lord wants us to behave.

The lesson from Hosea teaches us to always believe in the mercies of God and to not give up hope for salvation even though we are sinners. That means we should never stop trying to do right by God even though doing the opposite is a constant temptation. 

God loves us as His children and will never give up on us. His love is endless and His mercies are new every morning.

"The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning." Lamentations 3:22-23 (NLT)

Hosea's message to the Israelites in our lesson is that even though God was angry because of their behavior (Hosea 11:2), He would have mercy on them and will not destroy them completely (Hosea 11:9). But they must repent of their sins and change their behavior.

This may seem like an impossible mission—to overcome sin—since we have done it all our lives. But that is only what Satan wants us to believe. He wants us to give up, not just on ourselves but on the Lord. 

But through Jesus Christ, we will be victorious over sin and the greatest temptations of our life. Through His representative, the Holy Spirit, we will live a spiritually fortified life and love the Lord as He deserves.
 

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