“I don’t want your sacrifices- I want your love; I don’t want your offerings- I want you to know me”
Recently, I read a book called Redeeming Love. It’s a modern retelling of the story of the book of Hosea. If you haven’t read the book, God tells a man to marry a prostitute. The prostitute doesn’t understand why a good man would want a girl like her so she runs away. The man pursues her and brings her back home, and the process repeats. It can be a hard book to read. At times, you identify with the man, other times you identify with the woman. Despite feeling so strongly about most of the book, I learned a lot from it.
The first thing I learned is that religion can burn people. Whether it’s burnout or being burnt by the people, religion can hurt. Angel has seen her mother become burnt-out by desperately trying to follow her religion. Her mother was rejected by the church for her sins and she, too, has personally been burnt and rejected by the religion. A crucial thing I have learned on the field is that being religious does not mean you have a relationship with/ know God. Getting caught up in thinking that being religiously correct will lead you to God is dangerous thinking. “…the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” God doesn’t want you to fulfill your religious obligations and think you have a relationship with him. He doesn’t want you to think that you can’t have a relationship if you aren’t fulfilling your religious obligations. He would rather you know him than just give obligatory offerings.
When God says he’ll do something don’t assume that he won’t deliver in his timing, not yours. God told Michael to take Angel out of the brothel and marry her. He had promised him a good marriage. The promise of a good marriage did not come when he took his wife out of the brothel, it came years later after she had grown to a place where she could equally contribute to the marriage. A lot of times we think that when God promises us something he’s telling us because it’s coming soon. In reality, that promise could be for tomorrow or it could be for twenty years from now. We get caught up thinking that God hasn’t fulfilled his promise. Did the time he told you it would take already come to pass? You can’t say he’s unfaithful if you don’t give him the time to work.
Sometimes bad things happen to serve as good in someone else’s story. I’m going to give you two different perspectives of the same story. Perspective number one: Your wife wants to leave you. She says she doesn’t love you. She never has, and she can’t bring herself to ever love you. When you love her and take care of her she shies away from you. She keeps you at arms length away because she won’t allow herself to give you a chance. You pour yourself out for her. You give her everything. You cherish her. She leaves you. God tells you to go get her. You seek her out to bring her home and when you find her she’s cheating on you. You bring her home with open arms, you forgive her and restore her place in the home. You continue to pour yourself out for her and show her how much you love and care about her. She continues to keep you an arm’s length away and refuses to let you love her. She leaves you again. These circumstances suck. It hurts to love someone so much and have them leave you hanging, walk away, give their attention to someone else, and still continue to hurt you when you bring them back into your life. Perspective number two: You feel so dirty. You make everything you touch dirty. Your husband bought you out of prostitution. There’s nothing you could ever really do to repay him. He is clean. He lives an honest life. You don’t want to ruin him so you keep him at a safe distance for him. He is loving and kind to you. You can’t hurt him and tell him you really love him because he’ll never marry an honest woman like him if he thinks it will hurt you. He is trying so hard to get closer but you can’t let him because it will ruin the efforts of his whole life. You know that if you stay he will get to close, so you leave. You go back to your old life because you know you’re good at it and can support yourself with that life. You are settling back into your life when the man you left comes back. He fights for you and takes you back to his home. You don’t really know why he pursues you so much, yet it makes you love him more. He sees more in you than you see in yourself. He pretends that you never left, he acts like nothing ever happened. It hurts you to know that you can never truly have this life with him. You aren’t an honest woman. You don’t work with your hands and you aren’t loyal to one man. You block your emotions so much that you can’t even feel anything with him. You see how much it hurts him that you still can’t be open with him. You see how much being with him hurts him so you leave again. In this, you’re being considerate of the other person. You’re safeguarding them because they can’t keep themselves safe and are only asking to be hurt. These two stories are the same events. For the man, this whole situation feels like he got dealt the wrong hand and he’s hurt by his wife leaving him. For the woman, she is learning what love truly looks and feels like but she doesn’t want to hurt her husband because she doesn’t know how to love him back. This is a bad circumstance in the man’s life story because he is being hurt again and again and there’s no foreseeable end to this. This is a good circumstance in the woman’s life story because she only knows what it looks like to be lusted after and is learning what love really looks like. What is a bad time for the man is a good time for the woman. Without the hard for one, good wouldn’t come for the other.
Your past and circumstances do not dictate your future. Angel was sold into prostitution when she was eight. Now in her mid-twenties, she feels she has committed too much sin in her life to ever be loved by God. She didn’t have a choice in her circumstances. Her past wasn’t what anyone hopes for in life. Her past and circumstances did not keep her from the love of God. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re too for gone for even God to love you, He just wants you home. He welcomes you back with open arms. “I desire faithful love and not sacrifice…” He doesn’t want you to sacrifice everything to love him. He wants you to love him and as you love him more, the sacrifices become easier. As Angel learned the love of God, it became easier for her to let go of the only profession she’d ever known. It’s not a sacrifice of who you are in exchange for his love. It’s his love in exchange for a sacrifice in who you become.
God’s love is redeeming, satisfying, and whole. God’s love isn’t condemning. You know what you’ve done in your life. He doesn’t want to shame you, he wants to redeem you. His love doesn’t put you down. His loves calls you higher. God’s love doesn’t need to be supplemented. You don’t need to seek affirmation of others or seek out satisfaction from the world. His love will sustain you, you just have to trust him. When he leads you to the end of yourself, trust that his love will carry you through. God’s love is whole. He doesn’t love pieces of you. He loves you. He doesn’t love the you that goes to church on Sunday instead of the you that works on Sunday. He loves all of you all of the time. His love isn’t part-time. His love is wholesome, it won’t hurt you or tear you down.
This book carries so many messages and themes throughout it. These are only a few of the things that I got from the book. I highly encourage you to read the book for yourself. (Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers)
“I don’t want your sacrifices- I want your love; I don’t want your offerings- I want you to know me”
Hosea 6:6
Update:
- I have been in Guatemala for 2 months now (wow!!), meaning that I move to Ecuador the beginning of march.
- Everyone on my squad is fully funded.
- PVT is at the end of this month! My mom will be in Guatemala for a week doing ministry with my team and I!
