God is our loving Father
by Gini Crawford, MSW
10/22/2007
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Summary: This audio devotion on Hosea 11 is about God being our loving Father. It paints a vivid picture of how much God our Father loves us and how He intimately cares for us. It describes how God hurts (as we would) when we turn away from Him. This audio devotion can be used for a baby shower (like it was) or a woman’s event that has God is our Father for a theme or for personal edification. I also did a mini audio devotion that covers the first part of Hosea 11, if your time is limited.
First read this information page then listen to either devotion.
A little background about the book of Hosea: Israel is married to God, but they are being so unfaithful to Him that He calls them adulterers. God was very hurt because they did anything a false god wanted them to do to show their love to it. Their determination to be united to those gods got so bad that they were willing to even burn their children alive to woo the false god, Molech.
God used the prophet Hosea to convey His feelings about their unfaithfulness. He did this by having Hosea marry a prostitute to paint a vivid picture of how He felt about Israel loving other gods instead of Him. God also used Hosea to convey His hatred over the horrendous things they were doing to be united to those gods.
In most cases in the book of Hosea, God uses the illustration of being Israel’s husband. However in Hosea 11 God changes His illustration to that of a father, and how a father feels when His children love another to the extent they will follow after life threatening things. In this chapter God poetically shares His longing for His people to come back to Him by emotionally talking about them as His beloved but wayward children.
Read Hosea 11:1-8 before you listen to the devotion. Prayerfully ask the Holy Spirit to give you at least one insight about Him from the devotion, and journal or write out your insight.To listen to the regular audio devotion, click God is our loving Father (about 17 minutes)> For the mini-devotion, click mini version of God is our loving Father (about 8.5 minutes).
Note - These free audio files are in an MP3 format. You can listen to them on your computer by "clicking" on a link with your mouse, or if you "right click" it, you can save it to your music file and down load it to a CD, your iPod®, or other MP3 player.
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