Hosea's Prayer

I just finished the Old Testament book of Hosea. The first couple chapters are most famous--that's where God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute as a metaphor for how his relationship with his people has degenerated.

Over the next several chapters, God lays out his case against his people with warnings as to the consequences to come should they not repent.

But in the final chapter (Hosea 14), God through Hosea gives the people of Israel (who have forgotten him and hence have forgotten how to pray) a great prayer of repentance to pray:

Return, Israel, to the LORD your God.
Your sins have been your downfall!

Take words with you
and return to the LORD.
Say to him:
"Forgive all our sins
and receive us graciously,
that we may offer the fruit of our lips.

Assyria cannot save us;
we will not mount warhorses.
We will never again say 'Our gods'
to what our own hands have made,
for in you the fatherless find compassion."

This is a tremendous prayer, worth making your own. First, the invitation: to return to God and recognize that our sins have been our downfall.

Secondly, for those of us who have a hard time speaking honestly about what we've done and where we've been wrong, the Scripture here generously offers us some words, a scaffolding to build a prayer around.

We ask for forgiveness. We ask to be welcomed back into his family, into his presence. We offer to him our mis-spent worship--this re-routing of our worship away from all the wrong things towards the God we were made to worship.

And in the final stanza, a tremendous chance for us to get specific. Assyria cannot save us; we will not mount war horses. We will never again say 'Our gods' to what our hands have made.

Here, you might insert what you look to for importance, significance, salvation: your financial situation (many are recently realizing the impossibility of salvation found in Wall Street), your GPA, your gifts or abilities or intelligence or friendships or rabid independence or whatever. We don't build wooden idols with our hands in our culture, but we certainly have no shortage of attempts at creating our own gods.

And lastly, all of this is offered up to the God who's character is affirmed in the final line: in you the fatherless find compassion. This is the God who's family we're being grafted into through this prayer. In a world full of broken families, God has compassion on the fatherless, the motherless, the ones who come from dysfunction, abuse, brokenness. We are invited into a community, a family, that is whole and wholly good and wholly for our good.

This is repentance: re-aligning ourselves with the realities of who we are, who God is, and being honest about where and how we have turned away from him; all of this for the purpose of being restored into his family, into the Relationship we were made for.