What God Wants Most

Hosea 6:1-3, 6 – “Come, let us return to the Lord; for He has torn us, that He may heal us; He has struck us down, and He will bind us up. After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up that we may live before Him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; His going out is sure as the dawn; He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.

For I delight in steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”

God’s pursuit of His people is relentless. Here in Hosea he has led the prophet Hosea into a hard and difficult family life to illustrate God’s love for Israel. Hosea’s wife was a prostitute and his children may not have been his, and yet God called him to go after her, take her back, and love her.

In the above quoted passage, we learn that God loves His people so much that when He is at risk of losing them, He will sometimes bring them pain to get their attention and cause them to turn back to Him so that He would heal them—He even promises to heal them in verse two, if they will just return to Him.

God just wants an opportunity to show His love.

In verse three Hosea pleads with us to stop running from God and to know God. In fact, he says let us press on to know the Lord. That means that in faith we are to take a moment and put forth a little effort to look at the nature of God. He then assures us that God is absolutely knowable.

The word Hosea uses here means to know God both by observation and by experience. God wants us to know His nature, His character, and especially His love for us.

If we just take a step toward God, He promises to come to us and reveal himself to us.

To prove His point, that for those people who have paused to read this passage and to consider what God is saying through Hosea, God reveals in verse six His own personal desires to the reader.

God says in verse six, “I delight is steadfast love.” Some translations say “loyalty”. Then He says that He delights in our knowing Him—intimately, closely. In fact, God desires our love and intimate closeness so much that it is more important to Him than any religious activity we could offer Him.

Think about that! If it were a choice between you loving God or going to church, He would choose your love. If it were a choice between you going on a mission trip or knowing God, He would choose you knowing Him.

It’s that important!

It’s really not that hard. If we take the time to look at how deeply God loves us by considering that He sacrificed His Son to save us, love for God begins to form in us. I John 4:19 says “We love because He first loved us.”

Looking at God’s faithfulness to us when we were unfaithful, understanding His grace and mercy given to us through Jesus Christ on the cross, grasping God’s relentless pursuit of us while our eyes are on everything else but Him, reveals the amazing nature of our loving Father in heaven. All He askes is that we stop, wherever we are spiritually, and simply take a step toward Him. If we will do that, He promises to run to meet us.