Most people think they have to clean themselves up and make a bunch of changes before God will receive them.
In Christianity, however, we have the great reversal, seen in stories like Hosea. He offered his love to Gomer while she was a prostitute and again when she was an adulterer. She didn’t have to free herself from prostitution and clean herself up first in order to merit Hosea’s love. He offered it to her freely and unconditionally.
Hosea modeled God’s scandalous love for us: Acceptance and forgiveness and unconditional love come first; change follows in response.
One of the most riveting examples of this is Jesus’ encounter with his own Gomer—the woman caught in adultery in John 8.
In first-century Jewish culture, when you were caught in a flagrant act of adultery, you could be stoned to death. So the Jewish leaders bring this woman to Jesus, ready to kill her, and ask him what they should do with her. Jesus’ response? Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. When they all drop their stones and walk away, he asks the woman, “Where are your accusers?” and she replies that there are none left.
This is actually a frightening moment for this woman. Jesus is without sin. Out of everyone there, he alone would have been justified in whatever punishment he could give her. Yet he surprises her with one of the most cogent statements in all the gospels: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”
What makes that such a revolutionary gospel statement is the order of the two phrases. You and I would instinctively reverse them. We would be more likely to say, “Hey, if you go and sin no more, we won’t condemn you.” Clean up your life a little bit, fix your sinful habits—and then get back to us.
But Jesus put acceptance before change.
God’s acceptance is the power that liberates us from sin, not the reward for having liberated ourselves. The woman caught in adultery would never have the power to break the cycle of adultery until she had felt the warmth of acceptance and the love of the heavenly Father.
In the same way, Gomer would never have had the power to break that same cycle in her own life, so God used Hosea to mirror his love for her—the kind of love that comes back for her over and over again, even when she turns her back on him. It’s the kind of love that turns Gomers into Hoseas.
You see, God didn’t just want Hosea to learn about his love for his people. He wanted him to become a giver of that kind of love. That’s why he says to Hosea, “Go again, go again, go again, Hosea—because that’s what I do with you every time” (cf. Hosea 3:1).
He wants the same thing for us.
He wants us, who have experienced his outstretched arms again and again, to become the outstretched arms of Hosea. Acceptance comes first in the gospel, and change comes second, because it is only through the warmth of acceptance that we can experience the power to change.
So, to the parent who has been forsaken by your child, to the husband who feels neglected, to the minority who has been sidelined, to the boss who feels misunderstood, the friend who has been forsaken, the wife who has been taken for granted …
Go again.
Go again. Go again. Go again!
I’m not saying your outstretched arms will always change the Gomers in your life. Sometimes Gomers—like the one in this story—don’t change.
But I can guarantee that stretching out your arms will change you. It will make you more like Jesus, and that’s been God’s objective for you from the beginning—to take you from someone who is desperately dependent on the grace of the Father to someone who dispenses the grace of the Father.
The greatest thing God is doing in your life is making you more like him. Your situation is probably not as dramatic as Hosea’s—but we all have Gomers who mistreat us, take us for granted, or treat us unkindly. God is using the Gomers in your life to help you learn to go to those people again and again, accept them, forgive them, and love them—just like he has done for you.
