Hosea 11:1-2
“When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and I called my son out of Egypt.
But the more I called to him,
the farther he moved from me
offering sacrifices to the images of Baal
and burning incense to idols.
When I was a child, Jesus loved me. He protected me and brought me along. Then slowly I began to move away from Him.
This morning, these verses reminded me of my story. Here it is.
In my early teens, I stopped following Him. I associated Jesus with religion, rules, and rituals. This was the teaching of the Catholic Church.
They did not teach relationship. They taught me to be dutiful and repentant. I came away thinking I was a continual disappointment to Jesus. And as such, I walked away. I was a young man who was so morally corrupt that I could never please Him.
This lasted for 25 years from age 14-39.
I came to the end of myself. I could not deny Jesus’ existence, that God existed. After 25 years, I had no way back. All I knew was church, and I was not one of those people. But my guilt remained. I could not stop being this heavy-drinking, immoral man. I was succeeding in business until I wasn’t. And I believed I was failing at life as a husband and as a father.
What am I to do?
At the end of myself, I saw only two options:
Keep living the way I was living.
Do something else, but what?
The transition, however, to Option 2 happened one night when I came to grips with how disgusted I was by my drinking. I came to realize that my drinking resulted in removing my moral boundaries. I came to the conclusion:
If I thought it sober, I would do it loaded.
I wanted to get off this treadmill. I needed help.
I reached out to a neighbor for help. Jim Biesecker. He invited me to A.A. I didn’t know it then, but it was the beginning of my journey back to God/Jesus Christ.
After six months in AA and abstaining from drinking one day at a time, my brain fog was lifted. I now had a clear head. I asked myself: Who is this God who did this miracle in my life? He took the desire for alcohol away from me. He brought me to the ‘who is this God?’ question. He then brought people, His people, into my life with the answer.
It was Jesus. The same Jesus who loved me when I was a child. The God I walked away from beginning at age fourteen. The one who I now discovered still loves me.
Redemption and Renewal
He made me a new man. There was no other way that this could have happened.
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! — 2 Corinthians 5:17
Thank you, Jesus, for this rebirth, this second chance at life.
I shudder to think where my life would be today (if I were still alive) if I had not believed in Him and followed Him. If His Spirit was not in me, leading me and changing me from the inside out.
As bad as I screwed up my life, Jesus never gave up on me.
Hosea 11:8 and 10
“Oh, how can I give you up, Israel?
How can I let you go?
My heart is torn within me and my compassion overflows.”
— The Word of the LORD
“Someday the people (me) will follow me.”
These verses came true for me. God never gave up on me.