Identity & Worth
I have never really felt wanted by anyone. Does God actually want me, or is he just obliged to put up with me?
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.”
Hosea's marriage to an unfaithful wife was a living picture of God and Israel, and by this point in the book the people have exhausted every reasonable claim on his patience. What follows is not a lecture but a courtship: leading her out to open country in order to speak tenderly to her. The startling part is the initiative. God is portrayed pursuing a relationship he could fairly have ended.
“According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,”
Paul opens this letter with one long sentence of praise, and adoption sits at its centre. In the Roman world adoption was a deliberate legal act by which a chosen person gained a family name and an inheritance, with nothing accidental about it. Paul then adds a phrase about God's good pleasure, which is the part worth sitting with if you have only ever felt tolerated.
A path forward
Notice the word you keep using about yourself: tolerated, put up with, allowed. Ask where you first learned it, and say that to God plainly.
Read Ephesians 1 slowly, once a day this week, watching for what God is described as choosing rather than merely accepting.
Accept one invitation you would normally turn down. The belief that nobody wants you stays convincing while you keep opting out of the evidence.
Closing verse
“We love him, because he first loved us.”
- 1 John 4:19
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