Monday, August 21, 2006

Conditional Love

One of the thoughts I had as we studied through Hosea the past 3 Sunday nights was about conditional love. It's easy to imagine that everyone must think unconditional love is awesome, but that's clearly not the case. Some people come to love conditional love. Conditional love can be earned. It can be managed. It must be. Simply put, conditional love gives us something to do. Something addicting. Something that can become destructive in our lives.

After training our hearts toward conditional love, I can see where unconditional love could be considered repulsive or even boring. Repulsive because it isn't ours (in the sense that we haven't paid for it). Boring in the sense that there's nothing to do in order to keep it. I can understand better, now, why it takes some people so long to grasp and appreciate unconditional love.

I really enjoyed our 3 hours of discussion on Hosea. God spoke to me a lot as I pondered it throughout the month. Here are my handouts:

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