UNDELIVERED

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“The guilt of Ephraim is stored up, his sins are kept on record. Pains as of a woman in childbirth come to him, but he is a child without wisdom; when the time arrives, he doesn’t have the sense to come out of the womb.”

Hosea 13:12-13

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Think about the day you were born. Your only existence had been in your mother’s womb as you developed from a single cell into a human being, one of life’s greatest miracles, the miracle of creation.

Now think about what might have happened if you had never been delivered because you were given a choice to either emerge into the world and start an independent life or stay in the womb and never come out. In other words, to opt to be undelivered.

No one would want to do that, right? In fact, the mere notion of it is crazy to even think about.

Why have this discussion in the first place?

Because if we shift thinking about this from a physical perspective to a spiritual one, then we will be equipped to understand what God was getting at when He shared this message through His prophet Hosea:

“The guilt of Ephraim is stored up, his sins are kept on record. Pains as of a woman in childbirth come to him, but he is a child without wisdom; when the time arrives, he doesn’t have the sense to come out of the womb.”  Hosea 13:12-13

The Israelites, God’s beloved people, were in the womb of sin, the guilt within their transgressions stored up with them, transgressions which were on record with the God who sees and knows all things. That same God, the Heavenly Father of the Israelites, longed to deliver His people from their sins, to remove them from the womb of sin and bring them into a new life filled with His righteousness, a life where He would lead them to walk in accordance with His word, will, and way as He reared them.

But note that the Israelites were foolish, lacking the sense to be delivered even though the pains of childbirth were happening, the pains a person often feels when they are convicted and feel the guilt of the sins they have committed. Usually, this would be enough to get a person to want something new, a life free from sin, but the Israelites were a different breed. They didn’t want to come out of the womb as sad testimony that they were comfortable living in opposition to the God who wanted to deliver them.

That’s a place no one should ever want to be because rest assured that God will be the Great Deliverer and will deliver one way or another. He can deliver us from our sins and into His righteousness or He can deliver us into His judgment if we reject Him and choose to live in wickedness. Either way, the choice is ultimately up to us as to which way things go.

It was true in the days of Hosea and it’s still true today. There’s only one difference.

God has sent His Son Jesus to serve as His instrument of deliverance, the Savior of the world who died for the sins of all mankind so whoever believes in Him will never perish but live forever.

In other words, anyone who places their faith and trust in Jesus and the salvation He brings will be born again, emerging from the womb of sin and destruction into a new life that will last not just for the present but forever. This is the deliverance the Apostle Paul wrote about to the church in Corinth when he said:

If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!  2 Corinthians 5:17

Jesus delivers us to new life when we believe that He died in our place to pay the price for our sins. It’s the salvation message at the heart of the Gospel, the message of deliverance straight from the heart of God who desired and desires that none of His precious children would ever go undelivered.

Amen

In Christ,

Mark
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