Last week we started talking about God’s choice to be faithful and His use of Hosea to show His heart to the people of Israel. God did what He always does, He spoke; He talked to Hosea, He shared His heart with Him, shared His character with Him and then He invited him or called him not to simply join in the work but to understand and enter into the character and heart of God and to show the love of God. Hearing from God is not like getting directions, it’s not a series of steps to take, turns to make and clues to find so that you can get to the destination that we call destiny, purpose and blessing. Hearing from God is about seeing Him as He is in all of His beauty, hearing not just the sound of His voice but the holiness of His character and learning how costly, how patient, how self-controlled and how faithful His love truly is. God told Hosea to go and marry a prostitute and that his children would be the children of prostitution. He told Hosea that this action, this step of faith, this choice of obedience would illustrate how Israel had acted like a prostitute and how God had remained her husband, had remained the lover of her soul and had remained faithful to who He was and what He had promised. Today I’m hoping that we can move deeper into the story of Hosea and see that faithfulness does begin with a choice but as that choice is repeated, is continued and is believed in faithfulness becomes character. Numbers 23:19 tells us that “God is not a man, that He should lie”; He’s also not a man that He should change who He is because of what we do. Paul told Timothy that even when we are faithless that God is faithful because God cannot deny Himself. This means that faithfulness is not merely what God does it is who He is; He’s true to Himself, His emotions don’t change His character, His character rules over and when necessary even override His emotions. His actions are never to get our attention, prove His point or manipulate the circumstances, His actions are always connected to His heart; God acts according to who He is not what He wants to accomplish. What kind of King loves those that don’t love Him, waits for those that have rejected Him, fights for those that have fought against Him and refuses to give what is deserved, what has been earned, even what would be completely right to give until every hope of grace has been exhausted? That is the action of a king that does more than act faithfully, it is the action of a king whose heart is faithful.