“I have loved you with an everlasting love; I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.” — Jeremiah 31:3b
>> Sign up here for Sports Spectrum devotionals sent right to your email inbox <<
For professional athletes — whether married or single — living a pure life that pleases God isn’t always easy. They spend a lot of time on the road away from home, where sin can be more secret and loneliness can creep in sometimes. Many professional athletes are celebrities and some people can intentionally tempt them when the athletes are trying their best to be true to God and their families. Some athletes may lean on chaplains, pastors and other believers as accountability partners as they seek to keep a good testimony before the watching world. And when an athlete meets “the one,” their love story can be more public than any of us would like for ourselves.
We hear all kinds of love songs on the radio and across streaming services on the internet. Several love songs talk about somebody falling head over heels for a new love. Or we hear sad stories of cheaters breaking up good relationships and other songs about heartbreak over lost love for a thousand different reasons. These unforgettable tunes reflect the lives of real people who long for lasting love. Love between two people can be fickle, but we often admire people who spend a lifetime together in spite of the problems faced.
In the Bible, we see a big difference between God’s constant, unfailing love for people, and our tendency to love God one day and forget about Him a few days later. As God saw the Israelites distracted by other false gods, He used the example of a wandering woman who took a loving man for granted. “When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, ‘Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord'” (Hosea 1:2). In the true story, the prophet Hosea represented God (whose love is everlasting) and Gomer was the prophet’s wife, but she kept chasing after other men as a prostitute (representing God’s people chasing after idols and worldly desires).
Understandably, Hosea struggled with God’s command, but he obeyed because his marriage was designed to shock the people and help them realize how far they’d wandered away from God. The Lord wanted them to return, but spoke about backing away from the Israelites for a short period of time until they came back to Him. “Then I will return to my lair until they have borne their guilt and seek my face — in their misery they will earnestly seek me” (Hosea 5:15). In response, the people did wake up and return to the true God by saying, “Come, let us return to the Lord. … Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (Hosea 6:1a, 3).
God loves us with an unfailing, everlasting love. If you’ve wandered from it, His heart is for you to come back to His perfect love. His love is the model of true love for us to emulate and pursue. Let’s not fall into the patterns of what the world considers to be love, but look to His example to guide us in how we love.
— Bill Kent, Pastor of Memorial Baptist Church, Sylvania, Georgia
>> Do you know Christ personally? Learn how you can commit your life to Him <<
>> Dive more into God’s Word with Sports Spectrum through the YouVersion Bible App <<
If you would like to submit a devotional, please email all submissions to
devotionals@sportsspectrum.com
