Hosea 11:1-11

“Tender Bands of Love”

How does God love us?  Like a parent – like a really, truly, incredibly wonderful parent.  God loves us thoroughly, achingly, longingly.  Sometimes we make a very old mistake.  We imagine that the God of the “Old” Testament was some unloving war-mongering hater, and that it wasn’t until Jesus that we got a chance to meet a God of love.  It turns out that Jesus embodied and taught us about the incredibly loving God who was there all along – AND who is in our lives now!