Hoseenu

Names of God – part 55

Our maker

40 Blogs of Lent: 40

The same meaning in English as last week’s blog on this, but it is not really the same thing at all. Eloah ‘Ashah was about a God who created me, Hoseenu is about transformation. Like a potter takes a lump of clay and transforms us into something else, a vase it a cup of a plate, God takes us as we are when we come to him and transforms us into something beautiful.

The context here is worship and relates back to the Exodus, God took a group of slaves in Egypt and during the time wandering in the desert transformed them from slaves into a strong nation. One of the hard points was to remove the Egypt mentality from them. God had freed then from slavery, but in their minds they were sill slaves. So they complained. Complained they had no food, then complained they had the wrong sort of food, complained that Moses had gone for too long, so made their own idol, complained that the people in the land they had been promised were too strong for them. All through this there was the constant complaint that they were better off in Egypt. They had an Egypt mentality, not a God mentality.

Do you have an Egypt mentality?

Are you relying on God in your trouble or are you struggling along in your own strength? Are you getting the advice I received when I was struggling with the problem of realising I would never make a full recovery after an accident. I was told to keep on trying, “There’s always a light at the end of the tunnel,” they would say. Not if you’re in a cave there isn’t. I had to realise that walking with God was something to do in your darkest times. God is more than being elated in the good times. It meant letting go of my struggling in order to be with God and that is a very difficult thing to do. I found that God is reliable even if I am not. I still walk in pain, but I’m limping along with God. I have got my life back. I have learned to love my life.

I had been looking back on life without disability and complaining. I had an Egypt mentality.

When someone becomes a Christian they are asked to change their mindset from the world’s mindset to God’s mindset. It does not happen all at once. The Holy Spirit is gentle and will not change more than we can stand. The Holy Spirit is also a gentleman and will only change the things that we allow him* to change.

It was like when I had become disabled and was living with an able bodied mentality. It did not work out well looking backwards like that.

Do you have an Egypt mentality?

God’s change in us takes time. Do not be frustrated it happens in God’s timing and will happen when God wants it to.

Pray with me:

Holy Spirit come,
Come and change me,
make me more like Jesus.
Do this in your way and as you see fit.
Amen.

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Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
7 For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.
10 For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.”

Psalm 95 ESVUK

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.

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* masculine pronoun here to go with the word gentleman, I am not implying that the Spirit is masculine, the Hebrew for Spirit is feminine.