A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church building on Sunday 10 May. The service was simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.   You can catch up here for the next four weeks.

The Bible passage is Hosea 2:14-23, and David will be leading and preaching.

Sermon  God’s beloved children

Scripture:  Hosea 2:14-23

As you can possibly guess, I am a big fan of all-you-can-eat World Buffets.

When I was down in Glasgow recently I took advantage and went to Cosmo’s All You Can Eat World Buffet in the St. Enoch Centre. It’s a great place for people watching.

Now the key phrase here is “All. You. Can. Eat..” You can go back as often as you like.

And yet here you can find what I’m calling the “Scarcity Thinkers.” These are the people who approach the buffet as if a famine has been scheduled for 1:30 pm sharp. They don’t just take one slice of pizza; they build a “Leaning Tower of Pepperoni” on their plate. They have Indian curries, sweet and sour chicken, roast potatoes topped with sushi, all balanced like food-inspired Jenga. To be fair, it’s quite a feat of engineering.

But why? Are they worried their chosen dishes might run out? Are they worried the chef might forget them?

Have you ever felt that panic? The sense that if you don’t accumulate you’ll miss out. What are your leaning towers of pepperoni? What do you build around you to make you feel secure?

This is an ancient problem. Today we are in the book of Hosea, which is a book that is both deeply troubling… and beautifully wonderful. It tells the story of God’s relationship with God’s people through the metaphor of a broken marriage.

God is portrayed as the faithful husband. Israel is portrayed as an unfaithful wife. God’s people had developed an entire culture trapped in “scarcity thinking,” where the people frantically chased idols and false gods like Ba’al – the god of fertility and prosperity – in a desperate attempt to secure the rain and the harvests that only God (with a capital G) provides.

The Israelites wanted the security of God AND of Ba’al. They were hedging their bets. Sure, with their lips they would claim to follow God. But in their actions… well they weren’t trusting at all but taking things into their own hands.

When we forget that we are already unconditionally loved and provided for by a faithful God, we panic. We feel vulnerable, so we start filling that emptiness with whatever we can grab—wealth, status, control, approval. We build our own security. We chase after our own version of Ba’al.

Our society is fully of scarcity thinking. Even the richest seem to have “scarcity thinking.” Elon Musk is the wealthiest individual in human history, with a net worth hovering around 850 billion dollars. He has more resources than many nations. And yet, he has a constant drive for accumulating more: more influence, more ventures, more profit, more control over the future of AI or space. If this drive stems from a belief that one must personally architect the future, then even $850 billion will not be “enough.” When it comes down to it, Elon Musk simply has a very, very, very large “Leaning Tower of Pepperoni.” The sad thing is, his fortune can’t protect him from what’s vast and unknowable.

The Wilderness

Why do we do this? Whether it is at a Glasgow buffet, or the boardroom of a tech billionaire, or a house in Hilton, this scarcity thinking comes from the exact same place: a forgotten identity. When we forget that we are already unconditionally loved and provided for by a faithful God, we panic. We feel vulnerable, so we start building our own security.

So what does God do when we are frantically building these towers to protect ourselves? Often, he leads us into the Wilderness.

The Wilderness is the place where God gently but firmly knocks down our Leaning Towers. He removes the noise of our self-reliance so that in the quiet, we can finally hear Him remind us of our true identity. God says to Israel:

“Therefore, I will take back my grain in its time, and my new wine in its season: I will take away my wool and my linen, intended to cover her nakedness.”

Let me tell you about Shane Taylor. He grew up in a cycle of extreme violence and crime, and Shane eventually found himself in high-security prison facing a life sentence for attempted murder. At the Cosmo’s buffet, we build comical Leaning Towers of Pepperoni because we are afraid of missing out. Shane had built a much darker tower. His was constructed out of notoriety and terror. He defined himself by the fear he instilled in others because, deep down, it was his ultimate, tragic form of self-reliance.

It was in this stark environment that Shane was invited to a Christian Alpha course. He agreed to go, mostly because there were free biscuits and a break from his cell.

So what happened? Did God punish him further? Did he stay broken?

In that cell, God showed up. And God didn’t show up to condemn. God showed up to say: ‘This broken place? This is where I’m going to set up the welcome mat.’ The isolation of his high-security prison cell served as Shane’s wilderness. God dismantled that tower of violence, silencing the constant noise of his destructive lifestyle.

Shane describes a specific moment of prayer where the overwhelming weight of his past actions was met with an even more powerful sense of divine presence and forgiveness. He discovered that God’s grace was not just an idea. It was there, locked behind physical walls, that Shane finally found freedom.

For Shane Taylor, that high-security prison cell was his ‘Valley of Achor.’ In the book of Joshua, we learn that Achor literally means ‘trouble’. It was a place of absolute shame and death, named after a man whose self-reliance brought a devastating defeat upon the whole nation of Israel. It was the site of their first great failure in the Promised Land.

A new ‘you’

For the ancient Israelites, and for Shane, the Valley of Achor seemed like a dead end. But look at what God does in the loneliness of the wilderness. In our reading from Hosea, God offers a scandalous promise. Verse 15:

*There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.

Judgement isn’t the end of this story. Grace is. You see, faith is not built on the things we do or even our own understanding, but rather on God’s relentless pursuit of us. His constant love and grace is seeking to draw us deeper into the abundant life Jesus died to give us.

The scandal isn’t so much that God takes us out of the Valley of Trouble. The scandal is that God turns the trouble itself into the front door. Your greatest weaknesses and failures aren’t a barrier to God: it’s the very place He chooses to set up the welcome mat.

Listen to verse 16:

“You will call me ‘my husband’, you will no longer call me ‘my master’.”

To the people of Israel it’s God who declares a radical rebranding of the relationship. Instead of calling God master the people were to call God “my husband”.

Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber writes:

Identity. It’s always God’s first move. From before we are born, before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.

YOU are God’s beloved children.

Nadia goes on:

But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong. Capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school… they all have a go at telling us who we are.

But only God can tell us who we are. And God showed exactly how far He would go to secure that identity for us through Jesus.

Jesus entered our mess to prove it. On the cross, Jesus stepped into the ultimate ‘Valley of Trouble.’ He took the full weight of our scarcity thinking, our brokenness, and our ‘Achor’, allowing our false towers to fall upon Him. He suffered the judgement of humanity’s unfaithfulness so that the site of death could become our entrance to a new identity in Jesus and a new life.

Jesus scandalously said that the despised tax collectors and prostitutes would enter the kingdom of heaven before the religious officials.

It’s always the ones you least expect! It’s the Shanes… and maybe even the Elons… and the Davids… that prove there is no sin too great or distance too far that can stop God’s pursuit of us.

Jesus came to heal and help us, to rehabilitate and free us, to restore to us the identity that we were always meant to have.

Hosea shows us God who refuses to give up on us, even when we are building towers of distraction and listening to the static of our idols. This morning, we can remember that our flaws and past mistakes are not a dead end; they are a doorway.

What’s your Valley of Achor? What failure, shame, or broken place are you carrying? Because that’s not a dead end. That’s where God is setting up the welcome mat to meet you.

Maybe today we all need to take a deep breath and say:

‘Okay Jesus, You’re here… I’m here… Let’s start with that.’