Love in a Broken City
A Reflection on Hosea 1:1–11
If we’re honest, we like tidy categories. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Faithful or faithless. Our brains are wired to simplify the world that way. But Scripture doesn’t always cooperate with our need for clean lines—and neither does real love.
The book of Hosea is one of those places where God refuses to let us keep things neat.
Through the prophet Hosea, God tells a story that is deeply uncomfortable: a faithful husband, an unfaithful spouse, and children whose very names tell the truth about brokenness, loss, and pain. It’s a story about Israel’s spiritual infidelity—but it’s also a story about God’s relentless love.
This year at Church in the Square, we’ve been naming three discipleship values: Seek Truth. Show Love. Stay Curious. Hosea helps us see what showing love actually looks like in a broken city like ours.
The Expression of Brokenness
Hosea’s calling begins with a shocking command: to marry Gomer, a woman whose unfaithfulness would become a living picture of Israel’s own spiritual betrayal. God isn’t asking Hosea to preach about brokenness from a distance—he’s asking him to live inside it.
Israel’s sin is described as infidelity and idolatry, but God doesn’t dismiss his people as simply “bad.” Instead, he stays engaged. He keeps speaking. He keeps drawing near. Brokenness is named honestly, not to condemn, but to reveal what’s really going on beneath the surface.
The Cost of Brokenness
As Hosea and Gomer’s children are born, each name tells a deeper truth about what sin costs. A kingdom lost. Mercy withheld. Identity stripped away.
What makes this painful is that God isn’t inventing these wounds—he’s touching wounds that already exist. Sin doesn’t just break rules; it distorts identity. It takes away power, hope, and belonging. And when God names those realities, it can feel like harm when it’s actually the beginning of healing.
So often, we confuse love with avoidance. We stay polite. We stay vague. We don’t go upstream from behavior to identity. But love that never names brokenness leaves people unhealed.
The Healing of Brokenness
Just when the story seems unbearable, God speaks again.
“Yet…”
After loss, after judgment, after names that sound final, God promises restoration. “You are not my people” becomes “children of the living God.” The story doesn’t end in rejection—it ends in gathering, reunion, and hope.
Hosea ultimately points beyond himself to a better marriage, a truer union. In Jesus, God doesn’t just get close enough to see our wounds—he takes them into himself. By his wounds, we are healed.
Showing love doesn’t mean excusing sin or shouting judgment from afar. It means drawing close enough to tell the truth, staying long enough to be present, and loving deeply enough to point one another to the Wounded Healer.
That’s the kind of love our city needs.
And it’s the kind of love we’re learning to practice together.
Reflection Questions
Where do you find yourself tempted to simplify people—or yourself—into “good” or “bad,” rather than seeing the deeper wounds beneath behavior?
What feels harder for you: naming brokenness from a distance, or drawing close enough to name it with love? Why?
How has Jesus drawn near to your own woundedness, not to shame you, but to heal you—and how might that shape the way you love others this week?
