I’ve been in the Old Testament now for what seems like an eternity. But it’s exactly where I need to be.
Before I go any further, there’s something you need to know about the season I’m in. My beautiful mother-in-law passed away this summer, and since her passing, I’ve been a bit MIA. Grieving, processing, trying to understand, and trying to hear God beside still waters. It’s why I stopped the podcast and stopped writing. I’ve needed room to sit with what happened and bring my questions to God, even when I didn’t know how to put them into words.
I thought perhaps, knowing my season, he would lead me to Psalms and Proverbs. Maybe my favorites—the Gospels—where I could hear his voice and see his hand clearly. I imagined finding myself in passages where Jesus meets people in their grief, where his compassion is unmistakable, and where I could sit with something familiar while navigating something that felt anything but familiar.
Yet after walking me through the Torah and into Saul and David’s story in 1 Samuel, he led me to the Minor Prophets. And if I’m being honest, I wasn’t particularly thrilled about the shift. They are legit sad, heavy, and hard to understand. There’s historical context to work through, judgment to sit with, and language that requires more than a quick read before moving on with your day. It felt like it would take way more brainpower and spiritual fortitude than I had available.
So I stopped. Mad at God, I stopped. I wanted to hear him, but I wasn’t excited about where I felt he was asking me to listen. After a few days of pouting, I opened my Bible again, and he walked me through Hosea, a beautiful, painful story about God’s faithfulness to an unfaithful people. A God who sees their wandering, names it honestly, and still calls them back. I kept thinking about what it means to be faithful when faithfulness is costly, and what it means to be loved by a God who doesn’t pretend our unfaithfulness is harmless.
Then came Joel, a small book with a weighty invitation to return to the Lord. It called me to consider what returning actually looks like. How easy it is to offer God the outward expression of devotion while keeping parts of our hearts occupied with other things. How much courage it takes to come before him honestly, without trying to make ourselves look more surrendered than we are.
And today, I finished Amos. My favorite so far, which, considering how much judgment is in that book, surprised me.
Amos was a shepherd from Tekoa in Judah who also tended sycamore-fig trees. He wasn’t a professional prophet or someone whose livelihood depended on delivering prophetic messages. God took him from tending the flock and called him to prophesy to the northern kingdom of Israel before its exile. I love that detail. Someone doing ordinary work was given an extraordinary responsibility.
The book is literally judgment and accountability mixed with more judgment and accountability. God confronts injustice, the mistreatment of the poor, dishonesty, and worship that has become disconnected from the way people actually live. Israel has religious activity, but God is paying attention to what happens outside those gatherings, too.
Their treatment of people matters.
Their decisions matter.
Their devotion cannot be separated from their conduct.
Eventually, Amaziah, the priest at Bethel, reports Amos to King Jeroboam and tells Amos to leave. In my very unofficial paraphrase, he’s basically saying, “DUDE. Go somewhere else with this hot mess. We don’t want it here. Go back to Judah and say it there.”
And I get why they didn’t want to hear it. Amos is confronting things they’ve become comfortable with. He’s bringing God’s word into places where it interrupts their arrangements, exposes their behavior, and challenges what they’ve accepted as normal.
It is uncomfortable to have someone name what you’ve learned to explain away.
But Amos answers by telling Amaziah how God called him. He was tending the flock when the Lord sent him to Israel. That calling is the reason he is there, and he delivers the message even when it is unwelcome.
Reading his response, I kept thinking about the faithfulness I had seen in Hosea and the invitation to return in Joel. Now, in Amos, I was sitting with the things that needed to be confronted. Together, those books were making me think about a people being called back to YHWH, the God to whom they belonged.
Then, just when you think all hope is gone, you reach the final chapter. In my Bible, it includes a section called “The Destruction of Israel.” And yet that same chapter ends with “the restoration of Israel.” There is a promise of rebuilding, of ruined places being inhabited again, of a future God himself will bring about. The book leaves us with the seriousness of judgment and the hope of restoration.
As I closed it, I realized how deeply I want restoration and healing in my life, in my world, in so many things! But am I willing to face what has contributed to the brokenness? Am I willing to let God address the habits, decisions, attitudes, and attachments I would rather keep explaining? OUCH!
True restoration calls us into the kind of accountability that can feel brutal.
There is something painful about having the truth brought into places where we’ve been protecting ourselves from it. Our explanations get challenged. Our intentions have to be considered alongside our actions. We have to acknowledge the effect we’ve had on other people, even when that effect wasn’t what we intended.
By “brutal,” I mean the difficulty of facing that truth. Cruelty, humiliation, and manipulation do not become holy because someone calls them accountability. Scripture calls us to restore people gently. But gentleness can still be clear. A loving correction can still require a difficult response.
There are things we may need to confess, patterns we may need to surrender, and changes we may need to make without knowing how quickly everything will feel better.
Restoration is God’s gracious work, and we cannot earn it by enduring enough pain. Yet receiving his grace also means allowing him to tell us the truth. We can trust him with the rebuilding while taking responsibility for what he is asking us to change.
Practically, that may look like some unexpected person calling out your business, challenging your perspective, and calling you toward surrender. It may look like someone you’ve overlooked reminding you of who you are and what God has done.
You may not love their timing.
You may not have chosen them as the person you wanted to hear from.
Their words still deserve to be examined honestly before you decide they have nothing to offer.
That doesn’t mean every accusation is accurate or every difficult season is correction. We need discernment. We need to test what we hear against Scripture and consider the wisdom of people who know and love us. But we also need the humility to recognize when our resistance comes from the fact that something is true and we don’t want to face it.
So if you find yourself in a season of brutal accountability, before you blame the devil and call it an attack, pause. Examine your life, your heart, and your actions. Ask God what is true in what you’re hearing. Ask him what needs to be surrendered, confessed, or changed. Consider whether you’ve been defending something he is asking you to release.
Could it be that God is confronting something because he is calling you toward restoration?
Onward, Chari x