Love can be messy and painful. It is especially painful when it is not reciprocated. Yet even such love can culminate with a sense of triumph and completeness. Such is the love of God for His people that is depicted in the Prophecy of Hosea. But this book is, as a respectable scholar once it put, "one of the obscurest and most difficult to unfold clearly and fully." Commentaries on this book are aplenty; but they are often long and tedious. *LOVING PAINS: A Directed Study on the Prophecy of Hosea* is an attempt to make this book accessible and enjoyable to study by individuals and small groups. It looks at the Prophecy in fifteen manageable lessons, each introduced by a devotional exposition of the apportioned biblical text and capped with a series of review and discussion questions. In this way, the student is not left to be overwhelmed by the amount of work that is needed to understand the Prophecy, nor to be satiated by someone's opinion about it without the opportunity of discovering or verifying the truths for himself.