Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Jonah chapter 1 verses 1 through 10:
“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, 2‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ 3But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.”
I’m preaching later this morning at Robert Carr Chapel at TCU. Today’s Lesson is a snippet I’m sharing from the sermon:
“But, of course, instead of going east towards Nineveh, Jonah goes west instead, boarding a ship and setting sail for a place called Tarshish, somewhere across the sea, about as far away from Nineveh as Lubbock is from Brooklyn.
And why is that? Why does he hop a ship and run? The answer isn’t really revealed until the end of the story; and it isn’t the usual answer. The usual answer for the prophets’ reluctance is that they’re afraid. They’re afraid of rejection or repudiation or even afraid they’re gonna get killed. That’s a pretty good reason to run . . .
But that’s not the reason Jonah runs. Jonah runs, we are told at the end of the book, not because he thinks they won’t have ears to hear, but because he thinks they might. They might just might have ears to hear, and eyes to see, and hearts to change. AND, he’s scared he might also have a God willing to change them.”
What if our enemies are actually better than we wish? What if what we relish in their vileness says a lot more about us than it is them? What if we are the persons who really need to change? What if the call to Nineveh is actually the call to our own conversion?
Those’ll be something of the main questions/point of today’s sermon.
I would appreciate your prayers.
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