Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Jonah chapter 3 verses 6 through 9:
6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: ‘By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’
Today is Ash Wednesday, a solemn day of repentance in the Christian Church and a day for reflection on our individual and corporate lives.
Repentance means change; and today is a day for asking ourselves how we are called to change as persons and as a society.
In the book of Jonah, it was not just individuals in Nineveh who repented. The whole nation did so. Even the animals did so! This was a nation serious about change!
The last year of our lives has revealed so much to us. There is such profound inequity and injustice in our country and around our globe, such dearth of honesty in our leaders, such disconnect of community in and between us all.
Today is a day for thinking on these things and committing to change. It is a day for committing to person and communal change. It is a day for committing for focusing and refocusing, organizing and reorganizing everything we can for the purposes of everything we should.
And it’s not too late! That’s the good news about all this. We still have the opportunity to make things right.
It wasn’t too late for Nineveh! But even the animals had to repent.
How much more so the people . . .
Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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