Waist Deep 2018 - July 30


Jonah 4: 10, 11 “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people . . . Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (NIV)


If you want to be used by God, you must care about what God cares about; what he cares about most is the redemption of the people he made.*


I went to a lot of trouble to deliver a dog to my son and daughter-in-law only to have them decide the next day that they couldn’t keep him. I had only “known” the dog for a week but that day as I made the 8-hour drive back home alone, I cried for the poor homeless pooch that no one wanted. (He went to a rescue shelter and then to a good home but . . .) Turns out, I’m not so different from Jonah who was angry over the loss of a weed. (At least my concern was for something that could show affection!) But where is my concern for orphans and the homeless and the lost? How often do I cry for them?

As God points out Jonah’s pettiness he also showcases our own. How can we be small-minded when souls are at stake? We certainly expect God to show his grace and mercy to us, don’t we?


Men vainly pretend to piety who are defective in justice and charity.*


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