Thursday
December 4 .
God Provides
OPINION
Jonah 4
Jonah was an extremely immature and childish prophet. This could very easily
be determined by a quick read of Jonah 4. Complaining bitterly about God's
compassion and full of self, he asked to die. After all his hard work and prophesying,
he was going to look bad because God was merciful.
But if there were a book that told my life story, and you read those chapters,
I'm certain you would be able to
see the obvious immaturity in my
How often has my anger life. I'm afraid my childishness
been kindled over vines would be just as easily
that have withered? discerned as Jonah's. So God
gently nudges me out of my
I
judgment seat and says quietly,
Look with clear and honest vision at how | provide for you. See the circumstances
that uplift, the trials that test, the strong winds that buffet, the hot sun that scorches.
When you have failed Me, have you not welcomed My forgiveness and compassion?
Now from a position not quite so superior, | listen as God asks me to reflect on
Jonah's attitudes: his immaturity, his anger. And | see how closely these are
paralleled in my own life. How many times have | envied God's love manifest in a
life that | was tempted to think was less deserving than mine? How often has my
anger been kindled over vines that have withered and left me with some discomfort,
vines He provided and removed? Instead of acceptance of His providence, my
reaction was childish and immature, just like Jonah’s.
We need God to give us a full measure of wisdom, pressed down and running
over. It is a wisdom to understand how He provides the very things we need for
growth in our walk with Him. Most of all, we need to embrace His compassion, which
reached out to Jonah on a hot and windy day. It also embraced 120,000 residents of
Nineveh, who didn't know the difference between their right and left hands. Now that
compassion embraces you and me so intensely that it will not let us go.
REACT
1. Proverbs 3:11 tells us not to despise the Lord's discipline and not to resent
His rebukes because the Lord disciplines those He loves. Has God ever provided
something in your life (a vine or a worm) that showed your level of Christian maturity?
2. How grateful are you that our books are clean and spotless and beautifully
written, thanks to God's love and Christ's sacrifice?
Dwight L. Moody, Grand Rapids, Minnesota
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