When God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit. [Titus 3:5 (NLT)]
This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! [2 Corinthians 5:17 (NLT)]
Sent by God to warn the people of Nineveh of God’s judgment, Jonah went in the opposite direction. After he survived three days in the belly of a fish, God gave Jonah another chance to deliver His message to the people of Nineveh. This time, Jonah delivered the news that God intended to destroy the city in forty days. When Nineveh’s king heard Jonah’s warning, he called for fasting, praying, and repenting their evil ways. People and animals were to cover themselves with sackcloth (a coarse fabric of goat’s hair) as a sign of grief, submission, and contrition. Seeing their repentance, God was merciful and gave them another chance.
Barnabas and his cousin John Mark accompanied Paul to Cyprus but, for some unknown reason, John Mark deserted the other two in Pamphylia. Paul initially refused to give the man another chance but both God and Barnabas did. The cousins went to Cyprus and Paul and Silas went to Syria and Cilicia. Eventually, however, Paul gave the one-time deserter another chance and, twelve years later, John Mark was with the Apostle during his first imprisonment in Rome. When Paul was approaching the end of his life, he requested John Mark’s presence during his second Roman imprisonment. What became of John Mark? Because he was given another chance, the man who once abandoned Barnabas and Paul became the man we know as the gospel writer Mark!
Peter failed Jesus by denying Him; when given another chance he became “the rock” and leader of the disciples. Saul failed Jesus by persecuting His followers; given another chance, he became Paul and carried the gospel message throughout the Roman Empire to Jews and Gentiles alike. While we don’t know what happened to the woman caught in adultery, we know Jesus gave her another chance with the admonition to, “Go and sin no more.” One look at the history of the Israelites tells us that God is not a God of second chances; He’s the God of many chances!
We are not our poor choices and our failures should never haunt, confine, or define us. Our God is one of both forgiveness and transformation. Because He gives us another chance, who we were yesterday does not have to be who we are today. Unfortunately for Nineveh, their repentance didn’t last for long. Instead of leaving their past behind, they returned to their sinful ways. The second chance God gave them was wasted and the city of “murder and lies” was destroyed 148 years after Jonah’s first warning. Our God specializes in renewal and fresh starts. The people of Nineveh wasted theirs; let’s not make the same mistake!
Legend had it that an angel of the Lord occasionally would come into the pool at Bethesda, stir up the water, and that the first person to enter the pool would then be healed. Jesus, however, simply said to the crippled man lying there: “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!” and the man did just that. Since it was the Sabbath, the man later was stopped by the Jewish leaders and condemned for carrying his mat and working on the day of rest. According to the law, either he should have stayed and watched his mat or left it behind and walked away. When he explained that the man who’d healed him told him otherwise, they wanted him to identify his healer. Their curiosity, however, had nothing to do with knowing who had performed this amazing miracle; they wanted to know who’d broken the law!
To explain her sisters’ bitterness and sour outlook on life, my mother-in-law would say, “Well, their lives didn’t turn out the way they’d hoped.” Those women had no reason to complain when comparing their lives to Naomi (the mother-in-law in the book of Ruth).
When writing about the faulty theology of Job and his friends, I thought of when Jesus’s disciples questioned why a man had been born blind. Showing their belief in retribution theology and never considering that sin might have nothing to do with it, they asked whether the man’s blindness was because of his sins or those of his parents. Jesus’s answer, however, makes it clear that no one’s sins were the cause: “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him.” [John 9:3] After Jesus restored his sight, the man testified before the Pharisees that, “If this man were not from God, he couldn’t have done it.” [John 9:33] Disliking that answer, retribution theology reared its ugly head again when the Pharisees accused the once blind man of being born a sinner and threw him out of the synagogue.
He [Herod] put on his royal robes, sat on his throne, and made a speech to them. At its conclusion the people gave him a great ovation, shouting, “It is the voice of a god and not of a man!” Instantly, an angel of the Lord struck Herod with a sickness so that he was filled with maggots and died—because he accepted the people’s worship instead of giving the glory to God. [Acts 12:21b-23 (TLB)]
Devotions of the Heart 