What are you concerned about?

Recently I was reading through the book of Jonah in the Bible. It may seem odd to reference Jonah around Easter, but Jonah’s story pictures the depth of God’s plan for the world. "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matthew 12:40).　Jonah’s story was a picture of the coming Messiah and His message of grace to an undeserving world.
But Jonah’s story is also the story of many of us as Christians. Jonah was a good guy. He was committed to the moral guidelines God had established but he wasn’t fully surrendered to God’s purposes in the world.
Jonah reveals in chapter three that he is consumed with the fact that he’s uncomfortable, depressed, and bitter about God’s grace to the "undeserving" and ready to go home to the safe and prosperous confines of the familiar. God calls him out for being obsessed with the wrong things and shockingly unaware of his own desperate need for God’s grace. To paraphrase His words, "Jonah, I am concerned about this generation of people (120,000 Ninevites), what are you concerned about?"As many of us approach Easter weekend, we are in many ways surrendered to living morally. We are "good Christians" but are we concerned about the right things? For instance, are we concerned about this generation of people who are dying and going to Hell? Jonah foreshadowed the death, burial and resurrection of Christ that would cancel the debt of sin, absorb the wrath we deserved, and give us new life. Do we forget already how shockingly undeserving we are? Are we aware of the desperate need of those around us or are we going to just purchase some new clothes and go through the religious routine of attending a church service?
Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help. Go stand by the gates of hell, and hear the damned entreat you to go to their father’s house and bid their brothers and sisters and servants and masters not to come there. Then look Christ in the face—whose mercy you have professed to obey—and tell him whether you will join heart and soul and body and circumstances in the march to publish his mercy to the world.　

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William BoothThis Easter it’s not about measuring up to a moral code and mindlessly going through the motions of religious tradition; it’s that Jesus already meet the moral code we couldn’t keep and now we, in turn, surrender to his concern for this world for the sake of his glory. For the past seven weeks we have been praying #byname for those who need the radical grace of Jesus. This Easter weekend we have the opportunity to invite many of those people to attend. So continue to pray, be bold to ask, and be open to the conversations to share the name of Jesus. Join us Thursday night at 7 pm in the auditorium as we come together to pray corporately #byname and ask God to open the eyes of men and woman to the Gospel. We are excited about what God is going to do through us this weekend!
The message of Easter is that He’s concerned about this generation of people. What are you concerned about?