Jonah 3:3 “Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh.”

There are a couple of things for us to take home from the prophet’s second chance. First, the Lord is far less interested in using people who are already prepared for his work as he is in developing people, transforming them, and making them ready for his work. Isn’t that what Jesus did with his disciples? They don’t look much like the cream of the crop through most of Jesus’ life. They are self-seeking, naive, judgmental, argumentative, sometimes border-line violent. Remember when John, the so-called “apostle of love,” suggested raining down fire and brimstone on a Samaritan village and burning everyone to death because they wouldn’t let them stay for the night? But these are the guys Jesus picked. And with three years of training, and a lot of help from the Holy Spirit, God used them to change the world. There is a line about the early church’s enemies in the book of Acts that highlights the disciples’ transformation: “When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13).

So God’s second call of Jonah confronts us in two ways. We don’t get to pull excuses like, “But I’m not good at that” or “I don’t like to do that” when God needs something done. Maybe we aren’t very good at it. Maybe the Lord is going to use this to stretch us and grow us and make us something more than we used to be.

Also, we don’t get to criticize volunteers at church who may not be very good at what they are doing yet. Give them advice and help them, yes. Complain about them, no. Hey, at least they aren’t running away like Jonah did. Who do we think we are, to think that we can be more demanding and less forgiving than God? The Lord calls us to repent of attitudes like that.

The far greater take home from Jonah’s second chance, however, is to understand that God will be so gracious to you and me, too. He is the God of second chances, and thirds and fourths and five hundredths or more when necessary. It is not only his desire to forgive us when we fall–made clear in the extreme sacrifice of his own Son he was willing to make to purchase forgiveness for all our sins. He also knows that forgiven people make the best messengers of his forgiving grace. For them forgiveness isn’t a theory–something they read and studied about and can explain from the book. They have experienced it themselves. They know what it is, to borrow the words of Brennan Manning, to be “inconsistent, unsteady disciples whose cheese is falling off their cracker…poor, weak, sinful men and women with hereditary faults and limited talents…earthen vessels who shuffle along on feet of clay…the bent and bruised who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God.”

And yet…and yet God loves them with an everlasting love and forgives them at every turn. These are his children, we are his children, and he will not give up on his own. More than that, he uses us, though we have given him no reason to trust us, to bring his grace to others, just because we have needed it so much ourselves. He is the God of second chances, for people like his prophet, Jonah, and shaky servants like you and me.