Hebrews 3:1-2 “Therefore, holy brothers, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess. He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house.”

The Jewish Christians to whom this letter to the Hebrews was written faced many challenges to their faith. Their friends and neighbors were constantly lobbying them to give it up. They questioned Jesus’ identity. Was he really who he claimed to be? They denied Jesus’ distinctive mission. It seemed to some that you had all you ever needed in Moses and the Old Testament prophets. These Jewish Christians grew tired of the cross and burden that came along with following Jesus. Ridicule and persecution were no fun.

I think this context makes the book of Hebrews hugely relevant for us today. Some of my own friends have left the Christian faith. They were worn down by the constant messaging that Jesus doesn’t really matter, there’s nothing in Christianity you can’t find in other religions, nothing you couldn’t do with no religion at all. They grew tired of being considered odd, out-of-step with the norms and values of the world around them. Some have run into this spiritual buzz saw on American college campuses. Others experienced it working in the amoral climate of corporate America.

The problem is not with Jesus and the faith he founded. The problem is that we stop paying attention. Or, as the writer of Hebrews says, “…fix your thoughts on Jesus, the apostle and high priest whom we confess.” All the good reasons to fix our thoughts on Jesus can’t be condensed into six or seven sentences of one chapter of one Bible book. But here we have a start. One good reason to fix your thoughts on Jesus goes like this: “He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house.”

Jesus was faithful to his mission. “Okay. That’s nice. But other people have been faithful, too.” If we aren’t impressed, it’s because we haven’t been paying attention. God appointed Jesus to seek and save sinners. He had explicit orders to find the kind of people who seemed least likely to listen to him. I have heard people describe outstanding salesmen as the kind of people who could sell snow to Eskimos or sand to Arabs. Humanly speaking, the challenge before Jesus was greater still. He had to convince people who had taken a lifetime of abuse at the hands of religious people that his brand was going to be any different. And they wouldn’t be respected more by their critics. They just wouldn’t have their vices to comfort them.

On the other end of the spectrum, he had to convince people who were smug and content in their own version of holiness that he could give them a better holiness–if only they would throw their own holiness away and plead guilty to complete spiritual fraud and incompetence.

Who signs up for a project like that? Other founders of other world religions didn’t start out like this. But Jesus didn’t come to win a following. He came to change the world, including you and me. He deserves our attention, his life begs us to fix our thoughts on him, because he was faithful to his mission.

Jonah 3:4-5, 10 On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: ‘Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.’ The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth… When God saw what they did, and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened”

The message may sound harsh, but if the Lord’s only intent was to destroy the city, no need to send a prophet to warn them. Just let the catastrophe come. Shake the earth. Whip up the storm of the century. Send in the murdering hoards. Just because God did want to spare these people, Jonah had to preach like this.

That still has to happen if preaching is going to do any good. An old commentator was right to note: “A preacher must speak the truth frankly, and not sugar over it and deprive it of its power by ornaments and flattery. One must plainly say to sinners that they are hastening to destruction.”

That the Ninevites needed such a message, and Jonah had good reason to be afraid to deliver it, is more detail than the story in the Bible provides. From history we know that this was a scary people. They had made a name for themselves by their cruelty. On the battlefield they would make walls and towers out of the dead bodies of enemy soldiers. They liked to skin their enemies alive, or impale them alive on stakes and let them slowly die. After a battle they regularly enjoyed cutting body parts off of the local citizens–hands, feet, ears, noses, etc. When they weren’t at war, they entertained themselves at beer halls and brothels.

Those are the kind of people to whom Jonah preached. I suspect we would be just as frightened if God sent us to preach that kind of message in an ISIS camp or an Iranian mosque. You might wonder if you would get out alive. We might have more sympathy for Jonah’s initial response to God’s call: try to run away.

Then the first miracle happened. “The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.” How successful do you think your Christian preaching would be in an ISIS camp or a Taliban hideout? How many converts would you make if you preached Jonah’s way at the headquarters for the Freedom from Religion Foundation in Madison, WI, or in the sex clubs on Bourbon Street in New Orleans’ French Quarter?

Apparently, it might be all of them. The preaching of God’s word was so powerful that it turned the hearts of this wild and wicked city, a city with at least 120,000 people. And the repentance was real. Jesus comments in the book of Matthew, “The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at Jonah’s preaching” (12:41).

Then the second miracle happened. God forgave them. “When God saw what they did, and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” I say miracle, not because this is out of character for the Lord. By his own claim he is “the gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” I say miracle because only supernatural love and patience can forgive a people like this.            

Today you and I proclaim God’s word to our world. Our fellow citizens may seem like run-of-the-mill sinners compared to the violent and sensuous people of Nineveh. They are less scary, but their need for grace is just as urgent. May God give us the courage to go, and then see his miracle one more time.

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.

Jonah 3:1 “Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.’ Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh.”

Jonah ended up fish food the first time God sent him to preach in Nineveh. This second time was different. The Lord’s intervention with his prophet led to a better outcome.

God didn’t have to give Jonah this second chance. It’s not as though Jonah was his last option at the position of prophet. Hosea, Amos, and Joel are all biblical prophets who lived at the same time. They wrote books of the Bible. They bravely preached to people who didn’t want to hear their call to repentance. The Lord could have used any one of them to warn the city of Nineveh that God’s patience with them was about to run out.

But that’s not the way the Lord deals with the people he calls to serve him. If we want to get a job done, we generally try to find the best man or woman for it. We are mostly concerned with completing the task and doing it right. When my church built a new sanctuary, we interviewed three different consultants to help us run our stewardship campaign, a half dozen architects to design the building for us, and another five construction companies to erect the building. Everyone we talked to was reasonably competent and close in their bids. We wanted the best one. After all that we still ended up with windows that leaked at the very first rain.

The Lord is as concerned about growing and developing people as he is about getting a job done. Otherwise he would do it all himself. We all know about Jonah’s big fail the first time around. He didn’t merely do a poor job of preaching to Nineveh. He ran in the opposite direction. My wife manages restaurants for Pizza Hut. When she tries to hire someone, and they don’t come back after the first interview, she doesn’t hunt them down and drag them back into the store. If they don’t want to work for her she figures she is better off without them. It can be a headache to turn them into a good employee.

God, on the other hand, miraculously intervened in the weather, created a storm at sea, and nearly sank a ship and drowned an entire crew just to get Jonah thrown overboard. He sent some giant tuna (maybe it was a whale–the ancients didn’t classify animals the same way we do) to swallow Jonah and keep him alive for three days, giving the prophet some time to chill and think about the choices he was making. He had Jonah unceremoniously vomited back onto dry land after he had learned his lesson.

The Lord went to extraordinary measures to turn Jonah into the man he wanted for the job. He took extraordinary measures to free us from our sins. He still takes extraordinary measures to turn us into believers and use us in his church today. That is how grace works. It often is not efficient. It may seem to skip over the best qualified. But it overcomes our congenital resistance to God’s call and remakes us into the servants he seeks, obedient to his word.

Mark 1:11 “And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’”

The heavenly Father’s words about Jesus are loaded. In three short phrases he identifies Jesus for us, professes his love, and proclaims his perfection. First, Jesus’ identity: despite Jesus’ very human appearance, this incident leaves no doubt that Jesus is the Son of God who came from heaven to save the world. If you have ever worried to yourself, “What if Christianity is wrong? What if I am following the wrong religion and worshiping the wrong God?” here is the answer to your concerns. At this point in real history, God spoke from heaven to leave no doubt that Jesus is his unique and holy Son.

Then the Father professes that unconditional, unchanging relationship of love that has always existed between him and his Son. That love wasn’t based on Jesus’ performance or behavior. It freely flowed from the Father to the Son. The Son freely reflected that love back to the Father in the perfect way he lived. The Father could proudly proclaim about Jesus, “I am well-pleased.” Jesus was good like no person earth since Adam and Eve before the fall into sin.

Maybe we have come to expect this of our Savior. We aren’t overwhelmed by the Father’s confirmation of his perfection. If so, perhaps this will help with our perspective: Jesus came to live his entire earthly ministry as our substitute, in our place. He came to carry our sins and die for them.

But this is not only a negative thing. If Jesus came to take responsibility for all the negative things in our lives, he also came to offer us credit for all the good in his own. In other words, your Father in heaven is also speaking these words to you and about you today. This is how he has felt about you, ever since the day of your baptism. Listen to him saying this to you again.

“You are my Son.” You may not be the eternal, only-begotten Son of God, but by the faith the Father planted in you by word and water, you are his own child, a member of his own heavenly family. Do you know what that makes you? That makes you a very impressive person. It would be understandable if the rest of us were tempted to indulge in a little name-dropping, and mention to others that we happen to know you, since you are a member of the Royal Family.

“You are my Son, whom I love.” Do you remember the old children’s song, “God loves me dearly, grants me salvation, God loves me dearly, loves even me”? That little word “even” is a big word in that line. It says that we are aware of all the reasons why God shouldn’t love us anymore, and yet, God still loves even a rascal like me. You cannot imagine a sin so big that it would make God stop loving you. He has loved murderers and adulterers and swindlers and prostitutes and politicians and lawyers and accountants and even ministers. God loves you and God loves me, and our own baptisms are just one of many ways that he has told us so.

“With you I am well-pleased.” This is just too much. God finds a sense of satisfaction, and enjoyment, and pleasure in us like we do when we are eating our favorite food, perfectly prepared, or enjoying a favorite show, or game, or other pastime. Maybe it would be better to compare it to the rare times we spend together with dear, dear friends, and we have so much fun, and we can bear our hearts, and at the end we all conclude that we don’t do this nearly enough. We ought to get together more often. We are “well-pleased” at such times.

“With you I am well-pleased,” the Father says, as though we were the ones who had lived a perfect life free from a single sin, and because Jesus’ perfect life of love counts as our own, we have. Now we can see the wonder in the Father’s statement, because he is also bearing his heart for you and me.

Mark 1:10 “As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove.”

Jesus is the “Christ” which means “the anointed one.” You may remember that there were three jobs or “offices” that people in Old Testament times began by having oil poured over their heads: Prophet, Priest, and King. Jesus came to be the great fulfillment of all three, and his baptism is also his anointing. Now he was officially Israel’s Prophet, Israel’s Priest, and Israel’s King. The only difference is, as the Apostle Peter says in Acts 10, Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit instead of oil. He received a much higher anointing for a much higher task.

The Spirit brought with him the gift of power for his ministry. Immediately following Jesus’ baptism we hear that the Spirit led him into the wilderness to face the Devil in his temptation. Later we hear that he returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit (Luke 4). It’s not as though Jesus had never possessed the Spirit’s presence before this, but at his baptism he received a special outpouring of the Spirit’s gifts and powers for the hard work ahead of him.

While we can see the importance of all this for his work, maybe it seems a little matter of fact to us. Then let’s not forget that Jesus’ baptism was a real baptism. What the Lord gave to John and Jesus, and to us through these words, is a little glimpse into the invisible goings on of the spiritual world.

Perhaps you have read some of the novels by Christian author Frank Peretti that attempt to describe what’s going on behind the scenes in the realm of angels and demons at the same time that people are struggling through various earthly trials and challenges. Peretti paints dramatic battles between the demons and the angels as they fight to influence human behavior. While the stories make exciting fiction, the demons are portrayed with too much strength and the angels with too little relative to each other. The angels in the stories even depend on human prayers to help them.

Here, however, God makes visible for a few moments what otherwise happens behind the scenes in our baptisms. If you could see a baptism the way that God sees it, then you would see the heavens torn open as God prepares to cross the boundary that separates us from him. You would see the Spirit come rushing down from heaven and piercing the chest of that little baby or that trembling adult as he makes his home in a new heart. You would see, with your own eyes, that this is a person in whom the Spirit of God now lives.

On the outside, our baptisms may look quite plain, but here the Spirit comes bearing such wonderful gifts. God not only lives with us. He lives in us by his Spirit. It may be true that to err is human, and that nobody’s perfect, and that will remain true our entire lives. But by our baptisms we are no longer mere men and women. With the power of God’s own Spirit working within us, there is real help and real hope for a changed life. The Spirit can open up our minds to comprehend God’s word. He can open up our hearts to reflect God’s love. He has opened up our lives to carry out the meaning and purpose that God always intended for us, because in our baptisms, the Spirit came bearing his gifts.

Mark 1:9 “At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.”

There it is. Jesus came. Jesus was baptized. Jesus got soaked.

In order to understand why this is so special, one of the great moments of all time, we need to ask the question, “Why?” “Why did Jesus go to be baptized?” The other gospel writers tell us that John the Baptist wondered the same thing. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

With his baptism, Jesus was formally beginning his public ministry, entering into his saving work as the Messiah. As you know, the work Jesus did to save us did not consist so much in training us as it did in replacing us. He came to be our substitute. He came to bear our sins, to make himself responsible for their guilt. That was not something which took place first at the cross, but something he bore for us throughout his ministry.

No doubt the sinless Son of God felt that load of sin and guilt weighing down on him very heavily. That is what made baptism such a fitting way to begin his ministry. John had earlier described his baptism as “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” With our sins on his shoulders, bearing down upon his soul, Jesus received this statement of sins forgiven, assuring him and us that the Father will not hold them against us.

Do you see the extraordinary nature of his love here? Maybe it will help us to take a few moments to consider what sort of burdens we are willing to bear for each other. We devote an enormous amount of time to trying to make our lives in this world as easy and comfortable as they can possibly be. We set our hearts on having certain things. We will work like mad to get them. In our better moments, we will break away from the all-important work of enjoying ourselves for a little while to help someone else. We may dig into our pockets and come up with a little cash for them. Maybe we can use some of our skills to help someone out. On rare occasions we might even open our homes to someone who is down and out.

But let them intrude too far into the happy little world we had created for ourselves and what happens? We get tired of the burden. We start to resent the neediness of those we help. Then we start to resent the people themselves. Almost inevitably, we draw the line. “No more!” To us, perhaps, it just seems fair. To God, it just looks selfish.

Now look at Jesus coming to be baptized by John, bearing the sins of the world. He loved you and me so much that he carried the burden of our sins every moment of his earthly ministry until finally it killed him. He went to sleep at night with our sins. He got up every morning with our sins. He died of our sins. When Jesus came to John to be baptized, he fully knew what he was getting into and what it was going to cost him. He did it only because in his love he knew it was the only way to save us.

If that does not make our jaws drop and our eyes widen, then, my friends, we have lost our sense of wonder! Our Savior shows us incomparable love when he comes bearing our sins.

Mark 10:13 “People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

Apparently the idea that a relationship with Jesus is for the mature isn’t a modern idea. The Twelve also considered him an adult concern.

Jesus strongly disagreed. What the disciples didn’t consider was that Jesus came to love and to save little children, just like everyone else.

“Saved?” someone might ask. “Are you suggesting that children are sinners?” No more or less than anyone else. I have four children, and in my experience it didn’t take long for their selfish side to surface. “There is no difference, for all of sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” the Apostle Paul writes in the book of Romans. A couple of chapters later he gives the evidence no one can escape. “Death came to all men, because all have sinned.” Don’t children die, aren’t they mortal, too?    

“Are you saying, then, that children who die are lost?” No, not in every case. Jesus bled and died on the cross to cover the sins of everyone, including the little children. By his sacrifice on the cross he purchased full and free forgiveness for the entire world. He removed every barrier for our membership in the kingdom of God. By his resurrection from the dead he demonstrated that death can now be the gateway, the door, to a new and never-ending life.

“But isn’t a place in that new life, a place in God’s kingdom, something that has to be personally received by faith? Are you suggesting that children can believe?” Yes, I am suggesting, I am asserting, that they believe in Jesus and his gifts. “But how is that possible?” Look at Jesus’ words: “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” It is we, the adults, who struggle through doubts and skepticism. It is the children who simply believe like the song says, “Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.”

Years ago, when my daughter was a little girl, she more or less adopted an older, single lady in our congregation as a second mom or grandmother. Along the way she got to know her parents well, too. The father was in failing health, and one day he died. No one this close to my daughter had ever passed away before. As her parents, we weren’t quite sure how to break the news to her. We finally sat down with her and told her the news straight up. She thought for a moment. “You mean he is in heaven?” “Yes, Carrie, he is in heaven.” “Cool.” Now, who showed the greater faith, the worried parents, or the little four-year-old who simply trusted that this man was in heaven? She did so because she first trusted our Friend who is in heaven.

I am confident in the faith of children because I am confident of the power of God’s word. The Apostle Paul again tells us in his letter to the Romans that faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. Seven hundred years earlier God promised through the Prophet Isaiah that his word does not return to him empty, but it accomplishes what he desires, and achieves the purpose for which he sent it. His word is also involved in our baptisms. It lends them its power. And Peter assures us, “Baptism now saves you also.” In other words, God’s word can find its way into little hearts, whether accompanied by water or simply spoken into their ears.

“But can children really believe, with all their lack of developmental maturity?” Look at their faith in their earthly fathers and mothers. Don’t they trust them? Oh, they may be ornery at times, too. It is a real relationship. Christian faith isn’t the ability to spout long lists of theological truths. It isn’t a thunder and lightning experience at a single moment, though sometimes it comes with one. It is trust. Today I trust that the Kingdom of God belonged to the children Jesus blessed, and to our little children, because Jesus loves the little children, and he has made them his own.

Exodus 15:26 “If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians, for I am the Lord, who heals you.”

What kind of a God do you and I worship? People are naturally inclined to take extremist positions in their view of him. Before his gospel breakthrough, Martin Luther was raised to see God only as a merciless judge making impossible demands upon his people. He was a God who inspired only terror, fear, and trembling. There are still those who believe that a scowl, a frown, and a general spirit of gloominess are the normal uniform a Christian ought to wear. Following the Lord Jesus is the joyless, humorless burden we must bear if we don’t want to go to hell.

I believe the other extreme is more popular today. God is such an easy-going, mild-mannered, friendly sort of guy that you don’t have to take him seriously at all. One TV preacher with his permanently painted-on smile says that you can’t tell people that they are bad. God wants them to hear good news. A women once sat across the table in my office and argued that Jesus wouldn’t try to make a person feel guilty. He didn’t deal with people that way. I have run into any number of arm-chair theologians who are convinced that they don’t need to change. God loves them just the way they are.

It is tempting to say that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but that’s not quite right, either. The God who spoke to Israel in Exodus 15, the Lord we follow, does take some seemingly extreme positions. But he is more than a flat, one-dimensional character.

Do you think that he takes his demands seriously? What does he say? “If you listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his eyes, if you pay attention to his commands and keep all his decrees, I will not bring on you any of the diseases I brought on the Egyptians…” When God is bringing his word to you, you had better sit up and pay attention. We ignore his voice at our peril. He expects that we not only hear what he has to say, but that we earnestly put it into practice. “…if you keep all his decrees…” he warns. This is no toothless set of general guidelines or suggestions. Our very lives are at stake. How many thousands of Egyptians died in the 10 plagues for failing to follow his commands? How many sinners does death fail to overcome today?

If it seems his demands are simply too much for us, it should. When he preaches his law or tests our loyalty, he is leading us to know ourselves. He is leading us to see that we are weak, helpless, and needy.

Then we are ready to see that knowing the Lord is knowing him as “… the Lord, who heals you.” When we hear that name, we may be inclined to think of more demands from our ruler. But this is “LORD” in all capital letters. This is God’s Old Testament salvation name. This is the name which reminds us that he has freely chosen to make us the objects of his love. This is the name that assures he is faithful. Even when we wander away, he comes looking for us. He will not stop until he finds us and reclaims us. Even when we have angered him he wants nothing more than to forgive us and reaffirm his love.

It is this Lord who heals us. That’s not just physical healing. That’s not just spiritual healing. It is completely comprehensive. His invisible hand is involved in every problem that has ever been resolved in our lives: physical, spiritual, emotional, relational or any other. Our God is the faithful Lord who heals us, and he exposes our weakness so that we might know this better.