Summit Drive Church

The story of Jonah is intended to bring us face-to-face with our own questions about how far God’s grace goes in order to ask if we will have God’s heart for the world. God’s questions to Jonah come back to us: what will you do with my grace toward those you think are undeserving of it? How will my grace change you?

It can often be a tendency of the human heart to want justice for those who do us wrong, but mercy when we do wrong. What if God is more consistent than that? Jonah 3 opens us up to the God who is just and merciful with complete consistency.

God meets Jonah - and often meets us - in a desperate place. Here we see that Jonah repents... sort of... as it seems that he remains unchanged at the core. But God is rich in mercy, and he delivers and uses Jonah - and us too - regardless of the shortcomings.

In Part Two we see how Jonah is falls fast asleep in the bottom of the ship – a signal of his spiritual condition of being in a deep spiritual slumber. Jonah’s spiritual apathy causes him to ignore the very real needs of the rest of the crew. This text continues to be full of surprises about how the God of mercy is working for our good and his glory, even through the storms.

In Part One of our series, Pastor Dave will help set the stage for understanding the surprising message of Jonah. As Jonah runs from God, we’ll see more of why that is the case and what it says to our own heart postures toward our enemies.

In the book of Hebrews, we are instructed to “fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest” (3:1b).  In a world where there are many things competing for our attention, may we fix our thoughts on him this week.

In this message Pastor Dave shows that in the ancient world, clothing was an indicator of where you “fit” in the world.  In the final portion of this letter Peter tells the Christian community to “clothe yourselves in humility”, essentially taking on an identity as servants.  How does this get played out?  This takes the very pattern of Jesus’ self-giving love and makes it the norm for Christian life.

In our passage, we see Peter helping us examine our ‘expectations’ of the Christian life. But not just examine these – he shows us how to find true joy, to ‘rejoice’, even when under pressure for our faith.

LIVING HOPE | Part 8: The Christian’s New Reality and the Call to Show Up

The story of Jesus’ resurrection in Mark’s Gospel leaves us with many questions – and we’ll explore those this week.  But in the end, it turns the biggest question of all back on us: What will we do with the news that “He is risen”?