Loving Jesus Style

Scripture: Jonah 1:17-2:3 (NIV) 17  Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. 2  From inside the fish, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. 2  He said: “In my distress, I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead, I called for help, and you listened to my cry. 3  You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me. Devotion: The story of Jonah is well-known to many of us. We know how he tried to run away from God's call to preach to the wicked city of Nineveh, how he boarded a ship that was caught in a storm, how he was thrown overboard and swallowed by a great fish, and how he finally obeyed God and delivered his message. But do we ever stop to think about what Jonah felt and learned in the belly of the fish? The Bible tells us that Jonah pray...

Scripture: Jonah 2:1-2 (ESV) Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, 2  saying,         “I called out to the Lord , out of my distress, and he answered me;        out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and you heard my voice.   Devotion:             In this scripture, we find the prophet Jonah inside a great fish. Jonah had disobeyed God and wound up being tossed off a ship that was carrying him into the sea. God, however, was not content to let Jonah die for his foolishness and dramatically rescued him. Jonah’s rescue proved to him that God indeed hears prayer and sometimes chooses to act in ways that seem impossible to our modern understanding of the world. We all disobey what we know to be God’s will for us from time to time, sometimes purposefully, as Jonah did.         ...