Today I have a question for you. Have you ever felt like you were
the wrong person for the job, Like, what did you get yourself into
You didn't have the right experience or the right skill set? Well, I
know I have and you probably have too. This is Pastor Rick's Daily Hope,
the audio broadcast ministry of Pastor Rick Warren. Okay, today we're going
to continue with the series the Manifestation of Your Life Mission. Rick is showing
us that no matter how big the thing is that God is calling us to
do, we don't have to run away from it. We can actually run
toward it. This is such a good message and I hope you'll invite a
friend to listen along with you as we discover how to embrace God's calling on
our lives and how we can live according to the purpose and plan that He
has for us. And now here's Rick with part one of a message called
what to Do when you get a second Chance. God has a mission for
every life. God doesn't create anything without a purpose. And just as every
plant, every rock, every animal has a purpose. If you're breathing,
God has a purpose for your life. It's called your life Mission. You
weren't put on this planet to live for yourself. No, no, no,
you have a far bigger purpose in life than simply to make money,
retire and die. You weren't put on this planet to take up space,
to breathe, to use resources and die. God has a plan and a
purpose. He has a life mission for your life. Now in this series,
we're using the life of a prophet in the Bible called Jonah. Small
book, only four chapters, and actually Jonah did the wrong thing. He
ran from his life mission for much of his story, but he finally gets
it right in the end. So we learned from both the right things he
did, but we also learned from the wrong things that he did. Now
on the screen, as we looked at each chapter, and this is the
chapter three in this session, chapter one, we looked at Jonah rebelling and
running from God and his mission. If you missed that message, we talk
about ten truths you need to know about your life mission that we learn from
the life of Jonah. And when you run from your life mission, it
always causes problems, causes storms for other people. Then in Jonah chapter two,
we see Jonah repenting and returning to God and his mission, and that's
where he prays he's swallowed by this large fish that God had made taken to
the bottom of the ocean, and in the bottom of the ocean, he
cries out to God. And we talked about what to do when life feels
hopeless, when you've hit bottom. Now we come to chapter three, and
in Jonah Chapter three, we see Jonah restarting and running with God on mission.
And so now we're going to look at what happens when you get a
second chance. Now we ended the last chapter where this giant fish that God
had custom made for Jonah spits him up back out on the ocean on the
beach and Jonah Chapter three, verse one starts with one of the most important
verses in the Bible, and it says this, then the word of the
Lord came to Jonah a second time. Circle that a second time. God
is the god of second chances. God loves to give us second chances,
third chances, fourth chances. He gives us many many chances because of his
grace and his mercy. Now, after Jonah's rebellion, if you've been with
me the first two weeks on this message series, does Jonah deserve to get
another chance? No way, If you were God, would you give Jonah
another chance? Probably not. But God loves to give second chances. God
delights in showing grace. God delights in showing mercy. In fact, I
made a short list of people who God gave another chance. I could have
spent this entire message just sharing with you the names of people in the Bible
that God gave a second chance to. But let me just show you a
representative short list of You think, well, God would never give me a
second chance. Well, let me show you what he did. Dude,
Jacob cheated on his brother, cheated out of his cheated his brother out of
his family inheritance. God gave Jacob a second chance. Moses murdered a man.
God gave Moses a second chance. Rehab was a prostitute. She gets
a second chance and ends up being in the family tree of Jesus. God
uses her. Samson wasted his talent and ended up in prison. God give
him, gave him a second chance. David committed a adultrey and had the
husband of the woman he had affair with murdered. God gives him a second
chance. Peter denies Jesus Christ at his arrest right before the Crucifixion. He's
been with Jesus three and a half years. When they say, don't you
know this guy goes, I don't even know. The guy totally denies,
Jesus cops out at the last second, and then Zachias. Zachias was a
hated, dishonest businessman. Nobody likes Zachiaz, and yet Jesus gave him a
second chance. Now, God gives everybody chances over and over and over and
over. And that's what I want us to look at. What to do
when you get a second chance from God? You know, I want to
start with a true confession. I hate golf. Okay, I really don't
like it at all. I don't like it for two reasons. One,
it takes too long. I don't have time to go spend hours and hours
on that. And second and more important is you can play your entire life
and never get any better at it. That is so frustrating that you play
it and play it and play it and you still just don't get any better.
But my brother loved golf, and when my brother was alive, I
love to play golf with my brother because it was so much fun. It
gave me a chance to be with him. The one thing I do love
about golf was a term that I learned in playing golf, and it's called
a mulligan. Now, if you don't know what a mulligan is, a
mulligan is when you get another shot because you've made a poor one, and
so you get a do over and it's not counted on your scorecard. I
love this idea. It's called a mulligan. We ought to live in the
mulligans of God. The grace of God when he gives us a chance to
do over, to start over, to try again, and to give it
our best shot, and he just shows us mercy. He shows us grace.
He's forgiving over and over and over and over and over. And you
say, well, that's not fair. It's not counting in his scorecard.
Of course, it's not fair. It's called grace. It's called mercy.
Now. The mulligan verse of the Bible is in Proverbs, chapter twenty eight,
verse thirteen, and that verse says this, a man who refuses to
admit his mistakes can never be successful. But if he confesses and forsakes them,
he gets what another chance circle that he gets another chance. He gets
a Mulligan. This is amazing grace of God that anybody who refuses to admit
his mistakes, you're never going to be successful. But if you confess and
forsake them, you get another chance. Another Mulligan verse in the Bible is
the next verse on your Outline, Lamentations, chapter three, and in chapter
three, Verse twenty two and twenty three of Lamentations, it says this,
the unfailing love of the Lord never ends. In other words, God's never
going to stop loving you. You can't make God stop loving you because his
love is based on who he is, not what you do. The unfailing
love of the Lord never ends. It is his mercy that has kept us
from complete destruction. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for his mercy.
His faithfulness is great, and his mercies begin afresh. Read it with me
every new day. His mercies are new every new day. And I want
you to write this down. Every new day is another chance from God.
You need to start looking at your life as every new day is another chance
from God. God is giving you a second chance, a one hundredth chance,
a one millionth chance. Every new day He's giving you another opportunity.
So then the big question is if every day of my life is really another
chance, it's fresh start. His mercies are new every morning. He's not
going to run out of mercy. Then what should I do when God gives
me another chance? Well, I'm glad you asked that question because in chapter
three of Jonah, Jonah does five things. When Jonah finally gets another chance,
he gets a mulligan, he does five things. These are the five
things you need to do when God gives you a second chance, which is
every new morning of your life, he gives you a second chance. He
gives us five specific things to do. All right, So let's get right
into it. Number one, When God gives me another chance, the first
thing I need to do is this, live with profound gratitude. I need
to live with profound gratitude. I need to wake up every day saying thank
you God, thank you that my heart is still beating. There's blood still
pulsing through my veins. I'm breathing, I can see, I can hear,
i can eat. I'm alive. Thank you God, you have given
me another chance. You've given me another opportunity. You've given me another moment
of mercy and grace your mercies. Do every morning, thank you, thank
you, thank you. You live with a profound sense not of duty,
but of gratitude, of gratefulness, of thanksgiving. I'll never forget. Probably
forty years ago I said something to a guy. I said, how you
doing? And usually what people respond to that I don't even remember because it's
meaningless, so I'm doing fine or whatever. But I asked this guy,
and I've never forgot it in about forty years, and said how you?
And he said, better than I deserve to be doing? And I thought,
Wow, couldn't we all say that one better than I deserve to be
doing? Because it's all grace. If I got what I deserved, I
wouldn't be here, neither would you. It's all the grace of God.
It's all a gift of God. Everything I have is a gift from God.
He said, well, I worked for it. Where'd you get the
ability to work? Where'd you get your mind? Where'd you get your body?
Where'd you get your freedom? Where'd you get your brain? Everything you
have is a gift from God, and it's all because of his grace.
I didn't work for it. I didn't earn it. It's because I'm doing
better than I deserve to be doing. So, the first thing you want
to do when you get a second chance, and you know you've gone through
the bankruptcy, or you've gone through the divorce, or you've gone through the
cancer, or you've gone through the scandal, or you've gone through the mess,
or you've gone through the depression, or you've gone through a one hundred
thousand different problems. You got another chance. God gave you another chance.
What do you do? The first thing you do is you start living with
the profound sense of gratitude to God for his goodness, for his grace,
and you demonstrate how you are thankful to God for giving you another chance.
Now, Jonah does this. In fact, he did it even before he
gets out of the belly of that great fish, while he's in the deep,
deep part of the ocean. We looked at this in our last session.
In Jonah chapter two nine and ten, the last verses we looked at
in our last session. Jonah told God he's still in the middle of the
problem. I will sing my thanksgiving to you, and i will sacrifice to
you, and I'll do what I've promised you to do. Why because salvation
comes from you Lord. Then God ordered the fish to split up Jonah onto
the beach, and it did. Now in that verse. Again, we've
covered this before, but I want to reinforce it. Three ways you express
deep gratitude to God. Write these down three ways. Number one, I
sing my thanks to God. That's first thing, Jonah says, because I'm
going to sing my thanksgiving to you. Singing is a spiritual act of being
grateful to God. You don't have to be on key, you don't have
to have the right note. You just make a joyful noise. Psalm ninety
two, verses one and two says it's good to say thank you to the
Lord. It's good to say thank you the Lord and to sing praises to
him every morning, tell him thank you for your kindness. So every morning
you get up and you start singing. The hills are alive. No,
No, you just say thank you God, thank you. Really cool day,
glad to be alive. My paulse is still going, thank you.
I'm profoundly grateful for another chance, another opportunity, another day. I sing
my thanks to God. Number two, I give my offering in thanks to
God. I realize that everything I have comes from God, and I give
part of it back to Him as a symbol of gratitude. Going I realize
it all comes from you. You don't really own anything. It wasn't yours
before you were born. It's not going to be years after you die.
You only get to use it. God owns everything in the world. He
loans it to you for about an eighty year period. What you think you
own is really on loan. You're just a steward, you're a manager.
You don't really own anything because you didn't known it before you were born.
You're not going to own it after you die. You're not taking it to
heaven. So it's all God's. But he loans it to you, and
the Bible says that we give part of it back to him. It's called
tithing as a result to say, God, I just recognize it all comes
from you. I wouldn't have any of this if it weren't for you.
Now, the Bible says, and saw fifty verse twenty three, God says,
the people who honor me are those who bring me an offering. Why
to show thanks. God doesn't need your money, He doesn't need my money.
God owns it all. So what does he want. He just wants
your thanks. This wants your gratitude. He wants to demonstrate. A gift
is a demonstration of gratitude, says The people who honor me are those who
bring me an offering to show thanks. And I save those who obey me.
So I sing my thanks to God, and I give my offering and
thanks to God. The third thing I do is I commit my life to
God's mission for me. I commit my life to God's mission for me.
When God gives you another chance, he doesn't want you to just go out
and keep using it to live for yourself. He wants you to use it
for his purpose. Romans chapter six, verse thirteen says this ourselves completely to
God, every part of you, for you are back from death and you
want to be tools in the hands of God to be used for his good
purposes. So I sing thanks to God, I give an offering and thanks
to God. I commit myself and say, God, I want my wife
to honor you. I want to fulfill what you put me on earth to
do. Now, these three things that Jonah did, we do them every
week at Saddleback Church. Every single weekend. We sing thanks to God.
We give offerings back to God as a saying thank thanks God, and we
commit ourselves. We recommit ourselves every week saying God, really, I belong
to you, and so whatever you want to do with my life, that's
cool, whatever you want. That's how I say thanks to God. So
that's the first thing you want to do when you've been given a second chance
from God. You tell God how grateful you are. God. I'm alive.
I made it through that crisis, that scandal, that problem, that
sin, that relational hell, and I'm still here and You've given me another
chance, and I am so grateful God for your goodness. That's the first
thing Jonah does. Now here's the second thing Jonah does. And here's what
you need to do when you're given a second chance, which is literally every
day of your life. Number two, make my mission my top priority.
Make my mission my top priority. When God gives me another chance. Maybe
I've really messed it up, I've really just blown it. But whatever God
wants me to do with the rest of my life, that's what I'm going
to focus on now. After I've been given a second chance, it's not
the time to keep on doing the wrong stuff. It's not the time to
keep on doing what I've been doing, being selfish, thinking about me,
thinking about what I want, what I need and only and not even thinking
about God in my life. No, no, this is not the time
to keep living the way I want. Now I make the focus. If
God's given me a second chance, if I'm still alive, he didn't put
me here to continue living selfishly. He's given me another chance to live for
him. He's given me another chance to make my life mission the mission he
has for my life my top priority. Tewod Corinthians, chapter six, verse
one says this, do not let the grace that you receive from God be
for nothing. God has shown you mercy. God has shown you grace.
God has let you off the hook so many times. He's forgotten sins.
He's forgiven sins. God has let you off took so many times. Do
not let the grace of God be for nothing. Like I'm just gonna abuse
it. I'm gonna take it for granted. I'm going to continue living to
be a selfish clod. No, No, now I focus my mission.
I focus on my life mission as my top priority. You know, the
harder you've fallen, the more you falled. The more you understand gratefulness,
and actually the more you are committed to your mission. You know who Paul
the Apostle is in the Bible, but he wasn't always some great Christian saint.
You know what Paul was before God got a hold of him. He
was a religious terrorist. He went around killing Christians. That was his job.
He traveled around the Middle East literally murdering, killing Christians. And he
thought that was his duty, that he was such a zealot, that Christians
should be all wiped out. And he was a religious terrorist. And one
day, while he's going to to the city of Damascus to kill a bunch
of Christians there in Syria, he has an encounter with Jesus Christ. Thereri
is in christ and Jesus shows up on the road Damascus says Saul, why
are you persecuting me? And he goes, who are you? Lord?
He goes, I'm Jesus, And he falls to his knees and he says,
my Lord and my God. And he makes a one hundred and eighty
degree turn. And now he's becomes the Apostle of Love, and he's given
a second chance after murdering a lot of people, and here's what he says.
In Acts, chapter twenty, verse twenty four, Paul says, I
don't care about my own life, not anymore. The most important thing is
that I complete my mission, the work that the Lord Jesus gave me.
And what was that work? To tell people the good news about God's grace,
about God's mercy, about his willingness to give us another chance. Now,
this is the second thing that happens to Jonah. First, Jonah says,
I'm going to live in a sense of profound gratitude, and I'm going
to be grateful to God every day of my life for another chance. But
in Jonah chapter three, verse one and two, it says this. Then
the Lord spoke to Jonah again. Okay, here is he getting a second
chance. And he says, go to that great city Nineveh, and warn
them of their doom as I told you. In a circle the word warn.
We're going to come back to that in a minute. Says I want
you to go to the great city of Nineva and warn them of their doom
as I told you. For now, this is the exact same wording as
in chapter one. His mission has not changed. Jonah has gone through an
awful lot of problems. Since chapter one, he's been running from God.
He's been through all kinds of problems. He's been in the shipwreck a storm,
he's been thrown overboard, he's been swallowed by a great fish. He's
had all kinds of bad stuff happened in his life. But when he's given
a second chance, God says, up by the way, the mission hasn't
changed. It's the exact same thing I told you to do. It's what
I made you to do. It's what I created you do. It's what
I decided you would do with your life before you were born. Your mission
has not changed. No matter what you've been through. No matter how many
problems you've had, how much stress you've gone through, how many losses you've
had, how many sins you've committed, hadn't done one thing to change your
life. Mission. What God created you for, what He designed you for,
is still in full force. I want you to write this down on
your outline. Circumstances may change me, but they never changed my mission.
What a fantastic message from Pastor Rick. And now this really is one of
my favorite parts of the broadcast. Letters from our list. Here's Rick did
you know that you can listen to Daily Hope every day through our podcast.
Many of our listeners say they make this part of their quiet time each day.
You can actually download the podcast at Pastorick dot com and then you could
listen on the go whenever it's convenient for you. For instance, Debbie,
one of our listeners, says that she listens on her lunch break. Here's
what she wrote, Hey, Pastor Rick, your podcast is the perfect way
to just relax from a busy job and it refreshes, It fills my heart
with hope and energy, helps me be a light for Jesus and what is
sometimes a stressful and tiring day. And Debbie continues in the note, she
wrote, I recently came out of a two year period of depression and chronic
stress brought on by my mother's passing. I'm sorry, Debbie, and she
said, it took a long time to rebuild my confidence and hope and to
restore my daily connection with God. But the format of the Daily Hope podcast
is just perfect in that it's twenty five minutes of godly practice, biblical teaching
that I can absorb now having it available online for free, she says,
has been such a blessing. It's made such a significant impact on my personal
healing, and so I'm happily sending money to support this podcast because I know
it's a good soul and spirit food for anybody who listens to it. Bless
you and thank you for teaching me how God works through the pain that life
sometimes brings. You remain a spiritual lighthouse to me. Well, Debbie,
I know that God's going to continue to help you grow, help you learn,
and I'm blessed that He's using Daily Hope podcasts to do that in your
life. Thank you, Thank you, Debbie, and thanks to all of
you for supporting Daily Hope. Your financial gifts make it possible for us to
tell people around the world that there's hope in Jesus. Thanks everybody for listening
today, and I pray that you'll receive God's blessings because I know that even
when you can't see them, God is pouring his blessings into your life.
Would you like to help support Pastor Rick in this ministry financially? We'll go
to pastor dot com or text the word Hope to eight hundred, six hundred,
five thousand and four. Once again, Pastorick dot com or text the
word hope to eight hundred six hundred five thousand and four and thank you so
much for your support. We hope you'll join us next time when we look
into God's Word for our daily hope. This program is sponsored by Pastor Rick's
Daily Hope and your generous financial support.