Dear Members and Friends of our ELS:

Have you ever prayed in an unusual place? I doubt that we would find many who have prayed from inside the belly of a fish. But Jonah did. He prayed: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry. You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me” (Jonah 2:2-3).

Dr. Martin Luther urges us to take note of what Jonah did not say: “The waves and the breakers.” Instead Jonah prayed, “Your waves and breakers.” Luther commented: “Jonah felt in his conscience that the sea with its waves and billows was the servant of God and of his wrath, to punish sin.”

What waves does God send crashing over your life and mine to have us see our sins for what they are? There are times in our lives, too, where we are in need of a swift, divine slap of a wave in our faces. God does this in order to have us see the truth of what we read in the book of Proverbs: “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.” (Proverbs 28:13).

Only you can know your own personal sins; only I can know my own personal sins before the Lord. But wait! God is the one who had his prophet Jeremiah write: “My eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from me, nor is their sin concealed from my eyes” (Jeremiah 16:17). God sees all. Godis the one who has authored the commandments that we break. God is the one who threatens to punish all those who transgress his commandments.

Jonah saw his sin and humbly confessed it. Even from inside that smelly cavity of the fish he remembered the mercy of God: “I said, ‘I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again to your holy temple... You brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God...Salvation comes from the Lord’” (Jonah 2:4, 6, 9).

We, too, have hope as we confess our sins to our God no matter how many and how great they may be. Why? Our hope is in the same God of mercy. He has redeemed us from the pit of hell by the blood of Jesus Christ shed at the cross. For all who look in faith to Christ, the threat of punishment for sin is gone. In Christ, His own Son, our God has given us His pardon! On account of Christ, God says that He remembers our sins no more. And in His temple, His church, He dispenses the Means of Grace, His Word and Sacraments, wherein His forgiveness is found.