Jonah 1

Ben Linn preaching from Jonah 1.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Jonah one No the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amiti, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshis from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Jobbah and found a ship going to Tarshis. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarsh, away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lahor a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his God, and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship, and had laid down and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your God. Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish. And they said to one another, Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they said to him, Tell us, on whose account this evil has come upon us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you? And he said to them, I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. Then the men was exceedingly afraid and said to him, What is this that you have done? For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them. Then they said to him, What shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us? For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. He said to them, Pick me up and hurl me into the sea. Then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you. Nevertheless the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. Therefore they called out to the Lord, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you. So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, and so reads God's word.

SPEAKER_03 3:25

But uh we're gonna be in Jonah chapter one, so keep that open in front of you. My name's Ben. If you don't know me, I'm the executive pastor here at City Church. Add my welcome to Peter's. If you don't have a Bible, of course there's the there's the physical option. Maybe you don't want to do the welcome shame at this point in the sermon. That's fine. Uh you can always uh Google and find uh Jonah 1 ESV, English Standard Version. That's the version we will be using. This is the start of a new sermon series for us here. Uh we finished Luke last week. So that was about three and a half months that we were there. Great to get into that gospel, the story of Jesus' life. We'll be the next four weeks in Jonah, and then after that, we plan to go to Revelation for a short series there, before, Lord willing, our summer psalm series that we'll get to in July and August. But today we start Jonah. Now, Jonah might be familiar to it to you, it may not. But let me just say, coming to this and and looking at it critically and trying to figure out how to how to share from this book, it is a strange book, friends. It is a weird book. Maybe you're seeing that. Just here in the first chapter, you can see it. But if you look at the overall structure of the book, right, the Bible has a lot of books that are prophetic books. They're written by prophets, they're written about prophecy. All throughout the Old Testament, we see books like this, books like Isaiah, Jeremiah. And the thing about books of prophecy is, well, they're mostly prophecy, right? They're mostly God's words that he shares with his messenger. That's what a prophet is. He shares his words with the messenger, and then the messenger shares them with the people. That's what a prophet does, that's their job. They share God's words. But these books will usually have some sense of narrative in them, some context around what the prophet is sharing. You know, if you look at Isaiah chapter 7, for example, it starts off with, you know, such and such event happened, and the Lord sent Isaiah to bring such and such this message. But Jonah really has very little by way of prophetic messages to the people. In fact, spoiler alert, right? We get to chapter 3, Jonah actually brings his message to the people of Nineveh, and his entire message to them based on this book is five words in the Hebrew. What a sermon that would be, right? But the rest of this book is all narrative. It's very strange. And that's not even counting all of the strange things that happen in this narrative, right? You have a prophet, right? Somebody who is charged by God with a mission. And his response is kind of, eh. This isn't to say that there have never been, you know, reluctant prophets. You know, the prophet Jeremiah, for example, is sometimes called the weeping prophet, because God gave him some messages that I'm sure he didn't want to hear, let alone have to share with other people. But he did. Jonah, not so much. I mean, ultimately, spoiler alert, he does bring the message to the Ninevehites, people of Nineveh there. But it's really hard to say, did Jonah ever really cop on here? Did he ever really get it? And in our chapter this morning, we have God using weather and a fish to get Jonah back on track. So we have to ask ourselves, how do we regard this book? How can we understand it? Well, how do we see it? And there have been a lot of different ideas over the centuries, but really what it breaks down to is this book literal? Is this a literal story, or is it somehow figurative? By literal, I mean this is historical, this actually happened, this was a person, a place, and a time. This all came as it says here in the book. And you know, Jonah, the son of Amitai, we do see him mention other places in scripture. So, you know, there's there's certainly support for the idea that it could be a literal, historical account. Some other people have suggested that maybe it's it's a teaching story, right? It's a parable, it's a vision, it's a midrash, whatever. And it is there just to teach us and show us some moral lesson. That's hard to say, right? We know from the Apostle Paul in the New Testament in Romans, he says that uh whatever was written in former days, that's the Old Testament, whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. So, whether Jonah is literal or figurative, we have that promise that it's for our instruction and encouragement. But I'd caution you in one way when you're thinking about this. If you come to Jonah and you say, you know what, I'm gonna just look at this as some kind of a figurative thing because it seems a bit weird, a bit far-fetched, maybe a bit fantastical. Be careful with that. And I was uh Victoria pointed out in staff meeting this week when we were looking at this. She's like, the Bible is full of stuff that we would consider to be weird or far-fetched, right? Making God making a donkey talk or making the sun stand still. And let's not forget, the centerpiece of the Christian faith is that Jesus died and rose again. So we're Christians, we do far-fetched. So let's make sure we don't dismiss this book as a fairy tale just because it seems unlikely. Let's not put God in a box there. God works in unlikely ways. And Jonah surely is an unlikely prophet, unlikely person to be featured here. The book of Jonah here is something of a lens, maybe a mirror. Shows us things about God, shows us things about ourselves. The first thing that we're going to look at here is about God, and it is that God is mighty to save. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, obviously, God is powerful in this story. He's got a lot of his own power, capability on display. But the power that's on display is very specific. It's all tied to saving. How does the book start? Look at verse number one. It says, The word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. Now, why is God sending word to Nineveh that they're doing evil? Surely if he wanted to punish them for it, he could just wipe them off the map. Right? He could send fire, he could send disease, he could send confusion. But what does he tell Jonah to bring to them? Bring them word. Bring them warning. You know, if disaster is coming and you know it, you can prepare for it. And if you know why the disaster is coming, maybe you can prevent it altogether. We'll see this in chapter three. Don't get too far ahead of us here. Don't steal Peter's thunder. He's gonna be talking about that in a couple of weeks. But for now, the the event that kicks this entire strange story of Jonah off is God. God moving for the saving of the people of Nineveh. And that in itself is strange, interesting, isn't it? Nineveh was a great city in the Assyrian Empire. Not part of Israel, not part of God's people. It's especially interesting when you look at the book of 2 Kings. 2 Kings is in the Old Testament, it is a history book. It tells the story of Israel in the age of the kings. And in chapter 14, there is a reference to Jonah. It talks about him. Jonah was doing his job as a prophet, and he was advising a king called Jeroboam based on God's word, and the result was that the Israelites, people of God, there, were able to restore their borders. So territories that have been lost to foreign enemies, incursions and fights and whatever else, they were able to be brought back. It says, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah, the son of Amitai. So God used Jonah, presumably before the events of our book, to save and restore his own people. Now, the funny thing is, I don't know if it's funny, the strange thing is, the nation of Israel as a whole was pretty far from God at this time. This king Jeroboam was a very wicked king, and he led the people in wickedness. The same time that you've got Jonah over here, you know, sharing God's words of restoration and victory, you've got another prophet called Amos, who is calling out the nation for its evil. But even so, despite all of the stuff that's going on in the nation, God had mercy on them and he acted to save. But isn't it funny that God is now sending this same Jonah to save this foreign enemy? Well, Jonah thought it was strange, presumably, and he wasn't having it. And he heads off in the other direction, doesn't he? But still we see that God is using that power, that mighty to save power for Jonah as well. Just like the Ninevehites, right? If if if God had wanted to uh punish Jonah, he could have ended him, right? He could have unalived him, as the kids say. But he doesn't. God is even intent on saving Jonah from himself. You know, verse 4 says, the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. This was no ordinary storm. It must have been, again, strange. Must have been a strange storm because the sailors, these are guys who make their living sailing these waters. They're terrified. Right? They dump their cargo. This is their economic security here. They dump it and they just start to pray. They ask other people to pray. Their situation was hopeless. God acts again, right? In verse 7, it says, They said to one another, Come let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us. And they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. God left no doubt, no uncertainty. You want to know whose fault this is? You want to know why this supernaturally enhanced squall is falling on you? It's Jonah. And Jonah knows it. The sailors press him for answers. All of a sudden they want to know his whole story. I want to know his life story. What's the deal here? Who are you? Where'd you come from? What's your job? You know, just a few verses back, he was sleeping below the decks. They weren't too concerned about him then. But uh, verse 9, and verse 9 is, I don't know, I don't know if funny is the right word here either, but it's kind of a humorous answer. Because he says, I'm a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. You fear the Lord, Jonah? Is that is that your final answer there? No. You're you're at least not fearing the Lord when you're running away from him. You're not fearing the Lord, you're not showing him respect, you're not living your life out to please him. You're running away. But irony aside, you really have to wonder, you know, these these sailors have got to be hearing this, going, oh no, we're done. We're toast. Because you figure they probably would have had in their minds, they would have had the idea of maybe kind of regional gods, regional, local deities, idols, spirits that were for specific places or people groups. But Jonah here saying, hey, I'm running away from the God who made it all. The one who's the biggest, the baddest. Now, you and I standing here today, we know that this God is mighty to save. But the sailors, they probably thought, oh no, this fool has angered the most high. We are toast. But Jonas says, you can fix this by throwing me overboard. And they don't want to do that either, right? If this most high God is powerful enough to set this crazy, unprecedented storm in motion, he's watching. We kind of don't want to see, don't want him to see us throwing one of his own over the side here. So they work hard and they try to try to pull harder, try to get free, but guess what? It doesn't work. They finally call out to God, asking him not to hold them guilty for what they're about to do. When they toss Jonah over the side, storm just stops. Mighty to send the storm, mighty to end the storm. Again, leaving no doubt, no uncertainty. But God shows himself once again to be mighty to save. Where we would normally expect a man thrown overboard in the middle of the sea in a violent storm to die. God has other plans. Verse 17 the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Once again, if God's purpose had been Jonah's destruction, all he would have had to do was let nature take its course. But instead, he appointed a fish. I don't think anybody reading this for the first time or hearing this for the first time really had that on their bingo card. But if you read this in light of the New Testament, in light of what we know from the later parts of Scripture there, this sounds an awful lot like the second chapter of Ephesians. Second chapter of Ephesians is a great description of the gospel, right? It says that we were dead in our sins and trespasses. We were by nature enemies of God, objects of his wrath. Then it says, but God, being rich in mercy, made us alive together with Christ. And it's that kind of dramatic reversal. On the one side you have Jonah, and he's running from God. He's heading in the opposite direction. He's thrown overboard into a churning, stormy sea, but God, God appointed a fish. Jonah was in the fish for three days and three nights. It's as if God's saying, I'm not trying to destroy you, Jonah. I'm not here to punish you for your rebellion. I'm trying to get your attention to keep you from going down a self-destructive path. God is going to preserve Jonah and help him get back on course. Now, this idea of a God who is mighty to save might be new for some of you this morning. Maybe it's easy to think of God as mighty, but without that saving purpose, without that idea there. And of course, that idea of God is pretty frightening. By the way, when we talk about fearing the Lord, that's not what we're talking about. We're not talking about an abject terror. We're not talking about fear like we would think about being scared. We talk about the fear of the Lord, we're talking about living your life before him and respecting him and having reverence for him. God sent a storm to shake and a fish to swallow Jonah. You might be thinking, yeah, count me out. This sounds a little bit much. Or maybe you're on the other side of the fence. Maybe your view of God is that he would save if only he were strong enough, or aware enough, or wise enough to actually do anything. This view of God is a little more easy to swallow, but ineffective. Now I think the mighty and the saving are both critical to our understanding of who God is. And we can see them both in this chapter. God shows himself as creator and sustainer and ruler of the natural world. But what is sprinkled in, what's baked into all of these descriptions here, is that he has a saving purpose. Saving the lost. If you struggle to see God as mighty to save, I'd encourage you to reflect on that as we continue through this chapter. Now, make no mistake, the main chap the main character in Jonah's self-titled book here is not Jonah, but God. We've already seen God is mighty to save. Seen that the story starts and ends with God acting. But the second point shows us something about Jonah, and I'm going to clue you in on something here. Jonah is standing in for all of us, for the human race. The second point that we'll come to here is that we are prone to wander. Now, follow me through the chapter, you'll see it. God dispatches Jonah to Nineveh, and instead he goes to Tarshish. Now, Nineveh, it's a real place. It's around Mosul, up in northern Iraq. From Israel, it would be an overland journey, nowhere close to any shore. And yet, Jonah, what's his first response? He gets up and goes. Goes down to the sea. Nineveh's not a place that you sail to. It'd be like somebody saying, Why don't you go and preach the gospel in Tipperary, right? Landlock county there. But instead of going there, you head over to the ferry terminal and buy a ticket for the Isle of Man. And maybe you think, gosh, Jonah's just geographically challenged. He's not quite sure where he's meant to be going here. Verse 3 makes it very clear. He says that he's intending to go to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. Now, of course, that's laughable because Jonah would have known there's no place that's outside of God's presence. God's a prophet, after all. But this was his thought, and he admits as much in verse 10. That's what he tells the sailors that he's doing. If you look at the language used, it's kind of funny. Strange. Because we have this idea of going God's way is going up. Going away from God is going down. Okay? Verse 2, God says to arise, to go up, get up and go to Nineveh. Verse 3, Jonah goes down to Joppa. Verse 3, he goes down into the ship. Verse 5, he'd gone down into the inner parts of the ship. Verse 5, it says he'd laid down and gone to sleep. Think about the Old Testament, they talk about sleep, and sometimes that's kind of a metaphor for death. Okay, so maybe that's pointing us to the idea that there's no life apart from God, away from God. In verse 6, the captain wakes Jonah and says, Arise, get up, call on your God. Perhaps the biggest idea, an example of Jonah running away, comes in verse 12. He said to them, Pick me up and hurl me into the sea. Then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you. Now, think about what this means. At this stage, Jonah has no idea that God is appointing a fish to swallow him. What he's basically telling the sailors is, the way out of this storm is for you to kill me. And this is appalling in a couple of ways, really. First, Jonah figures the solution is his death, but he asked the sailors to do it, to take on that blood guilt for him. The bigger matter is this. He knows. This is a very, very basic doctrine that you see throughout the Old Testament, that God is gracious, that God is merciful, that he is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. And Jonah himself says this very clearly in chapter 4. So when the sailors ask what they can do to quiet the seas, Jonah could have stopped running. He's well aware, both from what he knows and from what he sees, that he has not escaped God's presence. He knows exactly why this storm is on. Surely he would know that the right way to solve his problem here is an act of repentance. What if instead of saying, throw me into the sea, he'd say, you know, come about, set a new course, let's head back for the shore, someplace that I can journey overland and do what the Lord commanded me to do in the first place, and then head to Nineveh. We have to assume that that that would have ended the storm just as quickly. But what he's basically saying in verse 12 is I would rather die than obey God. I would rather die than bring God's word to Nineveh. Funny part, like I say, it's not necessarily funny, haha. Jonah makes overtures. Makes reference to God, to fearing God. But it's a clear, it's so clear in this moment that he wants nothing to do with God. He refuses to stop running from God. He's not gonna obey, he's not gonna listen. But you know who will? Who will? Who will? The sailors. Take a look at that. Verse 16. What does it say there? The sailors, it says they feared the Lord exceedingly. This is after they've chucked Jonah into the deep, and the storm has stopped. The men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. Now, let's not forget, prior to this they were running from the Lord just as much as Jonah was. They recognized the reality of their situation, but before that, verse 13, Jonah says he's running from God, running from the God who made it all, running from the God who's everywhere. They're still rowing hard, they're still trying to escape this by their own efforts. But it's futile. They seem to recognize that their only hope in the situation is to fall on God's mercies. Now, as to this idea of a sacrifice and vows, this is worship, right? This is what this is meant to point us to. And the commentaries honestly are split on this. Some people say, oh, the sailors, they weren't necessarily actually converting, they just, you know, responding in the moment. Some would say, yes, they were converting. We can ask ourselves, you know, did they have this life-changing encounter that resulted in saving faith and repentance, or was it just a reaction of the moment? Obviously, only God knows for sure. Only the Lord knows. But I like to think that they did come to faith and that they were transformed that day. The reason is obviously it's not like they were worshiping, it's not like they were trying to cut a deal with God. You know, God, if you get us out of this, we'll follow you, we'll serve you, we'll honor you, we'll worship you. This is after the seas have already calmed down. They had seen up close and personal that God reigns over all. And their response was not to try and escape him, their response was not to try and hide from him, their response was to worship. And really, it's something only God can do, right? You think about this turn the rebellion of one man into salvation for several others. It's pretty cool. Now, we'll see in chapter 4 that Jonah's reason for running from God was because he didn't want the Ninevehites, the people of Nineveh, to get God's mercy. And, you know, fair enough, the Ninevehes were known as a ruthless and brutal people. But again, let's not forget what was going on in Israel at this time. The king was wicked, he was leading the people in wickedness. You can read the books, you know, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles. You can see all kinds of stuff in here about just how bad the people were. Especially this northern kingdom. They took up the evil practices of surrounding nations, you know, human sacrifice and all kinds of terrible things. Sometimes they were even going above and beyond their neighbors. And yet, God still showed them mercy. Their borders were restored in this time, like I said. God didn't have to do that, but he did. He brought comfort and relief. He showed unexpected kindness to his people. Jonah's here saying, It's not right that you should show mercy to Nineveh. By the way, thanks for doing that for us when we didn't deserve it, but it's not right that you do that to Nineveh. And don't we do the same? Don't we do the same? It's great that God's merciful to me. Sometimes I don't want him to be merciful to others. The modern example that I will compare this to, and maybe you're with me on this, is deciding how fast to drive on the motorway. Right? This is a great spot for our relativism, isn't it? Anyone who's going faster than me, faster than I want to drive, well, they're just reckless. They're looking for trouble. They shouldn't be allowed on the road. Dangerous. But anyone who's going slower than me, gosh, why are they so incompetent behind the wheel? Can't they keep with the flow of traffic? They shouldn't be allowed on the road either. And what's the standard in all of that? It's certainly not the speed limit, right? I might be going well above the speed limit and come up behind somebody and be like, why are you holding me up here? The standard there is me. Standard is my desire and my sense of what's right. And we do the same thing.

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Right?

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We can make ourselves out to be better than the people around us. I'm holier, I'm closer to God, far more humble, right? Ironic. But we do that. Our standard shouldn't be one another. Our standard is the Lord Himself. Let's think about this Lord, mighty to save that He is. He's holy, He's perfect. And the faster that I can recognize that I'm not meeting His standard, the faster I will accept someone else coming to faith and repentance. Even someone, quote unquote, worse than me. Because each one of us is in need of that mercy. Each one of us is, like I mentioned earlier from Ephesians, an object of God's wrath. But God, rich in mercy, can make us alive in Christ. Not our works, not our efforts, not our intentions, not our achievements. What do you say? Is it time to stop running from God? Maybe God is calling you to share his truth with someone. Maybe he is calling you to do something, to say something. Is it time to stop running? The third thing we're gonna see through the lens of Jonah, chapter one, is again gonna sound a bit strange, but everything has at this point. Jonah points us to Jesus. I know, sounds crazy. You have this rebellious, disobedient prophet. This guy's running from God, this guy's refusing his mission, seemingly more concerned with his own sense of nationalism than in saving the lost. How is it possible that he can point us to Jesus? Well, that's how the Old Testament works sometimes. The Old Testament, they call it types or shadows. It's pointing us ahead to Jesus. But it's not pointing us through perfect people doing perfect things. Sometimes it's through a type, sometimes it's through an anti-type. But no matter who they are, nobody is going to perfectly image and show us who Jesus is. Great example of this is King David. This would have been a while before Jonah. But David, you can read about him in 1st and 2 Samuel. He's called a man after God's own heart. That's great. He is serving as God's anointed king. That's Messiah. That's what that means. He leads the people in righteousness, he defeats their enemies, he provides victory to people who don't have to contribute to it. Sounds an awful lot like Jesus. But also, this David, he's an adulterer, he's a murderer, sometimes faithless, sometimes disobedient. So Jesus, as Tim Keller would put it, you can check this out on YouTube. It's one of my favorite videos on YouTube, true and better. Look up Tim Keller, true and better. But he said that David is the true, or Jesus is the true and better David. Elements of David's life look something like Jesus, but Jesus succeeds where David failed. Same story with Jonah, right? We might look at Jonah's story and say, well, sure, he failed a lot more than David did, but really that's us just applying our own human relative morality, our standard that's not God's standard. No human in the Old Testament is going to meet God's standard. Definitely not Jonah. But his story still points ahead to Jesus, even unintentionally. Right, verse 2, God sends Jonah to God's own enemies with the message of salvation. But where Jonah refused God's mission, where Jonah ran away from God, Jesus said, Not as I will, but as you will, ultimately choosing to die for his enemies. Right, Jonah falls asleep on the ship and sleeps through the storm. You could even say in some ways that he calmed the storm like Jesus did. But of course, Jonah was going to his watery grave as his ultimate act of disobeying God. Jesus died on the cross for us, as his ultimate act of obeying. In verse 16, this is probably the place where you could say that Jonah most accidentally shows us Jesus. He accidentally has already shown the sailors who the Father is. He's accidentally shown them signs and wonders. He's accidentally offered to die in their place, and he accidentally inspires them to faith and worship. But beyond all of that, we can see what Jesus had to say about Jonah. Jonah is mentioned by Jesus in Matthew chapter 12. I'll read this, read this to you, and you can see what Jesus has to say. It says, Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you. But he answered them, an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. For they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. Here Jesus is saying, if I may, paraphrase, just like Jonah, I'm going to be buried, be cut off from the land of the living for three days, and when I emerge, it will mean salvation. Not just for the Ninevehes, but for all who come by faith. And by the way, the Ninevites responded with faith when they were visited. Spoiler alert. This puts them over and above the religious leaders that Jesus was speaking against in his day. It's actually quite a pointed statement that Jesus is making. The scribes and the Pharisees, the religious insiders. Well, they're just as blind and hypocritical as Jonah. And who will be saved? The outsiders. People like the sailors in this chapter here. People who are able to see their need of salvation and their utter inability to work it out themselves. Just like the Ninevehites, just like the sailors, just like the quote-unquote sinners that come to faith in repentance in Jesus' day. Just like us, if you've come to Jesus as Lord, it's because you've recognized that you're not able to work that salvation out on your own. Jesus, the true and better Jonah, who was cast out so that we could be brought in for our salvation. So the best thing I can tell you, friends, is don't be like Jonah. If God is calling you today, don't run away. And I mean that if you're following Jesus, if you're a follower of Jesus, if you're a Christian today, are there ways that God is leading you that you're unwilling to follow Him? Are there things in your life that He wants you to take up? Things that He wants you to lay down? Yeah, just as a side note, we'll all have those. That's what sanctification is. That's this process, this lifelong growth, stripping away the things that are selfish in us, turning them over to the Lord. But let's take heed, let's be willing participants in the Lord's growth of us. Not be like Jonah. But I also mean this for people who don't yet know Jesus as Lord. If you don't yet consider yourself a Christian, remember, God is mighty to save. Maybe you're here this morning and you're like C.S. Lewis, C.S. Lewis guy who wrote Narnie on a bunch of other, a bunch of other books. He talked about his own journey to faith. And it was like he was becoming more and more convinced that the gospel was true and that God was for him and all of these things, and he was still very reluctant to respond in faith. He ultimately did, of course, and got some really nice uh books about the faith from him. But the question I have for you, if that's where you're at, is it time to stop running from God? We'll have some elders down front after the service. We'd love to talk to you. In the meantime, let's uh remember this God who's mighty to save. Let's uh let's uh set aside our prone-to-wander natures. Let's follow him. Let me pray. Lord God, thank you for this wild book of Jonah. Thank you that uh it it speaks so much truth about who you are and the work that you do in this world. Thank you that it shows us a bit of a mirror to things that are perhaps less than flattering about our own natures, Lord. And yet we see that you can call broken and sinful people to new life when they recognize their absolute need of you. Lord, I pray for everyone here this morning, whether they're following you, whether they're not, they would see who you are in a new way. Pray that we would all be grown, brought forward by your spirit through your word. We ask this all in Jesus' name.

unknown 40:52

Amen.

SPEAKER_01 41:07

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