Nineveh

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

Good morning everybody. My name is Daniel Oster and I'm a pastor here at South Burleson Baptist Church. And I get to preach a few times a year and usually when I do, I send my 90 year old grandfather an audio recording of our sermon. And I talked to him a few weeks ago and he's like, hey, I listened to your sermon twice, my last sermon. I was like, oh, that's great. He said, yeah, I fell asleep through the first time so I had to go back, listen to it a second time. And I was like, well, that's very encouraging, grandpa. Thank you very much. So I'll see if I can't do a better job this time. We're in the middle of a summer Bible world tour. We're hitting different spots in the Bible and just talking about what God is doing there. And today we're gonna look at another familiar place called Nineveh. And so part of this is I always ask myself, okay, like, where is Nineveh today?

I like to know like the historical context. And so this gives you an idea where Nineveh is today. It's in a city called Mosul, which is in Iraq, in Northern Iraq. And Mosul may sound familiar to some of you guys because during the Iraqi War, it was a headquarters for ISIS. So there's a lot of like today, what it looks like is there was a lot of like bombing, still kind of debris from all of that then. Biblically, we know that Nineveh occupied about 1800 acres and it's set on the east bank of the Tigris River, which we see that's that river coming through there. And it later became the capital city for Assyria. And so there's still like excavation happening where they're pulling out things from Nineveh. And one of the biggest kind of great finds was that they actually found like the palace underground. A lot of it's still intact. And a lot of this is still in the British,

a lot of this is in the British Museum, which I think would be, if we wanna take a field trip to London and go see the British Museum, I'm down. But this, they found, I mean, feet, about 100 feet of carvings of the wall that lined the palace like this. They also found some cool statues. And it kind of tells the history of the city and their conquest and who they were. And we know, biblically from the Bible, that the Assyrians were used a lot by God to punish the Israelites. We hear in Isaiah chapter 10, he says that the Assyrians were a rod, that God uses a rod of his anger. And so when we hear in the historical documents talk about the Assyrians, we know them to be very violent, very cruel people. The next picture here is part of the carving. This is them actually skinning people alive. So one thing they would do, and they would capture a city, is they would take the leaders out in front of everybody

and they would skin them alive. And that was kind of one of their calling cards of who they were. And so very brutal, vicious, horrible people. And that context is very important for us today because we're gonna be in the book of Jonah. And it's important to know who they are and how Jonah thinks of them. And when we talk about Jonah, the word picture that comes to everybody's mind is a big fish, am I right? When you say Jonah, you ought to make a big fish. He was like in two verses of the whole book of Jonah, but gets a lot of press. And we're not gonna be talking much about the big fish this morning because it can kind of make you miss what's really happening in Jonah. And so today we're gonna look at a theme that's really strong in Jonah, but it's also strong throughout the entire Bible. And that is that God is always in pursuit. Okay, we're gonna look at the fact

that God is always in pursuit. And what's unique about that is this morning, what's unique about God's pursuit is that he's gonna be in pursuit of even in despite our tendencies to flee, and he's always in pursuit of those who don't deserve it. Those are the two points we're gonna look at today. And both of those do not sound like reasons to pursue something, right? Something that's running from you, something that doesn't deserve you to go after it, but that's what we're gonna look at is how God's heart is different from ours. So let's pick up in Jonah one. Let's look at the first verse, and it says, now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. So Jonah's a character in the Bible. We see him originally in 2 Kings 14, and it refers to him as a servant of God and a prophet,

and he prophesied that the borders of Israel would be from Hamath to Syria, and it came true. And here in the book of Jonah, he received special instructions, and it's to go to Nineveh and to preach against it. That's what the NIV says, preach against it, the ESV says, call out against. So let's look at what Jonah does in the next verse, in verse three. It says, but Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish. From the presence of the Lord, he went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, and he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. Okay, so God tells him to do something, and Jonah does not do that. Here's a map. As you can tell, I'm like a very literal thinker, right? So we see Joppa, that's where Jonah is, and God is calling him to go to Nineveh. That's still not a short haul. It's 550 miles away, probably over a month's journey,

but what does Jonah do? Is he gets in a boat and he starts heading to Tarshish. Now this, which is 2,500 miles away, far away, they don't even, you know, this part of the world didn't even really know what was west. This would be like us saying, like 10 buck two, right? I don't even know what 10 buck two is, but it's to refer to a place that's just far, far away, and that's where Jonah pays a fare, gets in a boat, and starts heading that way. At this point, we're not really clear on why Jonah is fleeing. We will know here pretty soon, but we do know that God asked him to go one way, and he decides to go another way. And so this is kind of what brings us to our first point, is that we see God is always in pursuit despite our own tendencies to flee, okay? So when we dive deep in the book of Jonah, which is only four chapters, I didn't count the verses, but it's like 50, it's a very short book, 50, 60 verses.

When we dive deep and we start really looking at who Jonah is, you're not gonna like this guy, okay? I know he's kind of like famous for children's stories, but you're just not gonna like, he's a jerk, self-absorbed. How can he possibly reject what God's telling him to do? It's so clear. And so the difficulty we have with the book of Jonah, is it actually is like a mirror into our own lives. And when we look at the book of Jonah, and it's reflecting, that's why everybody has the name tag, that was me, everybody's wearing a name tag that says Jonah this morning. Because when we, except, okay, that's okay.

When we go through the book of Jonah, what I don't want us to do, is distance ourselves from him. Okay? Because we are, we're gonna see how much we are like Jonah. And so the first thing we see Jonah do here, is have a tendency to flee. And so our fleeing God does not involve typically us getting in a boat and selling to different parts of the world. What does fleeing look like for us? We're gonna look at three ways. One is second guessing God. The second one's gonna be spiritual drift, and the third one's gonna be slumber, okay? So the easiest comparison to kind of what Jonah is doing here, fleeing from God, involves God asking him to do something that's big and disruptive, and what does he do, is he second guesses God, second guesses God, by no way. This would be like, if I was to walk in, Dr. Danny Ivy, who's not here this morning. If I was to walk in her office,

and I had all these red splotches all over me, and I said, can you tell me what is going on? And she runs tests, and she says, you have a nut allergy, okay? What she does not know is, peanut butter is one of my favorite foods, okay? I don't like that answer. If I was to say, you know what? That's just, that's your opinion. I'm gonna go find somebody else. I'm gonna have this checked out somewhere else. What I'm doing is I am second guessing what she's telling me. And what is the reason that I'm second guessing her? It's because what she's telling me, I don't really like, I don't wanna hear. I want somebody else to tell me something that I wanna hear. And what basis is she telling me that? From her professional experience from the test, that there's just truth in what she is saying. And so when we second guess things that God is telling us to do, it's much like that.

It usually involves something where it doesn't really jive with what we want to do. It's not something we agree with. And so we essentially are telling God that we know better, that we know better than the holy one, that he must be mistaken. So God could be asking us to do something that doesn't fit with our normal flow of life. And why would we change? These verses in Isaiah have been rattling around in my head for like two weeks. So I want you to pay attention to these because I think they're just, I think meant for this morning. Isaiah 55, eight through nine. It says, for my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are my ways. Your ways, my ways declares the Lord. For as heaven is higher than the earth, so are my ways, higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Okay, so many times when we're like seeking God and we're trying to live a life that's honoring to him,

if something doesn't go the way we think it should, we kind of consider ourself on the same wavelength as God in his thinking. Like we're thinking on the same. And we hear from Isaiah here that God's ways and thoughts are way beyond our comprehension. So in our tendencies to second guess God and what God's asking us to do, we must remind ourselves of who he is and put our faith in him, okay? So like Jonah, we too like to flee with second guessing. Another way that we like to have a tendency to flee is spiritual drift, okay? I think this is actually probably more common than the first and it's probably hard for us to talk about it or even kind of like identify it in our lives. But let's look at the next two verses, verses four and five in chapter one. It says, but the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea and there was a mighty tempest of the sea so that the ship threatened to break up,

the mariners were afraid, each cried out to his God and they hurled 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 he had lain down and was fast asleep, okay? So this boat is moving away from what God is telling him to do. And it's not like Jonah is doing anything to actually kind of like make the boat go. He's just allowing it, he's not exerting inner energy to stop it, right? So his lack of effort to do anything against the drifting of God's presence is something that's real for us today, the spiritual drift to allow this drift.

And it happens by inaction. And I would bet that this is more common than us just taking our fist at God and saying no, no, no. But the root cause of a spiritual drift is our tolerance for sin. Even if it's very small, our focus on Christ can be slightly distracted and we begin to spiritually drift from what God is calling us to do and how we're to live our lives. Listen to the preacher in Hebrews in chapter three, verse 12, he says, take care brothers, lest there be any of you, an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day as long as it is called day that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. See, when we are passive with sin in our lives, it begins, we're being lied to, that it can take a place. Maybe it's not that bad, maybe we do more good than bad. We, as a family, we put a bird feeder

in the back of our yard that looks out the window so that we could see birds feed, which ended up being these big fat doves and it's frustrating, but they cause seed to go all over the place. And so a couple weeks later, we noticed, I turn on the back porch light and we noticed a couple like rats just vroom, vroom, runnin'. So we put traps out, caught a few of them.

And then a week later, we realized that this bin we had in our backyard was like infested with all these like mice and stuff. So we dragged that thing, and you just wished you had video of this, but and it was out to the front and trash picked it up. Still feeling our bird feeders. And then a couple weeks later, I'm working upstairs and I start hearing like scratching in the attic, running around, okay. And it was like, okay, I get up in the attic, I shine a flashlight, I see like three or four mice just scatter, I didn't scream, men, just let y'all know I didn't scream. And it was at that point, we're like, okay, we gotta get rid of these. I mean, we didn't have these before the bird feeder, we caught an exterminator and got rid of them. But what I say that to say, if we wanted to solve the problem like square one, we would have just removed the bird feeders.

But what was the problem? We were just tolerating what it was doing. We're trying to do these kind of like small fixes around it. And I think that's really kind of our mentality to sin sometimes. Instead of when they're sinning our lives, sometimes we're not really wanting to just grab, just take it to the Lord and repent of it. We maybe try some things around it. And what happens is, as we spiritually drift, we look up, kind of like I did, and go, we have an infestation, like something has gone horribly wrong, and it's at that point that we're going to God. And so our passivity allows spiritual drift, and many times it can go unnoticed.

And you look up and you see that you have a house full of mice and you're like, ah, I need to do something. So this is why daily repentance is so important. This is why it's important to go to the Lord daily and just kind of do a self-check of going like, is there something in my life that I'm putting above you? Is there something in my life that I need to just lay at your feet and repent of and work against? Teach me to hate sin. This is a prayer, I preach, I pray a lot. Teach me to hate sin the way you do. And I'm reading through the Old Testament now. God does not like sin. Just pick up a book in the Old Testament and just read through it. He hates sin. And so for us to see sin that same way.

So in fleeing from God, like Jonah, we second-guess God, we allow spiritual drift through tolerance to sin, and it also can lead to sin slumber. Let's read verses five again in verse six. It says, but Jonah had gone down into the end of the part of the ship and he laid down and was fast asleep. So the captain came down to him and said, what do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your God. Perhaps the God will give you a thought to us that we may not perish. So it tells us the storms were so bad when Jonah was sleeping that it was tearing up the ship. And the fishermen, the mariners were running around trying to think, and where was Jonah? He was sound asleep. And I feel, and this is another picture on how our tolerance to sin can lead us to a sin slumber, where we're just fast asleep to what sin is doing in our life.

I was talking to a guy that I do business with a few years ago, and when I was on the phone with him, I could hear the smoke alarm chirp. You know that annoying sound? Has anybody ever taken their smoke alarm out in the garage because they can't figure out how to make that noise? And we were having a conversation, and I'd hear it every three or four minutes, and I didn't say anything. And we'd talk again another week or two later, and I hear the same chirping. And I'm like, man, how's that noise? It's not just driving you crazy. And he's like, what? I'm like, you're smoking alarm chirp. He's like, oh yeah. He's like, it's weird, I don't even really hear it anymore. And I'm like, and the reason he didn't hear it is because he ignored it so much, it just kind of became part of his life. I mean, he tuned it out. And I think that's a really good picture on what can happen to us with sin,

is when we ignore it, and we ignore the prompting, by the Holy Spirit, we can be like Jonah. We can be like that guy with the chirping of the battery, is that we just don't even hear it. We're not even attentive to it anymore. But what caused Jonah to become aware of it? It's someone going down, is shaking him awake, and saying, arise, and call out to your God. Shaking him awake. I mean, I imagine the captain of the ship is like, how could you be sleeping in a time like this? We're near death.

And that's why we really put a lot of emphasis on church. Church in general doesn't get a great name, but the fellowship of believers, the family, a fellowship that we have here, Sunday mornings, growth group, life groups, one of the major reasons that we get together with other people is so that if we become numb to sin, if we become like Jonah asleep, that we have somebody in our life that can grab us by the shoulders and shake us and go, what are you doing? And I have guys like that in my life. And so if you're, so if, and the Bible even says this in Galatians 6:1, it says, brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him with a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself so that you too may not be tempted. Matthew 18, 15 says, if your brother sins against you, you shall tell him his fault. Between you and him alone,

if he listens to you, then you've gained a brother. So the part that's hard about this is we have people that says, you know what, my spirituality is private. Like I just, no one really needs to know. And I would say, okay, well show me that biblically, where you find that biblically, because there's not a place. And then I would say, how are you, how can people speak into your life? On some things like this that you may have blind spots to. So fleeing from God, we see that we can second guess spiritual drift and sin slumber. And I really feel like this is like Satan's playground, are these things. And what happens is, is maybe we've began to spiritually drift away, and now we feel like God is mad at us. And we have to do some work to earn his favor back. We feel really ashamed.

We feel like maybe our sin, like just repenting, isn't really enough that we need to do something more. Maybe it's a sin that you have asked forgiveness for for over a hundred times. And how could God forgive you one more time? And I feel like Satan loves just like lumping that shame on us. But those feelings and those thoughts are lies, because what they do is they diminish what Jesus Christ did on the cross for us. If Christ's blood is sufficient for all to cover all sins, it's your sin times a hundred, times a thousand. And so when we start feeling that shame and we feel like we need to do something to kind of work back into God's favor, that's really diminishing what Christ did on the cross for us. And so the thought that God would even be pursuing us when we're entangled in sin, when we've turned our back on him, when we've decided that we like this sin more than him,

really doesn't make sense to us. Why would God pursue us in that? We're being so defiant. But that's kind of what the verses were saying in Isaiah, that his love is greater than our comprehension. And that's a good thing. So God's always pursuing us in our tendency to flee. The second point is God is always pursuing those who don't deserve it. So three characters in Jonah that we're gonna look at, one is the clueless fisherman, okay? And then we're gonna look at the evil Ninevites, and then we're gonna look at the self-absorbed Jonah. Okay, so let's start with the fisherman. And they're kind of a small, you kind of forget about the fisherman, but I just don't want us to miss this. Look in chapter one, verses 15 and 16. It says, talking about the fisherman, so they picked up Jonah and they hurled him into the sea. And remember, they didn't really want to. They tried to row back to shore and it didn't work.

So they finally picked him up, throw him a sea, and the sea ceased from raging. Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. Okay, so if you remember what the fishermen were doing when the storm was going, they were just kind of playing like the God lottery, right? They were praying to all these gods, god of wind, god of storm, god of water, god of fish, god of all these different things, saying which god? And that's when they wake up Jonah and they're like, hey, pray to one of your god, all little Gs, if you're reading in the Bible, all little Gs, right? But then when they see the big G, God, deliver them from the storm,

they fear him, the same kind of fear that it's talked about in Psalms, that we're called about to fear this reverent fear of who God is. And so it's interesting to see that God is still pursuing others, not seeking him, and are clueless. These men, polytheists, meaning that they worship many gods, and we see here that when they saw that the Lord, they sacrificed and made vows to him, probably not on the ship, probably later when they landed, but it's important to see God's impact on their lives. And people have these experiences with God, they see things, but that experience alone does not produce a relationship. And one of the biggest evidences is this, you think about the Pharisees, they saw Jesus do many miracles, had conversations with Jesus face to face, and their sin pointed out by the Son of God, and yet they felt more threatened than loved. So even in times that were difficult,

dire, maybe were not in walking with the Lord well, we still see that God is doing work around us, even when we're not focused on him. You got Jonah here, who's doing the complete opposite of what God is asking him to do. And what's God doing? He's still pursuing people around Jonah in his disobedience, in pursuing these fishermen. And so many of our lives, no matter where we are, even if we're like feeling, being Christian, but that's a real thing, like sometimes you just don't feel like doing it. That doesn't change the truth of who God is and who his heart is. And so we have all these little interactions in our day. There's multiple interactions, whether that's small ones in lines, rating rooms, I'm thinking about like teacher conferences this week, or meet your teacher. You just run into these people, sometimes you know, some you don't, and it's kind of these small conversations.

And we have people in our lives where we get into deep conversations. The one thing we need to make sure that we are of the mindset of is that assuming that God is in pursuit of them. And that may involve us. In Colossians 4-6 it says, "'Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, "'so that you may know the answer, "'to answer each person.'" So even though Jonah is just kind of going off on his own, and sometimes we may be going off on our own, trying to do things, the Lord is still at work around us, and our conversation is the way we're talking to people, is very important, and looking for opportunities to share with them on what Christ has done with us. So that's the clueless fisherman. Let's look at the evil Ninevites. So we're gonna pick up after Jonah's in the whale, or in the big fish, for a full chapter he prays. The fish spits him out, and it says that the Lord of the,

it kind of repeats the very first verse, says the Lord of the Lord came to Jonah, told him to go to Nineveh. So let's pick up in verse four, it says, Jonah began to go, this is chapter three, verse four, Jonah began to go into the city, go on a day's journey, he called out, yet 40 days in Nineveh shall be overthrown. Okay, that was the length of Jonah's sermon. Okay, it's eight words I think for us, it's five words in Hebrew. So I imagine Jonah walked halfway into the city, and I play these things out in my head. I don't even think, I would imagine he didn't even say it very loud. I don't know if he wanted people to hear. And he gives them, God tells them to preach against them. And I know y'all would be excited if Drew or I came in and only preached like a five word sermon, I'd be like, oh man, we're gonna line early at the lunch. But Jonah says this, and he checks the box saying,

okay, God told me to do this, check. Let's look at what, let's look at the reaction of the people in verse five. It says, in the people of Nineveh believed God, they called for a fast, put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them, the word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes, and he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything, let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out to mighty God, let everyone turn from his evil ways and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows, God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. And so when God saw this,

how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it. So Jonah goes and preaches this amazing sermon of five words in Hebrew, and what happens? The whole city breaks out in repentance. They believe, they called for a fast, they put on sackcloth, even the king declared that the beasts do the same.

Kind of a side point is this is proof that when we were talking to others about Christ, our words really don't matter. I mean, they matter, but it's not how we present them. The emphasis here is on the work that the Lord is doing. And through five words in a defiant Jonah who doesn't want the city, doesn't want, we're gonna see that in a minute, doesn't want this to happen, in five words God pricks the heart of the entire nation and they repent.

I picture Jonah just kinda standing there with his mouth open going, I just said five words in Hebrew, and you guys have done this. You're repenting, you're tearing your clothes, you're setting in ashes, you're fasting. And so for most of us though, unlike Jonah, we may not have people we just let that have brutally murdered our families or people we know, and that was this evil. We may not have interaction, but I think it's important to know Jonah's heart. I'm just gonna read this, I'm gonna read the scriptures up here. I'm just gonna read the first part of chapter four to let you know, this answers the question, why did Jonah flee? I think growing up I just thought he was scared to go. I thought, Ninevites are bad people, he's scared to go. But it tells us right here in chapter four, after all this happens, verse one, chapter four says, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was angry.

And he prayed to the Lord and said, oh Lord, is it not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That this is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. Poor Jonah, right? He's so upset that God saved these people. He wanted to see this city just devastated for what they've done. And so if it's not clear before, Jonah was not fleeing God because he was fearful of the Ninevites. He was fearful of what God would do for them. So with all the hurt in the world, I'm sure there are people in our history that fall into this category in different scales. Maybe it's someone in your family you don't talk to anymore. Maybe it's someone mistreated you at work or church.

It could be that you have faced physical and mental abuse by someone because there is real evil in the world. I don't want to diminish that. But the thing that's a hard truth for us Jonas to understand is that God loves those people and cares for them and would love to see them saved. And you may be saying, yeah, but you don't know what this person has done to me. And I would say there is a large list of people God used, murderers, adulterers, prostitutes, all these things that are heroes of the Bible.

I was gonna pull in some stories of modern, I don't know if you ever just heard a testimony of somebody who was criminal, in prison and they found Jesus and were like, yeah. Those kind of testimonies are like, whoo, I used to joke I wish I had a really good testimony because I was just raising church all my life and I felt I could be cooler if something, you know. But when you hear those you're like, yeah. The part that's hard is if you're the victim of that person's past, it's a lot harder to go, oh yeah, I'm glad that person found Jesus. But if that person had done something to hurt your family or something, it becomes more real. So what is this saying?

We've established that God loves people even if they're evil. What does that really mean for me? Well, I'm glad you asked because God gives an object lesson to what I'm saying is the self-absorbed Jonah, okay. Let's read verse five in chapter four. It says, Jonah went out to the city and he sat east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under the shade till he should see what shall become of the city. So I wanna stop here for a minute. So Jonah goes outside the city, he builds a little shack thing and he's looking at the city to see what may happen. Now, do we think that he's out there to see all the repentance going on and a nation turned to the Lord? No, I would bet that he is hoping that this is just a fluke, give it some time, they're turned their backs against God and he'll get to watch fire rain down from heaven on him. So he builds a little shack, okay.

And he's sitting out there. So, but the Lord, in our theme of pursuit, the Lord is still pursuing Jonah. I mean, earlier he said, Lord, you saved these people. Now that you did that, I would rather, I'm so angry, I'd just rather die, okay. So he goes out, he builds a little thing and he's still kind of hoping, I imagine the worst to come on, Nineveh. Let's read verses six through, we're gonna read the rest of it, I believe. Now the Lord appointed a plant and it made it come up over Jonah that he might be shaded over his head to save him from the discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when he drawn, when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind and the sun beat down on Jonah's head and he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said,

is it better for me to die than to live? But God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant, he said. Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die. And the Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you may grow, which came into being in a night and perished in night. And should I not pity Nineveh, the great city in which there is more than 120 persons who did not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle?

That's the end of Jonah, by the way. Kinda leaves you hanging a little bit, right? So you got Jonah out there, he's mad, he's angry at God. And God gave him an object lesson here. What happened? He gives us an object lesson because remember we're Jonah. He's sitting out there to see what happens to Nineveh and the hot sun and God sends a plant to shade him. And then it says that Jonah is happy. This is the first time we hear Jonah being happy in the whole book and it's because he has shade. And then what happens? Then the Lord sends a worm. Now, if you're kinda following the pattern here, the Lord is orchestrating all of this, starting back in chapter one. He sends the wind, the sea, he sends the fish. And he's sending the hot sun here, he sends the plant, he sends the worm. God is all in pursuit of Jonah to show him something. And it says, what is God trying to show Jonah

in this message of this entire book, which has nothing to do with the big fish and has nothing to do with Jonah. It is that God cares for the souls of people and so should we, okay? A few weeks ago, Aaron Peltier and I, we rented an aerator, if you don't know what that is, it's a big massive machine that you stand behind that pokes holes in your yard so that you can have a nice yard. We spent a whole day poking holes in our yard. That sounds weird, but we had fun. Sweat and labor, Aaron sweats a lot more than I do. And spent all day, fertilize, all that, try to take really good care of the lawn. If somebody were to come and just pour like a grass killer on my yard, I'd be devastated, okay?

And what the Lord is saying, those things that you care about so much, Jonah, those little things, like imagine if you take how much you care for the lawn and compare it to how I care for the people of this world and their souls. Like imagine if you cared, imagine Jonah, if you cared as much for these people as you do your lawn, or fill in the blank for you guys. Whatever you really just care about. If something was to be taken away from you right now, and just, what would that be?

You realize that love and labor are always connected. We labor for what we love. And what if the same care and compassion was directed at those to know Christ? I want you to think about something that's frustrated you lately. I mean, you got mad, okay? Let's give it about a month or two period, okay? Going back two months. Has anyone gotten so upset that they gave somebody else the silent treatment?

Has anyone thrown an adult temper tantrum for not getting what they felt they deserved? Anyone hit something like steering wheel or a desk out of anger or frustration? Anyone yell at like a coworker or a spouse or a stranger? Even if they couldn't hear you. We really don't do public confession, but if any of those you've done in the last couple months, can I just see a hand, raise? Okay, I'm glad to know that we don't go to a perfect church. If y'all hadn't raised your hands, I probably would have just walked out. So, a lot of hands raised. I want you to pick one of those instances, I want you to think about it, and I want you to think about what it was that you were angry about, okay? My guess would be, if you started kind of drilling into it, that essentially, it was something around the fact that you didn't get what you felt like you deserved, okay? You didn't, something wasn't right.

Someone did you wrong. You deserve better. That could be respect, it could be the right of the way, it could be something that was fair, you know? Skipping in line, I hated when people skipped in front of me in line when I was a kid, and still do today. And when you drill down to it, all that kind of, all that is rooted in that anger and that frustration comes out of you, not getting what you deserve. And when God gives Jonah this plant and states that Jonah is exceedingly glad, why is Jonah glad finally in this book? Why is Jonah finally glad? Because he is finally comfortable, he gets shade. He's getting what he thinks he deserves.

But then why did he get so angry that he could die? Multiple times, actually. But in the last one, he got angry because God took the plant away, and he was hot. On top of that, how could those horrible Ninevites experience the same grace and love that God showed Jonah in the Israelites? Remember, Jonah is this honorable, deserving, better than most instrument of God. And we look at this and we say, dumb Jonah, don't you remember that God saved you in the belly of the fish? I always wanna say, well, big fish. Doesn't say well. Don't you remember all the ways God provided for you in your past? How could you possibly have that attitude towards God?

And to me, that sounds very familiar as a Jonah, those thoughts. The Jews still celebrate today, Yom Kippur, which is like the 10th day of the lunar month. So I was kinda seeing one, it usually falls into September or sometime in October. And what they do, it's a day of atonement where they fast all day, and praying and asking forgiveness. It's really a day focused at repentance. And one of the things they do, a tradition is, they actually read the entire book of Jonah. And a lot of times they will recite, I am Jonah. I am Jonah. And so we wear these name tags this morning. It can be disappointing to think that we are like Jonah and all his thoughts, flaws. Like looking in a mirror, like one of those mirrors that like zoom in and have like light where you really see your flaws. That's like the book of Jonah.

But if we're like Jonah and we kinda look at ourselves and we feel kinda like, man, I don't know how I'm going to love like Jesus, I don't know how I'm gonna do these things that God's called me to do when I have Jonah tendencies. I wanna read something to you in Matthew 12, starting in 38, 41. 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 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 judgment with this generation and condemn it. For they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold something, this is important, don't miss this part, something greater than Jonah is here.

Something greater than Jonah is here. What, who's he talking about? He's talking about himself. He's talking about Jesus. The greatest example of God's pursuit of his people is not the story of Jonah, but the story of Jesus Christ. And there are similarities. You see a lot of foreshadowing when you read the book of Jonah about being in the belly three days and then Jesus says, yes, just like that, I'm gonna be in the earth three days, but I'm gonna rise again. But what makes Jesus greater than Jonah is that Jesus' sacrifice and what he did is for all people. It covers, it's enough for all people. Jonah's sermon was at 120,000, but what Christ did on the cross is for the entire world. So Jesus is greater signed to his people because his sacrifice is sufficient for all, of which we are beneficiaries of. So one thing is certain that God Almighty is pursuing you even in our tendencies to flee,

even when we don't deserve it. So if you don't have a relationship with Jesus or maybe you're unsure, what does this mean to be pursued by God? It means that you should stop and maybe give it some real attention. Like the Ninevites, you may feel like you're disqualified. I mean, think about the resume for the Ninevites to get God's grace. I mean, they were skinning people alive. I mean, there's stories about, I mean, I went down a wormhole. I mean, they would have people, they'd have families, they would have the husband grind the bones of his family,

and to just demoralize them. Those people God loved and sought after. So when you think that you're disqualified from God's grace, if the Ninevites were not, I doubt you are. So I don't want you to feel disqualified. What I think I encourage you to do is, first, to understand that believing in Jesus is more than a mental exercise, that I believe in Jesus and it's just that, but it's a lifestyle of full surrender. And some questions you can ask yourself are like, if there's a possibility of the God of the universe wants a relationship with me, maybe I should just stop down and just give it some attention. I mean, just explore the idea that maybe there's a God of the universe who sent his son to die for you. Just go at it for yourself. And he wants somebody to do that with you. We have people here that would love to do that.

You can start in somewhere like the Book of Mark talks about Jesus at 16 chapters, very fast pace. And then just take your, the Lord does not mind your doubts, your frustrations, just to go to him with that. Maybe you're walking with Jesus, but you're in a deep, you're deep in habitual sin. Whether it's second guessing, spiritual drifting or sin slubber, you feel that you are in deep and there's no way, you're past the point of saving. Like if the people in this room knew what I've done and how I've done it, there's no way. I've asked forgiveness for this same sin multiple times. Well, that is not uncommon. Everyone in this room has committed the same sin multiple times. And so, Satan loves to keep you there. And so my encouragement for you this morning as we're going to prayer here at the end and we're singing a song, and it has one of my favorite verses in the song, it's talking about your heart

being prone to wonder. For some reason, that just hits me every time. To leave the God I love. Like how could your heart want to leave God who's done so much for you? But if you're like me daily, I'm just so prone to wonder, so prone to drift. To drift from the God I love. So my encouragement to you this morning is to remember those truths and to just lay the sin at the feet of God and just say, I need help. I'm not deserving, I need help. I need you to help me, I need you to, I need you to want to repent for this and I need your help to just fight against it. And lastly, you may be a follower of Christ for a while. I think it's a good time that when we look at Jonah, we look at the object lesson of what God was teaching Jonah during this time.

The question is to ask ourselves is, where does my desire for people to know the Lord fall short compared to God's? Because everyone in this room, it does. Why does it fall short? Those are some good things to work. How can I be more focused? How can I be in pursuit like God's in pursuit? How can I pray for, who's the people I can pray for more? Who's the people I can be more intentional about getting time with? Those are things, because you do what you care for. We just talked about, your labor and love is connected. And so imagine what it would be like if our church, if our labor and love just looked like what Jesus calls us to do is to make disciples. What would it look like if our labor matched that same love?

So we're all like Jonah, but praise be to God that greater than Jonah, Jesus, love and cares for us and is pursuing us daily. So let's go ahead and go to the Lord in prayer. God, as we read through Jonah and are reminded that so many of these tendencies we have, and we don't always trust you. We always don't want to do what you wanna do. We think that our ways are better than your ways. And Lord, just help us two things this morning as we go into song. Help us to see sin the same way you do. Help us to see it as just treason against the king. And on the flip side, Lord, on that same feeling, help us to just feel so grateful that we have a God that pursues us, that pursues the people around us with love and grace and forgiveness. And just help us to go to you this morning as we close

in those feelings. Amen. So if anybody wants to pray, I'll be back at the couches. Let's go ahead and stand and sing our last.