Text: Jonah 1 Jonah and Me 1. I am Jonah September 15-16, 2018 ***** Last month, my father was admitted to the hospital. He s 87, and we had just applied for him to move into a retirement home when illness changed our plans. The day after he was admitted, I happened to be passing near the hospital and decided to stop in and see how he was doing. I had heard he was agitated about being stuck in a bed and was wanting to leave. When I walked into his room, I was surprised and relieved to see that he was relaxed and peaceful. We chatted a bit, then I left. When I got home, it hit me. I had missed an opportunity. My dad was not a follower of Jesus. And that week, I had asked my small group to pray for me because I planned on talking to him about Jesus. But there I was in his room with the chance to do it, and I just settled for talking about his body and not his spirit. Maybe that was because for more than 40 years, every time I brought up the Gospel, he said no. I had shared my story with him. Nothing. I showed him video of people I knew who had been miraculously healed. I said, If there is no God, how do you explain that? No dice. I tried asking him to read a passage from the Bible with me. He just explained it away. I even asked him, What do you think happens when you die? He said, Nothing. We cease to exist. But now that there was a real possibility that he could die, I felt terrible that I had a chance to talk with him and I passed it up. Sometimes, I am Jonah. Jonah was a well-known and well-respected prophet in Israel around 760 B.C. He had prophesied that Israel would expand her boundaries, and it had happened! Israel was in an economic boom. People were getting rich. So, Jonah was a celebrity. And he was very patriotic. But Jonah is most famous for the story found in the Old Testament. It starts in Jonah 1:1-4 The word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, 2 Arise, go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me. 3 But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. So, he went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare, and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. God told Jonah told to go preach to the city of Nineveh. And instead, Jonah ran away to the city of Tarshish. Nineveh was 500 miles north and east of where Jonah was. It was a major city on the banks of the Tigris River. It was in modern-day Iraq, about 300 miles north of Baghdad. Archeologists have found the ruins of ancient Nineveh right outside the city of Mosul in Iraq. Tarshish was almost 2,000 miles west in Spain. So, Jonah headed 2,500 miles away from where God told him to go. God said, Go east." Jonah said, I m going west.
Jonah understands God wants him to preach to Nineveh, but he won t do it. The Ninevites were pagans who ignored the laws and ways of the living God. They were avoiding God, but, so was Jonah. Verse 3 says that Jonah went down to Joppa. That s true on two levels. First, to get to Joppa, Jonah had to go down in elevation to the seacoast to the port of Joppa. Second, by going to Joppa, he was going down spiritually. Verse 3 also says he went down into the ship from the presence of the Lord. So, Jonah was moving away from God. He was not a pagan. He knew God. He heard the word of God. He had accurately announced God s purposes for Israel. And yet, he was running from away from God and from his assignment. I hate to admit it, but I ve done that. I suspect you have too, because -- We are all runners at times. No one is really a spiritual seeker. We are all runners. Some of us run from God s call to yield our lives to him. We live life the way we want to and resist God s pull on our lives. We are not followers of Christ. Maybe that describes some of us here today. We all start there -- running from God. Others of us run from God s call to tell others about him, even though we are believers. We stopped running when we heard the Good News, and we said, yes to Jesus. We asked for his forgiveness and invited him to lead our lives. God made us alive spiritually. We became children of God, adopted into his family. We became part of the Church, which is called the Body of Christ. But we can still be runners at times. Just like Jonah, we ve been commissioned to communicate God s message to those who are apart from him. In Matthew 28, Jesus told his disciples, Go in to make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded. Jesus says, Go in to the world. But sometimes we run the other way. Why we run from our call: We re afraid of people s reactions. Jonah had a reason to worry about how the Ninevites would react to his message. Asking a Hebrew like Jonah to go preach to Nineveh would have been like asking an American to go into ISIS-held territory and announce that God said they should repent. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria. The Assyrians were the terrorists of the Ancient Near East. They re considered by some to be the most brutal nation in recorded history. They regularly invaded and conquered neighboring nations. If anyone resisted them, they showed no mercy. When the Assyrians surrounded a city to invade it, sometimes the city s entire population committed suicide rather than fall into their hands. That s because when the Assyrians invaded a city, they would murder children and rape without mercy. They took the men outside the city and skinned them alive, hanging the skin on the walls. They also cut off their hands and feet and impaled the men on stakes in front of their city gates. Then they cut off their heads and stacked them in pyramids in public places in order to warn others not
to resist. They devised even worse tortures. But I don t think I need to tell you about them. You get the idea. 1 Now you see why God told Jonah, I see the evil these people are doing. Go tell them I am going to destroy them if they don t repent. But Jonah wouldn t do it. He ran away instead. He might have thought, I know what they do to people they don t like. I don t want to sign up for that. We, too, might worry about the reaction we get from others if we tell them about Jesus. We don t have to worry about being murdered. But who wants to be ridiculed or rejected? I sure don t. Maybe I didn t talk with Dad about Jesus again because I didn t want my parents to think I m a fanatic and avoid me. We don t always need to share the Gospel with people. Sometimes we can invite them to worship with us and pray God works in their lives. On October 20 th -21 st, we re going to have a weekend specifically geared for inviting someone you know to worship. I know that sometimes people hesitate to do that because they re afraid of the awkward factor, like this video shows. [Video shown on the big screens.] Inviting someone to worship doesn t need to be terrifying or awkward. We can invite someone to church just as naturally as we invite them to go get dinner with you. We don t need to be Jonah-like about it. A second reason we might try to dodge Jesus Great Commission is more penetrating. 2. We don t have God s love for runners. Jonah was a prophet. But somewhere along the line, he lost God s heart. He didn t want the same thing God wanted. Let s be blunt. Jonah didn t like Nineveh. But God loved Nineveh. God showed Jonah that the Ninevites were in danger. But Jonah didn t care about Nineveh. And he didn t think God should care about Nineveh. Jonah saw the evil brutality of the Ninevites, and he wanted them destroyed. But God saw the evil brutality of the Ninevites, and he wanted them to be saved. I m sure many Jews thought, Look at how the Ninevites brutalize innocent people. How can God let them get away with that? Why doesn t God stop them? God did do something. In verse 2, he says, their wickedness has come up before me. He was going to stop them by causing them to repent so they d change. And the way God was going to change Nineveh was to send his spokesman there to deliver his message. But Jonah ran. God loves the U.S., and he wants the U.S. to love him. Let s not criticize and despair when we see what isn t right in our country. Let s be God s change agents. The way he is going to change our nation is the same way he has changed people throughout history -- through his people. That s us, if we don t run. We re runners when we argue our political positions more passionately than we share the Gospel with others. We re runners when we listen to our favorite cable news channel more in one day than we read the word of God in a month. We re runners when we call on the government to fix what s wrong with the country instead of calling on God to change the hearts of the people of our country. Let s not run. Let s stay confident in our hope. Let s not settle for 1 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f4af/bb82f1b7920fa9444e29eb128bd13832cd46.pdf
comfort and isolation. Let s demonstrate God s love to this broken world and share the life-changing news of the Gospel. God loves runners enough to pursue them. God was pursuing the Ninevites. The Ninevites were not seeking God. They were happy in their brutality. It was making them rich and powerful. They were not looking for God. But God was pursuing them. He started to arrange circumstances so that they would be able to hear and respond to his message. God was also pursuing Jonah. He arranged circumstances so Jonah would turn back to him. The rest of chapter one tells us that Jonah hopped onto a ship to Tarshish, but he never made it there. God arranged for a storm to stop the ship. They were about to sink when the sailors discovered that Jonah was running from the living God. Jonah said that if they threw him overboard, the storm would stop. Even though the sailors were pagans, they were reluctant to do that. Finally, they did. 15 So they picked up Jonah, threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. 16 Then the men feared the LORD greatly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows. 17 And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights. How ironic. The pagan sailors tell Jonah to pray, and they start to worship the living God. Whereas the prophet of God isn t praying, and he isn t obeying. But God pursued Jonah anyway. God loves runners so much that he will pursue them in amazing ways. A member of our church recently shared with me that she had been praying about a situation with her young adult son. He had been unjustly beaten up by a police officer. The case went before the review board, and it was determined that her son had done nothing wrong, that the police officer had acted improperly. Of course, most police officers are upstanding and heroically serve our communities. But this one had acted wrongly. Now, if you want to get a mother s hackles up, just mess with one of her kids. That ll do it. This mom had felt those protective instincts. But she was also taking the matter to God in prayer. She had been praying intently for everyone involved -- her son, the officer, the review board. A while after the case was resolved, a new family moved in next door to her. Can you guess who it was? Yep, it was that police officer and his family. God brought them right next to her. The officer doesn t know that she s the mother of the man involved in that case. But that mom realizes that God is pursuing that officer and has arranged for him to live next to one of his messengers. The officer just thinks he has a friendly neighbor. She has the chance to show God s love and bring his message in a unique way. God pursues runners. God will bring people across our path. He deploys us as his messengers to people who have not yet stopped running. We don t need to be like Jonah. We can embrace our calling. After I realized I had blown the opportunity to talk with my dad, I prayed for another chance. Dad had not been conscious for several days, but when I
walked in, I was surprised to find him sitting up and watching TV. He wasn t able to talk, but he could make gestures. After some small talk, I plunged in. I explained the Gospel to him as clearly as I could. I told him that we all need forgiveness from God. I told him he could have God s presence with him now and eternal life after he died. Then I asked him if he wanted to say yes to God. There was a pause as he looked at me. He didn t nod yes, and he didn t shake his head no. He lifted his shoulders a bit and moved his hands to indicate he didn t have an answer. I said, You want to think about it? He nodded yes. Well, that was a big step, considering the last 40 years the answer had been a flat no. Two days later, he had a cardiac arrest. The doctors were able to revive him, but he was unconscious for days. I prayed that if he had not made that commitment to Christ already, that he would not die before I had another chance to invite him to. The following week, he woke up enough for me to visit. He couldn t talk, but he could squeeze my hand. I came right to the point. I said he could live forever because Jesus died for his sins. I asked him, Do you want to say yes to God today? If so, just squeeze my hand. A couple seconds went by. Nothing. Then, he squeezed my hand. Oddly enough, after 40 years, I wasn t surprised. I was expecting it somehow. I immediately prayed for him, and when I left a bit later, he was sleeping peacefully. I walked away wondering, Did he really understand? Since he couldn t talk, it was hard to tell what he was thinking. But I think he probably did. We never know for sure how. Jonah ran from his calling. But God pursued him and brought him back. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have been called to go make disciples. We are God s messengers. We have a chance to be intentional about that October 20th- 21st when it s a weekend to invite someone to worship with you. The action step today is simple. Will you pray for who you might invite? This week, will you tell God you are embracing his mission and pray about who you re going to invite?