Embracing God's Mercy: Lessons from Jonah and the Prodigal Son

In this sermon, I explored the story of Jonah, a prophet who tried to outrun God's command to preach to the people of Nineveh. I emphasized that Jonah's attempt to escape God's presence and his belief that he could overpower an omnipotent God were misguided. I also highlighted Jonah's journey on the ship, his time in the belly of the fish, and his eventual delivery of God's message to Nineveh. I pointed out that Jonah's story is not just about his physical journey, but also about his spiritual journey and his struggle with God's mercy and grace.

In the second part of the sermon, I drew parallels between the story of Jonah and the parable of the Prodigal Son, focusing on the theme of bitterness and resentment. I shared personal experiences with my brother, who, like the Prodigal Son, made choices that led to suffering and consequences. I emphasized that it's easy to focus on being spared from immediate suffering and forget about the need to be saved from sin for eternity. I concluded the sermon by encouraging the congregation to reflect on their own attitudes towards God's mercy and grace, and to strive to embody God's love in their interactions with others.

Key Takeaways:
- Jonah's story is not just about his physical journey, but also about his spiritual journey and his struggle with God's mercy and grace. #!!28:26!!#
- It's easy to focus on being spared from immediate suffering and forget about the need to be saved from sin for eternity. #!!44:22!!#
- We should strive to embody God's love in our interactions with others, even those we might feel resentment or bitterness towards. #!!49:10!!#
- We should reflect on our own attitudes towards God's mercy and grace, and seek to grow in our understanding and acceptance of them. #!!49:44!!#

Day 1: The Foundation of Faith is Jesus

Theme: The Person and Work of Jesus

Description: The foundation of our faith is not in the stories we grew up hearing, but in the person and work of Jesus. Even as our understanding of these stories shifts, our faith remains grounded in Jesus. This is a call to deepen our faith beyond the simple narratives we learned as children and to anchor it in the transformative power of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. [21:07]

Bible Passage: Hebrews 12:2 - "Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God."

Reflection: Reflect on how your understanding of faith has evolved over time. How has the person and work of Jesus become the foundation of your faith?

Day 2: The Call to Counter-Cultural Living

Theme: Surrendering to God's Call

Description: As followers of Jesus, we are called to live counter-culturally, surrendering our lives to God each day. This means resisting the temptation to conform to the world's standards and instead, living in a way that reflects God's kingdom values. This is a call to radical discipleship that goes against the grain of our culture. [51:30]

Bible Passage: Romans 12:2 - "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will."

Reflection: Reflect on areas in your life where you feel the tension between cultural norms and God's call. How can you live more counter-culturally in these areas?

Day 3: The Challenge of Loving Our Enemies

Theme: God's Mercy Extends to All

Description: It's easy to love those who are like us, but what about those we consider our enemies? God's mercy extends to all people, even those we might find difficult to love. This is a challenge to examine our hearts and confront any biases or prejudices that may be hindering us from showing God's love to all people. [34:56]

Bible Passage: Luke 6:27 - "But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you."

Reflection: Reflect on who you might consider an 'enemy'. How can you show God's love and mercy to this person or group?

Day 4: The Danger of Cultural Comfort

Theme: Cultural Comfort vs. God's Calling

Description: The desire for cultural comfort can often overshadow our calling from God. When we prioritize fitting in over following God, we compromise our faith. This is a call to resist the allure of cultural comfort and instead, courageously live out our calling as followers of Jesus. [37:19]

Bible Passage: Matthew 16:24 - "Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.'"

Reflection: Reflect on instances where you've chosen cultural comfort over God's calling. How can you make different choices moving forward?

Day 5: The Power of God's Word

Theme: Incorporating God's Word into Our Lives

Description: The power of God's Word is not just in hearing it, but in incorporating it into our lives. This is a call to move beyond merely listening to God's Word and to actively apply it in our daily lives. This is how we grow in our faith and become more like Jesus. [28:26]

Bible Passage: James 1:22 - "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."

Reflection: Reflect on a recent sermon or Bible passage you've heard. How can you incorporate its teachings into your daily life?

Day 1: The Power of Stories in Faith Development

Stories are powerful tools that God uses to teach us about His character, His love, and His plan for our lives. The story of Jonah is a perfect example of this. Jonah tried to outrun God's presence, but he soon learned that God is omnipresent, always with us no matter where we go.

Jonah 1:3 - "But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD."

Reflection: Reflect on the story of Jonah. How have you tried to outrun God's presence in your life? What can you learn from Jonah's story about God's omnipresence and how can you incorporate this understanding into your daily life?

Day 2: The Danger of Compromising Faith for Cultural Acceptance

In today's society, it can be easy to compromise our faith for cultural acceptance. However, the Bible warns us against conforming to the pattern of this world.

Romans 12:2 - "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will."

Reflection: Can you identify any areas in your life where you may be conforming to the pattern of this world, compromising your faith for cultural acceptance? How can you live out a counter-cultural relationship to the world, embodying the convictions and compassion of Jesus in these areas?

Day 3: The Struggle with Sinful, Selfish Desires

We all struggle with sinful, selfish desires. However, the Bible teaches us that we can surrender these desires to God's will and incorporate the identity available in Jesus into every aspect of our life.

Galatians 5:24 - "Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires."

Reflection: Reflect on your own internal struggle with sinful, selfish desires. How can you better surrender these desires to God's will and incorporate the identity available in Jesus into every aspect of your life?

Day 4: The Undeserved Mercy of God

The parable of the prodigal son is a powerful story of God's undeserved mercy. Even when we are undeserving, God extends His grace to us.

Luke 15:20 - "So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him."

Reflection: Reflect on the parable of the prodigal son. How do you react to God's undeserved mercy towards those you deem undeserving? How can you better accept and extend God's grace in your own life?

Day 5: The Importance of Growing Faith

Our understanding of biblical stories and our faith should grow and mature over time. As we grow in our faith, we move beyond a simplistic understanding to a deeper, more mature understanding.

2 Peter 3:18 - "But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen."

Reflection: How has your understanding of biblical stories and your faith grown and matured over time? Are there areas in your faith that you feel you've outgrown or need to grow into? How can you allow your faith to grow with you, moving beyond a simplistic understanding to a deeper, more mature understanding?

Well, good morning, Menlo Church! So glad to be with you for what I think is a really special message in our series, "The Rest of the Story," where we are focusing on what it looks like to grow our faith from the flannel graph version that some of us grew up with to something more, to something deeper.

A special shout-out to our Bay Area campuses up in San Mateo and Mountain View, here in Menlo Park, in Saratoga, and online. I hope that you've been encouraged in this series that the foundation of your faith is actually the person and work of Jesus. Even if your understanding of some of these stories that some of us grew up listening to and learning starts to shift, your faith can be okay. There is still the person and work of Jesus as the foundation of what you believe.

Now, what we said throughout this series is that we often learn Bible stories as kids in a way that we're capable of understanding, which sort of matches our capacity. But if we don't let our faith grow up with us, we will often outgrow it along the way.

Today is a very important story focusing on the prophet Jonah from the Hebrew Scriptures, or what we call the Old Testament. But before I dive in, I'm going to pray for us. If you've never been here before or never heard me speak, I pray kneeling. The reason that I do that is to prepare my heart and to prepare ours for the work that God wants to do in each one of us beyond my words. It's God's word that we look to learn from together.

So, wherever you are, would you humble yourself just for a moment with me as we talk to God together?

God, I am so thankful for the gift that no matter what we bring into this room, you have something waiting for us. No matter what distractions or voices we're listening to in our lives, your voice is ready to speak. Would you help us to tune our hearts and our ears to hear it? We love you. It's in Jesus' name, amen.

Now, I'm sure that whether you are a seasoned Christian or this is all brand new to you and church and faith is a whole new idea, you have probably heard at least in part the story of Jonah and the whale. That's kind of crossed your path somewhere along the way. The flannel graph version that some of us learned in Sunday school as kids was pretty simple, right?

God told Jonah—there's Jonah right there, looks pretty cute to me anyway—he was a prophet who spoke for God professionally, like as his job. God sends him to Nineveh, but Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh because of how awful they were. Which again, these guys look pretty nice; not really sure what his deal was. But he jumps on a ship right here and he heads to Tarshish in the exact opposite direction.

So, God brings a storm, and the sailors, who were not followers of God, throw him off the ship at his request after exhausting all other options. Then a big fish right here swallows Jonah for three days and three nights and waits until Jonah finally repents or changes his mind before he spits him out.

I'm guessing maybe if you grew up in this, maybe you heard this verse before: "And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights."

So then the fish finally delivers Jonah to Nineveh. Anyway, Jonah tells the people about God, and they were saved. The end. But that's not actually the whole story.

When I was young, my dad was a big project guy, especially around the house. When you fear your dad and you help on projects, it's easy to overcompensate. I remember helping him in the dining room one time with a project, and my task was to sand the paint off of the baseboards—an exciting task for any 10-year-old, by the way. Thrilling experience!

The problem was, because I didn't want to get into trouble, I didn't ask more questions, and I didn't want to stop too early. So, I sanded for a long time—like so much time that by the time I was done, we had to pull that baseboard part off of the wall and put a new one because I had sanded it down so low.

Sometimes I think that's exactly what we do with Bible stories like Jonah. See, the story of Jonah has some rough and uncomfortable edges to it that we have to look at because they point to some things in God and implications for us that we often avoid or overlook. Like the fact that God loves all the people who don't deserve it, including you.

Before we take a step back and we jump into the story and into the areas that we avoid, we have to start where we've started with all these stories throughout the summer so far, which is to ask the question: Is it true? Is this story believable? Is it even possible?

I've been telling you this a little bit each week, but there's a way that we study the Bible, and that term is called hermeneutics. We all bring a hermeneutic to the Bible, and while we want to bring certain ways to study to some areas and other ways to other areas, our hermeneutics—or the way we study the Bible—bleeds into other parts as we study, and that happens with Jonah as well.

So, here are just a couple of major views of how people think about and study Jonah. The main one is called a literal event written poetically. This view is probably most common with people whose understanding of the Bible trends to the literal interpretation of events overall. Think about it this way: If God created the world in seven days, caused a global flood, and created innumerable languages, then a fish story isn't much of a stretch, right? It's no big deal.

Now, it is certainly written poetically, but there are plenty of places in the Bible where something is poetically written but refers to literal events as well. That's really what the book of Psalms in the Hebrew Scriptures is built on.

The basis of the second view is that it is a satirical poem—that it's not necessarily literal. This view focuses on the poetic nature of the story and uses extreme circumstances mixed with humor and irony to communicate ideas that a more conventional or normal narrative would struggle to articulate.

It's important to note that until relatively recently in history, Jonah was often discounted as not possible at all to take literally. It seemed completely impossible for someone to live inside of a fish, especially if you don't hold that supernatural events can take place.

It's important to note that actually, Nineveh wasn't discovered as a place until the 19th century. So, until very recently, it wasn't even seen as a possibility. But as discoveries like ancient Nineveh and finding out there are these historic events where people are swallowed up and live inside of whales for hours and survive, all of a sudden it's become more plausible to believe that this story might be more than poetry.

Now, I've given you a resource each week to help you go further onto topics and stories that we're studying, and this week's resource is incredible. The late great Tim Keller wrote a book called "The Prodigal Prophet," which was released just a few years ago, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You're going to hear some quotes later, but honestly, you should just download it on your phone right now, start reading it, and stop listening to me. It's that good!

It's a really good book. Just like every other story, we should take a moment and pursue what our own understanding of the story is. What is the genre? What did the nature of the text seem to indicate at the time? How do you think about it? What is your view of it? Absolutely.

But no matter what major view you hold to, the power of these stories—the power of taking a flannel graph faith and bringing it to an adult level of integration to my life—is what I do with it, how I actually incorporate it into my life.

So, we're going to dig in beyond the flannel graph version. We have to ask: What's in the rest of the story? What is it that we are missing? What is it that got left behind? What were some of those rough edges we sanded off?

After hearing God tell Jonah to go preach in Nineveh, he ran. He specifically ran because he believed he could outrun the presence of God. Now, if you don't know this, there's a term for God: He is omni—or all-present. So, you can run anywhere; he's already there.

So, pretty bad for a professional dude that does this his entire life. He also thought that he was more powerful in his ability to escape than an omnipotent or all-powerful God. So, he wasn't paying attention to all the messages he was preaching, but that's what he tried to do.

So, he gets onto this ship, and the wind is so strong that professional sailors—they knew this route well—were fearing for their lives. As they were throwing off the shipments that were their livelihood just to preserve their own lives, Jonah was sleeping.

When they wake him up, they realize that he's a Hebrew, that his God is Yahweh. They knew that his God was different. In this kind of mixture of bravery and a little bit of cowardice and selfishness, he tells them to sacrifice him so that they would survive. Eventually, after exhausting every other option, they comply, and Jonah finds himself swallowed by the fish for three days and three nights.

Somewhere in those 72 hours, he prays a prayer that gives us hope that he's figuring it out, that he's putting it together. The fish then pukes him up on the shore, likely with his skin bleached and smelling horribly.

I don't know if you've ever been inside of a really gross, nasty seafood restaurant—like imagine you were in a really gross, nasty seafood restaurant. That was Jonah for 72 hours.

So, Jonah brings his message to Nineveh. I've got a feeling it was a little understated. You know, he had a pretty rough few days. He says, "Hey, in 40 days, just so you know, God's going to take you out." There is no exit strategy, no unless you just— in 40 days, you're done. The one true God, Yahweh, is going to kill you.

His overall physical appearance probably left an impression, especially since they knew a God in their pantheon— their big group of gods—who was half fish and half man named Dagon. So, probably Jonah had a unique level of authority in the moment as well.

Nineveh— all of Nineveh—grieved their sin and begged God for mercy, from the king and nobles all the way to the commoners and cattle. The book tells us this way: "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it."

That's kind of where the flannel graph story ends, isn't it? Just the end, happy ending, amazing. But then Jonah's response to this—remember, he's the guy who has been telling people about this God his entire professional life. This is his response to watching God show mercy to an entire group of people.

He says, "Oh Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my own country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in 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."

A little melodramatic, see? Jonah hated Nineveh so much that God's mercy on them made him want to die. God grows a plant to shade Jonah—likely a castor bean plant—but as quickly as it grew, it dies.

The story ends in a back-and-forth with God and Jonah, where Jonah is showing more compassion on the plant than the people. See, we talked about identity a lot last week, and reflecting on this story and our own Jonasized blind spots, Tim Keller points it out this way: "When Christian believers care more for their own interests and security than for the good and salvation of other races and ethnicities, they are sinning like Jonah. If they value the economic and military flourishing of their own country over the good of the human race and the furtherance of God's work in the world, they are sinning like Jonah. Their identity is more rooted in their race and nationality than being saved sinners and children of God."

See, some of us, we can already feel the internal conflict with a quote like that because it's pointing out our own rough edges, pointing out the things we want to avoid. All of these competing identities can blur out God's love for our assumed enemies, for the people and categories that we would rather ignore, avoid, or worse.

But before we look at another question, I want to name something that I feel like I see more and more in our moment. I hear more and more this line, which is, "I don't feel safe."

Now, if that is someone referring to physical safety or active threats, I want to be the first person to advocate for safety. But here's my concern: My concern is that we have widened this term, and safety has become synonymous with comfort. Therefore, when something challenges my assumptions or the way that I think, it makes me uncomfortable. I have a quick out to avoid the implications of the possible change in my life.

This form of safetyism is a great way to avoid conflict, but it will shrink your character. So, what will you do with this? How will you process a quote like this, even if it makes you uncomfortable?

Who are the enemies that you assume and would be angry if God showed mercy to them? Like, you don't hate anyone, right? But there's like a group of people that you don't think much about, and if there's a button you could push and they would all go away, you'd push it. But you, like, don't hate them, you know?

Where is your desire for comfort shadowing your call from God? Maybe for you, this is your political opponent—the person that you just think, "How could I possibly love someone who holds that political view, who voted for that candidate, who doesn't stand up or post about or put something on their lawn about this issue?"

Or maybe it's the person that you could never talk to again because of what they did or what they said about you or someone you love. Or maybe it's the person from a country that in your mind should never enter this one, or it's the person that holds to a different faith than you do.

See, it's easy. It's easier. But to answer these questions for each of us, there is one more answer for all of us. We have to answer the question: Who are we in the story?

And there are quite a few characters to choose from, right? Let's assume that no one is tagging themselves in God—like hopefully nobody here is like, "I know who I am in the story. I'm God. Yahweh, crushing it!" You know? But there are still a few to choose from, right?

There's the Jewish people, the professional sailors, the Ninevites, and Jonah himself. The other one that I think we are pretty quick to excuse ourselves from being is the Ninevites, but I'm not as sure about that.

See, in Jonah's day, he had to take this trip. He had to travel to find a group of people who were characterized as lawless and without any reverence to God. And I'm not sure in our moment and in our culture that requires a business trip.

With that in mind, I think our relationship to Nineveh—this culture and society opposed from God—has to do a lot with our posture in the moment, how we relate to our culture. I think that this idea of that kind of culture is way closer than we think.

Some of us, we live compatible lives where we seek comfort above everything. And when culture and cultural comfort conflict with our calling, cultural comfort always wins. And you know that because nobody in your life would tell me that you were a Christian. They'd be surprised to find out that you were because every time there is resistance between your calling as a follower of Jesus and your cultural comfort at your job, in your neighborhood, at your school, culture always wins.

Some of you, though—some of you—you have a complicit life to this culture where we actually don't even wait for a conflict. We will change everything from our career to our calling to our convictions, even our core theology, because of the pressure we feel to fit in.

For some of us, this is about having a respectable faith. But the problem is we live in a culture that will never respect your faith. So, if that's the goal—if you're like, "I'll change it all so that eventually it can be compatible with the culture around me"—I'm just letting you know that kind of complicit faith is no longer a biblical vision of Christianity.

The one that followers of Jesus are called to walk out is actually a counter-cultural relationship to culture. It isn't weird for the sake of being weird, but it offers the convictions and the compassion of Jesus every single day.

There is this experience of following Jesus where over time your identity as a follower of Jesus impacts you every single day. There is never a day, there is never a place, there is never an employer, there is never a school, there is never a teammate, there is never a home, there is never a neighborhood where you get to turn off being a follower of Jesus. That's your calling.

That book that I recommended earlier can be a great starting place to identify where you really are showing up and what identity is actually informing your life. Keller points it out this way: "Shallow Christianity, shallow Christian identities explain why professing Christians can be racists and greedy materialists, addicted to beauty and pleasure, or filled with anxiety and prone to overwork."

It comes because it is not Christ's love but the world's power, approval, comfort, and control that are the real roots of self-identity. I mean, nobody in here struggles with that stuff, but you know some people who do, right?

The reason that all Christians have a version of Jonah inside of them, inside of us, is because we are all at war—with our own sinful, selfish desires to fit into a culture that wants nothing to do with this vision of Jesus. And it doesn't fit your calling of following him every day and incorporating this identity you have available in him everywhere you go.

Jesus tells a story about a father who has two sons. The oldest son is a loyal and hard-working child who stays by his father's side. The younger son, early on, asks the father to give him his inheritance, which at the time would have basically been saying, "I wish you were dead."

He takes his inheritance from his father and goes and lives a reckless life and squanders all of the inheritance. When he finally comes back home because he's run out of money and run out of options, and he'd rather be a servant in his father's home than homeless on the road, his father is waiting with open arms.

As a matter of fact, he has been waiting every single day. Even before his youngest son can get to him, he runs to his youngest son and embraces him. The older brother is furious—furious because the younger brother doesn't deserve this love, doesn't deserve this mercy, doesn't deserve this acceptance.

See, the older brother had to do the work. When the younger brother left, he picked up the slack. He earned it; he deserved it. This is the heart of Jonah.

We call this parable "The Prodigal Son," but it's probably better named "The Prodigal Sons." Neither one understood it. I'm the youngest in my family and the youngest of four, but oftentimes I've had to function like the oldest just circumstantially in life.

When I was eight and my older brother James was 16, he ran away from home in part to escape the abuse of our father. But it's complicated. He was gone for 15 years. We thought he died, but after having his sentence—his lifetime sentence for international drug trafficking—vacated on a technicality, he re-entered our life.

I promise that's actually what happened. Over the course of the last 15 years with him back in our lives, there have been times when I have felt like the older brother in Jesus' parable, frustrated at my brother's choices, annoyed that he never seemed to face the consequences for them.

But as my mom's health had worsened over the last few years, leading to her death just a few months ago, my brother and I became much, much closer. After my mom's passing, I had really hoped that we would stay close and that many of the addictions and patterns of my brother's past could change.

Unfortunately and tragically, my brother passed away just a couple of weeks ago, and I still feel the spirit of Jonah inside of me—the older brother left to clean it up again.

See, there are times when God has to slow me down to see the bitterness creeping in—tired of cleaning up other people's messes, tired of taking care of the message that other people left behind, fixing the problems that other people caused. But if in these moments I forget that I am just as guilty and in need of God, then I become Jonah. So do you.

People have asked me in recent days how I'm doing, and to be honest, I don't really know. I'll take some time over the next couple of weeks with family and friends to reflect, to rest, to grieve. But life keeps going, so will I—with God's help, with your help, with loving community in our lives.

But something that has stood out to me with my brother is true for lots of us, I think. If we're not careful, my brother was often worried about being spared from the suffering that was immediately in front of him, often as a result of his own choices. But being saved from his sin was never a focus for him, even in very extended, frequent conversations that I had with him about it.

I think we can all default to this way of thinking, though, particularly when we have done things that normally bring suffering. We sort of try to make deals with God, don't we? We pray to be spared from the suffering, and it can blur out the need to be saved from the sin for eternity.

See, that's even what happened with Nineveh. Sure, they were spared suffering in this moment, and if Jonah is the only book you read, that sounds like an amazing end. But if you keep reading the Hebrew Scriptures, you'll come across a prophet named Nahum, and Nahum depicts the destruction that happens in Nineveh because all they wanted was to be spared from suffering.

If all you want is circumstantial blessing or to avoid pain, that's the most you'll ever get. But when eternal salvation is understood, when we understand what's really at stake with God, why Jesus really came and died for us, then even if we aren't spared suffering—even when we face huge challenges in our life—it's okay because we understand the timeline that God is working with is so much greater than ours.

So, whoever you assume doesn't deserve God's love or yours, you're right, but for different reasons than you think. That political opponent—they don't deserve God's love, but for a different reason than you think. That problem person at school or at work, in your neighborhood, your sibling—they don't deserve God's love, but not for the reason you think.

See, the bias that you have for a different culture or group of people or individual—that they don't deserve God's love—it's true, but it's not for the reason that you think. The problem is, you don't deserve it either. I don't deserve it either.

God does not love us because we deserve it; he loves us because he is a good and holy God. And when we remove grace and God's character from the equation, then no one gets love. No one has deserved it; no one can earn it. That's the kindness of God who created you in his image, regardless of what you think or believe about him, with infinite dignity, value, and worth.

That even when you sin, even when you fall short, even when you make mistakes that violate your own standards, God's love for you is extended. Remember, God loves all the people who don't deserve it, including you, including my brother.

Even though I don't know where he is spending eternity, I know that God loved him and that he had a path to eternity with God if he chose to surrender his life to Jesus, just like any of you do.

The reason is because Jesus is the better Jonah. What Jonah shared partially, Jesus showed completely. As a matter of fact, Jesus doesn't leave us guessing. After the religious leaders during his earthly ministry asked him for a sign, Jesus responded this way: "An evil and adulterous generation seeks for 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."

Jesus did not come primarily to spare us from suffering; he came to save us from our sin. He came and lived a perfect life fueled by love and compassion for people who don't deserve it, and then he died a death that we all deserve.

When he rose from the grave, it was an offer; it was an invitation to humanity—not an offer for us to continue on as modern-day Ninevites or judgmental Jonas, but to live among them, saved by grace through faith, not as a result of our works, so that no one could boast, so that the love of God could shine through our lives to a world lunging for whatever low-hanging options for temporary numbing are available in the moment.

I know that many of you have people in your life like my brother—tragedies you long to see God intervene in—but you also have people that you don't lose sleep over. You also have some people you've stopped praying for. But the thing is, God loves those people. Jesus died to save them.

So, I'm going to finish our time by asking God to reveal the Jonah inside each and every one of us and to reawaken our hearts for the love that God has for them and for us—not because they deserve it, not because we deserve it, but in spite of the fact that we don't, he does anyway because of how good our God is.

Would you bow your head with me? With your heads bowed and your eyes closed, would you give all of our campuses and pastors a chance to pray for you?

With your heads bowed and your eyes closed, if you sense a person or a group of people or a type of people that you just know you've done what Jonah did—you don't actually want to see God's mercy or grace in their life, at least not with your standards being met first—if that's you, if you say, "I'm holding that bitterness, I'm holding that anger towards a person or a group of people," would you just do me a favor? Just slip your hand up. Let me pray for you specifically.

If you say, "You know what? There are some things, God, you need to do some work in my heart because I've misunderstood the people that you love." Thanks for letting me pray for you.

Let's pray together.

God, all of our hearts need to be softened, and God, I pray that you would soften them right now. God, I pray that you would put us in the belly of that whale right now—that the dark and lonely place where the only person we can find is you is where we would find ourselves in our prayer even right now.

The people, God, that we assume are excluded from your love, would you teach us your truth again—that you love the whole world, that you're not willing that any would perish but that all would come to know you—that God, your love and your gift is made available.

And God, for us who are followers of you, would you help us to live this out, to be the kind of thoughtful witness in our community that it so desperately needs? This choice between being a stupid Christian or a smart atheist—that we could show something different, not trying to win arguments but trying to win people, not trying to show how smart we are but how good you are.

God, don't leave us as Jonah, floundering and flailing in our own judgmentalism. Don't leave us in Nineveh, compromised and complicit to a culture that's killing us and others. Help us to be counter-cultural followers of you, surrendering our lives more and more each day.

God, we love you. We pray that we would walk with you this week because we know you're already with us. It's in Jesus' name, amen.

How do we stand and sing together, trading your crown for a cross, willingly died?

1. "This form of safetyism is a great way to avoid conflict but it will shrink your character. So what will you do with this? How will you process a quote like this even if it makes you uncomfortable?" - 34:56

2. "Where is your desire for comfort shadowing your call from God? Maybe for you this is your political opponent, the person that you just think, how could I possibly love someone who holds that political view?" - 35:36

3. "Some of us, we live compatible lives where we seek comfort above everything and when culture and cultural comfort conflicts with our calling, cultural comfort always wins." - 37:19

4. "The one that followers of Jesus are called to walk out is actually a counter-cultural relationship to culture. It isn't weird for the sake of being weird but it offers the convictions and the compassion of Jesus every single day." - 38:24

5. "The reason that all Christians have a version of Jonah inside of them, inside of us, is because we are all at war with our own sinful selfish desires to fit into a culture that wants nothing to do with this vision of Jesus." - 39:39