Good morning and welcome to Grace View. We're glad you're here. We've been going through the Book of Jonah, and we'll keep doing that again today. So if you will, open your Bible to Jonah chapter 3. Thank you. It may take you a while if you are using a hardbound Bible; you may need to look at your index. But Jonah chapter 3 is where we'll be today.
Let me ask you if there is anybody that you can think of that you would be okay if they went to hell—someone you just don't care for, or they're not your favorite kind of people, or you don't agree with them, or you don't have much compassion for them. You see, the title of this series of messages is "I Am Jonah." So many times, as I looked at these four chapters, so few verses in it, I see evidences of Jonah that I see inside of myself.
I am Jonah when I don't want to go where God wants me to go. I am Jonah when I don't want to love somebody that God wants me to love. I am Jonah when God gives me a task to do, and I try to make all kinds of excuses for why I don't want to do it. I am Jonah when I do the task but don't do a very good job of it or put everything that I have into it. We'll see that today in chapter 3. I am Jonah when I'm willing to let other people be put in danger because of my own laziness or my own unwillingness to be obedient to God, as Jonah did in chapter 1. And I'm Jonah when I become angry because of what God does, and I don't agree with it.
We're going to see all those things about Jonah in this chapter or in this little book. I want you to look at not so much the fish or the actions of Jonah, but what I want us to see really above everything else is the compassion, the glory, the love, and the mercy in the grace of God. Because Jonah is not the hero of this book; the fish certainly isn't the hero of the book, but the hero of the book is God Himself in His amazing grace and miraculous mercy that He has for some of the worst people you can possibly imagine.
I've told you a little bit about the Ninevites, or the Assyrians, as they were. They were cruel; they were wicked; they were harsh. They were people who tortured and humiliated their enemies when they defeated them in battle. One of the kings of Assyria, it's been noted in historical documents, stated that with the other king that he defeated, he took his knife, punched a hole in his jaw, and put a chain through it, leading him like a dog. That's kind of what the Ninevites were like. They skinned people alive and hung the hides of the people on the sides of their houses. They impaled people on poles; they beheaded them and then stacked the heads at the gate of the city they had defeated.
I mean, I don't know if there's a nation anywhere in the world today that is equal to their evil. Even if you think of North Korea, you might think of China, or Russia, or some other countries that are kind of harsh and backwards, but there was probably no one as evil, wicked, and cruel as the Ninevites. And here is God sending one of His prophets, who was serving in the northern kingdom, the northern ten tribes, and He says, "I want you to go to Nineveh because the wickedness of that city has come up before me, and I have to do something about it." One of the first things I'm going to do is send you to tell them a message.
Now, you may think of people in our culture today that you think are so far gone, so ungodly that they're just almost worthless. Maybe you think of drug cartels, organized crime, criminals, or prostitutes in the districts where those kinds of activities take place, and you think, "Well, it's hopeless." But could it be that God would ever call you to minister or to preach or teach or reach in a place like that? And if no one is willing to go to those places, then how would they ever be reached?
We see that Jonah tried to hide from God in chapter one, but if you listen to a few scriptures before we get to Jonah, I want to share with you. First of all, in Jeremiah chapter 23, we see in verse 23 and 24 that Jeremiah gave us a word that Jonah needed to pay attention to. He says, "Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Jonah, listen to this next verse: Can a man hide himself in some secret place so that I cannot see him, declares the Lord? Do I not fill heaven and earth?"
There's the omnipresence of God. In other words, even Jeremiah says you can't hide from God; you can't run from God. If God tells you to do something, you can't just duck your head and go, "I think I just want to act like I heard that." You ever used to do that with your parents when you were a kid? You know they had a job for you, and one of my strategies was, you know, if you knew that your dad was going to give you a certain task, like sweep the garage, pull the weeds, mow the yard, the goal of man was to always be absent from the premises. Like, you get up before Dad gets up, get on your bicycle, and ride away because if you're not there to hear that command, you don't have to do it, right?
Well, Jonah was kind of like, "I did hear God tell me to do that, but I'm going to run from God." He got on a boat and was going to go to Tarshish, which is probably in Spain, and get as far away as he could from Nineveh. Here God reminds him, "You can run, but you can't hide. I will see you wherever you are." The same is true for us today. None of your sins is ever hidden from God. No things you say, nothing—not even the things you think—are hidden from God. You can't run or hide from God.
So how are these people going to, that we may think of, that are like undesirable, hopeless, wicked, almost not worthwhile? How would we ever think that they might get the gospel? The Bible tells us in Romans chapter 10, follow along with me as I read what Paul had to say about us. He's saying these words about us and about what our task and our mission is. We are not just a church to be a religious club; we are a church to be a people on mission, and our mission is to make disciples.
So he says in chapter 10 of Romans, verse 11, "For the scripture says, 'Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.' And there's no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." But look at this next verse: "How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear unless someone is preaching? And how are they to preach unless they're sent?"
As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news." How are they to hear unless some of us—all of us, really—are willing to go wherever God wants to send us?
Well, what do I do when I go, Pastor? What if God were to tell me to go to this neighborhood that is dangerous or go to this place where the darkness of sin is just rampant? What am I supposed to do? First of all, remember that you have the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us in Romans chapter 8 that we have the Holy Spirit living in us. Paul said in verse 9, "You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they don't belong to him."
So what he's saying there is if you're saved, you have the Holy Spirit. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, the Spirit dwells in you. Ephesians chapter 1, verse 13 says that the Spirit is God's deposit in you. It's like it's the seal that sets you apart as a child of God. You have the Holy Spirit in you if you're a believer in Jesus Christ.
Because you and I are believers in Jesus Christ, Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 11 and then verse 16 through 21, he has given us a ministry of reconciliation. So that even as we ourselves have been reconciled unto God, the output of that is that we join God now in the ministry of reconciliation—not if we want to, not if we feel like it, not if we think it's a good idea or a good suggestion from God. But the scripture says you and I have the ministry of reconciliation. God wants us to be involved in helping people come to know who Jesus Christ is in this ministry of reconciliation.
So we want to see today, as we look at this section of Jonah, exactly what we need to be on guard about or need to be protecting ourselves from. Because we, like Nineveh, live in a very perverse and dark culture. You agree with that? I mean, life is dark; the world is dark. I won't take the time to read it, but you could go into Romans chapter 1, verses 18 through 32, and see all the things that the Apostle Paul talks about there—the being given over to homosexuality, the rejection of God, the worship and idolatry of created things instead of the Creator. All of that is happening in our world today, and it's all happening in America today.
This is our Fourth of July weekend, a long weekend for many of you, in which we celebrate, as you notice in all the songs we sing, the freedom that we have in Jesus Christ. We celebrate the freedom that we have here in America. We, as believers and people who have half a brain, have to recognize that our freedoms are gradually and sometimes radically being eroded and taken away.
So we, like the city of Nineveh, need a revival. We need to see God's Spirit move in such a way in this country that we would see a turning back to God. Now, the concept of revival—let's make sure we understand that lost people getting saved is not revival. Revival is when the church gets right with God. Revival is when you and I come to that place where we respond to God in obedience and be like those people that the Old Testament talked about: "If my people who are called by my name will turn from their wicked ways and pray and seek my face." That's revival—when the church gets revived.
But what we need to see in America is a great sweeping outpouring of evangelism so that lost people get saved. And that is exactly what happened in Nineveh. Nineveh wasn't a group, a city where all the believers had started backsliding; they were all unbelievers. They were lost people; they were heathens; they were pagans; they were idolaters. And here is this one lone, lonely Jew named Jonah, who is a prophet who's had a pretty rough time lately. God came to him in chapter one and said, "Jonah, I want you to rise, go to Nineveh because the wickedness of that city has come to my attention."
We know what Jonah did: he went to the first place he could go to buy a ticket to a boat to go as far as he could go. While he was on that boat ride, the storm came up, and the people who were manning the boat—the captains of the boat—they were praying to their false gods and throwing stuff overboard, trying to keep the balance of the boat up, and Jonah was asleep. They came down and said, "Wake up, O sleeper, and start praying to your God." They don't even know who his God is, but they said, "Go pray to your God because we're praying to our gods, and they're not helping."
Jonah told them he was Hebrew, but he didn't say he was a prophet. "I'm a Hebrew; I worship the God who made the heavens and the earth," etc. But he didn't tell them what he was doing; he didn't tell them he was running from God or that he was being disobedient to God. But he did say the storm is happening because of me, so you throw me overboard, and you guys will all be okay. They tried to not do that, but they eventually had to break down and say, "Well, he said this is what we got to do; let's do it." So they tossed him overboard, and as soon as he did, the storms ceased.
Then the next thing we saw after that was that God had prepared this great big fish to come and swallow Jonah. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? You know, I have never caught a fish big enough to swallow me, but this was a fish—probably not a whale. It never says in the Bible that it was a whale, but most of us think of that because that's the biggest fish in the Bible. But I saw "Jaws," and I saw that movie where one man got swallowed by a big old shark, so who knows? Maybe it was a big fish like a shark; we don't know. But this fish swallowed him, and he spent three days and three nights in the belly of this fish. I mean, Jonah's not having a good time; this is hard. He's having a hard journey here, all because he chose to disobey and rebel against God.
So after three days, he kind of finally comes to the place. The reason he's there is because God sent him. God gave him a mission and a task to go preach to some people that he didn't want to see get saved. Like, they deserve hell. These people are so bad, so mean, wicked, and cruel; they just don't deserve to hear about the God who would forgive them. So he wrestles with God, and then we saw last week that finally, after the third day or so, he comes to his senses, and he says, "All right, God, salvation's your deal. I'm not the one who gets to decide who can be saved; you get to decide that. Salvation belongs to the Lord," he said in chapter 2, verse 9.
Then the Bible says God spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. I mean, Jonah's having a bad period of time here. Not only are you tossed overboard and you drown and you've been eaten by a fish, and now the fish throws you up, and you're swimming around in all the gastric juices of the fish's belly. Like, this is not the vacation Jonah had hoped he would have. He spent three days on a foam blubber mattress, and it probably didn't smell too good in there. Now the fish throws him up.
Let's take a look here at chapter 3. So then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. Jonah's probably going, "I got out of that one deal, so maybe God will have something better for me." But God didn't change His mind. He said, "No, Jonah, you're still going to go to Nineveh." So He says, "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it with the message that I will tell you."
At this point, Jonah doesn't even really know what he's going to say. You know, sometimes when you are trying to be a witness for Jesus Christ, you're not going to have it all mapped out. You're not going to know exactly what you could say or should say, and that's one of the beauties of allowing the Holy Spirit to work freely and spontaneously. So He says, "Arise and go and speak."
So look at verse 3. So he arose and he went. Then in verse 4, he started speaking. So Jonah's now on the right path: get up, go, and talk. The same thing needs to happen with us. We need to get up out of our comfort zone, be willing to go where God sends us, and then be willing to say what God tells us to say. But remember, as I said earlier, you have the Holy Spirit in you. John chapter 16 says that the Holy Spirit will tell you what to say when God puts you where He wants you to be. He will give you words to say; He'll recall scriptures to your memory that will help you in the situations that you're in because you're involved in a dynamic moment of doing something for God.
You think God doesn't care about that or God's not involved in that? He's all over that. So at the point that you put yourself out there and try to say, "I'm going to go talk to my neighbor," or "I'm going to go try to witness to somebody at work," or "somebody that I know is lost," the moment that you go to God in that way and say, "God, I want to serve you in this," God's going, "I'm with you there. I'm right there with you." So you just trust me; hang tight; I'm going to give you the words you need to say.
Now, I'm not saying don't prepare. I'm not saying don't learn some scripture verses or even maybe some witnessing processes like the three circles or the four spiritual laws or the Roman Road. Those things are all helpful to know, but what you'll probably discover is about the time you get locked into some kind of special outline, they'll ask you a question that throws you totally off. You got to learn to trust the Holy Spirit in these encounters that we have in which God puts us in the presence of somebody who needs to hear about Jesus because He's all wrapped up in that.
So he doesn't know what he's going to say yet, but he's going, and he's not going to argue with God anymore. "Okay, God, I will go." But imagine he's going like, "Well, what am I going to say?" So now, after he comes back, the fish, you know, pukes him up on the beach, he's still got about 500 miles before he gets to Nineveh. He's got to walk about 500 miles. So all this time he's walking, he's thinking, "What am I going to say? What am I going to say?" He's trying to like, "Give me three points; give me a poem; give me a sad story; give me a good joke to tell God," and he doesn't know what he's going to say.
When he gets there, it says Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey, and he called out, "Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown." That's his message. We don't have any indication that he said anything else but that. As he made his way through the city streets, he kept repeating these same eight words. By the way, it's only five words in Hebrew: "Yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown." Nineveh will be destroyed.
Now, you're a Jew; the Ninevites don't like Jews. Here you come sashaying into their city, probably not looking so good after a 500-mile walk and three days and three nights in the belly of a fish. You come into the city streets, and all you start doing is telling people, "Yet 40 days, and God will overthrow you." There was never, "But you need to repent; turn to God; put your faith in Him. He's a God of mercy; He's a God of grace; God loves you." He doesn't say anything like that. This is his message. It's almost like, "I don't want to preach this message, so this is all I'm going to do. I'm going to give them the least possible I can give them: 'In 40 days, you'll be destroyed.'"
And he's just walking down the street, "In 40 days, you'll be destroyed. In 40 days, you're going to be destroyed. In 40 days, you'll be destroyed." And that's all he's preaching to these people. But you know what? Even a brief, short, kind of shallow message like that, when it is empowered by the Holy Spirit, it does amazing, miraculous things.
We look at the next verse, and we see that the people of Nineveh believed God. It doesn't say they believed Jonah; it doesn't say they believed his message. It said they put their faith in God. That word "believed" there is the same word we see when talking about Abraham, when the Bible says, "Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness." It's the same word. They didn't just have an emotional fling, a little spasm of, "Oh, maybe we ought to not be so mean." It says they put their faith in God.
And he didn't hardly even tell them about God. All he said was, "In 40 days, God is going to destroy you." It says the people of Nineveh believed God, and they called for a fast, and they put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. We see here that an amazing thing happened to a wicked city.
Now let me read a quote to you. This was a quote by a famous American patriot. This really was spoken; it's a real quotation. Listen to this. Speaking of America, this person says, "We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us. And we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace. Too proud to pray to the God that made us. And it behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness."
If that was true in April of 1863 when Abraham Lincoln said it, it's more true today. We need a revival in this country. Therefore, we need to be the people on mission with the message that God has given us of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The pastor by the name of D. M. Patton wrote these words: "It is a foolish blunder to suppose that any age can be too evil for revival." I mean, America is just too far gone, right? Look, we got all this political chaos; we've got political corruption; we've got the Church of Satan; we've got all this sexual transgenderism and sexual identity and confusion stuff; we've got homosexuality; we've got—you name it—pornography; we've got people selling drugs and fentanyl to our kids and cocaine. This world, this country, is just getting too far away.
He says, "It is a fallacy to believe that we are too far gone for God's arm to be able to save. Revival is possible, and I'm convinced that revival is what we must have in this country." As we think about this coming week celebrating the freedoms that we have in this country, how much more do we in the church today need to recognize that it's not just our job to stand and put our hand across our chest and sing "God Bless America" and say the Pledge of Allegiance, but we need to be God's pledge to this country that we'll be the ones who have the vision and the message and the voice and the guts to be the people of God in it.
Otherwise, quit complaining about the country; quit complaining about all those problems. We're on the boat trying to get away from all of it. While we're not in the boat, you know where we are? It's not in the boat; we're in the church. We think Christianity has become a go-gather on Sunday, get some spiritual food, grow your faith a little bit, have some sweet fellowship, maybe a potluck or two every now and then, and that's church. That's not church.
Read the book of Acts. You know what church was? They took it to the street. They didn't keep it in the church house or wherever it was they gathered; they took the faith to the street. The Bible says that not just that they added a few people—when we get excited if three or four people visit our church on Sunday—they said that they were adding people by the thousands. America is not too far gone for God to reach and save and bring revival.
The prophet Isaiah in chapter 60 predicted a time when he said, "Darkness will cover the earth, and thick darkness will cover the people." Isaiah chapter 60, verse 2. The King James calls it "gross darkness." We are in that period of time, and revival—a dark era, a dark age—is the seedbed for when God can bring His revival.
Somehow, people think, "No, we're too evil for revival." Are you kidding me? Every great revival that you see throughout history was preceded by the worst periods of darkness. I'd like to read A.W. Tozer; I like his books. He wrote a long time ago, but there's so much wisdom in his words. I found somewhere online that he recommended this formula for revival. I kind of like it.
Number one, he said you got to get—I'm just going to read his words, okay? These are not my words. A.W. Tozer said, "First of all, get thoroughly dissatisfied with yourself." I'm not talking about how much you weigh or the hairstyle or your wardrobe. He said, "Become thoroughly dissatisfied with yourself." Where he says, "Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is a stagnant soul."
Secondly, he said, "Set your face like a flint toward a sweeping transformation of your own life." He says, "Timid experiments are tagged for failure before they even start. Well, God, I'll try. Oh, God, I'll go a little ways; I'll meet you halfway." He says, "We must throw our whole soul into fulfilling God's desires."
Number three, he says, "Put yourself in the way of blessing." He says, "It's a mistake to expect God's help to come as a windfall apart from the conditions that are known and met. To desire revival and at the same time neglect prayer and devotion is to wish one way and walk another."
The fourth one is a tough one: "Do a thorough job of repenting." Hasty repentance, he says, means a shallow spiritual experience. Let godly sorrow do her healing work. He says, "It is our wretched habit of tolerating sin that keeps us in our half-dead condition."
Number five, make restitution wherever it's possible. If you owe a debt, pay it. If you've quarreled with anyone, go as far as you can to achieve reconciliation as fully as possible. Make the crooked path straight.
Number six, he says, "Bring your life into accord with the Sermon on the Mount and other such New Testament scriptures that are designed to instruct us in the way of living righteously." He says, "An honest man with an open Bible and a pad and a pencil is sure to find out what's wrong with himself very quickly."
Number seven, "Be serious-minded about this. There must be a radical change in our habits, or there will be no permanent improvement on the interior of our life."
And here's an interesting one that many of you probably would say, "Yeah, I kind of like this one." Number eight, he says, "Deliberately narrow your interest." And he's not saying be narrow-minded, okay? Don't think that's what he's saying. But how many of you would say today, "I'm too busy; got too many things going on in my life. Man, I can't keep up with everything. Kids are going here, this one there; I'm doing that, working 60 hours."
He says, "Too many projects use up time and energy without bringing us nearer to God. The mansions of the heart will become larger when the doors are thrown open to Christ and closed against the world and sin."
Number nine, he says, "Start witnessing. Find something to do for God and for your fellow man. Make yourself available. Do everything that God asks you to do and learn to obey Him."
And then finally, he says, "Have faith in God. Have faith in God. Begin to expect God to work. Remember that all of heaven is on your side. God will not disappoint you."
Revival can happen in this country if we will do what God has called us to do, and we have a mission. You can call it the Great Commission; you can call it when I give you my Spirit, I'm going to send you to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth. But I want you to make disciples, teach people how to love me, know me, and follow me. Teach them to obey the things; baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we have that mission.
So here's Jonah now, finally, in chapter 3, verse 2, after all the myths of chapters one and two, where he's running from God, hiding from God, trying to hide from God, being thrown in the water, eaten by the fish, puked up on the beach. He gets busy, and he goes. He doesn't really know even what he's going to say yet, but he goes. He went, and he started crying out, "40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown." Eight words, five in Hebrew. And yet there was tremendous result from it.
We're going to look more at that next week in the last five verses of this chapter, but the tremendous result of this message that he preached and the Spirit moving through him was the city repented and came to faith.
So if we're going to see—if we want to see revival in our country, then we as a church have responsibilities. This is going to be the simplest, easiest four points you ever heard. We need to be faithful to proclaim the message of God's salvation in the gospel and of mercy—the message Jonah preached that wouldn't have even got a passing grade in any of my classes I had in seminary or college—but it was what God used.
If there is going to be revival in this country, it's going to be because God's people are faithful with the message of grace and salvation that God has given to us. Secondly, we as believers—we call ourselves believers—we need to believe in God. We need to believe that He can do it. We need to believe that He is able.
I told you before that the people didn't believe in Jonah; they believed in God. They didn't believe in his message; they believed in God. It says that the city believed; the people of Nineveh believed God. In chapter 4, we'll see that the numbers there are 120,000 people. This is the greatest revival in the Bible. I mean, this is a little bitty tiny book—48 verses—and yet it has within it the greatest revival, the greatest outpouring of evangelism and gospel and message anywhere in the Bible.
The third thing is not only do you believe, but you need to let belief lead you to action. There's one thing to say we believe God; we talk to God; we pray to God; we sing to God; we believe God. So what are we doing about that? I mean, beyond just coming to church, how are we taking the gospel to the street? How are we taking it to our neighborhood? How are we taking it to our workplaces? How are we living it? How do we have it ready on our tongues to be instant in season when God gives us an opportunity, opens the door, and there is somebody that God just brings right to us who needs to hear the gospel?
Do we just kind of struggle with that and go, "Well, I hope somebody tells them, but it's not going to be me"? There's going to have to be action on my part and your part. What we see in verses 6 through 10—we won't take the time really to dig into this too much today—but what we see is that all of the people, even including the king, did something because of what they believed. Their belief led to repentance; their belief led to actions; their belief led to fasting, wearing sackcloth and ashes. They believed God.
The fourth thing that they did was they turned away from sin. They turned away from any known sin that they were guilty of. What that means is repent. They repented. Now, there's a lot of confusion today about what is repentance. What do you mean, "repent"? What is that? Some people think that repentance is like remorse. "Oh God, I'm so sorry. God, I know that was wrong, and I'm sorry for it." And that's not repenting; it's remorse. And remorse can lead to repentance, but it's not repentance.
I mean, for example, remember the rich young ruler? The Bible says he went away from Jesus how sorrowful, but he didn't repent, and he didn't get saved—at least not at that time. Other people think that repentance is like to have a really deep, strong regret. "Boy, I wish I hadn't done that. I regret doing that. I so regret saying that. I just wish that that had never happened. I wish I had never done that." But regret is not repentance. The Bible says that Pontius Pilate regretted his decision with Jesus, but he didn't repent.
And then some people think repentance is to make a better resolve. "I'll do better. I'll turn over a new leaf. I'll pull myself up by my bootstraps and be better in the future." It's not resolve. Repentance is a change of heart that leads to changes in actions. This is plainly what we see in the Ninevites. Their hearts were smitten; they were stricken with shame and guilt. They believed in God, and they changed. That's when repentance has taken place—when change takes place.
The king will even get involved in this, as we'll see next week. They find that what they discover is exactly what Jonah said when he was in the belly of the fish: "Salvation belongs to God, and He can give it to whomever He chooses." So while I'm oftentimes analyzing people and like, "God, they're too far. Those people have heard the gospel so much, and they're too far gone, so why bother? Why pray for them? Why do anything? Because they just don't get it."
There has to come this point in time when we remember when we didn't get it. Do you remember that? Do you remember when you were lost? Maybe you lived a long time—maybe you were an adult when you got saved, and you lived a long time not thinking God was anything to you. We, as believers, need to recognize that we serve a Savior. We tend to think of like, "Boy, we can't wait till you come back, Jesus, and start judging and throwing people in hell because we've got a whole list of people that we want to see go there."
I mean, there are some Hollywood actors that I want to see; there are some government politicians that I want to see go there. That is not ever our prerogative. Our hope in prayer should always be that we would hope, pray, seek, work, live, teach, preach, and act like we want to see people come to know the Lord Jesus Christ.
And believe that if He can save a city like Nineveh, He can save America if only His people will stop being Jonah, who want to run from it, hide from it, hate from it, and turn ourselves over to God to say, "You use me however you want to use me," because that's how we're going to see revival come.
One more scripture, okay? Then I'm finished. Jeremiah chapter 18. This is a promise. Jeremiah chapter 18, verse 7. God says, "If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will pluck it up and break down and destroy it—" What did Jonah say? "In 40 days, God's going to destroy you." This is the message from God. God told me to tell you this: "In 40 days, you'll be destroyed." He didn't even tell them that that might not happen.
Here comes Jeremiah, and he says, "And if that nation concerning which I have spoken turns from its evil, then I, God, will relent of the disaster I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I intended to do to it."
God is able to turn things around. He's able. It's not God's will that any should perish, right? And I love what Paul said in Romans 2. After he, in Romans 1, talked about how dark and how desperate things were, in Romans chapter 2, he says, "But the kindness of God leads us to repentance." That in His kindness, God doesn't want anybody to be lost, and He desires for their salvation. He will bring them to the place of repentance—not because they deserve it, but because of His kindness to them.
We live in a country right now that is, no surprise to anybody, that needs to repent and turn to God. Our politics is corrupt; our media is corrupt; our values have gone corrupt. We have become a nation that shows almost no regard—in fact, Christians are quickly becoming the enemy in this country. Therefore, all the more important it is for you and I to arise and go and speak the truth of God's word to the people in our country, to the people in our neighborhood, maybe in our own house, so that we can see God do a miracle of revival.
Let's go to the Lord together in prayer. Father, there may be somebody in this room today that has never trusted you to be their Lord and Savior, and they have seen in their life a cycle of decline where things don't matter as much as they used to. Values have shrunk; convictions are fading, and it's because we're not close to you. That is possible for a believer, and it's possible for an unbeliever.
But I pray today, Lord, that if there's anyone in this room who's been running and trying to hide, and you've told them that you've got a job and a task for them, you've got a mission field for them, and it's not the mission field of, "Let's change the politics," or "Let's change this social problem that we've got in our country." It's the mission of the Gospel of Jesus Christ because that's the only hope there is. Social reform will take people straight to hell; political reform will do nothing for eternity. People need to come to Christ—the Savior, the Redeemer, the one who forgives all of our sins and our iniquities.
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to cleanse us of our sins and purify us from all sinfulness. I pray, Lord, that none of us in the church will become so jaded against those people or that group or that movement that we turn our heads and go the other way and think that they're too evil to be saved. Don't let us be like Jonah, because we may discover if we are that way, it will cost us a great deal.
If there's anyone here today, Lord, that needs to come to you and accept your salvation and become a believer and a follower and to repent of sins, may they simply be led by your Spirit to say obediently, "Yes, Father. Yes, God, I need your forgiveness, and I need salvation, and I want to belong to Jesus Christ for eternity." In Jesus' name, amen.
Those are great words—a very small book in the Bible of only four chapters, but it couldn't be more clear of what He's trying to tell us. Jonah resisted greatly and even fought when he was there, but what did God require? He required that Jonah say a few small words. He didn't even have to explain it. As Brian said, he went and said a few small words, and he saved the whole city.
What better example did God give us of what is required of us? Almost nothing except obeying. Last week, we talked, you know, we were in Jonah, and Brian mentioned so many great things, but we prayed about what God has called us individually and as a church to do. What are we doing in the city of Tomball or in our neighborhoods to change?
You think about what people—July 4th is here—what people gave to this country just so we could meet here freely. We could be in another country right now and be hauled off for doing this, right? So I want you to think about again praying what God has called you and this church to do.
So this is kind of different. We're going to do the invitation that Brian said. If you want to come up for that, but I want us to come up here in front and pray for that specifically. I know I have some prayer warriors here. I see some faces that are willing to come up here and just pray together for a few minutes and pray for what we individually and as a church can do in this community that God has called us to do.
Again, we always think, "I don't have time; I'm so busy." What did Jonah have to do? He spent way more time in the belly of a whale or whatever it was and fighting. All he had to do was go there and say a few small words, and God took care of it. You don't have to be gifted for this. Whatever it is, you don't have to have—God provides what we need, right? To do the things that He's called us to do, He only calls you to be obedient. You don't have to be perfect. Like me standing here, I am so far from perfect, but I'm trying to do what God has asked me to do. That's it. That's all there is to it—just try to do what God has asked you to do.
So if you guys would come up here, join us. Brian's going to be here; I'll be right here. Let's just pray together for that specifically. If you want to pray about something else or talk to the pastor, that's fine. But let's do that. Thank you.
on Nov 05, 2023
