Jonah 3:1-5
Amen, turn to Jonah chapter three. Tonight we’ll look at verses
one through five. Jonah chapter three, one to five.
So Jonah three is a parallel to chapter one, at least the
first couple of verses. You can turn to both and see
that the beginning of chapter three is much like the beginning
of chapter one. So chapter three of Jonah, verses one through
five, I hear the word of the living God. It says, the word
of the Lord came to Jonah the second time saying, arise, go
to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message
that I tell you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh
according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly
great city, three days journey in breadth. Jonah began to go
into the city, going a day’s journey, and he called out, yet
40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And the people of
Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put
on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. Amen. The word of our God. Second time’s a charm. That’s
what we’ve got here is the title. You think about where we would
be if Jonah had just done what it says in verse three and he
went to Nineveh and he preached. We would be missing the disobedience. We would be missing the boat
trip. We would be missing the storm. We would be missing getting
tossed in the ocean. We’d miss the great fish, the
salvation of God. We’d miss all of these, wonderful
things, including last week Jonah’s psalm, Jonah’s prayer. What if
Jonah was just chapters three and four? Jonah went. Jonah preached. Jonah had success. The people
repented. That would be wonderful. Wonderful
for, well, readers. It would be easy, less painful.
But I want to suggest to you that the life of your preacher,
the life of Jonah, Very often goes through a lot of the same
turmoil that you do. I think sometimes people look
into the life of the preacher and say, Oh, look, look, he’s
got it all figured out, right? I’m sure that’s what y’all say
about me. You say, Oh, look at the preacher. He’s got life all
figured out. When he preaches a sermon, it’s
pie in the sky. Let me tell you, that is very
often not the case. Very often not true. In fact,
I don’t think you’d want to have a pastor or minister or elders
where they’ve just got it all wrapped up and neat. Because
there’s no compassion. There’s no meaning behind the
message. There’s no fire. So I would imagine
Jonah here, He’s got a little oomph in his
ministry. He’s got a little fire in his
bones. He’s got a little something of
energy to give to the people. And I want us to look through
these couple verses of Jonah chapter three and see the bare
bones simplicity of his message. The first thing you want to look
at in chapter three verse one is it’s his second calling. All right, remember the first
time he didn’t go. And if you look back at chapter one, first
verse or two, and you look at chapter three, you’ll notice
a very important addition to Jonah’s call. It says, the word
of the Lord came to Jonah. Okay, that was in there before.
The second time, well, that wasn’t in there before, because the
other time was the first time. Then it says, arise and go to Nineveh,
that great city, and call out against it. Okay, that was in
there before. And then it says, the message that I tell you.
Um, I don’t know if God is trusting Jonah yet. Um, you’re, you’re
not only going to go to an end of a, uh, but you’re going to
say exactly, uh, what I have said to say, this is, this is
kind of a commissioning, isn’t it? You get a little echoes here
of Jesus. Great commission. They trained
his disciples. He had prepared them and then
he sent them. Did he say, go say anything you want? Did he
say, go start a basketball program and hope families will start
coming to church? Start a scout program and that’ll get families
in the church. A friend of mine was telling me that his church
has a preschool and they spend like $200,000 a year running
this preschool. And he said, guess how many families
come to our church? Zero. We forget. It’s pretty simple. Do what God says. Preach. And
Jonah’s second calling here is not as simple as it sounds. Go
to Nineveh. It’s a great city, a wicked city.
It’s a city that is known across that part of the world for being
a God-hating city. So here’s Jonah’s second call,
second calling. We know he’s going to get it
right. He’s just going to go with a bad attitude. But here’s his second calling.
And notice the message that God gives them. It says, Jonah arose,
he went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Not
getting out of it this time, it says, Nineveh was an exceedingly
great city, three days journey in breadth. That says something
maybe about the size of the city, and it may also say something
about how long it would take him to itinerate throughout the
city. But it says very simply, Jonah
began to go in the city, he went a day’s journey, and he called
out, yet 40 days, and none of us shall be overthrown. Earlier
this week, I popped in a sermon on my iPod when I was out taking
a morning walk, and I thought, I wanna listen to this person,
I wanna listen to what they had to say. And the longer I walked, the
more confused I was. The longer I walked, the more
this person talked. And I got to thinking about Jonah.
Yet 40 days, and none of us shall be overthrown. Preaching ought
to be pretty simple, right? I have a friend in ministry.
He’s gone on to be with the Lord, but he said that early in his
ministry, somebody told him, you’re a wordy man. You say in
a thousand words what could be set in 200. It’s usually true
of pastors. They say too much. But what’s
his message? Yet 40 days and then shall be overthrown. And
our American sensibility says that’s not enough. Well, if it
was the message given by God to Jonah to proclaim, it’s enough. And it seems to have done some
work. Yet 40 days and none of us shall
be overthrown. Now maybe Jonah stopped and told
people about his running from God. Maybe Jonas stopped some
folks and told them about the ship and about the sea and being
tossed overboard. Maybe he told some about the
great fish and the three days salvation in the belly of the
great beast. Maybe he told them some other
things, but at any rate, his message was rather simple. Judgment
is coming. What is the American church these
days? Come over here and have fun with us. Come over here and
like McDonald’s, you can have it. Your way. Come over here
like Burger King and you can have it your way. That’s right.
That’s the American church. Jonah seems to give a pretty
damning message, doesn’t he? In 40 days, God is gonna overthrow
this place. Think Sodom and Gomorrah. Think
Jericho. Think other times and places
in the Bible when God took care of business. And so you can imagine
in Jonah’s ministry, there was some urgency. He had just experienced
what God does when God is displeased. He had just experienced what
God does when you’ve made him angry. He had just experienced
what God does when you turn your back on him and say, will God
know? He had just experienced God’s
mercy as well. Can you imagine not just the
tumult in Jonah’s life of the up and down of the boat, the
down, down, down into the sea, the weeds wrapping around him?
How did he describe it? I went to the base of the mountains,
the roots of the mountains. Can you imagine all the gulps
of water and nastiness that had to pump out of himself while
he was catching his breath in the belly of that beast? He had
seen the highs and the lows, the ups, the downs, the death
and the life. And so don’t you think he had
something to say? There’s a saying sometimes that preachers will
say to one another or use with one another. Your preaching needs
to have a feeling to it. It ought to have some urgency
to it. We ought to preach a felt Christ. There ought to be in
our conveyance of the truth that God is, well, he’s real. and that our God does love, yes,
that’s true, but our God does judge. And we ought to, with
great urgency, plead with people to put their faith, their hope,
their trust in Almighty God. You think about church these
days. Church is kind of a play toy, right? Church is a play
toy for so many people. But as we have been studying
our little section in Acts and looking at Elders, deacons, and
ministers. I’ve been reading through 1st
and 2nd Timothy. I hope y’all have. Church for Paul was not
a play toy. Church for Timothy was not a
play toy. It was not something to come
and just have fun at. It was the pillar. It is the
pillar and buttress of truth. It is the household of faith.
It is where people either get convinced and converted of their
sins or comforted and build up. And so you can imagine Jonah
had some sort of urgency in his ministry. Yes, I’m gonna go. He wasn’t happy about it. But
yes, I’m gonna preach. And he does preach. Yet 40 days
and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So in his second calling, with
this simple message, there’s another thing we see. It says
simply, and the people of Nineveh believed God. Now I hate to say too much about
the modern church, but I’m gonna say another thing. You go to
a lot of churches in America and it’s a business model. If
you build a Starbucks looking building, you get the kids off
in a campus of their own, you serve really good coffee, you
put people in an easy chair. In fact, Darren Stone, who preaches
for us from time to time, says he went to church out in California
over the holidays, and he said, from the time you step on that
campus, it’s just easy. The chairs lean back, the coffee
tastes good, your children are taken care of. You sit and are
sung to in church. There’s no singing by you unless
you happen to know the words, and the message is not going
to offend. It’s gonna soothe your every ache and pain. And so that’s sort of the American
church. And we think we have this formula,
if we make everybody happy, make them feel easy going, the people
will believe God, so to speak. But aren’t we seeing, we’ve read
the statistics in recent history, all these mega churches have
said it didn’t work. It didn’t work. We thought we
had a plan, it didn’t work. And look at Jonah’s simple results. He gives a pretty terrible message.
Forty days and you’re dead. Forty days and you’re gone. Forty
days and you’re cooked. Forty days and it’s curtains.
That’s not the power of positive thinking. That’s not how to win
friends and influence people. That is not a Joel Osteen message
of smile, smile, smile, and God loves you and would never do
anything to harm you. That is not American Christianity. 40 days and well, God’s gonna
pour out his wrath on you. It says, the people of Nineveh
believed God. And notice the further response.
They called for a fast. They put on sackcloth from the
greatest of them to the least. Now, next week we’ll look at
six through 10 and think about what it looks like. But let me
ask you a question. And I mean to ask you about this
church too, but your other church experiences. How often do you
hear in the word, hear in the church, the word repent? Okay, hopefully hear a lot. Cause
we have a confession of sin every week. So, and we do it on Sunday
night as well. Hopefully a lot. Do a little Google search. Somebody
visiting a modern American church. You’re not gonna hear the word
repent. Why? It’s a negative word. It means you’ve done something
wrong, and oh, we don’t want to upset. But why must we preach
repentance? Well, because if you keep going,
you Ninevites, or you Americans, or whoever, if you keep going
this way, you’re gonna walk right into the wrath of God. You’re
going to walk right into the eternal day of judgment. You’re
going to walk right into the pit of hell. Think about the
revival preaching that we read about and so are interested in,
particularly in New England. New England’s kind of a pagan
part of our country, isn’t it? But that’s where all the great
revivals took place. That’s where Jonathan Edwards would preach.
That’s where some of the great, they call them the events of
the century, not only in the 1700s and the 1800s took place,
but that’s where great revivals broke out, the Haystack Revival,
the great revival of New York City in the late 1800s. These
revivals broke out not because of gimmicks, but because of prayer
meetings and because of preaching of repentance. And so as we look
at the landscape of America and we wrestle our hands and we say,
oh boy, what can be done? Well, the answer is pretty simple.
Preach repentance. Preach turning from evil and
returning to almighty God and perhaps God might lead people
to call a fast and put on sackcloth. I know Many of us have lived
through the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. We’ve lived through
the moral majority, right? Pat Buchanan, the fellow up there
in Lynchburg, Falwell. We’ve lived through the Reagan
years. We’ve lived through the rise of evangelical Christianity,
and it is ingrained in our head, because we listen to James Dobson
and we listen to all these programs, if we just vote for the right
person, America will change. That’s not how it works. If preachers
preach, and people come in here. That’s how our nation will change. And you think how awful Nineveh
was. This was the capital, well, not
the capital at this time, but this was one of their major cities
where when they went and took captive other nations, as they
will do after this at some point, they’ll take the northern tribes
of Israel, they were dirty. They were mean. They were brutal.
They put fish hooks in people’s mouth. You know how you see,
maybe you go to the zoo and you see a little kindergarten class,
and they’re all walking and holding their little rope. Don’t let
go of the rope. Get lost. Well, what the Assyrians
did is they put hooks in your mouth, and they hooked those
hooks to a chain, and you were on your little preschool line
with a hook in your mouth off to exile in Assyria. They laid
waste to cities. They laid waste to people. Sounds
a little like the news we’re watching. These were wicked,
nasty people, and yet God in his mercy brought repentance. So what could come of America?
What could come of our university system? What could come of our
our children that are being raised these days on pop culture and
not much else. What could come of the fatherless
generation that our world has? Well, anything glorious could
come if they would but hear the gospel. So I wanna encourage
you as we think of Jonah’s very simple message, don’t clutter
up the gospel. Don’t clutter up with churchy
stuff. Don’t clutter it up with some
to-dos and not to-dos. Give it to them simple. God is
a God of grace and he is going to come in judgment. But if you
will repent of your sins and turn to faith in Jesus Christ,
perhaps he might grant you that great grace. And I hope that
you’ll have the urgency of Jonah, not because you’ve been swallowed
by a fish or thrown overboard. But because as you have walked
through the hardship and the pain and the turmoil of life,
you’ve seen it’s all there is. It’s all you’ve got. There’s
nothing, no other message to give except the plain message
of faith in Jesus Christ. Let’s go to God in prayer. Our
Lord, we thank you for the simple message of Jonah and the simple
message of the gospel you give us. You save sinners. You love the unrighteous. You
give grace, our sins are many, your mercy is more. Lord, we
could say it simply over and over, and yet we tend to hide
our faith under a basket. Lord, let our light shine bright,
and so that we might tell the world of Jesus and the way to
escape his judgment. Hear us and help us in the name
of Christ, amen.