Father in Heaven, we give You praise for what You have given
us. This day already overwhelms our
souls. We're so thankful for Your
faithfulness to us, so thankful that we trust Your holy Word, so
thankful for Your mercy, so thankful Holy Spirit, for your
illumination. We pray God that You would now
speak to us through Your Word and Spirit, that we would be
eager to turn away from anything that displeases you, that
through the work of Your Word and Spirit we would be enabled
to leave this place obedient, faithful, full of joy and making
known the good news of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Overwhelm us with Your presence and send us, Lord, for Your
glory. We ask this in Jesus name, Amen.
This morning I'm going to be reading from the 3rd chapter of
Jonah, beginning at verse 4. We have been in the study of
Jonah this fall. Next week as John D Phillips
preaches for the missions conference, he'll be preaching
from the book of Haggai and then we will move back into Jonah,
which will take us up to the season of Advent.
If you're new to our church, this very familiar story we
believe is a true story. And so as you hear what is being
read, we believe this is an account of a man who was
swallowed by a fish, spit up on the shore.
And now after God has given him a second word and his obedience,
he's moving towards one of the most evil cities known to man.
And he's moving towards that city to tell them the message
that God has given him. And this is what happens.
Jonah three Beginning at verse 4, Jonah began to go into the
city, going a day's journey, and he called out.
Yet 40 days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
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.
The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his
throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth,
and set in ashes. And he issued A proclamation and
published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his
nobles. Let neither man nor beast heard,
nor flock taste anything. Let them not feed or drink
water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let
them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil
way and from the violence that is in his hands.
Who knows, God may turn and relent and turn from His fierce
anger so that we may not perish. When God saw what they did, how
they turn from their evil way, God relented of the disaster
that He had said He would do to them, and He did not do it.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Please be seated when God's word reaches a soul.
When God's word reaches a soul, repentance follows.
Repentance means a change, a different direction, a new way
of thinking, a new way of feeling.
When God's word reaches the soul, repentance follows.
From the beginning of the Bible to the end, the story of
redemption follows that reality. Jonah chapter 1.
He receives the word from the Lord.
He is a prophet of God, the prophet of God.
As a prophet of God, he rejects the word that God gave him.
He rebels and moves away from the Lord, as far away from the
city of Nineveh as he can, and as far away from the Lord as he
can. But our sin and our rebellion
cannot outrun God. In God's Providence and in His
power, He gave birth to a fish, 1 fish whose purpose was to
swallow this man, showing God's grace and pursuit of the Sinner.
Jonah would spend 3 days in the belly of that fish, finally
coming to the end of himself. And the fish spits Jonah up on
the shore, and in the word the Lord comes to Jonah a second
time. There was a real fish.
There was a real shore. There was real seaweed wrapped
around Jonah. There was real funk all over
him. Jonah is standing on the shore.
He receives the word again, and this time he rises up.
Instead of running from the Lord, instead of running from
Nineveh, he now moves towards this people.
Now this is what is important to remember.
This is an evil people. It is a big city, 120,000
people. The 120,000 people are led by a
very evil and very violent king, and they are a very evil and
violent people. Jonah walks towards that city.
He doesn't just magically appear in that city, he moves towards
that city, a real place on this real earth.
And as he walks he knows that he has one command.
Tell them the message that God had given them, given him, and
the message was this yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
It's not a self help message, it's not how to have a better
day. It is not a good feeling
message. Even if Jonas said more, and
it's very possible that he did, it would have been what God told
him to say. He's being obedient and God saw
that. As that message is summarized,
this is the summary He wanted us to have yet. 40 days and Nineveh
shall be overthrown. The way we're going to approach
this today and really over the next few weeks after the
missions conference, is to look at what their response, the
people of Nineveh was to the message Jonah gave.
And then what was God's response to the people of Nineveh?
And then what is Jonah's response to their response?
That'll be in two weeks. And then what is our response
which will stay with that as well today, let's begin by
talking about the power of the word of God.
Look with me again at verse 5 after the text tells us Jonah
said yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Verse 5 tells us, and the people of Nineveh believed God.
This is important. It doesn't say, and the people
of Nineveh believed Jonah. That wouldn't have been
inappropriate because Jonah was the vessel, but it's more it's
in the people of Nineveh didn't just believe the preacher.
They didn't just believe the prophet.
They just didn't believe the one who is an ambassador.
They believed God. They believed that the word that
this man was bringing to them was truly God's word, the power
of God's Word. Verse 6 tells us that the word
reached. I love that word.
The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his
throne. When God's word reaches a soul,
repentance follows. When God's word reaches a soul,
repentance follows. The power of the Word of God is
present here. Jonah did not bring his own
word. He did not bring his own
courage. He did not bring his own
cleverness. He didn't bring his own
creativity. He brought the Word of God.
And the Word of God is living and active.
If you're in Christ Jesus, you've been called to take God's
word as a missionary wherever you live.
We believe in the priesthood of all believers.
We have the privilege of taking that message.
If you're in Christ Jesus, you know what needs to be said.
Many Christians are like, I don't know enough.
What if they ask me a question? I don't know?
Friend in Christ, you know more than you think you know.
And yes, grow, learn more, but you know enough.
And if you don't think you do, we can give it to you quickly.
People that are lost, they don't need your cleverness, they don't
need your cultural analysis. They don't need your quotes from
lots of other books. They need the word of God.
And the word of God is powerful and active, alive, and it's
sufficient. Jonah brings them the word.
Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
Think about that. To the most violent nation at
that time, this large city, this one man in obedience moves with
his message, the message God gave him.
People of Nineveh believed God the king.
The word reached him. Whenever God's word reaches the
soul, repentance follows. John Calvin, commenting on Jonah
Three, speaks of the ways in which kings cannot bear to be
admonished even by their equals. Calvin writes, But Jonah wasn't
an equal. Jonah was a stranger and of
humble condition. That he therefore so touched the
heart of the King, must be ascribed to the hidden power of
God, which God he puts forth through His Word whenever he
pleases. God does not indeed work alike
by the preaching of his word. It doesn't happen the same way
every time and every place. He does not always keep to the
same course. But when when he, God, pleases,
he so efficaciously touches the hearts of men that the success
of his word exceeds all expectation.
Right now I want you to consider what nation, what leader, what
person in your life do you think?
I don't think they could come to Christ.
I don't think it's possible that they could ever believe.
The veil is too thick, the darkness is too great, the evil
is too pronounced. Who is it?
If you were living back then and you were an Israelite, it would
have been the king of Nineveh. We have those kind of people in
our lives. As you pray for their salvation,
do you do so with the confidence of what God can do through His
word, that He can bring an evil king to the end of himself?
And through doing that, he would call on his whole nation to
repent. That's what happened.
Do you believe it next Sunday or this coming weekend?
The whole weekend is the missions conference next Sunday,
as John D Rhodes is here preaching in this pulpit.
I won't be here in God's timing. I'm going to be in Japan.
I'm going to be preaching from a different pulpit with a
translator in a different language.
I'm going to Japan. Leaving early tomorrow morning
to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Christ Bible
Institute, a ministry that we have been partnering with, eager
to support, and are so excited to watch.
Our home church missionaries Brett and Taylor Rail continue
to lead that ministry. It's amazing.
Japan, of all the modern cities of the world, is the least
Christian nation. Less than 1% of that population
professes faith in Jesus. One of the missionaries from our
denomination who's been there a long time, Dan Iverson, will be
here, actually, for our missions conference.
He and his wife landed there, and it took them eight years
before they saw one person profess faith in Jesus Christ.
The soil is hard. I remember the first time I
went, I think it was 2018, my daughter was living there just
out of high school in a gap year, serving with Christ Bible
Institute. My whole family went.
And as we were there, I heard over and over and over again
from missionaries, from those who are serving on the ground.
This is hard, hard soil. And it is.
But my word of encouragement to them was it doesn't take any
more power of God to save one Japanese soul as it did the
apostle Paul's or did the king of Nineveh to bring him to
repentance or me. It's the same power.
It's the same God. It's the same word that they
need. We don't need to worry about the
results. We just need to be faithful to
give God's word wherever He calls us to give it.
And for most of us, it's right here where we live, where we
work, where we play. And the Word of God reaches a
soul, repentance follows. So how did the people of Nineveh
respond to the message? Yet 40 days and Nineveh will be
overthrown. Well, here you're going to hear
the sound of repentance and really the sound of reformation.
Let's go back to verse 5. The people of Nineveh believed
God. They called so vocally, now they
believe God. And whenever some soul has been
reached by the word, repentance follows.
And so you begin to see the action that takes place, A soul
that is now in fear. And we all should be of the
living God. And on reverence, they're
calling out to one another, they call for a fast, they put on
sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least.
To get more specific, the word tells us in verse 6 the word
reached the king of Nineveh When the word reached the king of
Nineveh, Because the word reached the king of Nineveh, it
led to repentance. Repentance follows.
The word says in verse 6 that he arose the same word for when
Nona no Jonah rose and went the wrong direction.
The same word when the king or the the the sailor in the
captain of that ship said rise up the same word here at the
beginning of chapter 3 when it says Jonah arose.
Now the king with the word of God reaching him moves into
action. He rises from his throne, he
takes his robe that only he can wear, He takes it off, and he
covers himself in sackcloth, and he's set in ashes.
The word tells us in verse 7. And he issued A proclamation and
published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his
nobles. Let neither man nor beast heard
nor flock taste anything. Let them not feed or drink
water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let
them call out mighty to God, and let them call out mightily to
God. Let everyone turn from his evil
way. This is the sound of repentance.
The sound of repentance is people living in grief and shame
and fear and humility, and in hope.
They put on sackcloth, because sackcloth is humiliating and
it's rough. Every part of the skin it
touches, you feel it. And as you feel it, you're
reminded of why you were in this posture.
The king sitting in ashes instead of on his throne is a
symbol of profound humility. The word has reached him.
He's repenting. He calls for a fast.
What's interesting, though, is this fast isn't just for the
human beings. Did you notice that the king in
his decree says we can't eat, but neither show our livestock,
never show our beast? I want you to think about that
for a minute. Why?
Why did that matter? Well, if you've ever fasted, you
know that the word of God and calling us the fast is about
penitence, it's about desperation, it's about seeking
wisdom from the Lord. And when you fast, your stomach
doesn't know why. And so your stomach begins to
speak to you and it says, feed me.
It's time for us to eat. And when you feel that hunger
pain, it's because it's there. And that hunger pain reminds you
of your desperation for God. It reminds you of why you were
in this moment. And there is the sound of
repentance. But in this case, the situation
is so severe that the king says not even the animals can eat.
Now I can explain to my children why we're fasting.
You could explain to yours. You could explain to your
friends, but how would you explain it to the animals?
So here's the sound of repentance.
When that hunger pain hits the animals, they're going to let
you know. When they are thirsty and you're
not giving them something to drink like you're supposed to,
they're going to let you know. So in the city of Nineveh, this
really happened. 120,000 people that the Lord has pity on are
now wearing sackcloth. There's ashes which people are
sitting in, they are all fasting.
And the sound of that repentance is these animals moaning,
screaming, begging. That was the sound of repentance
and that's the sound of reformation.
How does God respond? God's response, we are told in
verse 10, is that when He 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.
God's mercy, they deserved it. We all deserved it.
There's not one who is here, not one who has been born that
deserved mercy and grace. We all deserve the wrath of God
because of our sin, but here God shows mercy to a people that
looks so evil and so violent and so dark because they are.
Jonah didn't even want to go tell him the good news.
Now the king calls on them to pray.
He says in verse 9, Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn
from his fierce anger so that we may not perish.
The king didn't know what would happen, but God shows mercy.
The word for repent in Hebrew that describes the repentance of
the people of Nineveh is a word that describes moving from evil
to good. It means from turning from doing
evil violent things, and they all were doing that to doing
good. In some translations you will
hear in verse 10 where it says and God repented from what he
was about to do. It's not the same word.
God doesn't have to repent from something that is evil because
he doesn't do evil. The word here that is translated
relent is a word that describes how God had an inward suffering
as he considered the people of Nineveh.
That inward suffering led to profound pity.
And that's how the book of Jonah ends.
Verse 10 of chapter 4 or verse 11 of chapter 4.
Jonas hears from God, and God says to Jonah, and should not I
pity Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than
120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their
left. Those who didn't know their
right hand from their left were reached by the word of God, and
when they were reached by that word of God, it led to
repentance from the king to the beast.
There was a fast called sackcloth put not just on the
humans but also on the animals. Can you imagine trying to do
that? The sights and sounds of
repentance were all around them. God's response?
Pity, mercy, because that's His nature.
It's the same way He sees His children.
And in meeting the need that we all have for salvation, He sent
his Son Jesus to die. The greater Jonah, the one and
only one who could pay the price that we all deserve to pay, came
Christ. The message that we have to give
is not just this great story, this great true story about a
man named Jonah, but about the one to whom this points.
And that's Jesus, the only one who can save for eternal life.
In preaching on Jonah and then writing a commentary on this
book, in this chapter, Teaching on Jonah 3, Sinclair's Ferguson
shares a very personal story. We've had Sinclair in this
pulpit many times. He's a dear friend of this
church and maybe the greatest living theologian.
Sinclair Ferguson is in a hospital room.
He's visiting an elder in his congregation.
His life had been truly, remarkably blessed by God.
As Sinclair moves in to see his friend, his friend describes the
unit they're on, and it's all mostly fatal.
Down at the end of the hall, there's two boys who are yet in
their teens. Sinclair's friend looks at him
and says, do you see those two lads?
Yes. I discovered that they had not
ever heard of Jesus. There are people all around you
who have not heard of Jesus or what they've heard of Jesus
isn't right. It's not true.
It's not the true word going out.
Sinclair was so overwhelmed by that moment that he describes
his drive home. He says I drove home feeling as
never before. The failure of the church's
witness and the great need for us in the church to cry to God,
to come down and touch the hearts of people and sovereign
mercy. How much we need a revival as
much as Nineveh did. But it is vital to recognize
that Jonah was not sent to Nineveh with the assurance of
being a revivalist. We'll see in chapter 4 that
Jonah had an idea that God might show mercy, but what happened I
don't think he could have ever imagined.
He wasn't sent to be a revivalist.
He was sent there as an evangelist. 1 commissioned by
God is a herald just like you and just like me.
Years ago, I guess it was 2008, I sat in the fellowship hall
next to my wife, Christina. Some of you were there.
The search committee and the session we're moving forward
with recommending me in the role of senior pastor.
It was full. And then we entered into a
season of Q&A. You could ask me anything you
wanted, and you asked some great questions.
My wife has a habit of putting her hand on my leg when we're
talking, or mostly when I'm talking, and whenever she senses
that I'm about to say something that is going to make you or her
uncomfortable, she might squeeze my leg that day.
Someone asks one of the best questions I've ever been asked,
and God gave me through His Word and Spirit an answer.
The question was, Mark, how do you anticipate steering this
ship and a new direction? And I thought for a minute about
that. I thought about how throughout
the history of the church, a boat and men and women on a boat
are a great symbol of the church on mission, fulfilling,
fulfilling what God calls to do at another time.
Look around the sanctuary. You'll see it in the stained
glass. Don't look now, stop it.
But a couple of things need to be said.
I knew then I'm not the captain of the ship and I never will be.
And if you don't choose me, whoever you choose won't be.
There's one captain, and it's the Lord himself.
It's Christ. My wife didn't squeeze my leg
until I said this, but I don't plan to steer the ship anywhere.
I think we need to dry dock. I think we need to move in and
take a season of just asking the Lord to show us who we really
are and here's who I think we really are.
I said this in the spring of O 8 and I'm offering it as a warning
today and it will be needed again before Christ returns.
I said we are called to be like a military vessel taking the
gospel all over the world right where we live and wherever he
calls us to go. But we're not a military ship, I
said. We're a cruise ship.
My wife grabbed my leg, I said. But it's worse than that.
We're a cruise ship that has painted itself battleship Gray.
So we actually think we're doing a lot of things for the Lord.
But the truth is we're just kind of lined up an endless buffets
of Bible studies, and we need those.
But those Bible studies aren't reaching us.
That word isn't reaching us if it's not leading to constant
joyful repentance, repentance for things that we've committed,
sins of Commission, and repentance for sins of omission.
We are a cruise ship painted battleship Gray, but God can
change that. And how does He do it?
By reaching us with His word. Right now some of you are
saying, I'm so glad he's saying that.
For all these people around here, they need to hear it.
We all need to hear it. In fact, we've heard it.
God's Word is clear. If He has reached you as one of
His children, your life began to be a life of repentance.
Over time, though, we can be seduced into comfort or a lack
of compassion, are idolatry and distraction, and not seek the
things that the Lord's Lord has called us to.
We are all called to give this message away.
He has placed you in families and neighborhoods and places of
recreation and work and service on boards where you have a
chance as He leads you to hold out the Word of God, which is
the only thing that has the power to change a soul.
And when it reaches a soul, that soul repents and enters into a
life of repentance. I told the 8:00 congregational
time together this morning in worship again at 9:30 and here
every week multiple times I hear somebody say to me, I think
we're in the midst of revival or I think 1's coming.
What do you think? I'll be honest, I'm never going
to know and I don't even think about it or worry about it.
I pray for it, but I don't think it's that helpful.
What I will tell you is that revival starts not by
revivalist, but by obedient children of the living God
who've been reached by his word, and then say, I can't believe
this good news, and I can't believe that I get to take this
good news in His power wherever he calls me.
These are the words of eternal life.
They reach people. They're going to reach every
person that belongs to Christ, whether you engage in obedience
or not. He's going to accomplish His
mission. But if you don't, you are
missing out on the most glorious gift of holding Jesus out to a
world that's desperate for Him. Most of you know enough.
If you don't think you do, we would love to show you and it
won't take that long. That's not our biggest struggle.
Our biggest struggle is that we don't care that much.
We don't love that much. We don't have the kind of
compassion that Christ had and we don't trust the power of His
word. If that just was received by
you, if that just reached you, joyfully go to the Lord and
repent. Change by his grace and for his
glory. Father in Heaven, we have
missionaries coming next Sunday. Some are here today, but every
Sunday this sanctuary is full of your people, your missionaries.
So many to missionaries, to islands I could never get to.
And Lord Jesus, we do not need to fear, because you have the
power in an instant to change any heart to reach them with the
power of Your word. So, Father, I pray as you taught
us to pray to the Lord of the harvest, that you would provide
laborers, because the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are
few. And so, Lord, as we bring that
petition to you because it's the way you told us to pray, let us
pray with an ear open, recognizing that it is us that
you desire to use. Show us where, show us when,
show us how, show us what, and let us live and the power that
is ours in Christ and whose name we pray.
Amen. Please stand.