Jonah in Nineveh

A visit required three days. On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned." The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast and all of them from the greatest to the least put on sackcloth.

When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat down in the dust. Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh. By the decree of the king and his nobles, do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything. Do not let them eat or drink, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God.

Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from His fierce anger so that we will not perish. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction He had threatened. So far, our reading.

Now there are three points that I want us to look at this morning regarding the mission that God had initiated in Jonah chapter one. And we'll see three things about this mission. Firstly, that the mission is restated. Secondly, that the mission is accomplished. And thirdly, how the readers internalise or perceive this mission.

So the mission internalised. Firstly, the mission restated. We see that after Jonah is spewed up by this great fish, having spent three days in its belly, God's word comes again to Jonah. Go to Nineveh and preach the message I give you. Now imagine that Jonah has just been spat out by this giant fish.

Perhaps he's still lying there with mucus and slime. That stomach acid's still on him and he's lying on the beach, panting, still in shock perhaps, and God's word comes to him again, "Get up and go. Get up and go." There's no indication at the start of chapter three just how much time had passed at all. Jonah is just told, "Get up and go." Now this shows the heart of God and what's really important to him.

This is a missionary God. This is a missionary God and He has an urgency about Him. And that's why our series is called "Jonah and the Missionary God". Not "Jonah the missionary", "Jonah and the missionary God". God says, "I told you before, Jonah, and I'm telling you again, get up and go to Nineveh."

In essence, we're back to square one. We're back to square one. But this time, look at verse three. Jonah obeyed the Lord. Jonah obeyed specifically the word of the Lord.

In other words, nothing was now as important. Nothing moved Jonah more now than simply the word of the Lord. He could have said, "Man, I've just experienced some massive stress. I'm dealing with post-traumatic stress here, God. Come on."

Jonah hears God says, "Go," and he goes. And what is the result of Jonah's obedience? He arrives at Nineveh safe and sound. The whole plan goes without a hitch. And this is a challenge for us because life can actually be so much simpler when we obey God's word.

When God has spoken, it should simply be enough. The difficulties, the dangers, the fears, the anxieties in our life, all of these should simply give away to the simple phrase of obeying the word of the Lord. We might also find ourselves in the mud. We may also find ourselves in the mucus. But resign your wisdom.

Refuse to be ruled by the things that are temporary and fleeting, the anxieties that come and go. Why? Because we also believe that there is nothing impossible for God. If the Lord has said something in His word, if He has applied it to our hearts through the Holy Spirit, then He will keep it. That is the promise.

That is what we see again in Jonah. God's word never fails. God says to Jonah, "Okay, Jonah. Let's try this again. Get up and go to Nineveh."

Jonah gets up, he wipes off the slime, and he starts walking. And lo and behold, he arrives in Nineveh without a scratch. Tries to do it his way, and he nearly drowns and kills how many passengers on that boat along with him. Friends, if you're missing the tranquility and the peace that you desire, here is the secret. Obey the word of the Lord and you will have peace.

Obey the word of God in all its fullness, in all the compartments of your life, and all your fears, and all your doubts, and all your anxieties will pass away. Why? Because the word of the Lord endures. It doesn't change. God simply brought Jonah back to square one and said, "Okay.

Let's try this again." It doesn't change. His word, in other words, is His will and His will will make a way. His word is His will and His will will make a way. So we see the missionary God with His eyes focused on Nineveh telling His rebellious prophet, "Get up and go.

We've got work to do." Now we come to the second part and we see the mission accomplished. I love this part of the story. Jonah arrives at the great city of Nineveh and we see a little side note here. It was an important city, the NIV says.

In other translations, a great city, a big city. And it says that in our translation again, a visit required three days, but the literal translation is that the city was three days wide. So again, if you were to walk through its suburbs and its alleys and everything, it would take three days to go from one point to the other. That's how big the city of Nineveh was. And we see that on the first day's journey into the city, Jonah starts to preach.

In this city, which is by all accounts one of the biggest and greatest cities of that time. One day's journey into it, and Jonah starts to preach. He says, "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned." Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned. Get your affairs in order, guys.

Judgment is coming. And I hope that Jonah did this with gusto and with preaching zeal. But knowing Jonah, it may have been like this. "Hey, guys. Something bad's gonna happen.

Just make sure you're organised. Guys, forty more days. Forty more days." And you can just imagine that, you know, he just wants to get through with his thing and pack up and leave. But their reaction is amazing.

Within the first day of a three-day journey throughout the city, the entire city comes to repentance. The message spreads like wildfire throughout it. Neighbours telling neighbours, coworkers telling coworkers. Guys, this prophet of the Lord has said that if we don't repent, if we don't turn around what we're doing, if we don't change our ways, something bad is gonna happen. The city will be destroyed. It will be overturned.

And we see in verse five that the entire city believed. Verse five: the Ninevites believed God. Now Jonah, knowing Nineveh is so big, was prepared for a three-day preaching gig, but not even a third of the time goes by and the gig is done. The message spreads amazingly. And there's an immediate turnaround.

People put on sackcloth. They put on rags. They sit in the ash, in the dust. And that was a traditional form of mourning, of grieving. They were grieving for their sins.

They were grieving for what they had done to God. What an image, an entire city doing that. What a sign of God's Spirit at work. Tears and contrite hearts filled the streets. Can you imagine that?

And it says from the poorest in the slums to the richest nobles in the city centre with the grand park views, they repent. And they turn to God, and they ask for forgiveness, and they change their ways. And it says it reaches so high that the king of Nineveh, the king, the emperor of the Assyrian government, puts out a royal decree. He, in fact, takes off his royal robes, the Bible says, the most extravagant clothing that would have existed in the empire. He casts them off.

He puts on rags, and he sits in the dust. And he sends out this decree saying that everyone, including even the animals, must fast. Every woman, every man, every child, including the animals, must put on rags. And they are to pray to God to have mercy upon them. The city hears the message of Jonah, and however it was proclaimed by Jonah, the message strikes home.

And people respond and they repent and they believe God. What an amazing twist. Now if you were an Israelite hearing this news for the first time, it would have struck you between the eyes. These dirty Gentiles, so evil, known for being murderers and pillagers, repent and believe in God. We see a similar thing happening in the New Testament.

When the gospel of Jesus Christ is seen to be spreading much quicker among the Gentiles, the early Christians wonder about this and ask, "Does it mean that the Jews are lost forever?" And Paul answers them in Romans 11:11. "No. Not at all. Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious."

In other words, God's faithfulness to the Jews has not ended, but the gospel will drive Israel back to God so that some may be saved. Now this is a challenging thought because we see or we expect God to change hearts through punishment and judgment, but God is using Nineveh to reach back to Israel. That's an amazing thought. God is saving Nineveh to save the Israelites from making them envious, through making them ask, "Why isn't this happening with me?" And it just shows the character of God, that God uses grace rather than punishment to teach a lesson.

In the context that Jonah would have been received, that Jonah, this book, would have been read, would have been a context of exile. The nation of Israel had been taken captive. And so this message comes to them, and they would have asked, "Why am I missing out on this? Why didn't this happen for us?" And the answer is because your hearts are hard.

The Jews saw the Gentiles being saved and entering into a new relationship with God. They saw the contrite hearts of these Gentiles, the passionate relationship that drove them to cast off their royal robes, put on the rags, and sit in the dust with tears and repentance, and it would have struck a deep, deep blow to their pride and their self-righteousness. And this is a challenge for us today. Do we really believe that God wants to save this great city? This suburb that we find ourselves in.

More specifically, do we want this city to be changed? Are we like the Jews who have a special relationship with God and expect Him to operate according to how we understand grace and how we would choose who are saved and who are not? Or are we moved to compassion by the messiness and the pain and the lostness of the lives around us? Have we fallen to the trap that Israel fell into? And this was never the intended purpose of saying, "Not my life, not my business. Not my life, not my business."

And that is such a Western phenomenon, isn't it? "If it doesn't affect me, I don't care. If it doesn't affect me, I don't care." In fact, if you peek over my fence and you look into the backyard of my life, then you are actually very unloving. The question is, is it really loving to remain silent?

Is it really loving to remain silent? Is it loving to let things slide? If someone is hurting themselves and they don't even know it, is it loving to keep them to allow them to keep doing it? You see, sin makes us believe that whatever happens behind closed doors is a personal choice. And personal choice wins out every single time.

But speaking of Jesus, John writes in John 3:19. "The verdict is this: light has come into the world." He's speaking here of Jesus as the messenger of God having come into the world. "Light has come into the world, but men love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed." Wait a minute.

This isn't exactly a Western philosophy then, is it? This is a condition of the heart. This is a condition of sin. "Don't approach me about how I choose to live. I want to remain in the darkness.

The truth, the light, Jesus will expose me. It will show what's going on inside here. Don't approach me. I want to remain in the darkness." It might validate the guilt, in fact, that I'm feeling but that I'm trying so hard to suppress.

"Go away. I can't handle this message. I don't want to deal with it. Mind your own business." Now I also need to mention just the flip side of this as well that God's word also warns us not to be meddlers for the sake of it.

That, you know, people get a kick out of gossip and talking and slander, and we dealt with this at youth last night as well. The weird sense of voyeurism, seeing people's dirty laundry being hung out to dry. But again, meddling is a selfish thing. You get a kick out of getting into people's business. And it's not for their sake, is it?

It's for your sake. It's for your buzz. Deep down, you do it because you enjoy it. But this is the balance. Being on God's mission, being on mission with Him, being a disciple maker means you view that other person.

You view that other person as a potential disciple of Christ. This is the balance. A disciple in the making, in other words. And that changes your heart towards them because you mourn when they are sinning. You don't find a joy out of seeing that.

You don't find a joy out of confronting that. Your heart is broken by their sin. You rejoice when they live righteously. There's no tall poppy syndrome in this either. You are thrilled when they love Christ deeply because you rejoice in the truth as they rejoice in the truth.

Can you see the difference? In other words, the book of Jonah is putting this message to God's people that we need to be moved by the lostness and the pain of a people that don't know their right hand from their left, who have no awareness of God. We need to be moved by the lostness and the pain of our friends who are in a dysfunctional relationship with God and with others. It is only with this true compassion that we can really enjoy being on God's mission. If we don't have that heart, it will be like Jonah in chapters one and two.

It's a slog. It's a pain. And you can do it begrudgingly with guilt or if your heart is changed, it will go without a hitch. And I can tell you, friends, that it is only with that true compassion and that true love that you will find joy that is unsurpassable. It is amazing.

If you see a life change because of God's grace, man, that is the biggest spiritual high you will experience. That thankfulness, that thankfulness is off the Richter scale. And I know there's some of you that will say yes, amen to that. The joy is unquenchable. So we see the mission is accomplished.

We see God viewing this, and He decides to spare the Ninevites. Yeah. So in verse 10, we see the mission that is internalised. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He had compassion on them and did not bring about the destruction that He had threatened. And here we see again grace just so beautifully presented.

God has compassion on them and He relented. God's hand was ready to strike. He was poised to strike, but He relented when He saw the genuineness of their repentance. And then if you have ever walked with God for a while, you'll say to yourself, "Was there any other result? Was there any other result?

Could it have ended any other way?" Because we know God and we know, just like Jonah, that He is a God of compassion, slow to anger, and abounding in love. Was it ever going to end any other way? The answer is no. It was never going to end any other way.

That's the God of Jonah that we know. Remember, that's why he didn't want to go to Nineveh in the first place. Remember that? He said, "God, I know who you are. You're going to forgive these guys.

You're gonna feel sorry for them. You're gonna love them, and I don't want that for them." But Jonah felt the anger and the frustration that we feel about wickedness in people's lives. And they were wicked people. They were rapists.

They were pillagers. They were murderers. They were idolaters and sexual perverts. Name it, and that's what they were. But poor Jonah, what a short memory he has because he appealed to this same God of mercy and grace in the belly of the whale, didn't he?

What a short memory this man has. He forgot that he was doing exactly what the Ninevites were doing, rebelling against God. And we see that in chapter two, God was punishing Jonah, and He was ready to snuff out that life. And in that punishment, in the severity of God's wrath, he cries out in Jonah 2:8. "Those who cling to worthless idols will forfeit the grace that could be theirs." To put it another way, Jonah said, "God's grace is able to extend to all who would accept it.

God's grace is available to all that would accept it." In other words, His grace could be theirs if they would just forsake their idolatry. And that's a powerful image. It's not saying, "Maybe if you forsake your idols, then maybe God will have grace." It's saying that if you forsake your idols, this grace could be yours.

As reformed believers, you may have heard of the acronym TULIP, which talks about God's salvation. Right in the middle of that acronym, the letter L stands for limited atonement. Now that is one of the most unfortunate terms that we can talk about when it comes to salvation because it sounds like God's salvation is weak and that it is limited in its power, in its efficacy, but it's not. It's not. What it really means is that God's salvation is able to save everyone, but not everyone will be saved.

Similarly, Jonah says grace could be theirs. Grace could be yours if you would but forsake your idols and worship the living God. And the amazing thing is, Nineveh does this. They forsake their idols. They believed God, verse five says.

I'm challenged by this passage, friends. I'm challenged by it because it asks me the question, "Do I really believe that God's grace is powerful enough to save anyone? Even the dirty, filthy Ninevites." And more importantly, do we want that? Would we be comfortable with a church full of people with questionable hygiene and messy backstories?

Or are we far too suburban for that? Perhaps those type of people don't exist in... Maybe that's the case. But again, just watch the 17:30 news, the local news, and you'll see Narrangga come up every single night. We know that they exist. Is it possible for us to be a church group that is moved by that?

And are we willing to give up some things so that God will enable us to be that? Because you can't be a disciple without discipline. You can't be a disciple without discipline. At the same time, this discipline isn't moved by guilt. "Oh, man.

I must do this. I need to evangelise. I need to have mercy. I need to offer my time and my money." It is moved by joy.

It is moved by joy, by expectation of seeing lives radically transformed. And like I said, that is the biggest drug that you can find. Imagine the rejoicing if my friend in our cell group came to Christ. Imagine the privilege it would be if I was to lead them to Christ. How much easier would Jonah's life have been if he was excited about being able to preach to 120,000 plus people and having them all come to Christ?

Billy Graham, eat your heart out. Come on. Who doesn't want that gig? One day's worth of preaching and 120,000 plus people are saved. That's not a bad day's work.

Hey, Bob. How we view God's grace and the power of it and its availability shapes how we understand mission and our personal calling. Let me say that again. How we view God's grace and the power of it and its availability shapes how we understand mission and our calling. It's the engine room to a life of disciple making.

Everything else, everything less will be a slog. It will be a duty. But we know that God is a God of life and of freedom. And I believe you won't find anything more satisfying than being part of this great mission story that God is calling us to be a part of because the mission hasn't changed. We have the potential to change entire cities, not because of our skill, but because we have a God whose potential is limitless.

The God we worship is limitless. And, man, I need to hear that for myself. I'm preaching here for myself because my visions and my dreams are so small. I just want to get auntie so-and-so to church on time. I just want our people to come to church regularly.

But there's so much more that God is wanting to do, is able to do, and that is the challenge. Think about this. If a church of 100 can simply disciple one new person for one year, we're about 100. If we can disciple one new person for one year and then that new disciple take on a new disciple of their own the following year and we go on with someone else. You know that in five years' time, we would sit with a church of 3,200 people?

That would be one of the biggest churches in Australia. That's one person discipling one person in one year. That's not impossible. That's why we need to be doing this. It's not impossible.

It's easy. And we're going to be this year really focusing on our small groups, on our cell groups to try and support you guys to do that. One person, one year. It's not rocket science. It's not Billy Graham preaching.

If we can stretch out across the city to create these little harbours of sanctuary where the gospel is lived out and celebrated, where it's shown as an attractive thing, as a community of love and acceptance, then we can change the city. And I think the Gold Coast is 120,000 plus, minus, isn't it? No. Maybe, maybe more. 500,000.

Okay. Well, 100,000 wouldn't be bad anyway. But it's something that I'm challenged with. And I don't think that it's impossible. What if, in other words, if God could do that, what could He do with a church that is obedient?

I want to encourage you this morning. God has already started here. He's already doing it. It's small victories, but they are definite victories. We've had a boy two weeks ago in our youth group come to Christ, put up his hand and said, "Zeb, I need you to pray with me.

I want to know Jesus." Last night, we gave a Bible away to a boy that came up to me literally. I was vacuuming the floor. Was about to close the door and get out and he said to me, "I want a Bible. I've been here.

This is my second time." And I asked him, "Okay. So why do you want the Bible? Why do you want to know more about God?" He said, "I don't come from a Christian family at all.

We don't know what church is about, but I just want to find out. I want to know." It's amazing. And it's simply putting on a barbecue here and having a few snags and having fun. It's amazing what God can do.

It's amazing what God can do. God is the missionary God. God is the missionary God. He is on a mission. We need more men and women to stand up and take on this course, more people making themselves available for this mission as we, as a church, feel called to.

And like I said, there's going to be some things that we want to start and promote and grow and strengthen as well. And I challenge us to be thinking about this seriously and praying about how we, as a church, can go about this. Let's pray. Lord, You are the missionary God. We are surprised every time by Your grace and just how free it is and how powerful it is.

God, for an entire city of 120,000 people to come to faith, that is phenomenal. And we know, Lord, that it is possible. Father, we pray that You can do that in the Gold Coast. And we know that there are many, many brothers and sisters that are actively doing that. We pray for them.

These churches around us, we pray for them, Lord, that they may preach and proclaim a gospel of salvation that is solely built upon You and gives all glory to You. Father, we pray for a great ingathering of people, and we know that this is a prayer that is according to Your will. And where Your will is, there is a way. So we ask that Your will be done in us. And this morning, we are challenged, but we are also comforted, Lord, that You have grace and compassion upon us as well.

And that the hesitancies and the resistances and the great excuses that we can make, Lord, You know and You can deal with and You can change. So Lord, we offer ourselves to You again. And in humility, we say sorry, Lord, for ignoring those nudges and those hints. And we pray, Lord, that You will give us the ability, the time, the time management to do this well. And Father, above all, we ask for that joy, that engine room in our soul to be ignited, Lord, and give us a passion, a burning desire to see lives changed, Lord, so that we may thank You for it, that we may rejoice in that.

We ask that because we know that You are powerful. You have sent Your Holy Spirit to us to help us with that. We know, Lord, we can ask this because You have promised it to us. In Jesus' name, we pray these things. Amen.