Jonah's Mulligan Series

ENGAGE

I occasionally play golf with a group of friends which includes another pastor. Since we’re all average golfers at best, we play “grace golf” which means that we have our own modifications to the official rules of golf that are intended to make our frequent poor shots less punitive than they would otherwise be. Among those modifications is that we allow each person in the group to have one mulligan for each nine holes.

For those of you who aren’t golfers, a mulligan is basically a “do over” or a “second chance”. So when – notice I said “when” and not “if” – one of us hits a bad tee shot, we get to tee up another ball and tee off again with no penalty. Most times I really appreciate that second chance because it results in a better score on that hole than would have been possible if I would have had to play the original shot. But it is also possible, like what happened a couple weeks ago, that the second chance shot is actually worse than the first, in which case under the “grace golf” rules, we just have to play the first ball and take whatever score we get.

In rare cases, such as when all four of us in the group hit our tee shots into the middle of the desert, we have even been known to extend even more grace and allow everyone in the group an additional mulligan on that particular hole.

While the mulligans in our golf game are certainly welcome, they really don’t end up making any kind of significant difference in my life. Fortunately, I don’t have to try and make a living playing golf, so all that is really on the line when I play golf is bragging rights within our group. And even that usually isn’t a big deal. Most of the time I play, I couldn’t even tell you what my exact score was for that round.

TENSION

I think most of us here this morning often wish that we could get a mulligan in other areas of our lives – that we could have a second chance to go back and do things differently in our marriages, as parents, in our jobs, and even in our relationship with God.

While we can’t go back and change the past, the good news that we’re going to focus on this morning is that God is a God of second chances – actually He’s often a God of third and fourth and even tenth chances at times.

TRUTH

Before we look at chapter 3 of Jonah where we’re going to see that idea played out in the life of Jonah and in the life of an entire city, let’s take a moment to review what we’re trying to accomplish in our study of Jonah:

1) The first goal is to help all of us to develop a greater appreciation for the love of a God who constantly pursues us even when we run away from Him, and

2) The second goal is for all of us to develop a deeper love for others, especially for those who might seem far from God or who might be so much different from us.

We began two weeks ago by developing an overall theme for our study. By now, you should be able to fill in the blanks here without my help.

Because of His relentless love,

God does not give up on us

even when we give up on Him

We’ve already seen how that is true both for Jonah and for a group of pagan sailors that Jonah boarded while he was fleeing from God. And this morning, we’re going to see that is also true for an entire city full of evil, godless people.

Just in case you haven’t been with us the entire time, let me give you a quick summary of what happened in the first two chapters of Jonah.

God calls Jonah and tells him to arise and go to Nineveh and to preach the message that God is going to give him. But Jonah tries to flee as far away from Nineveh as he can get, so gets on a ship headed for Tarshish in Spain.

While he is on the ship a tremendous storm comes up and once the sailors determine it is Jonah’s fault, they reluctantly follow Jonah’s advice to throw him overboard, but not before they develop a fear of the Lord that causes them to pray to Him and worship Him. So, even though Jonah never intended for it to happen, those sailors become his first “converts” on his journey.

As soon as Jonah hits the water, the seas become calm and God sends a large fish to swallow Jonah. As we talked about last week, even though it might not seem like it, that fish was an instrument of God’s grace. Jonah spends three days and three nights in the belly of the fish and during that time he prays to God. At the end of our time last week, we left Jonah on the shore in some unknown location after having been vomited onto the shore by the fish. Apparently disobedient prophets don’t make a great meal – even for a fish. Since I sure don’t want to dwell on that picture, let’s move on to chapter 3: