THE WATCHING WORLD WANTS TO KNOW
JONAH 1:1-17
Then they said to him, “Please tell us! For whose cause is this trouble upon us?
What is your occupation? And where do you come from?
What is your country? And of what people are you?”
Jonah’s ministry took place in the 8th century B.C. – sometime between 780 and 755 B.C. He is referenced in 2 Kings 14 as predicting the expansion of Israel’s territory during the reign of Jeroboam II. During his tenure as prophet, Jonah clearly had been a prophet of respect and stature. God sends him on a mission, a mission he does not want from which he runs bringing near disaster to all those around him and causing them to want to know – Who was he? Who did he belong to? What was he doing? What was he doing to them? Why was he sleeping at the worst time? Like Jonah, the world watches the believer and wants to know the same thing.
I. Who are you?
A. Jonah was supposed to be a holy and caring prophet of God. But those sailors around him do not see anything about him to identify him as God’s prophet.
B. They asked him, “Who are you?” – “Identify yourself!”
C. In his sermon, “We All Need Roots,” William P. Tuck tells of a man who stepped onto the platform at an American Legion Convention. As he looked over the large crowd, he asked, “Can anybody tell me who I am?” He had lost his memory, with no record of his past or his identity. His desperate appeal was: “Does anybody know who I am?”
D. Acts 19:13-15 “Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists took it upon themselves to call the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, "We exorcise you by the Jesus whom Paul preaches." Also there were seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, who did so. And the evil spirit answered and said, "Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?”
E. As born-again Christians we need to identify ourselves completely through our relationship with Jesus: it is the identity of Jesus that determines our identity.
F. Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”
G. Do people identify you as a child of God?
H. The dilemma of an unclear sense of personal identity was illustrated by an incident in the life of the famous German philosopher Schleiermacher, who did much to shape the progress of modern thought. The story is told that one day as an old man he was sitting alone on a bench in a city park. A policeman thinking that he was a vagrant came over and shook him and asked, “Who are you?” Schleiermacher replied sadly, “I wish I knew.”
I. 1 John 3:2 “Beloved, now we are children of God…”
J. John Warnock, or Clarence Joyce Jr., or Wayne Hutchings -- or whoever he is -- was jailed in Ottawa, Canada, in June 1999, for using a stolen credit card, but criminal charges against him were soon dropped -- because figuring out his real identity proved too difficult. After his arrest police found identification on him ranging from drivers’ licenses to hospital cards with 10 different names with addresses from as far off as Australia and England. Various birth dates made him as young as 42 and as old as 50. Apparently, the mystery man has played his game of deception for so long that even he doesn’t really know who he is anymore!--for, when stopped by police and asked for identification, he supplied them with two cards with different names. Prosecutors said that, in order to prove that "Mister X" had actually been using stolen cards, they would have had to show proof that he was not actually any of the people named on the cards. That would have meant flying in witnesses from all around the world to testify that he was not the person whose name was on the cards. You, too, may think that you can fool the entire world about your ’real’ identity, and pretend before others to be something you’re not. Realize that God knows and discerns the "real you"!
II. Who do you belong to?
A. They asked Jonah not only who he was but to whom did he belong? What country do you come from? What sets you apart from others?
B. Jonah explained that he was a Hebrew – a term that was used to distinguish them as a class of people distinct from all the other people groups in the same area around them.
C. Every ancient culture except the Israelites worshipped idols. One writer commented that it was easier to find a god in Athens than a man: there were more idols than people! When God gave his chosen people the land of Israel, he placed them at the crossroads of civilization. He wanted his children to influence the world. He wanted them to become a testimony of his love and power to the pagan world.
D. Deuteronomy 12:29-30 "When the Lord your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land, 30 take heed to yourself that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed from before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, ’How did these nations serve their gods? I also will do likewise.’
E. As such they were to be different and not conformed to the world in which they lived.
F. Leviticus 11:45 “For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.”
G. Christians are called to stand out as light and salt to the world we are in.
H. 1 Peter 2:9 “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”
I. “Christians in the 21st century, it seems, have become so enmeshed in the culture in which we live that we have been conformed to the culture — the world — rather than being transformed by Christ.” - copied
J. Romans 12:2 “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”
K. The best illustration of blending into the culture rather transforming it is Lot. Lot became so much a part of the culture of Sodom and Gomorrah that he found it difficult to leave when God’s judgment fell. Don’t blend in with the culture of the world... if you do no one will know who you belong to and you’ll find it hard to leave.
III. What you doing?
A. The next question they asked Jonah is “What’s your business?”
B. Jonah’s business is supposed to be the Lord’s business. But he’s not doing business for the Lord. He’s supposed to be going with the Lord’s message to Nineveh. Instead he went his own way in the opposite direction.
C. John 17:18 “As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.”
D. Vance Havner wrote, “We have been saved out of this world to go right back into the world to win people out of the world, and that’s the only business we have in this world.” – Vance Havner, When God Breaks Through, p. 111
E. What are you doing for the glory of God? What are you doing to fulfill God’s will?
F. A little girl had been rummaging in her mother’s trunk. There she found a church letter which her mother had neglected to present to the church into whose neighborhood she had moved. The little explorer rushed into her mother’s presence shouting: "Oh, mamma, I have found your religion in your trunk!" There is a needle-like point in that story for a great many people. That mother had confessed Christ some time, somewhere, but her life had been such a repudiation of her profession that even her own child was surprised to accidentally come across her "religion". --Topical Illustrations
G. James 1:22 “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves”
IV. What effect or influence are you having on those around you?
A. “So they asked him, Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us?
B. Romans 14:7 “For none of us lives to himself, and no one dies to himself.”
C. Matthew 5:13 “You are the salt of the earth: but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing, but to be thrown out, and trampled under foot by men”.
D. As Christians, we make an indelible mark on the lives of numerous people every day, often without even realizing that we’ve done so.
E. Joshua 24:14-16 “But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord." Then the people answered, "Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods!”
F. Joshua influenced by what he chose and by the example he set.
G. My life shall touch a dozen lives before this day is done;
Leave countless marks for good or ill, ere sets the evening sun.
This is the wish I always wish, the prayer I always pray:
Lord, may my life help other lives it touches by the way. - Source Unknown
V. Why are you sleeping?
A. Verse 6 “The captain went to him and said, "How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god...”
B. "Jonah was asleep amid all that confusion and noise; and, O Christian man, for you to be indifferent to all that is going on in such a world as this, for you to be negligent of God’s work in such a time as this is just as strange. The devil alone is making noise enough to wake all the Jonahs if they only want to awake . . . All around us there is tumult and storm, yet some professing Christians are able, like Jonah, to go to sleep in the sides of the ship." – Charles Haddon Spurgeon
C. Jonah slept while the perishing needed him. "Sleeping Christians" take their naps while the perishing world needs their message and testimony - copied
D. Romans 13:11 “And do this, understanding the present time. The hour has come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.”
