ENGAGE
I have occasionally been known to drive a few miles an hour over the speed limit – especially on the section of Oracle Road that I drive almost every day where the speed limit is 55. In my mind, I have a very good reason for doing that, claiming that if I don’t, I’ll get run over by all the other cars who are driving 60 miles per hour or faster. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I also justify doing so because I frequently see a Department of Public Safety. Pima County Sherriff or Oro Valley Police vehicle parked along the side of the road timing people and I’ve never been pulled over.
But when someone passes me, especially one of those drivers that is weaving in and out of traffic, my immediate thought is “I sure hope that person gets pulled over and gets a ticket”. And on the rare occasion when I’ve seen that happen I’ve been known to shout for joy and pump my fist as I drive by.
Now before you judge me, I’m pretty sure that most of you here this morning have done exactly the same thing. In fact, I know that many of you have because you’ve told me.
TENSION
Although you may not have thought of it in these terms up until now, this is just one example of our human tendency to want to be treated with mercy personally and for others to receive justice. When it comes to our driving habits, that might not be such a big deal and it probably doesn’t have much of an impact on our lives or on the lives of others. But we’re going to see this morning that it has a tremendous impact on our ability to love others the way that God loves us.
TRUTH
This morning we’ll wrap up our series from the book of Jonah by looking at chapter 4. But once again before we do that, I want to remind all of us of the overall purpose for this series:
1) First, I hope these messages have helped all of us develop a greater appreciation for the relentless love of a God, something that we’ll see one more time in the final chapter of Jonah.
2) The second thing I hope to accomplish is that understanding God’s love for us more deeply will help us all develop a deeper love for others, especially for those who might seem far from God or who might be so much different from us.
One last time, let’s review the overall theme for the book that we developed the first week:
Because of His relentless love,
God does not give up on us
even when we give up on Him
I know most of you have been with us for the entire series, but let’s take a moment to review what we’ve learned so far.
God comes to Jonah and tells him to go to the wicked, pagan city of Nineveh and to preach the message that God is going to give him. But Jonah runs from God and boards a ship bound for Tarshish, which is about 2,500 miles in the opposite direction. Once on board the ship a storm comes up and the sailors on board do what Jonah tells them to do and they throw him overboard, but not before they become Jonah’s first “converts” and they pray to God and worship Him.
Jonah is rescued by the most unlikely means of God’s mercy – by being swallowed by a great fish. While he spends three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, he prays to God. And then the fish vomits him out onto the shore.
God comes to Jonah a second time, and gives Jonah the same assignment and this time Jonah obeys. As I said last week, I think he probably would have done just about anything that didn’t involve getting on a boat at that point. He makes the trip to Nineveh and when he gets there he preaches a five-word sermon. And in response to that sermon, the people of Nineveh, along with their king, and even their cows, repent, and God stays His judgment upon them.
So far we have seen God’s relentless love at work in the lives of the sailors on the ship, in Jonah’s life and in the lives of the inhabitants of Nineveh.
You would think that at this point Jonah had to be feeling pretty good about himself and about God. God had used him to reach an entire city and those people all repented and God responded with His mercy. So you would think that Jonah would have been humbled that God had given him a second chance and that God had used him as an instrument of His mercy in the lives of the people of Nineveh. And you would think he would be grateful for the lives that had been changed.
But, in another one of the twists that we find throughout the book of Jonah, we will see that he had a completely different mindset.
[Read Jonah 4:1-11]
Before we get to the heart of the passage, I want you to think for a moment about the ending of the book. This reminds me a lot of a movie that Mary and I went to see a number of years ago called “Inception”. At the end of the movie, Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DeCaprio, finally returns home to his kids after spending a long time in a dream world. Cobb carries a little top with him. If the top keeps spinning, that means he is in a dream. If it stops and falls over, it means he is back in reality. The final shot of the movie shows the top spinning, but never reveals the final outcome.
The ending of Jonah is a lot like that isn’t it? We read God’s question in verse 11 and then we’re looking for verse 12 to read Jonah’s answer, but it’s not there. We really never know for sure how Jonah responds to that question. Perhaps that is because God is asking all of us that same question which is essentially this:
Do you love others the way that I do?
So keeping that question in mind, let’s go back and look at this passage from the beginning. Once again, I’m going to begin with the main theme of the passage and then we’ll develop that more fully as we study it in more detail.
If I want to love others like God loves me
I can’t make life all about me
As I said earlier, we would have expected Jonah to be really pleased that the people of Nineveh had repented upon hearing the message that God had given him to preach to them. But instead, Jonah is displeased and angry at God. Our English translation really doesn’t do justice to verse 1. If you’re using the ESV, you’ll see a note that indicates that the verb “displeased” could also be translated “evil”. And the word “angry” is a word that means to “burn with anger”. So when Jonah looked back on how the people of Nineveh had repented, he considered that to be evil and his anger over the fact that God had treated them with mercy burned inside of him.
Essentially Jonah is mad at God because God didn’t treat the people of Nineveh how he thought they should have been treated. He is unable to love the people of Nineveh because he is making life all about him rather than about what God wants or about what is good for others.
But once again, we do have to give Jonah at least some credit here. He takes his anger to God in prayer. Remember back in week 1, I told you that if you came back today we would learn the main reason Jonah disobeyed God in the first place? Well here it is in Jonah’s prayer in verse 2. And essentially here is what Jonah is saying to God. “God, I know that you are a gracious and merciful God, and I’m grateful that you deal with me like that. But these godless pagan Ninevites don’t deserve to be treated like that. You should have just rained down judgment on all of them and wiped them out.” Again, Jonah is making this all about him and his feelings.
So Jonah asks God to just kill him right there. Jonah seems like a bit of a drama king here, doesn’t he? But perhaps if we were in his shoes, our response might have been similar. Think about it, Jonah now must return home to his own people, the Jews, who have been consistently rebelling against God and who are suffering God’s judgment because they won’t repent, and tell them about God’s mercy towards Nineveh. That wasn’t going to make him real popular back home. But again, we see here that in Jonah’s mind, it’s still all about him.
I just love what Jonah does next. Apparently, he is still holding out hope that maybe the repentance of the Ninevites will be short-lived and God will end up destroying them anyway or that God will change His mind and wipe them out in spite of their repentance. Again, Jonah seems to be thinking only of himself and what he wants. So he finds a vantage point where he can see the city and waits for God to act.
How many of you here this morning are thinking what I’m thinking at this point? Why doesn’t God just grant Jonah’s wish and kill him? That is certainly what he deserves. But God still isn’t going to give up on Jonah even though Jonah has given up on God. This time, the instrument of His mercy is going to be an “In the Bag” message that involves a plant, a worm and a scorching wind.
As Jonah waits in the hot sun, God “appoints” a plant to provide shade for Jonah. This is the second time we’ve seen that word “appointed” in Jonah. The first time was when God appointed the fish that proved to be God’s first instrument of mercy in Jonah’s life. And Jonah, who had been exceedingly displeased and angry at God is now exceedingly glad. Once again, we see that for Jonah, life was all about him. As long as God makes Him comfortable, he won’t be angry at God.
But the next morning, God “appoints” a worm that attacks the plant so that it withers. And He followed that by “appointing” a scorching east wind that beat down on Jonah’s head to the point he became faint. And Once again, Jonah asks God to let him die. And for the second time, God asks Jonah if he does well to be angry – this time for the plant. This time, Jonah actually answers God and says that he is angry enough for the plant that he just wants to die. Again, for Jonah this is all about him.
The book ends with the question that God not only asks Jonah, but is asking all of us?
Do you love others the way that I do?
God had provided the plant for Jonah’s comfort even though Jonah had done nothing to deserve that, nor had he done anything to cause it to grow. He hadn’t planted it, watered, it or tended it, and yet when it withered,
God has done exactly the same thing for us spiritually. He has provided a way for us to be close to Him even though we have done nothing to earn or deserve that privilege. While we were still in rebellion to God, He sent His Son Jesus into this world to live a perfect life, die on the cross to pay the penalty for that rebellion and then rise from the grave to prove His authority over sin and death. And it is God’s desire that we love others like that – that we treat them with grace and mercy, even when they have wronged us.
Unfortunately, Jonah had not yet come to understand that. He had more compassion for that plant than for the people of Nineveh, people that, just like him, were made in the image of God and loved relentlessly by God.
Jonah certainly wasn’t alone in that. He had been brought up in a Jewish culture that had lost sight of why they were God’s chosen people. Instead of focusing on the promise that God had made to Abraham all the way back in Genesis 12 that He had chosen them to be a blessing to “all the families of the earth” (Genesis 12:3), they had developed the wrong idea that they were somehow superior to the Gentiles and that therefore only they were deserving of God’s mercy.
We certainly see that same idea still existed at the time Jesus came to the earth. After His death and resurrection, there were many Jews who insisted that one first had to become a Jew before becoming a disciple of Jesus because they still believed that only the Jews were deserving of God’s mercy.
Hopefully, it’s now evident why we began with this idea:
If I want to love others like God loves me
I can’t make life all about me
APPLICATION
So let me ask you another question this morning:
Is your life all about you?
Before you just answer that question flippantly with a quick “of course not”, I want you to think about your life and answer it honestly.
Last October I wrote a blog post titled 5 Signs You Might Be a “Christian Narcissist” which addresses this question and here are the five signs that I identified then:
1) You refuse to consider you could be wrong
2) You constantly boast about your own achievements
3) You twist Scripture to serve your own purposes
4) You insist that others adopt your preferences
5) You desire to be served rather than to serve
If any or all of those things are true in your life, that is probably a pretty good indication that your life is about you.
Let’s see if we can’t approach this idea from a more positive perspective and look at …
FOUR WAYS TO PREVENT MY LIFE FROM BECOMING ALL ABOUT ME
1. Find my identity in Jesus
I think this is especially important in our culture where we tend to put labels on people. We identify people by their race, their gender, their political party, their income, their sexual preferences, their immigration status or their religion, among other factors. And when people begin to find their identity in those labels it invariably causes friction and division among those various groups and it hinders our ability to see others the way God sees them - as individuals who He loves very much.
This is exactly what Jonah had done. It is clear from this passage that for him his primary identity was as a Jew and that led him to view those who were not Jews with much disdain. It seems that he also found his identity in his occupation as a prophet. And that, too, led him to consider others who were not part of that group as being inferior.
The only antidote is to find my identity in Jesus, to know that my worth to God is not found in any of those other traits or identifying characteristics I mentioned a moment ago. It is knowing that God loves me so much that He pursued me when I was far from Him and drew me to Himself. It is knowing that Jesus loved me so much that He willingly laid down His life for my sake so that I can be close to God. And it is understanding what Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16 ESV)
I want you to circle two words in that verse – “world” and “whoever”. Those two key words serve as a reminder that I’m just the same as every other person who has ever lived on the face of the earth – that nothing else really matters except whether I have put my trust in Jesus alone. It means that just like them I can’t rely on anything that I can “bring to the table” to earn favor with God. That idea leads us directly to the second action I need to take…
2. Be “re-gospeled” daily
This s the same principle that we developed a few months ago when we studied Acts chapter 15 and talked about how we bring the kingdom of God near to others when we gladly lay down our rights for the good of others. But this idea is so important that it won’t hurt us to re-visit it again.
Here is what I mean by the term “re-gospeled”. Every day of our lives we need to remind ourselves of what God has done for us personally through the gospel. We need to be reminded that we are nothing more than sinners who have been brought near to God, not by anything we have done, but solely by the grace and mercy of God, expressed to us through the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus. We need to be reminded that we aren’t “owed” anything by God or by anyone else
I am convinced that if we just took this one step at the beginning of every day, we’d be in a lot better position to love others like God has loved us. We might even refrain from cussing out the guy that cuts us off in traffic on the way to work. The more we reflect on what God has done for us personally, the more likely we are to take the next step and…
3. Be a mercy giver
Jonah had no problem receiving God’s mercy. But he sure was too anxious to extend that same mercy to others, was he? Jesus reminded His disciples of the importance of passing on to others the mercy that we have received from God:
Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.
(Luke 6:36 ESV)
It’s easy to sit here and criticize Jonah for not wanting God to extend the same mercy he had been given to others or for not being an instrument of God’s mercy in the lives of others. But we need to be really careful to make sure we’re not doing the same exact thing. As we talked about last week, God’s mercy, which is often given to us in the form of second chances, is also someone else’s first chance to experience God’s mercy. And since we spent quite a bit of time last week discussing how to turn our second chances into instruments of God’s mercy in the lives of others, I won’t dwell here. If for some reason you missed that message I’d really encourage you to go to the website and listen to or watch that message.
4. Be willing to be uncomfortable
Mark Mittelberg, author of The Contagious Church, once said that Christians are all for evangelism and outreach and reaching the lost for Christ until those people start taking our parking spot or sitting in our pew, bringing kids who don’t behave the way we like, or bringing in worship music that we can’t relate to. Then our comfort becomes more important than the souls of those other people. We want to see the lost saved, but sometimes we’d rather they got saved somewhere else.
That describes Jonah to a “t” doesn’t it? As long as God only asked him to go bring the word of the Lord to his own people, that was comfortable for him. He’d probably done that for much of his life. He knew many of the people he was speaking to and he had a lot in common with his audience. But when God asked him to take a message to one of the bitter enemies of Israel, that definitely took him way out of his comfort zone and he just wasn’t willing to do that at first and even when he did obey the second time, his heart really wasn’t in it.
As you and I live our lives on a daily basis I can guarantee that there are going to be times when God is going to call you to go be an instrument of His mercy in a way that is going to require you to get way out of your comfort zone. That is going to look different for each one of us. But we’ll all have to answer the same question when that time comes: What is more important – my comfort or God’s love for people?
INSPIRATION
When we began this series four weeks ago I said that we are a lot more like Jonah than we would care to admit. But instead of asking us to go to Nineveh and preach a message just one time, I believe that God is calling us to go to our Nineveh every day. And unlike Jonah, we don’t have to travel hundreds of miles to get there.
Our Nineveh is all around us. We live in a culture where people have largely turned away from God in order to serve idols of all kinds - material possessions, status, power, reputation, and above everything else, self. And because of that, marriages are failing and homes are falling apart, people of different political persuasions can’t even have a civil conversation, children and teachers are being killed in their schools, and homeless people go without food and shelter.
Nineveh is all around us and we enter into it every time we go out the front door. So every day we are faced with a decision. Will I go into Nineveh and love people who are different than me the way that God has loved me or am I going to make life all about me and my comfort?
Can you imagine the impact that even this small body assembled here this morning could make in our neighborhoods and in our communities if we just made the commitment to quit running from God and go to our Nineveh each day? What if we decided to be an instrument of God’s mercy even to those who don’t deserve it? What if we went home today and invited our neighbor to dinner so we could get to know them better? What if we picked up the homeless guy on the street corner and took him out for a meal? What if we had a civil conversation with someone whose political views are completely different than our own and blessed that person rather than calling them names? What if we visited someone in prison or in a nursing home in order to tell them about Jesus? What if we befriended the bully at school or sat with the person that nobody else wants to sit with at lunch?
If I want to love others like God loves me
I can’t make life all about me
ACTION
I know that right now many of you probably believe at least most of what I’ve said today and you even have good intentions about putting some of these principles into practice in your life. But if you don’t do something concrete right now, chances are you may never get around to actually making any changes in your life. So I am going to ask everyone here this morning to do one of two things:
• If you have never personally accepted God’s grace and mercy into your life by putting your faith in Jesus alone, will you do that today? While I know most of you here this morning well enough to be confident that you’ve already done that, I don’t ever want to assume that just because someone comes to church on a regular basis that they have actually made a commitment to Jesus and put Him in control of their life. So if you’ve never done that, or even if you’re not sure if you’ve done that or you have questions about what that means, we’d love to talk to you more about that and there will be someone at the back during our last song you can talk to about that.
• If you’ve already made that decision, then I want you to think of someone you know for who you have resisted being an instrument of mercy in their life. Maybe you’ve done that because they have done something to hurt you or someone you love. Maybe it is because they are different than you – they belong to a different political party or have a different ethnic background or religion. Maybe you just look at how they live their life and you feel like they don’t deserve mercy. Once you’ve identified that person, will you write down their name? And will you also write down one concrete thing you’re going to do to be an instrument of God’s mercy in their life just as soon as you can? And no, that guy speeding past you on Oracle Road doesn’t count.
Discussion questions for Bible Roundtable
1. Even today, Jews read the book of Jonah on Yom Kippur, their holiest day of the year. Why do you think that is an appropriate reading?
2. Because the book of Jonah ends the way it does, we never really know how Jonah responded to God. How do you think he responded? Why do you say that?
3. How has “identity politics” and labeling caused such deep divisions in our country? As Christians, how do we make sure that doesn’t hinder our ability to be instruments of God’s mercy?
4. What are some things we do as a church that are “comfortable” for us, but could hinder others from receiving God’s mercy?
5. What are some practical things we can do to avoid developing the kind of attitude Jonah had toward those who were not like him?
