'40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown'…an 8 word sermon.
Who can tell me who these people are?
[pictures on slides of:
Jonah
John Wesley
Evan Roberts]
What have they all got in common?
They have all been engaged in God’s revival. Jonah’s story we will hear more about.
Wesley, whose heart was “Strangely warmed” in Aldersgate, May 1738, then went on to preach in the open air, covering 250,000 miles and seeing God transforming the lives of thousands.
Evan Roberts, 26 year old welshman from the Valleys had visions and led the 1904-5 welsh revival. Leading 100,000 people to Jesus.
Do you think any of them knew of the impact that their obedience to God’s call would have?
Just a quick whistle stop recap on the past few sermons in this series:
Wk1 - Jonah 1:1-3 — Running away from God
Wk2 - Jonah 1:4-17 — When life unravels
Wk3 - Jonah 2:1-10 — Turning back to God
Wk4 - Jonah 3:1-10 — Revival
Wk5 - Jonah 4:1-11 — Why, God?
So far then, Jonah has been called by God to a specific task. Gets the collywobbles and tries to run away from his responsibility. Gets thrown overboard by sailors who appear more faithful than him. Prays to God from the Belly of a great fish. And has just been vomited up onto the beach back where he started in Joppah.
In this passage, we see the impact of obedience to God’s transforming call in Jonah’s life and the lives of the Ninevites. Here we can start to understand the impact of our obedience to God’s call for our lives and for the communities we live in. A clarion call of transformed lives, communities, nations, world. Here we see radical transformation at God’s initiative. Here we see Revival!
Because in Revival God Radically Transforms:
1. Our Lives from: runaway rebellion to walks of obedience
2. Our communities: from citadels of darkness to cities of light
3. Our World of woe into his Kingdom of Heaven
And the Good News for us, the Great News for us, is this amazing transformation is happening right here, right now. When we are obedient to God’s call — Revival Happens!
[In Revival our lives are transformed from runaway rebellion to walk of obedience…]
vv1-3 [read out]
What a difference three days make:
Runaway Rebel to Obedient Servant?
Clearly Jonah’s life has been transformed and he is ready to follow God’s will.
He isn’t perfect — he is still mistaken about God’s will here, but what is important is that he is willing to act as God requires him. And that is all God needs. Because it is God that does it.
[Illustration own call to church planting] I couldn’t possibly…feeling ill-equipped for planting. Ready to run at a moments notice. God uses our fear, our weakness to bring glory to his strength.
Jonah had to walk from Joppah to Nineveh. That is 550 miles, approximately 40 days travel, for a single person with not much equipment at a steady pace. 40 days, walking with God, in the way that Jonah has been led.
What is God calling you to be obedient in?
Does the thought of it terrify you and excite you at the same time?
The church has been called to adventure — remember the prophetic word given by Rob earlier this year:
‘"I am calling you to pilgrimage, to travel with me as a church, to pass through a desert like a pilgrim people, with my pillar of cloud and fire to direct you. The physical disruption of this place is a picture of the spiritual mobility, flexibility and willingness to travel with me as your guide that I am calling you as a body to move into. Are you ready to leave the comfort of certainty and travel with me? Are you ready to reawaken gifts and ministries I have put in you, leave the reassurance of known environments, and work with me.
Are you willing to give generously and recklessly, knowing that I will more than make up for any apparent lack? Walk with me, follow me, adventure into the future with me”’
Jonah walked with God, Jonah wasn’t perfect, none of us are perfect but God calls us on adventure…are we going to walk with God?
[Citadels of darkness are ‘overthrown’ to become cities of light…]
vv4-8 [read out]
That 8 word sermon of Jonah’s is the most powerful set of words in the entire book. It sets wildfire running across the city so that within a day everyone in the ‘great’ city of Nineveh has heard it.
Thing is, it isn’t the most eloquent set of words in the world is it?
It isn’t a soundbite or a tweet that these days would get much attention.
We are all shouting at the top of our lungs in social media. So why was Jonah’s message so powerful?
It was a word given in season — It appears there had been some events which may have caused the Assyrians to fear divine retribution: earthquakes, eclipses are recorded at about the time that Jonah may have been preaching the message.
It wasn’t Jonah’s message. It was God’s. And when God speaks, things happen.
Isaiah 55:11: ‘So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; It shall not return to me empty but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.’
God spoke creation into being with what? A word. The disciples hearts burned within them on the road to Emmaeus because of what? Jesus' words. Jesus calms the storm with what? A word. Heals the sick with what? A word. And raised the dead?...with a word.
… and in this case God gave them a word. He told them plain, the city would be 'overthrown'…except, hang on a minute, it wasn’t? What is happening here?
Well lets look at the response of the people: from greatest to least, people and animals, repented of their evil ways. They completely acknowledged their sin and repented. They changed their hearts and this action is seen by their fasting in sackcloth and ashes. They believed in God. They trusted that he would see their changed hearts. They threw themselves into prayer and sought God’s mercy. All in a day!
Is that not overthrow? The word 'overthrow' has a double meaning in Hebrew — linked to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but also a total transformation or change of heart as in Deut 23:5 the Lord turned (overthrew) the curse into a blessing. In Nineveh, God did cause the city to be overthrown…He overthrew the citadels of darkness, the power of Satan over that place, he turned it upside-down and in their obedience to his word the city of darkness became a city of light.
God radically transformed the people of Nineveh, he radically transformed the city of Nineveh. God can radically transform the people of Stockton, he can radically transform the community of Newtown.
Word is getting about of our move into Newtown. I am already talking with people in the church heirarchy about the plant into St Paul’s. Next week I will be talking with local councillors and Alex Cunningham, MP, about the plant. What do you think I will be saying? Do you think I might say: “I hope you don’t mind but we are looking at perhaps bringing more people in to St Paul’s Newtown”? Or should I say: “God is calling us into Newtown to help to transform that community, where can we start”? No brainer right?
We are called to be agents of light in places of darkness. Let’s get into Newtown and give it a heart of flesh — God is calling us to call others. God has blessed us to be a blessing: to others in this area and wherever we are, but specifically to the people of Newtown. He wants us in there, lighting up the darkness for him, bringing hope to the hopeless, love to the loveless, breaking the chains of addiction, debt and poverty.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not about some rescue mission — God is not calling us to go and have pity on those around us. He is calling us to be his agents of transformation — helping people to see the hope that is Jesus Christ, so that they too can be transformed by Him.
It was the people of Nineveh who repented, as we will see in a couple of week’s time Jonah, had very little intention for the place to be anything other than utterly destroyed.
But we can partner with God in his mission in Newtown. And that will not only transform Newtown, not only transform the lives of people as they meet with Jesus, but it will transform our lives as we come face-to-face with Jesus again and again in other people. And as we see lives changed and our lives change the community will change, the town will change. And as that community sends out people as agents of God’s transforming presence, we will see nations changed.
[In Revival God transforms a World of woe to the Kingdom of Heaven…]
vv9-10 [Read Out]
But, and I don’t want you to miss this, the people of Nineveh repented blindly. “Who knows?” says the King.
At that time, who did know?
They operated on blind hope that God would not destroy them as in Sodom and Gomorrah. That faith in God’s Word, that transformation of the people’s lives changed that city from darkness to light and as they turned to God, he turned his compassion and mercy to them.
If the people of Nineveh, who trusted blindly in the Word of God can be effected by it so much that they are transformed. How much more can we trust, as God’s people who have encountered the risen Lord Jesus, in his salvation plan for the world?
We know Jesus as risen and ascended. We know that he was crucified for the sins of the world and sits at God’s right hand so that whoever believes in him will not perish (like the Ninevites) but have everlasting life. As John also says, We have seen his marvellous light. A light that shines in the darkness that the darkness cannot overcome.
God overthrows the citadels of darkness through the light of his Gospel that proclaims Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour. We know he has done it. The sacrifice that ripples across history into our futures.
Therefore we can be confident in proclaiming his light in the darkness.
As we walk with God to plant this church in Newtown, we will be confident that he will banish the darkness. We will see his Kingdom come in Newtown, his Kingdom come in Stockton, his Kingdom come in the UK, in Europe, and the whole world. We can play our part in his plan with confidence because, unlike the King of Nineveh, we know the King of Kings who calls us is faithful and he will do it.
Because God’s revival, his radical transformation, doesn’t stop at lives, it transforms whole communities, towns, cities, countries and the world.
Conclusion —
So what do we think about when we think about revival? What do we mean when we talk about it? I suggest we mean God’s radical transformation:
Of individual lives of runaway rebellion into walks of obedience;
Of citadels of darkness into cities of light;
Of a World of Woe into the glorious Kingdom of Heaven.
Because it all adds up to the end goal, the master plan that we see in Revelation of a new heaven and a new earth transformed by the saving power of Jesus Christ.
And the Good News, the Great News is that God calls us into this story of redemption. If you don’t believe me read Matthew 28. He has given us authority to get the job done. So lets do it!
Prayer ministry points:
Lives transformed.
Obedience to call.
Discerning call [plug life groups — plug our life group]
Burden for a part of the community
Long for the coming Kingdom
