Notes for Jonah 4
Sermon for 7/20/2003
Introduction:
In a biography of the life of Mikey Mantle there is a story told about a hunting trip that Mikey and Billy Martin took together in the off season in the early sixties. Mikey Mantle was known as much for his excesses as he was for his home run power. Mikey hit hard, played hard, drank hard and when Mikey got angry, it was said that he burned hotter than most anyone and was capable of anything during his fits of anger. On this particular hunting trip the” Mick” and Billy Martin traveled to upstate New York to hunt deer on the farm of a friend of Mikey’s. Upon arriving at his friend’s farm, Mikey left the truck to notify the friend that they would be hunting on his farm that day. The friend agreed but asked Mikey to do a favor for him. The friend had an old mule that was very sick and the friend wanted to put the poor animal out of his misery but didn’t have the heart to do it so he asked Mikey if he would stop at the barn down the road and “put him down” for him. Mikey agreed but thought he would play a practical joke on Billie Martin as well as doing a favor for a friend. Mikey stormed out of the house, jumped in the truck, hurled a few expletives at the man and told Billie that the man had refused to let them hunt. As they drove past the barn, Mikey stated, “I’ll show him. I’m going to go in that barn and shoot his favorite mule; you can’t do this to Mikey Mantle and Billie Martin.” He threw the truck into reverse and skidded to a stop in the barn yard road. Mikey strutted into the barn, leveled his gun at the mule and “blam”, shoots the animal dead. As Mikey is checking to make sure the mule is dead, he hears two gun shots from the barn yard. He ran out to find Billie Martin outside the truck with his rifle against his shoulder. Mikey asked, “Martin, What are you doing?” Martin yelled back, “We’ll show that so-and-so, I just shot two of his cows.”
One might wonder how Martin could get caught up in a practical joke to that degree. But, apparently he had seen Mikey do some things in anger and thought that he was capable of getting angry enough and losing control enough to shoot a friend’s mule dead.
Have you ever shot any mules? Are you capable of shooting mules? Have others seen a side of you that would lead them to believe that you are capable of such fits of anger?
WBTU:
A. In our text today Jonah displays anger. He doesn’t go off and shoot any mules or cows but he does throw a fit and says that he wants to die. Like a three year old who doesn’t get there way.
B. Everyone gets angry. It is an emotion that is necessary and built into the human race.
C. Why? Why do we need anger? Anger is an emotion in response to a real or perceived injustice or wrong doing. Anger focuses our attention and moves us to a state of alertness or preparedness.
D. Our heart rate goes us, adrenaline enters the blood stream. Our sense of justice has been violated and we feel like we must respond.
E. We must respond. If we do not anger often causes ulcers, high blood pressure, impatience, critical spirits and even depression. If we respond in a fit of rage, we might end up in the jail.
F. (Eph 4:26 NIV) "In your anger do not sin" : Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry,
G. This is the problem. Most times anger leads to sin.
Thesis: When we have anger in our lives we need to ask ourselves the question, “Do I have a good (Biblical) reason (NASB) to be angry?” Vs. 4
For instances:
1. Yes!
A. Reasons that are correct for anger
2. Moses was hot with anger after Pharaoh would not let the Israelites go. Pharaoh had promised that if Moses prayed to stop the plagues then he would let the people go. After the plagues were gone, Pharaoh would not let the people go. Pharaoh deliberately broke his promises. He lied.
3. Nehemiah made a covenant with the people of Jerusalem and with God that they would rebuild the walls around Jerusalem. They all signed a document stating what they would do. While they were working on the wall, the bills pilled up and so many of the rich were foreclosing on the poor people. Even though they had all signed the covenant, while they all were working, the rich were taking advantage of the poor. Nehemiah reminds these nobles, the rich that this is not right and so they stop. Nehemiah is very upset about this.
4. (John 2:13 NIV) When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem.(John 2:14 NIV) In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money.(John 2:15 NIV) So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.(John 2:16 NIV) To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!"(John 2:17 NIV) His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me."
5. Holy anger is anger toward any kind of genuine wrongdoing: mistreatment, injustice, or breaking of laws.
B. When we have examined our anger and we can say, “Yes” it is holy anger, how do we deal with this anger? (From Gary Chapman The Other Side of Love: Handling Anger in a Godly Way)
1. Admit your anger.
2. Restrain your immediate response: Verbal or physical expression or withdrawal and silence. Wait before you act.
3. Locate the focus of our anger. If a person has wronged us, identify this person’s sin. Determine how serious the offense is. Some wrongs are minor and some are major. This will affect our response. Prayer will help us to have discernment.
4. Analyze our options. Our response should be positive and loving. 2 basic options:
a. Lovingly confront the person
b. Consciously decide to overlook this matter.
5. Take constructive action. If we choose to let it go, release this problem into the Lord’s hands. Turn this person over to God and let God deal with him/her. If decide to confront, do so gently. Listen to any explanations. Accept humbly any apology. Seek another mature Christians help if no repentance or if this is serious enough to think about legal action.
2. No!
A. Reasons that are incorrect, unbiblical for anger
1. Hatred toward a particular group of people.
2. Jealousy. He is better than me in this area and so I am angry.
4. This person spoke the truth to me and it hurt me so I am angry.
5. Someone is taking up the case of the one I am angry with so I am angry with them.
6. This person will not give me what is rightfully mine, whether praise or property.
7. This person frustrates me or I don’t understand them so I am angry.
8. This person humiliated me in front of others so I am angry with them.
9. This person stands up to me and refuses to go along with the right way.
10. This person misleads me.
11. We see a common thread here. Someone did something to me that slighted me or made my life unpleasant so I get angry.
12. Not that I am angry because God is being insulted, not that I am angry because this is unjust. Not an issue of right or wrong, it is an issue that personally affect me and so I am angry. This is the more common.
13. Anger has been warped by this world. It was put into us because of our sense of justice, but more often than not, we respond in anger when we are personally insulted or humiliated or disrespected.
14. How many people really get angry when they see injustice in this world? How many more get angry over petty things but because it involves them personally, they are outraged.
15. Most of the time this kind of anger is between two people, personality conflicts, miscommunication, etc.
B. How do we deal with this anger? (From Gary Chapman The Other Side of Love: Handling Anger in a Godly Way)
1. Pray as you go and talk with this person.
2. Go to this person and share information. Focus on the event, no name calling or other areas.
3. Negotiate understanding. Express your struggles in a non-threatening manner, requesting understanding. Listen and respond. Open, honest conversation.
4. Request change as long as we are not demanding or manipulative.
5. Give it over to the Lord. Do not seek revenge.
Conclusion:
A. God is a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.
B. Reasons for Jonah’s anger- He was angry with God.
1. David Wilkerson- Not long ago, I picked up a missionary biography entitled Aggie - and I couldn’t put it down. This amazing story gripped my heart, and I ended up reading it in one sitting. I’d like to summarize the story for you here - because it vividly illustrates the destructive power of grudging anger in a Christian’s heart:
In 1921, two young couples in Stockholm, Sweden, answered God’s call to the African mission field. During one particular mission’s service, these two couples received a burden to go to the Belgian Congo, which is now Zaire.
Their names were David and Svea Flood and Joel and Bertha Erickson. Svea Flood was only four-feet-eight-inches tall, and she was a well-known singer in Sweden. But both couples gave up everything to lay down their lives for the gospel.
When they arrived in the Belgian Congo, they reported to the local mission station. Then they took machetes and literally hacked their way into the Congo’s insect-infested interior. David and Svea had a two-year-old son, David Jr., and they had to carry him on their backs. Along the way, both families caught malaria. But they kept going forward with great zeal, ready to be martyrs for the Lord.
Finally, they reached a certain village in the interior. Yet, to their surprise, the people wouldn’t let them enter. They told the missionaries, "We can’t allow any white people here, or our gods will be offended." So the families went to a second village - but they were rejected there also.
At this point, there were no other villages around. The worn-down families had no choice but to settle. So they hacked out a clearing in the middle of a mountain jungle and built mud huts, where they made their homes.
As the months went by, they all suffered from loneliness, sickness and malnutrition. Little David Jr. became sickly. And they had almost no interaction with any of the villagers.
Finally, after about six months, Joel and Bertha Erickson decided to return to the mission station. They urged the Floods to do the same, but Svea couldn’t travel because she’d just gotten pregnant. And now her malaria had become worse. Besides all that, David said, "I want my child born in Africa. I’ve come to give my life here." So the Floods simply waved goodbye as their friends began the one-hundred-mile hike back.
For several months Svea endured a raging fever. Yet all that time, she ministered faithfully to a little boy who came to see them from one of the nearby villages. The boy was the Floods’ only convert. He brought the family fruit, and as Svea ministered to him, he simply smiled back at her.
Eventually, Svea’s malaria got so bad she became bedridden. When the time came for her to give birth, she delivered a healthy baby girl. But within a week she was at the point of death. In her final moments, she whispered to David, "Call our girl Aina." Then she died.
David Flood was badly shaken by his wife’s death. Summoning all his strength, he took a wooden box and made a casket for Svea. Then, in a primitive grave on the mountainside, he buried his beloved wife.
As he stood beside her grave, he looked down at his young son beside him. Then he heard his baby daughter’s cries from the mud hut. And suddenly, bitterness filled his heart. Anger rose up in him - and he couldn’t control it. He flew into a rage, crying, "Why did you allow this, God? We came here to give our lives! My wife was so beautiful, so talented. And here she lies, dead at twenty-seven.
"Now I have a two-year-old son I can hardly care for, let alone a baby girl. And after more than a year in this jungle, all we have to show for it is one little village boy who probably doesn’t understand what we’ve told him. You’ve failed me, God. What a waste of life!"
At that point, David Flood hired some local tribesmen as guides and took his children to the mission station. When he saw the Erickson’s, he blurted out angrily, "I’m leaving! I can’t handle these children alone. I’m taking my son with me back to Sweden - but I’m leaving my daughter here with you." And with that, he left Aina for the Erickson’s to raise.
All the way back to Stockholm, David Flood stood on deck and seethed at God. He’d told everyone he was going to Africa to be a martyr - to win people to Christ, no matter what the cost. And now he was returning a defeated and broken man. He believed he’d been faithful - but that God had rewarded him with total neglect.
When he arrived in Stockholm, he decided to go into the import business to seek his fortune. And he warned everyone around him never to mention God in his presence. When they did, he flew into a rage, the veins popping out on his neck. Eventually, he began drinking heavily.
Shortly after he left Africa, his friends the Ericksons died suddenly (possibly poisoned by a local village chief). Little Aina was handed to an American couple - Arthur and Anna Berg. The Bergs took Aina with them to a village called Massisi, in the northern Congo. There they began calling her "Aggie." And soon little Aggie learned the Swahili language and played with the Congo children.
Alone much of the time, Aggie learned to play games of imagination. She imagined she had four brothers and a sister, and she gave them all imaginary names. She would set a table for her brothers and talk to them. And she would imagine her sister continually looking for her.
When the Bergs went on furlough to America, they took Aggie with them, to the Minneapolis area. As it turned out, they ended up staying there. Aggie grew up to marry a man named Dewey Hurst, who later became president of a Bible College.
Aggie never knew that her father had remarried - this time to Sea’s younger sister, who had no heart for God. And now he had five children besides Aggie - four sons and a daughter (just as Aggie had imagined). By this time, David Flood had become a total alcoholic, and his eyesight was failing badly.
For forty years Aggie tried to locate her father - but her letters were never answered. Finally, the Bible school gave her and her husband round-trip tickets to Sweden. This would give her the chance to find her father personally.
After crossing the Atlantic, the couple spent a day’s layover in London. They decided to take a walk, so they strolled by the Royal Albert Hall. To their joy, a mission’s convention was being held. They went inside, where they heard a black preacher testifying of the great works God was doing in Zaire - the Belgian Congo!
Aggie’s heart leaped. After the meeting, she approached the preacher and asked, "Did you ever know the missionaries David and Svea Flood?" He answered, "Yes. Svea Flood led me to the Lord when I was just a boy. They had a baby girl, but I don’t know what happened to her." Aggie exclaimed, "I’m the girl! I’m Aggie - Aina!"
When the preacher heard this, he clasped Aggie’s hands, hugged her and wept with joy. Aggie could hardly believe that this man was the little boy convert her mother had ministered to. He had grown up to be a missionary evangelist to his own country - which now included 110,000 Christians, 32 mission stations, several Bible schools and a 120-bed hospital.
The next day Aggie and Dewey left for Stockholm - and word had already spread there that they were coming. By this time Aggie knew she had four brothers and a sister. And to her surprise, three of her brothers greeted her at the hotel. She asked them, "Where’s David, my older brother?" They merely pointed across the lobby to a lone figure sitting in a chair. Her brother, David Jr., was a shriveled-up, gray-haired man. Like his father, he’d grown embittered and had nearly destroyed his life with alcohol.
When Aggie asked about her father, her brothers flushed with anger. They all hated him. None of them had talked to him in years.
Then Aggie asked, "What about my sister?" They gave her a telephone number, and Aggie called it immediately. Her sister answered - but when Aggie told her who she was, the line suddenly went dead. Aggie tried calling back but got no answer.
In a little while, however, her sister arrived at the hotel and threw her arms around Aggie. She told her, "All my life I’ve dreamed about you. I used to spread out a map of the world, put a toy car on it, and pretend to drive everywhere to find you."
Aggie’s sister also despised her father, David Flood. But she promised to help Aggie find him. So they drove to an impoverished area of Stockholm, where they entered a rundown building. When they knocked on the door, a woman let them in.
Inside, liquor bottles lay everywhere. And lying on a cot in the corner was her father - the one-time missionary, David Flood. He was now seventy-three years old and suffering from diabetes. He’d also had a stroke, and cataracts covered both of his eyes.
Aggie fell to his side, crying, "Dad, I’m your little girl - the one you left in Africa." The old man turned and looked at her. Tears formed in his eyes. He answered, "I never meant to give you away. I just couldn’t handle you both." Aggie answered, "That’s okay, Daddy. God took care of me."
Suddenly, her father’s face darkened. "God didn’t take care of you!" he raged. "He ruined our whole family! He led us to Africa and then betrayed us. Nothing ever came of our time there. It was a waste of our lives!"
Aggie then told him about the black preacher she’d just met in London - and how the country had been evangelized through him. "It’s all true, Daddy," she said. "Everybody knows about that little boy convert. The story has been in all the newspapers."
Suddenly David Flood broke. Tears of sorrow and repentance flowed down his face - and God restored him.
Shortly after their meeting, David Flood died. And although he was restored to the Lord, he left only ruin behind. Besides Aggie, his legacy was five children - all unsaved and tragically embittered.
Aggie wrote down the whole story. Yet as she worked on it, she developed cancer. Just after she finished writing it, she went to be with the Lord.
David Flood represents many Christians today. They’ve been disappointed, cast down - and now they’re full of rage toward God!
3. Why? Because of pride. Angry with God. Jonah was in the same state.
4. Everyone has it. How do we handle this anger toward God? (From Gary Chapman The Other Side of Love: Handling Anger in a Godly Way)
a. Take the anger to God. God is a compassionate God and He will not strike you dead for revealing your true feelings. Jonah did. God does no wrong. He will either help us understand His perspective on our situation or He will simply ask us to trust Him
b. Listen to God’s message. He might lead a Christian friend, a sermon, in our devotional material or something else to reveal His purpose or simply His peace.
c. Report for further duty. God is not through with us yet.
