True Repentance

(1) First we think of Jonah, who was swallowed by a large fish because he refused to obey the Lord’s command to go preach to them.

(2) Secondly we think of their ranking with the most wicked people who ever lived on earth.

Illus: Once the Ninevites would capture a town they committed horrendous acts:

-Once they had captured all the men in a town, they would sexually violate all the women.

-When they were through torturing the women and sexually abusing them, they would take the men one by one, and with great pleasure cut off their noses, ears, hands, and then they would puncture their eyes.

When we consider how cruel the Ninevites were, we can understand why Jonah did not want to preach to them.

Jonah, along with everyone else, would have been simply delighted if God would have wiped the Ninevites from the face of the earth. They were a menace to society!

As cruel and violent as the Ninevites were, The Bible mentions them when it comes to TRUE REPENTANCE.

Why? Perhaps it is because it takes wicked people getting saved to show us what TRUE REPENTANCE is!

For example, a morally good person can be saved and one can not observe a tremendous change in his life because he had not committed the visible sins, but when the violent, wicked person is saved the change is easy to observe.

This was one of the things that impressed the apostle Paul about the Thessalonians.

Look at I Thess. 1:9. He said, “...and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God;”

That is, once they had come to God for salvation, it was obvious that they had been saved because they forsook the idols they had been serving.

Also, when we think of being gloriously saved, we can not help thinking about the man in Mark, chapter 5.

Illus: Before that man was converted, he had been a wild man. He had to be chained like an animal. He lived in a cemetery. The Bible says, Mark 5:5, “And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.”

What a pitiful man! Sin had wrecked his life, but once he came to know the Lord, what a change we see in his life! When the towns people, who had known that mad man, came to see him after his conversion, look at the change they saw. In verse 15, we read, “And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind:...”

Now the Bible says he was-

• Sitting. He was no longer stomping around like a mad man.

• Clothed. He no longer tore his clothes off, but he was fully clothed.

• In his right mind. He was no longer out of his mind.

Listen, when a person truly repents of his sins and comes to know Christ, the Bible says of him, II Cor. 5:17, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

The Ninevites were the most wicked people of that time, yet when those wicked Ninevites turned to God, we see evidence of TRUE REPENTANCE.

This is why God’s Word has a great deal to say about the Ninevites’ repentance.

We know they truly repented of their sins because the Bible declares they did.

Look at Luke 11:32. We read, “The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they REPENTED at the preaching of Jonas...”

Once they repented of their sins they no longer were a cruel and wicked people. They changed the way they did things. It was no longer business as usual!

They convinced God, Who can not be fooled, that they were truly sorry for the sins they had committed. God forgave them of their sins and spared them from the destruction He was going to send their way.

Let me show you THREE things about their repentance that we can see in the scriptures. It is clear as A, B, C.

I. “A” IS FOR THEIR AWARENESS.

Look at Jonah 3:3-4. “So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days’ journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”

Ninevah was such a big city that it took three days to walk across it. Notice, it was when Jonah was one day into his journey through that wicked town that he began to proclaim the message of REPENTANCE.