Religious But Rebellious At Heart

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So we're taking a break from the Gospel of Mark to look here now in this minor prophet,

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Jonah. And what we're going to do, as I mentioned before, we're going to take a six -week break from Mark and work through almost a chapter a week, six weeks through this book of Jonah.

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And I want to begin our time, we're lower in numbers in terms of kids, but I'm going to put the three kids that we do have on the spot, four if we include teenagers, older teenagers.

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And I want to ask you this, what is the book of Jonah about?

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Or if you were to give me maybe even more specifically the main theme of the book of Jonah, what is it about?

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Do I have any kids that would be willing to volunteer? What is Jonah about? No cheating there,

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I heard that. Are there any adults that want to step in and help out?

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What is the book of Jonah about? This is good that no one's answering.

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It means I'm going to teach something helpful, hopefully. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Brother, go ahead.

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God's mercy. God's mercy. Okay. That's excellent. Very good. Well, thank you for contributing. God's mercy is one of the themes that we're going to come out of the book of Jonah.

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And what I find interesting is that when you ask that question, almost everyone is afraid to talk about the fish.

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Because everybody talks about the fish. And that's invariably what we find. If you were to ask many people today, whether adults or children, when they think about the book of Jonah, or when we say we're going to be preaching on the book of Jonah, immediately what you think of is some man sitting in the belly of a fish.

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Or if you have maybe a fuller picture of it, it's a man who disobeys God, who runs from God, who goes into a boat, who's cast overboard, who's swallowed by a fish.

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And if you get beyond that, there might be something about maybe a city somewhere in the

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Middle East, or maybe his relationship with plants. A lot of people think about Jonah as this reluctant prophet.

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And there is some truth to that. But for the vast majority of people, they do not know more than what

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I've just described. That's how they would describe the book of Jonah. And if they were to read it today, that's what they would discover again in the book of Jonah.

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And I think that if we were to hit the streets, I always like this idea of getting out there and just going out to the average

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Canadian Christian who went to church today, and the week before that, and the week before that, and we were to survey the average

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Christian, I think what we'd find is that most would readily admit that they know very little about the theme of Jonah.

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Or that they could place the book of Jonah, or the events of Jonah, in the timeline of God's redemptive history.

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Or if you were to just go up to a person on the street and say, without looking, can you just turn to the book of Jonah?

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It would get lost in the canon of Scripture. It would get lost in the story, the redemptive story of Scripture.

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And it would get lost largely just in terms of theme. Most people just think of the cartoon storybook

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Bible version of Jonah. For some people, Jonah is nothing more than a fictional allegory or a parable.

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For others, it's an entertaining or it's an engaging Bible study for children. But regardless of who you find, most people don't know.

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And I would venture to say, most people in this room don't know how the book of Jonah applies to your

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Christian life today. If you were to think about that. And so that's one of the reasons why

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Steve and I have chosen this particular book to study. The book of Jonah is familiar, but we know that familiarity breeds contempt.

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And many people read it, but few understand what it actually teaches. How it actually applies to our life today.

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And so what we're going to do over these next six weeks is take some time to study this book.

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To rightly understand what it teaches. And what we find is that actually the book of Jonah is very, very helpful for us as Christians today.

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In the world in which we live. In a world that is contrary to the

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Christian message. That is contrary to biblical values. That is contrary to all that is good.

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To a world that is depraved and lost in sin. The book of Jonah gives us a ton of information to learn how we interact with this world.

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And so I mean it. I know some people get up and they talk about being eager to study a book. And they want that enthusiasm or eagerness to be contagious or infectious.

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I say it because I mean it. I'm eager to study this book. There's just so much for us to learn.

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And then maybe at the end of these six weeks we'll begin. When we get back in Mark or wherever we land. We'll ask you, what is the book of Jonah about?

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And we can see a whole host of hands come up and tell us what it's all about. So this week we're going to look at Jonah chapter 1 verses 1 to 6.

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And what we're going to find is this. In terms of the main theme of this first passage. In this introductory section of the minor prophet

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Jonah. What we see is, or what Jonah shows us is what it looks like to be what

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I would say religious but rebellious at heart. Religious but rebellious at heart.

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And what we'll find as we study this book is that Jonah serves as a representative for the nation of Israel.

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And as a representative of the nation of Israel. He shows us what it looks like to belong to the people of God.

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Or to claim to belong to the people of God. But to have a heart that is hardened to God.

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That is contrary to God. That is given over to one's own wills and desires.

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And so as we study this text we're going to find it's not just an entertaining story for children. Especially these first six verses.

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It's going to serve as a sobering warning to what I would call the religious but unrepentant.

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Or even if you're here and you're a Christian today. Truly a believer in Christ. It serves as a warning to any man or woman who is growing cold or beginning to backslide.

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We're going to see what it looks like to be a rebel. To be a man of God or a supposed man of God. And yet to be a rebel.

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And the way we're going to divide it is this way. And perhaps we have just the right composition of the group in God's providence for today.

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Because we're going to dig in. In order for us to understand where Jonah falls in redemptive history.

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The cultural, historical, geographical context. The literary context. We're going to spend the first half of today just drilling into the book of Jonah.

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These first six verses we're going to give about 20 to 25 minutes. Just looking at the substance.

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It's going to lay the foundation for the book. And so if your mind easily wanders, grab a pen.

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Maybe we can get you a pen if you need to. Write it down. Mark it down. Do what you can to follow along.

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And then after we lay out this foundation in the book of Jonah. I want to provide us with what

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I would say are five indicators. Five indicators that you might be religious but a rebel at heart.

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Or five indicators that you might be backsliding or at risk of backsliding.

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And so let's get into the text together. We'll start in verse one. I'll read the first two verses. Now the word of the

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Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.

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The book of Jonah begins like so many minor prophets do in our Old Testament. With that saying, the word of the

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Lord came to and then fill in the blank. And so we find that over a hundred times actually in the

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Old Testament. We find that in books like Micah or Haggai, Joel, Malachi, to name only a few.

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And so it's not surprising that we should find the book start just abruptly like that. The word came to Jonah, one of the minor prophets.

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And we're told very little about this prophet. It just gets right into the story. But what's interesting, what I always find interesting, is if we were to dive into other parts of the

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Old Testament, we could learn a little bit more about who Jonah was and the time in which he lived.

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And so a good example of this is found in 2 Kings 14 and verse 25.

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We're not going to turn there, but maybe write that down and have a look at it later. In 2 Kings 14, 25, we're told that Jonah was a prophet in the northern kingdom of Israel.

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We deduce that from that text during the reign of Jeroboam II. And while many people would rush through these details, him being in the northern kingdom and Jeroboam II and all of those good things,

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I think it's important for us to actually drill in and learn a little bit more. And so if you would humor me, and we're going to go on a bit of a ride through the history of Israel, or at least the history of Israel leading up to Jonah.

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That way, if someone were to ask you, that surveyor to come to you afterwards and say, where is Jonah in redemptive history?

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You can say, it's exactly here. This is where it took place. And so let's look at that together.

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So the nation of Israel, as many of us know, was established when

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Moses and Joshua led the nation into the promised land. Truly established geographically.

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And for about 300 years or so, the nation of Israel was ruled by judges.

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And we see a long sequence of judges. We know some of them. We know some of the famous ones like Samson.

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The one female judge, Deborah, during that period of time. And then it was about 1 ,000 years before Christ.

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If you want to be more specific, 1 ,050 years before Christ that the first king of Israel was appointed.

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Does anyone remember what that king's name was? The first king of Israel. Anyone have a guess?

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Yes. Very close. King Saul. King Saul. And then followed by King Saul were some of the most famous kings in the whole nation's history.

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That was King David and then King Solomon, his son. And during that time, Israel enjoyed an unrivaled period of peace and prosperity.

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It really was the golden age of the nation of Israel. It was during that time that Jerusalem became the city of David.

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That Jerusalem became the center for political and religious practice in the nation.

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Solomon. It was during that time that Solomon built the first temple in the city of Jerusalem.

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And 1 Kings 10, verse 27 aptly describes what it was like to live in Israel during this time.

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And kids, why don't you think about this for a second. It says this, And the king made, this is Solomon, silver as common in Jerusalem as stone.

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Now that might be hyperbolic language, but what it means is this. There was a lot of prosperity. Think like Edmonton, Alberta in 2005.

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When just everything was going right, at least as the oil field people would say it was.

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But that was until the nation was divided into two by a tragic split.

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Solomon's son, Rehoboam. And we can read about him in 1 Kings chapter 12. Sorry, I'm just full of references.

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But only two chapters after that description of the peace and prosperity of Israel, Rehoboam took over the united kingdom that was

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Israel. And if anyone remembers, because of his own machismo and bravado, he wanted everyone to know that he was going to rule the nation of Israel harder than even his father

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Solomon. And so as a result of that, the nation of Israel became two nations.

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There was a split. And if you know anything about the geography and the history of Israel, what happened was the ten tribes in the northern part of Israel broke off and became simply

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Israel. That's as they went. So if you're reading in the prophets or in some of the older history books in reference to Israel, that is the ten northern tribes.

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The remaining two tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained in the south, and they became known as Judah.

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And so as you read through, you see this distinction between Israel and Judah, living as their own distinct countries with their own distinct laws, their own distinct kings, and unfortunately, regrettably, their own distinct religions.

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And what we find is that the northern kingdom, those ten tribes quickly took a left turn and followed after the gods of Canaan and the surrounding nations.

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And so during that time, after this split, for some 250 years, these two nations went side by side, increasing in their disobedience, increasing in their rebellion against God.

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And that was until about 760 BC. So about 240 years after David, we see a man named

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Jonah arrive on the scene. And Jonah came during, in the northern kingdom, those ten tribes in the northern kingdom, and he came during the reign of Jeroboam II.

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And during that reign of Jeroboam II, the nation was doing very well in terms of its military might and prosperity.

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It was growing in size. The borders of Israel were expanding under Jeroboam II.

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But as is often the case, and we see this in our own country, when prosperity increases, when peace increases, so does spiritual bankruptcy.

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And so as the people were getting richer spiritually, they were becoming poorer and poorer. And so verse 2 tells us that God spoke to this

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Jonah, son of Amittai, with a very specific and unique command in this period of time.

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And someone might ask, what was the content of that message? It was very unique.

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Rather than prophesying to his own people, which was the typical practice of prophets in that time,

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Jonah was commanded to arise. It's the Hebrew word kum. It means literally, stand up and go to Nineveh.

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And we don't learn a lot about the message yet, but he was to go and he was to speak against the evil in that city.

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And the contents of this message, ultimately we find, was that Jonah was to preach a message of repentance so that the city would turn from its wicked ways lest it be destroyed.

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And our text tells us just a little bit about Nineveh. Nineveh was a great city, we're told.

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It was a great city and an evil city. And almost the way it's described, it reads very similar, if anyone remembers the account of Sodom and Gomorrah, just as Sodom and Gomorrah were great cities and evil cities, so was

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Nineveh. And for most people, for many people today, for many

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Christians in the average pew today, when they read this story and they read about Nineveh, they know very little about the history, about the geography, about why

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Nineveh is such an interesting place for God to send one of his prophets, Jonah.

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And so we'll dive into that a little bit. Why didn't Jonah want to go to Nineveh? Now, oftentimes when we read these texts, we have no idea, in terms of geography, where one city is in reference to the other.

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And so we'll start first with geography. Nineveh was located not in Israel, immediately close to Galilee, probably where Jonah was ministering or serving as prophet, but it was located some 800 kilometers northeast of Galilee.

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800 kilometers. If anyone follows the news, you might have remembered from a few years ago, there was news about ISIS being in Iraq, and they had a stronghold in the city of Mosul.

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Mosul, within Mosul, are the ancient ruins of Nineveh. And so Jonah would have had to travel some 800 kilometers through what we would know as Syria and into Iraq, into the city of Nineveh, to preach a message of repentance to this nation.

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And we read that this city here, that it's described as a great city. And Jonah 3 .3,

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it says that it was three days' journey in breadth. And there's a reason for that.

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If we were to go all the way back to Genesis chapter 10 and look at the origins of Nineveh, we actually find that it was

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Noah's great -grandson. His name was Nimrod.

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And parents don't name your kids, potential parents don't name your kids Nimrod. But it was

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Nimrod, Jonah's great -grandson, at least someone's laughing, who established the city of Nineveh.

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And so it was established almost immediately from the post -flood resurrection, or you could say the post -flood revival of civilization.

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And so it was at this time when Jonah was called there probably, most historians say, probably the largest city in the world.

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It had 600 ,000 citizens living in the city of Nineveh. If you were to go outside, kind of like we do with the

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Anthony Henday, and draw a circle around the city of Nineveh, it was 100 kilometers in circumference around the city, a massive, sprawling city.

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And then in the core of the city, it was protected by a wall that was 13 kilometers long.

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And all jokes aside, we hear people talking about building a wall on the southern border of the

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United States, or Trump's wall, or whatever the case. But no wall would hold a candle to this wall that was in Nineveh.

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It was over 53 feet tall in the tallest spots. And think about this, 53 feet tall and 49 feet thick.

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And so this was a solid wall for 13 kilometers around the inner core of the city.

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And not only was this a great city, but it was an evil city. Nineveh was well known to be the center, or one of the centers of worship, for the false god

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Dagon. You probably remember hearing about him in different parts of the Old Testament. Probably one of the most famous parts is when they brought the

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Ark of the Covenant into the temple of Dagon. And Dagon fell face forward before the

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Ark. And they put Dagon, because that's what you have to do with those gods, is stand them back up into their temples, because they can't stand up for themselves.

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And then the next day, they went in and found Dagon again on its face in front of the Ark of the Covenant, this time with no head and no hands.

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And so the people of Nineveh loved worshiping Dagon. And interestingly enough, as we study this book, maybe we shouldn't be surprised that Dagon was the fish god.

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He was the fish god of the nation. And so he was depicted as being half man and half fish.

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And when people weren't worshiping Dagon, the fish god, they would worship his female counterpart.

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Her name, oh, I got to find it now, was Nanshi. And Nanshi herself was also a female fish goddess, lowercase g.

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And so this was the center of fish worship, you could say. So we shouldn't be surprised in a couple chapters when

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Jonah ends up in a fish on his way to Nineveh. And not only was it a place of worship of false gods, but it was a city known for its brutal violence and torture.

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PJ, if you were an enemy of the people of Assyria and you were to be captured and taken to Nineveh, it was not uncommon for them to skin their prisoners alive and then to impale them on posts in the hot sun and let them bake there with no skin in the hot desert sun until they perished.

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It was a brutal city. Think of, some people like that description apparently.

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It was a brutal city, a terrible place to be. And if God called you to go to that city, you'd probably feel reluctant too.

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And so this is what we read in verse 3. We're moving along. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the

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Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days journey. Oh, I'm in chapter 3, excuse me.

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Chapter 1 and verse 3. But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the

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Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the

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Lord. So what we find is this. God sends Judah to go to Nineveh. He tells him, arise, that word kum, arise, go to Nineveh.

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Preach to them. But what we find said in verse 3 is that Jonah arises, that same word again.

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He stands up, but he goes, he flees literally. The Hebrew word denotes running away, and he gets out of there.

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And it's really interesting. Again, this is why geography is important to understanding this. He decides that he's going to flee to Tarshish.

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Now, there's a lot of debate about where Tarshish is. But if you read some of the ancient historians like Herodotus, or if you look at some of the most reliable conservative commentators of today, most people would place

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Tarshish in a place called Tartessus, Spain.

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Now, if you were in Jonah's day, you did not have the atlas that we have today. You didn't have

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Europe and Asia and Africa and North America and South America. The furthest place on your map, if you were in Israel in 700

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BC, the furthest place on your map was likely where Christopher Columbus sailed out of somewhere in Spain.

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And so what Jonah did was he found a ship that was going to Tarshish, and he sailed past Greece and past Italy and above North Africa all the way to Spain, where the

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Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. That was his plan, not just to get a little ways away, but to get as far away as was humanly possible.

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And so he lands first in Joppa. I love the providence of God in this way that Joppa was the exact same place where, if you remember in Acts chapter 10,

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Peter was in Joppa when he had a vision that God was going to save not just the

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Jews, but all of the Gentiles. And so you have this prophet, this reluctant prophet that goes through the city where God would later use as a place to save all the nations.

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He passes through and he says, not only am I not going to obey God, but I'm not going to preach to these

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Gentile sinners. I am out of here. Now, I've already kind of fumbled in calling

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Jonah a reluctant prophet, but I think that's actually giving him more credit than he deserves.

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Jonah was not a reluctant prophet. When we rightly understand what God was calling Jonah to do, we see that Jonah was a rebellious prophet.

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When God called Jonah to preach a message of repentance to Nineveh to avert his wrath, not only did Jonah not want to avert

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God's wrath, but he tried to flee from God's presence to get to the furthest possible place away from God.

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And this is what we read in verses 4 through 6. But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so the ship threatened to break up.

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Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his God. And they hurled, notice that hurling in verse 4, and then again here in verse 5, and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.

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But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain there and was fast asleep.

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So the captain came and said to him, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your

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God. Perhaps the God will give you a thought to us, or give a thought to us, that we may not perish.

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Notice that language, that God hurled a storm upon the sea, and so the sailors, terrified, hurled the cargo out of the ship.

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If you were to set sail out of Joppa, one of the things that you would find is that the Joppa port was controlled by two groups.

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They were the Philistines and the Phoenicians. And if, in this case, Jonah was on a ship run by the

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Phoenicians, we don't know for sure. The Phoenicians were legendary for their seamanship and their ability to navigate the open water.

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And yet you have here these experienced men crying out, each of them to all of their gods.

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And then that same word, the word that we've heard twice already, the captain, the leader of the ship, he comes to Jonah, he says,

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Arise. Again, stand up and call out to your

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God. And so what we see in this text is this. We have a

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God, or maybe we'll start with Nineveh, we have a people, a lost people, a sinful people, a godless, pagan group of people.

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They have rebelled against God, they've sinned against Him, they rightly deserve His wrath.

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We have a God, who in this case, as was pointed out by our brother, who is merciful, who is slow to anger, who has concern not just for the nation of Israel, but just as He designed

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Israel to be a blessing to all the nations, He has a concern for the people of Nineveh.

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And then we have a prophet, a supposed man of God, who is to go to the nations, to bring a message of repentance, and to save lost sinners.

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Now what do we do with all of this, besides laugh at some of Jonah's mannerisms, or some of these other little things?

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What we're going to see as we see the story develop, what it suggests is that this is a cautionary tale for us as Christians today.

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It's a cautionary tale if you're here in this room today and you're a Christian, and it's a cautionary tale if you're in this room and you're not yet a

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Christian. So I want to take just two perspectives on this, and then we're going to look at some application.

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And so this is a cautionary tale, first, that if you are a child of God, it's possible, like Jonah, to backslide into disobedience.

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I trust that Jonah was a true prophet, I'll tell you why in a little bit, but to backslide into disobedience, not to cease to be a child of God or to be a

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Christian, but to give in to sin and to lose ground. We see what it looks like in the life of Jonah to do that.

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But I also want to say this, Jonah, as a representative of the nations, it's possible to be religious.

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It's possible to come to this church every single Sunday, or to go to another good

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Bible -believing, Bible -preaching, gospel -proclaiming church every single Sunday, to serve even in some capacity, to have some semblance of faith, but to be a rebel at heart, to have all the externals without all of the internals.

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And so we're going to look at a few quick points of application. And like I said, it's going to be five indicators.

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If you're driving down the road in your car and a light comes on in your dash, I'm not a mechanic, but what does the check engine light look like,

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PJ, on your car when it lights up? Not good. Maybe a loud sound.

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But these are five indicators. These are lights on your dashboard that are blinking to tell you that you might be backsliding.

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You might be drifting away from God and of Christ and of his gospel, or that you've never been a believer to begin with.

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And so we're going to look at these together, and they're brief. We have about 15 minutes left, and so we'll go through those together.

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So the first indicator, that first light that you might see lighting up on your dashboard is this.

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Selective obedience to God's word. If you have the handout, you'll see there's headings there.

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Selective obedience to God's word. I alluded to it already, but in 2 Kings 14 .25,

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we see that Jonah was a true prophet. In that passage, he foretold that Israel would have military success, that Israel would restore its borders, and that's exactly what happened.

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What is the mark of a true prophet? They say something, and it comes true. They say something, and it is in accord with God's word.

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But what we find is this, in verses 1 through 3, we see that when God called Jonah to bring his word for the good of the enemy, rather than for the good of the nation of Israel, he was unwilling.

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And what we find is that Jonah's obedience was conditional.

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He had placed conditions upon his obedience to the word of God. Jonah was not committed to every word that proceeded from the mouth of God, but only that which served his own interests.

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And so when the hard word came, he was already gone as far as he could. Now let me ask you, brothers and sisters,

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I'm going to pose questions to you for each of these indicators to help you, to see if this light is blinking on your dashboard.

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Are you selective in your obedience to the word of God? If you look honestly at your actions, in contrast to or in consistency with the word of God, would you say that you are sold out whatever

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God says in his word, I will do, I have done?

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Just this week, our brother Sam and I were walking down White Avenue, and we came upon this man who eagerly, he asked for a track.

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You know, sometimes if you've been out there, we hand out tracks. Some people are reluctant to receive one.

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They don't even acknowledge you. This guy says, yes, let's see it. And he grabbed the track, and immediately as he read the track,

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I knew that he was making a mockery of the track and a mockery of God's word, reading just the most glorious truths about the gospel, that we've sinned, that Christ died for sinners, that while we deserve death,

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Christ gives us eternal life. And as we got talking, I was really surprised at the end of the conversation when he said, well, this is great.

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I'll keep it because I'm a Christian. And I thought, what in the world? How can this man who professes to be a believing

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Christian mock God's word like he just did on this gospel track? Now, I can't believe him that what he said was true, but as I reflected on that,

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Sam and I actually started talking about the story of Thomas Jefferson. I don't know if anyone here knows about what's been called the

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Jefferson Bible. Has anyone ever heard of the Jefferson Bible? One of the things that Thomas Jefferson did, he was the third president of the

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United States, and he is famous. We know his words well in the Declaration of Independence in the

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United States. He was the man that wrote these words, all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.

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Thomas Jefferson was religious, but I'm going to suggest religious with a rebellious heart.

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And this is why. Well, he believed that all men were created equal. He did not believe that all of God's word was created equal.

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And so what he would do is he would read Scripture. He found that he would disagree with certain things.

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And so he would take out his, we would call it today an exacto knife, but maybe a razor blade.

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And with precision, he would cut out the sections of Scripture that he disagreed with.

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And he explained the process like this. He said that the process of going through the Scriptures and collecting the verses that he thought best was like finding diamonds in a dung hill.

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Referring to God's word as a dung hill with only the words that he liked as the diamonds.

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And so he went through and he systematically, he doubted the Trinity. And so he cut out any reference that might teach the

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Trinity. And he doubted the Old Testament miracles. And so he cut out all of the miracles in the

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Old Testament. And then that followed by all the miracles in the New Testament. And then as he went, the book that he eventually created became known as the

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Life and the Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Not the Holy Bible, but the

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Life and the Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. And in this book, the

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Life and the Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, or the Jefferson Bible, what you would find if you were to look it up, and I believe you can find it online today, is that in that book,

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Christ encounters the blind. But he never heals them. And he encounters the deaf, but they remain deaf.

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He encounters the hungry, but they remain unfed. He encounters the sinners, there is no forgiveness. The book ends when

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Christ dies on the cross and is buried with no resurrection. One commentator that was talking about this

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Jefferson Bible later, they said, Jefferson's is a hard gospel.

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A hard gospel. No hope, no Savior, just a dying and dead

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Christ. And yet Jefferson, every year after he put together his Bible, every single day he read that Bible with devotion and with joy.

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That was the Life and the Morals of Jesus Christ. Maybe he read it more consistently and more faithfully, more joyfully than you read your

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Bible. I don't know. But every day he read that Bible. Now I trust that many of us, all of us,

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I would hope in this room, would not take an exacto knife to our Bibles. Please, tell me you wouldn't.

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But I hope that, but I sometimes wonder, I mean, that if we do this, that we do this functionally, not maybe physically with an exacto knife, but we do this with our minds and with our hearts and with our wills.

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Over time, we major on the passages that are important to us, that we agree with.

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They become our diamonds. And then we minor or we put aside the

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Scriptures that we are less inclined to believe or obey. And they become the functional dunghill of our complete

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Bibles on our laps. And sometimes I find, I don't know about you, I find tremendous value in comparing my life today with the zeal in my life when

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I became a believer in Christ some 15 years ago. And let me ask you, if you think back to your early days as a

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Christian, perhaps there was a time when you think about your relationship to the

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Bible. I remember when I got my first copy of the Bible, I had to be,

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I had to tell myself in my own mind, it sounds strange maybe to you, I'm not sure, but that this

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Bible points to God, but it is not God. I just love the Bible so much.

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And perhaps for some of you, you found that too, that when you got the Bible and you started reading it, you said in your mind, there is no command that I will not obey.

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There is no requirement, there is nothing that God has said in this book that I will just not joyfully, happily, sacrificially submit myself to.

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Perhaps there was a time when you would consider it your greatest privilege and pleasure to surrender your whole will to God in obedience to His Word.

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God gave you a rule of life like a child. With childlike faith, you devoured it, you mastered it, you wanted to be mastered by it.

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Maybe that describes you when you first became a Christian. I know when I look back, albeit imperfectly,

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I see the desire that I had to give it all to the Lord. But now, for you, 5 years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, can you honestly say that with that same zeal, with that same commitment, with that same love,

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I would give it all, cast it all away, submit it all to God and His perfect Word?

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Or are you now holding some things back? Now that you've been a

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Christian for a few years, do you feel justified in disregarding parts of the

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Bible, God's Word, that seem unfavorable or unrealistic or even unattainable?

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There's no way I can beat sinful anger, and so I'm just going to permit it to live in my life.

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Maybe at one time you sought to kill impatience and anger, sinful anger, but now you've placed limits on your patience.

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Now you allow for irritability in your life. You even celebrate it to a certain extent because it's effective, maybe in your workplace or in your parenting.

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You allow fits of anger or rage. Maybe at one time you sought to be generous. I love that our brother

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Sam always tells people to read the treasure principle. Read this book, read this book, and people read that book, and it just makes them,

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I want to be as generous as I can. I'm going to redesign all of my finances according to God's Word so I can be generous and store up treasure in heaven.

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Maybe that described you at one time, but now you find that you're tight -fisted with your possessions and with your money.

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Maybe there are things, websites or photos or movies, that you would have never set your eyes on five years ago, that today without even singeing your conscience, you can just run to it and look at that image or watch that movie or listen to that stand -up comedian or whatever it is.

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Beloved saints, let me ask you, are you growing in your commitment to God's Word as the final authority for your faith in life?

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Is your commitment to God's Word as resolute as it has ever been and growing?

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Or is it depleting? Are you fully yielded to God's will as it's revealed in God's Word or even subtly are you becoming selective in your obedience to Scripture?

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Ask yourself that before God. The second indicator that we see in the life of Jonah is this, contempt for the presence of God.

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When Jonah was given a command that he didn't like, not only did he refuse to obey, but he tried to run away from the manifold presence of God.

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Perhaps, and theologians have different ideas, maybe he wanted to get away from the temple where they said that God dealt with his people and the physical manifestation of God's presence in the nation of Israel.

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Others would suggest that he wanted to get away from serving God as a prophet before the face of God.

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We don't know for sure, but one thing is for certain that Jonah no longer saw value in drawing near to God, to being in God's presence, to communing with Him.

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We might say to praying with Him, to be walking with Him. Jonah at that moment was content to be far from God.

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And let me say this is always characteristic of those who are backsliding or who are about to backslide, who are about to drift and fade away in your commitment and your love for the

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Lord. And it is always a description of those who have never known the Lord.

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Contempt for the presence of God. And when I say contempt for the presence of God, I mean this, it's not worth your time.

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It's not worth your effort. It's not worth whatever is needed to be with God alone, to be with Him.

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In Psalm 105 verse 4, God has told us this, Seek the Lord in His strength.

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Seek His presence continually. What a wonderful passage.

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Does that describe you, brother or sister? We see this picture of that kind of spiritual health in another psalm.

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In Psalm 63 verses 1 to 3, there it says, Oh God, the psalmist says this.

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I love this verse, these verses. I will confess it is not my heart, but I want it to be my heart every day.

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Oh God, You are my God. Earnestly I seek You. My soul thirsts for You.

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My flesh faints for You, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon You in the sanctuary, beholding

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Your power and glory, because Your steadfast love is better than life.

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So my lips will praise You. In our hermeneutics course, we've been talking about how the nation of Israel might have felt very justified as they walked through the desert, parched, thirsty.

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You're in a desert. It's way hotter than anything we've ever experienced here in Alberta. And Abner Chow tells the story of taking students into Israel, and they're like 20 minutes into a hike, and they're already complaining that they're thirsty, and they're tired, and they're hungry.

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And then he looks at them and he says, And the nation of Israel did this for 40 years.

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But how many of us come to God like that, thirsty? Oh God, if I don't have

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You now and today, if I cannot walk with You, if I cannot see You and be with You, oh

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God, Your steadfast love is better than life. Does this describe you?

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Does this describe your walk with God as your Father in heaven?

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Your saints, is your prayer life? Think about this question. Is your prayer life getting better and better, or is it getting worse over time?

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What is your trajectory? This quote we share fairly regularly in our bulletins, promoting our prayer meeting, and I'm going to give us the whole quote from Martyn Lloyd -Jones.

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He says this, When a man is speaking to God, he is at his very acme, his highest point, his greatest point.

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He says, It is the highest activity of the human soul, and therefore it is at the same time the ultimate test of a man's true spiritual condition.

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There is nothing that tells the truth about us as Christian people so much as our prayer life.

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What does your prayer life speak about you? If we were to read your prayer life, to discover what your spiritual condition is like, what would it say?

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The third indicator of backsliding or rebellion is apathy for men's souls.

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Jonah knew that the people in Nineveh rightly deserved God's judgment, and that God would pour out His wrath upon them unless they repented.

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And this is the thing. Jonah knew that he was the prophet that God had sent to Nineveh.

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He was the means by which they would hear this message, that they were to repent and to turn to God and to honor

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Him. But Jonah did not care. There was total indifference on his part.

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God's concern for the wicked people of Assyria was met head -on with Jonah's total apathy.

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And such is the case. It is always the case. With every

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Christian who allows themselves to drift from the gospel, or every believer who has never known this, or the unbeliever, excuse me, who has never known the saving power of God through the gospel.

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One of the most important evangelism passages in all of the Bible is a passage, at least for me, is not a passage that is primarily about evangelism.

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It's Luke 6, verse 45. And there it says this, Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.

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When your heart is full of the good news of Jesus Christ, full to overflowing as you preach the gospel to yourself and you meditate, it's like when

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I think, when people ask me how I'm doing, and I want to say, better than I deserve. Because of all that Christ has done for me, when your heart is overflowing, evangelism, in many ways, it's not perfectly easy, but it is so much easier.

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It just comes out of you. You need to share it. But when your soul is barren, there is no overflowing, and therefore there is no joyful sharing of Christ.

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One of my favorite books is a little book called Why Revival Tarries? by Leonard Ravenhill.

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And in this, he offers really what is a condemnation of the apathy that so many of us feel toward the eternal welfare of others.

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He says, Could a mariner sit idle if he had heard the drowning cry?

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Could a doctor sit in comfort and let his patients die? He loved to rhyme, by the way, as you'll know.

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Could a fireman sit idle, let men burn and give no hand?

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Can you sit at ease in Zion with the world around you damned?

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Dear brothers and sisters, can you look at your unsaved friends or your neighbors or your co -workers or your family members in the eyes?

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Can you see, when you see them, their complete and utter lostness?

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Can you see that they are on the broad road to destruction and they do not know the gospel? Can you see that within a few short decades, they will go to a place, if they do not hear of Christ and come to Christ, where the worm does not die, where the fire is not quenched, where the smoke of their torment, we're told in Revelation 14, rises up forever and ever and they have no rest.

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Can you see all of these realities, all of these people and feel nothing?

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In that same book, Ravenhill writes, is a man a human at all who can say to another with no tears, you will be dying eternally and yet never know the relief that death brings?

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Is it possible that you're becoming lukewarm? And one of the ways in which that is manifesting is that you can think of the realities of the gospel and of Christ and of hell and of all the lost people around you and do and say and feel nothing at all.

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The fourth indicator, and we're going to move rather quickly here now, is this, that there is no fear of God.

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In the midst of the storm, these experienced sailors, maybe they're Phoenician sailors, these legends on the ocean, they are crying out to their gods, they're losing fortune and livelihood and casting all of the cargo off the ship to make it lighter.

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Very much like Paul, who went to preach the gospel, but this is for a failure to preach the gospel.

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And yet, you find Jonah inside the ship, no fear whatsoever.

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You want to know how I know that I'm not anxious? Because I can have a great sleep. And here

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Jonah is, sleeping perfectly. And he's acting like an unbeliever.

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Romans 3 .18 says, Speaking of unbelievers, or us, before we were regenerate, there is no fear of God before their eyes.

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But that's not the description of the Christian. God has, like the hymn goes,

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He has taken our fear from us, and He has taught our heart to fear aright. And so we read in the

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Proverbs, for instance, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.

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Proverbs 8 .13, The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil, pride and arrogance in the way of evil, and perverted speech

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I hate. It was a new covenant promise for Christians, you and I, that God would put, and we read this in Jeremiah 32 .40.

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He says, I will make an everlasting covenant with them, and I will not turn away from doing good to them, and I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me.

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As we are partakers of the covenant, the new covenant of God, this covenant, as we learn what

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God is like, as we as a church study the attributes of God, and study the full counsel of God's word, what we learn is this, that God is to be worshipped, yes.

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That God is to be loved, yes. That God is to be trusted, yes, amen. And that God is to be feared.

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That God is good, and that we ought to revere him. That when we do something wrong, we ought to have a real sense of the displeasure of a good and holy

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God, the God whom we are grieving. Once heard a story of a man, a theologian, pastor, he performed a variety of functions in church history,

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Andrew Fuller. And one time he was traveling with a couple of young men.

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Kind of sounds like a hunting trip that I recently went on. And these men were just engaged in the most profane conversations, going back and forth.

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And they looked at Andrew Fuller, and they thought, why is this man so square, so sullen?

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Why won't he participate in just a little bit of this back and forth that is between us?

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And eventually, after going on and on and on, one of the guys said to Andrew Fuller, he said, why?

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Why is it that you will not, in his words, not indulge yourself in a manner corresponding with us?

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Why aren't you like us? And Andrew Fuller said this. He said, it's because, sir,

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I fear God. I cannot be like you because I fear

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God, because God is real. He deserves my worship. He deserves my love. He deserves my obedience.

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And he is to be feared, even and especially by the Christian. And the biographer writes, scarcely a word was spoken during the remainder of the journey.

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It just silenced everyone that this man feared God. One of the surefire ways that you will know that you are backsliding or at risk of backsliding is you will find that the fear of God in your heart is gone or going.

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That you can do things today that a year ago you couldn't imagine yourself doing.

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And you don't feel it at all. You're searing your conscience. And you're desensitizing yourself to the fear of God.

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Does that describe you? And the last indicator that I'll share here, there's probably more that we could go into it, but it's this.

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It's being asleep to God in His glory. Asleep to God in His glory.

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The ship was being blown and tossed and the pagan men cried out to their gods, who were no gods at all.

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Jonah, he could have arose at that very moment and prayed and said, don't pray to that God.

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Don't cry out to that God. I serve the God of heaven and earth, the maker of all things, the creator and sustainer of the seas.

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He alone has authority over the ocean. Let's cry out to Him. But that was not

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Jonah. Jonah was down in the bunks where the crew sleep. Totally asleep until he was ultimately rebuked by a pagan sinner.

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Dear saints, for the sake of time, I'm going to be fast in this one, but we are to be awake. In Mark 13, verse 34, it goes longer.

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Maybe read it later. Mark 13, 34. Jesus said, it's like a man going on a journey when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work and commands the doorkeeper to stay awake.

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In verse 37, he says, and what I say to you, I say to all, stay awake.

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Are you falling asleep? Are you no longer alert to the opportunities that God has put before you to glorify

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Him? When you see people murmuring and gossiping and complaining at work, do you just go into it with them and join?

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Are you asleep, brother or sister? Asleep to God and asleep to His glory.

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A number of months back, I shared a story about Amy Carmichael, and I'll wrap up with this story. Amy Carmichael was a dear sister, a missionary to India, and near the end of her life, or a couple decades before the end of her life, she badly injured herself in a fall.

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She fell down, and she was bedridden, confined to her room in constant pain for the next 20 years of her life.

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It was terrible circumstances, and yet she was surrounded by a number of associates, Indian people, and the

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Indian children, and the greater Indian community, and what could have happened, what might have happened, is this.

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She could have said that, I've fallen, I'm useless. She could have become decrepit and just either gone home or died in her bed, given up, but what she said was this.

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She said, she quoted a little bit from Isaiah 25, 15. She said, glorify the

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Lord in the fires, not when they've passed or when you are out of them and are only memories, but glorify the

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Lord in them. She was awake. She saw the opportunity that God and His good providence had laid her out.

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She was going to be in a bed. She was going to live in a bed. She was going to die in a bed, and so what did she do?

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She was alert to the opportunity, what? To glorify God. So, long introduction to the first six verses of Jonah, but what we see here is we have the opportunity to learn from the negative example of Jonah, and I don't want to leave you hanging here.

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If you're, I imagine all of us, I would expect all of us, if we're in the driver's seat right now, there is a light blinking on the dashboard.

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There is something in our life, many things in our lives that are concerning indicators that we ought to take heed to and learn here from the example of Jonah.

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What did Jonah go to do but to preach a message of repentance to the nation of Assyria, to the city of Nineveh, and what does

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Jonah do in the whole corpus of Scripture, but he serves as a type of Christ.

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Everything that Jonah was not, we're going to see Christ reference himself in comparison to Jonah later.

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Everything that Jonah was not, Christ is. Christ went to his enemies.

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He died so that they may have eternal life, that they may have salvation, and so dear brother or sister, if you find yourself, as I do right now today, in a position where I say, judging from the book of Jonah and the life of Jonah, I have some repenting to do, then let me encourage you, dear brother and sister, repent.

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That's one of the themes of the book, is God's mercy, that God is slow to anger, that he is quick to love, that he is abounding in forgiveness to all who come to him by repentance and faith in Christ.