Running Away From God's Calling?
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So today we are going to dive into Jonah. Yeah, I thought, thought you'd appreciate that. Um, but we are going to discover that it is so much more than a Sunday school or kids' story. It's actually a story about the incredible grace of God, and honestly, I think, well, I know I certainly need His grace, and I'm sure that everyone here does as well.
Have you ever looked back at a conversation or a season sometimes of life or a moment or a reaction that you had, and you wish that you could delete it? Like, not just edit it, but completely delete it. I feel like generally we tend to assume that God works through people that have it all together. You know, people that don't struggle with their attitudes or with their motives, with their pride, or with their fear, or with their resistance, and maybe even people who respond correctly and obediently the first time.
Like, those are the kind of people God uses, right? Well, we meet Jonah. And to be honest, we meet me as well. Um, and I wanna give you an example of that, and it's a story that I've shared before, so some of you will be familiar with it. But when I was 18, I headed off to Kenya to teach English and share Jesus with the kids in the Kibera slum.
And Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa. And, um, I was serving at a youth com- compound right in the center of Kibera. Had a gate out the front, so it was a gated complex. They had guards with guns at the start of the complex, so it was quite confronting, and I was given one instruction: do not leave the compound on your own.
It wasn't a suggestion. It was a rule. And, you know, y- you can see, I think they've got a photo up there, but Kibera is a maze of tiny little walkways and little shanty houses. And not only that, you know, the chance of getting lost, but it was really crime and is really crime-ridden, and, um, muggings and, and worse were very commonplace.
So I'm there for a few days, and then one afternoon, I grab my camera, and I decide to take a little walk. Um- I would say that I was naive, but if we're honest, I would also add to that, that I was ignorant and probably a little bit privileged, to be honest. And so I grabbed my camera and off I went. I ignored the rule, but worse than that, I ignored a very clear prompting from the Holy Spirit.
I distinctly heard the Holy Spirit say, "Don't do it." But I ignored it, and I pushed on. Have you ever had one of those moments? Maybe not an audible thundering voice from heaven, but a really distinct nudge, you know, a knowing, a prompting, not that way. Go and talk to the, that person. Don't do that. Anyway, what did I do?
I went anyway, and not long after, I found myself completely surrounded by a gang of young men who were high because they had been sniffing glue. And over in the slum, a cheap way to, I guess, escape, um, some of what they were facing is to take shoemaker's glue and sniff it. And, um It can result in unpredictable aggression.
So I was feeling like I'd made a really bad choice at that point. And suddenly I realized, like, not only was this a bad idea, but this could end really badly. I was completely out of my depth, and I was very, very aware that it was completely me who had put myself in this situation. Thankfully, what I hadn't realized was that one of the guys from the compound had seen me leave, and he had followed me, and he arrived just in time to defuse what was going on and lead me back into the safety of this compound.
So not my greatest moment. Happened on a missions trip. You can serve God, and you can still resist God. And even though this story is about disobedience, absolutely, it's also a story about grace, the grace of God, because our God is loving, and he is kind, and he is incredibly gracious to us. And God rescued me not because I deserved it, not because I had listened to instruction and been obedient and, you know...
He, he rescued me because he is gracious. And just so we're clear, that is not the only moment of disobedience that I have had in my life with God since. I wish I could tell you that since the age of eighteen I learnt my lesson, and I've been very quick to respond to the voice of God ever since, and I've never resisted his prompts, but that would be a lie.
Unfortunately, that definitely would be a lie, and there have been moments in my life since that I have resisted the Holy Spirit's instructions, and I have, um, you know, not said yes to the promptings that he has asked me to. Different circumstances, you know, different decisions and different excuses. And my guess would be that I'm not the only one That people sitting in the room with us and those of you that are watching online as well, that maybe you have a story.
Maybe it's not the story of an unwise teenager that heads out into a slum all alone, but maybe there have been situations in your life where you too have ignored the promptings of God. You know, you've known what you should do, but you haven't done it. And maybe it's when you have run away from a difficult conversation or from forgiveness that you feel like that you need to extend.
Sometimes we run from trusting God and taking that next step of faith that he is calling us to. Sometimes we're not running from God, we're just running from the thing that he is asking us to do. And I know that obedience can feel uncomfortable sometimes, and that forgiveness can feel costly, and that, you know, even trust can feel incredibly risky.
But the longer that we run, the more excuses that we keep coming up with. And so that is why I've loved to come-- I've, I have come to really love the story of Jonah, because I think that it's definitely not a highlight reel. When you read through, and we're gonna go through the context this morning across all four books, like there's a lot of lowlights there, and we're gonna unpack them this morning.
Jonah is the story of a God-- of a man who knew God He loved God, he heard God, and he served God, and yet he still resisted God. And if we're honest, I think that that can sometimes be a little closer to our lives than we realize. So let's start. Let's meet Jonah. We're gonna kick off in chapter one, verse one, 'cause that's where a good story always begins.
So let's see. It says, "The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Ab- Amittai." And I'm gonna stop there before we even get further, 'cause sometimes it's really quick and easy to skim past the first verse of a book like this. But what we understand from this, and also from context in the rest of the scripture, is that Jonah was a prophet.
He was a recognized prophet, and long before this, uh, back in 2 Kings, we actually read about Jonah being a prophet, and he brought a word of the Lord to a king, and that word came to pass. And so he was recognized as a prophet. Um, he knew God's character. We also know from that backstory that he knew God's voice.
The word of the Lord had come to him before. So he knew God's character, he knew God's voice. We can be therefore confident that when it says, "The word of the Lord came to Jonah," that he heard it, just to set that up for when you hear the next verse that says, "So the word of the Lord came to Jonah and said, 'Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.'"
So Nineveh was not just another city. Nineveh at the time was the capital of Assyria, which was Israel's enemy, and this nation, like imagine cruelty and multiply it by 10, and that is this nation. It was feared for its violence, for its cruelty, and it is the kind of place that no one in their right mind would volunteer to go to, and yet God says, "Go."
So Jonah ran away from-- We get straight into the story, isn't it great? Like, there's no, there's not a lot of preamble. Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed to Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and he sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.
Basically, God said east, Jonah goes, "Nah, I'll go west." Like, not just a little bit west, but like far, far west. So I go- I asked Chris to do a map up for us just so we could see just how far from the mission he strayed. So God's destination is Nineveh, over here. So Nineveh would've been a journey on land. He didn't even have to catch a boat.
He could've just gone on land, probably around 800 to 1,000 kilometers east. Um, it's in modern-day northern Iraq, for context. What does Jonah do? He travels to Joppa. So Joppa was like a fishing, um, like a port, a seaport, and he boards a boat, and he travels all the way to Tarshish. Now, they suggest, that's why we've put a question mark, it's possibly on the southern coast of what we now know as Spain.
More importantly, at the time, the Israelites believed Tarshish to be the absolute edge of the world that they knew. He literally went to the edge of the known world to avoid this instruction, and that would've been 3,000 kilometers approximately. So he's gone a long way in the opposite direction. This is not hesitation.
This is not misunderstanding. Um, and it's not even confusion. It's, it's absolutely Deliberate resistance, right? Um, Jonah knew exactly what God was asking of him. He just didn't want to do it. But before we're too hard on Jonah, let's turn the mirror back to ourselves. How many of us have had moments like that, where-- I, sometimes I think that we think that the challenge is hearing the voice of God, but I wonder if sometimes it's actually just that we don't like what He's saying Maybe.
So Jonah gets on board and a violent storm sort of whips up. The sailors are terrified. They start throwing cargo over the board. They... Overboard. They are literally fearing for their lives, and they start praying to every single god that they know of, and nothing is happening. They meanwhile discover Jonah fast asleep at the bottom of the ship, and they figure out that he is the cause, and, um, they discover-- they sort of ask him, like, "Who are you, and what are you doing?"
And he says that he is fleeing God. He's running from God, the creator of... Let me read it to you: "I am fleeing from the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." My first thought when I read that was, why would you try to flee from the God who made the sea, on the sea? But clearly he wasn't, um, thinking that through.
So the sailors say to him, "Well, what have we got to do then to make this storm calm down?" Like, what's the next point of action? And so he, he says this. Like, not, "I'll go back to where God asked me to go." Instead, he says, "'Pick me up and throw me into the sea,' he replied, 'and it will become calm. I know that it's my fault that this great storm has come upon you.'"
And initially, they don't want to. They're good guys. They're like, "No, we can't do that." They try and row even harder to get back to the land, but the storm just keeps getting worse and worse. And so eventually, we read in verse fifteen that, "They took Jonah and they threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm."
So Jonah is turfed overboard, and the storm stops. The sailors, we read, now start praising the one true God who they have discovered through this process, but Jonah starts sinking beneath the waves. And what happens next? Well, the Lord provided a huge fish, not a whale, sorry, but maybe, who knows, to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Now, when I was a kid and I would sing along to all my little Jonah songs, in my mind, I, I recognized that the whale was a rescue, but I also kind of thought that the whale was punishment. I don't know why. I think maybe that's the way that my mind was processing his disobedience. But, um, it isn't. It's not punishment.
We actually read the Lord provided. The whale. Without the whale, like Jonah was already on his way to death. He was beginning to sink. Um, he's facing death. Without the fish, Jonah dies. And so the whale absolutely is rescue, but even more than that, the whale is the provision of God. Sometimes I think that grace doesn't appear the way that we think it should look, because inside the fish, Jonah prayed, and that's how chapter two starts.
So chapter two, verse one: "From inside the fish, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God." So he's in the belly of a fish. He's in a place that he would never have chosen to go. He's in a place where he can no longer run. He's in a place where he can no longer control the outcome And he's in a place where he can reflect, and he can finally turn his attention back to and encounter God.
And the second book, the second chapter of Jonah is just that. It's this beautiful prayer that he brings to God, and he doesn't just say like, "Oh, I'm sorry, God," and that's it. It's this prayer of desperation and of honesty, and he weaves in these, like, little moments of scripture and worship. And you can see Jonah in his prayer move from resistance to acknowledging that he needs to surrender and that God is sovereign, and that's the whole second book of Jonah.
And he finishes his prayer with this line. He says, "What I have vowed I will make good. I will say, 'Salvation comes from the Lord.'" Jonah had run thousands of kilometers from God, and yet God's mercy went even further, and those beautiful themes of mercy and grace are what we see throughout this book. The fish was not just a rescue from Jonah's drowning.
It was actually a place where Jonah was able to stop and God could start working on reshaping his heart, and that's a gift. So after three days in the belly of the whale and encountering God again, Jonah is back finally on dry land. And so we read in chapter three now these incredibly beautiful words, some of the most hope-filled words in this whole entire book, because it says, "The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time."
God could have written Jonah off. God could have chosen another prophet. God could have said, "You had your chance," but he doesn't, and the word of the Lord came a second time, not because Jonah was suddenly perfect, and certainly, you know, not because he'd earned a second go, but simply because our God is gracious and full of mercy.
And so I don't know about you, but I for one am incredibly grateful that we serve a God of second times because I think that if God only used and moved through people who got it right the first time, probably there would be an empty room here today. Um, and anyway, so God says, "Go," the second time. "Go back.
Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim it, the message that I gave you." And I think to me when I read those words, like, the word of the Lord came a second time, that is a theme that we see throughout the old and the new covenants, isn't it? Where God comes to us again and again in his grace and in his mercy, and that's what this whole series has really been about, isn't it?
Like, Moses after failure and David after his repentance and Peter after his denial, and time and time and time again, God basically restores people and calls them forward. And I love that because mercy doesn't just rescue us. Mercy calls us back into mission It calls us back into mission. His grace lovingly says, "Come on, take another step.
You can do this." As we experience God's grace, He begins to work within us. He works on our hearts, and He begins to shape us into His image and His likeness, and He sends us back into our everyday worlds, into our everyday lives, to reflect that love and that grace and that mercy. God is for us. How can we not be for our communities, our families, our work colleagues, our communities, like the people that we encounter each and every day?
And so finally, Jonah obeys, and he heads to Nineveh. And in verse five of chapter three, we see the result. It says that, "The Ninevites believed God." How good is that? That means that the very thing that God had instructed Jonah to do has come to pass. But the very thing-- It also means that the very thing that God w-- um, Jonah was running from has now happened.
The people in the city have responded. They've repented. They've turned to God. Um, it looks like, when you read this, that the mission has been a resounding success, and it feels like the story should end here. Like, this is-- In fact, I think I've got the last verse in chapter three as well there. It says that, "When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He relented, and He didn't bring upon them the destruction that He had threatened."
What, what a great way to end this story. He obeyed. He did what he was asked. Salvation has come to an entire city. Except that that's not where the story ends, is it? In fact, this is where it starts to get really interesting, and this is the part that I think we begin to see the mirror held up for each and every one of us.
So the fourth and last chapter of Jonah begins with this slightly unusual sentence. God has just showed His mercy and not smite an entire town of people. But to Jonah, this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. The real problem in the Book of Jonah was not the storm. It wasn't the fish. The real problem in the Book of Jonah was Jonah's heart, and that's what we see.
He cannot bear to see mercy extended to this city. He would rather die. "I knew," he says, "that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live." What a reaction to God's mercy.
Jonah did not run because he doubted. Jonah did not run because he was scared, even though I think that would have been a valid response given the city that he was going to. He didn't run because he wasn't sure whether God would show up or not, or show up or not. He ran because he knew exactly what God was like.
He was-- he knew that his God was compassionate and full of mercy. He knew that God was slow to anger, and honestly, he didn't want Nineveh to receive any of it The problem wasn't that Jonah struggled to receive mercy. The problem was that Jonah struggled extending it Think about Jonah's story. Jonah ran, and what did J- God do?
He pursued him. Jonah rebelled, God rescued him. Jonah failed, God restored him. Jonah received a second chance, and grace, and mercy time and time and time again. And yet, when mercy reaches Nineveh, he's not there for it. He gets angry because he had already judged the city himself, and in his eyes, they weren't worthy of receiving the mercy of God.
He knew their violence, he knew their cruelty, he knew their history, and he thought that they weren't worthy of receiving God's compassion. When we come to Jesus, though, we see the heart of God fully
For God so loved what? The world. Not just Israel, the world. For God so loved the world that He gave His Son that whoever would believe in Him would not perish. Not just good people
The sinners, the broken, the undeserving, the Ninevahs Me and you And because of our, because of Jesus, our response, our calling is not to judge, not to sit in judgment, but simply to show love. We don't decide who is worthy of receiving grace. We don't decide who is worthy of mercy. When we choose to follow Jesus, we reflect the very grace that we have found.
We reflect the mercy and the love that we have found. But I wonder, do we sometimes forget that, and do we find ourselves sitting where Jonah was? How many of you, like me, tend to give yourself extra grace? Like, when we look at what we're doing and we make mistakes, we look at our intentions, right? We give ourselves extra grace.
When I mess up, I think, "I didn't mean it that way," you know, "I was tired," or, um, "I'm stressed. You don't understand what I'm carrying." And those things are true, and we also know our own stories and our own context, and so we know our motives, and so we give ourselves extra grace. And yet when someone hurts us or when someone else fails, when someone else misses the mark or responds poorly or disappoints us, we often only see the behavior.
We don't give them the grace of their intentions. We don't see their story. We don't see their wounds. We don't see their fear or their pain. We just tend to see their action. We give ourselves the grace of our intentions, but we often fail to give others the grace of theirs, and that's a little bit Jonah-like.
So we're back to Jonah, and we read in chapter four that, um, Jonah has gone out, and he's actually found a place to sit outside the city, and Scripture says that he wants to wait and see what would happen to the city. So even at this point, I'm thinking, is he just waiting to see if God will change His mind and suddenly send destruction upon this city?
Uh, so he's sitting out there, and God provided a plant which grew and gave Jonah some shade, and he was really happy about that 'cause it was hot and windy, and he wasn't in a good place. So the next morning, though, God sends a worm, and the worm eats through the plant, and the plant withers and dies, and Jonah is angry and hot now 'cause he's in the sun, and he says, "It would be better for me to die than to live."
It's another phrase that he likes to use a fair bit. And then this is what God replies to him. He says, "But the Lord said, 'You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow, and it sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there is more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?'"
In other words, he says, "Jonah, you are grieving a plant. I am grieving people." Jonah sees an enemy, God says-- sees people. And it's fascinating to me that Jesus points back to Jonah. You know, Jonah descended into the depths for three days. Jesus descended and then defeated the grave and death in three days.
Jonah descended in rebellion, Jesus descended in obedience. Where Jonah ran from difficult people, Jesus always moved towards them. Where Jonah struggled with mercy, Jesus embodied mercy. Jonah points us to the one who perfectly reveals God's heart. And then the book ends. That's exactly how the book ends, with that question, quite abruptly.
There's no response from Jonah. There's no final prayer, just this sudden ending and this one question from God: "Should I have concern for Nineveh?" And then silence
And I think it's because the answer belongs to us
The deeper invitation of Jonah is not simply, will you obey God? It's will you allow God's mercy to reshape your heart?
Because receiving mercy is one thing, but allowing His mercy to reshape your heart and send you back out on mission is completely another. Will I rejoice when grace reaches people that I struggle to understand? Will I learn to see people not just through my experiences and my hurt and my assumptions, or will I learn to see them as God sees them?
Will I extend the same mercy that I have received? Maturing in our walk with Jesus is not just about receiving His mercy, but allowing it to transform us and then taking His mercy and taking His grace and taking His love and giving it to the people in our world And that is where the Book of Jonah moves from Jonah and back to us.
And so as we close, I, I wonder this morning if there are a few questions that God might ask each of us. Question one: Where am I running? Not necessarily onto a ship and across an ocean, but where are you running from a step or an area where God has been inviting you into a deeper area of obedience, forgiveness, a step of faith, compassion, trust, surrender?
Have you been quietly heading in a different direction? Question two is: Where do I need grace? Because we read a book like this, and maybe for some of us, Jonah's story immediately reminds us of the spaces and the places that we have failed, where we have gotten it wrong, where we have hurt other people or missed the mark or fallen short.
And maybe today you need to know that Jonah ran, and Jonah resisted, and Jonah eventually reluctantly obeyed, and Jonah got angry, but God still used him, because God's grace is sufficient for people like Jonah and people like us. And maybe you've been thinking, "God can't use me," or maybe even, "I can't come to God until I get this all together, you know, until I'm stronger or healed or..."
You know, I don't know what that, fill in the blank for you, but what if God is looking at that space in your life, the very thing that you think disqualifies you, that just might be the space where God is saying, "My mercy and my grace can be o- on display in that area." What if God's grace is already sufficient, and His power is already at work?
And then the third question, and this one might be a little bit pointy, but who is your Nineveh? Not where, who. Not geographically, relationally Who have you struggled to see through God's eyes?
Maybe it's not someone you've even actively disliked or judged, but it might be somebody that you've just stopped seeing as God does. Maybe a few difficult experiences have left you with assumptions about a whole lot of people Oh, young people these days. E-bikes. Yeah. E-bike-ritis. "People like that never change."
Have you ever heard yourself say that? "They brought it on themselves."
Maybe you've reduced people to a category instead of seeing them the way that God does and seeing them as someone who He sent His Son for
Your neighbor, a coworker, a family member, a community. Jonah loved mercy when he was the one drowning, but he struggled with mercy when Nineveh was. And I wonder if sometimes we do, too. And maybe one of the quiet, unseen works of the Holy Spirit is that he would enlarge our hearts so that we would begin to see people the way that God does, so that we would begin to have our hearts broken by the things that break God's heart, so that our hearts and our lives would be moved by the things that move the heart of God
Oh, every single person that we meet is someone that Jesus Christ willingly went to the cross for And perhaps the question that God asks Jonah is the same question that he has for you and I today. Can you see them the way I see them? Because the more that I'm aware of the grace and the mercy and the love that I've encountered, the more compassionate I will be.
And that's why the story of Jonah isn't ultimately about a giant fish. It's about a God whose grace is more than sufficient, a God who gives second chances and keeps working on hearts that still need to be transformed God's power has never been made perfect in perfection. It's made perfect in weakness.
My grace is sufficient for you, and my power is made perfect in weakness. And maybe the greatest miracle in the Book of Jonah isn't that God rescued a runaway prophet. It's that He never stopped working on his heart, and the same is true for us. So I wanna take some time now, and I don't want us to rush past what God might be doing and speaking to each and every one of us.
And maybe you've recognized this morning that you are in a place where you've been running from something. Maybe you've been reminded that you need God's grace again, and maybe the Holy Spirit has highlighted a person or a situation or a part of your heart that He wants to continue shaping. The response to God's grace is not to strive.
It's simply to surrender. And so I wanna give us just a few moments this morning as the band, um, lead us into this song, and there's a couple of lines in this song that says, "What can I say and what can I do but offer this heart completely to you?" And I feel like that is the final message of Jonah for each and every one of us this morning, so would you pray with me before the band lead us in this song?
Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your grace. I thank You that that grace is sufficient, not for the perfect version of us, Lord, but for who we are right now, for our weaknesses and for our struggles and for the parts of us that are still being transformed. Holy Spirit, would You continue to do Your work in us?
Would You show us, Holy Spirit, where You are inviting us to deeper obedience? And show us, God, where we're running and remind us that we need Your grace. And would You soften our hearts, Lord, to people. Help us to see them the way that You see them and love them the way that You do, and may Your grace continue to shape us into a people who reflect Your heart.
And we offer You our hearts and our lives again today, and we thank You for that in Jesus' name. Amen.