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670 | You Cannot Run From God’s Calling · The Woman at the Well Ministries Podcast

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Through. Running from God's calling is impossible. Join us in this podcast of.
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Woman at the Well Ministries as Kim takes us on a journey through the scriptures,
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revealing how God uses mercy
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and discipline to bring his disobedient children back to him.
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Kim unfolds the lessons demonstrated by the biblical account of Jonah fleeing
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to Tarshish instead of going to Nineveh, where God had instructed him to go.
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God pursues Jonah with a violent storm to wake up his rebellious heart.
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God loves you too and will not allow you to remain rebellious.
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He will pursue you, seeking your repentance.
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Hello, and thank you for joining us in this podcast of Woman at the Well Ministries.
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Today, we're going to take a look at Jonah chapter 1 through chapter 3 through verse 4.
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There are four chapters in the book of Jonah, and I do hope sometime in the
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near future to be able to preach out of Jonah chapter 4.
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But what God has given me today is going to span that passage of Scripture from.
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Jonah 1 verse 1 to Jonah 3 verse 4.
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And in that passage of Scripture, what we're going to learn is that God mercifully
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pursues rebellious people.
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God confronts sin and he calls them to repentance and obedience.
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God does not let us get by with being rebellious.
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And the consequences of that are great.
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Sin and disobedience will always cost you more than you want to pay.
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Keep you longer than you want to stay and take you further than you want to go. Let's pray.
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Our kind and most gracious to Heavenly Father, Lord, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you how it is alive and it is dynamic and that it meets us right where
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we are and brings us to where you want us to be in our lives.
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I thank you, Lord, that you never give up on us and that your mercy is limitless,
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your grace is limitless, and your love is not only limitless, it's beyond measure.
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And we can't outrun it. We can't do anything to lose it.
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And your love is a constant companion with our heart and our mind.
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And Lord, I just thank you.
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I thank you that you never leave us or forsake us.
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Lord, I pray that you would be in this message that I would be able to articulate,
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all that you've given me from this passage in Jonah.
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Lord, that you would condition our hearts and minds to hear exactly what you have for us.
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And Lord, that it would go out with clarity and anointing. And Lord,
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that you would remove me from the message as far as the East is from the West.
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Lord, we love you. We praise you and we thank you in Jesus' name.
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The text that I'm going to read in your hearing to begin this message is out
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of Jonah chapter one, and it's going to be verses one through three.
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Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amittai,
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saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it,
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for their wickedness has come up before me.
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But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord,
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and went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish.
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So he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish
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from the presence of the Lord.
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So the entire premise of this message is about going from the presence of the Lord, not his presence
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where he will never leave you nor forsake you, but from where the spout is where
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the glory comes out, where you are removing yourself from where God has told you to be.
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In fact, what you see is that.
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Jonah goes 180 degrees opposite of what God is asking him to do.
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Nineveh is northeast of Tarshish, which is west.
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And so here you got, instead of going to where God has commanded him,
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he goes through a lot of trouble to go completely opposite of that.
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And he gets himself into a whole bunch of trouble.
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And he gets those that are around him in trouble as well.
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See, Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh because Nineveh is the capital of Assyria
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and they were absolute enemies of Israel.
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And Jonah was not only afraid to go there because of the wickedness and the
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fame and claim of how just horrible these people were in Nineveh,
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but he also had a personal vendetta against them.
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These people in Nineveh were his enemies. They were his mortal enemies.
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And you're going to see as we watch this unfold in Scripture in the book of Jonah
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that Jonah himself has an issue with God having mercy or compassion or love
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or kindness towards these people because he himself did not.
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He could not comprehend how people so wicked, so bad, so far from who God is,
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who had caused such trouble to God's chosen people,
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how could God love them and how could God redeem them?
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And so he didn't want any part of them. He didn't want to help them,
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and he certainly didn't want to be hurt anymore by them.
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So when God gives Jonah this command to go to Nineveh and preach the gospel, Jonah says, no.
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Jonah, a prophet of God, but he was resisting God's command.
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And before you get so high on your self-righteous horse to say,
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how could a prophet of God ever say no to a command of God? No.
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I want you to know that prophets of God are fleshly beings too.
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And I want you to know that you have been given the commission,
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to go into all the world and preach and teach the gospel, to spread the light
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to every single person that you come into, to let others know who God is through
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your actions and through your personal testimony.
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And he has gifted you and he has given you opportunity to show others who he is.
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And there are times in each and every one of our lives that when God says go, we just sit.
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Now, most of us probably don't run
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so far as going a complete opposite direction, but I think some of us do.
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And there are reasons why we justify it. Sometimes we're afraid of what people
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will say. We're afraid what it will cost us.
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We think we don't know what it is, but it's just the same kind of thing.
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There's something about it that makes us afraid there's something about us that
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we're afraid if he tells us to go do that that it's just going to be uncomfortable
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it's something about it we just want to do.
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But in this passage of Scripture, as we begin to unfold the many truths,
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one in which we will unfold is that God has a concern for Nineveh,
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but he also is going to do a work in Jonah's heart.
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God cares about you and the condition of your heart, and if you haven't picked
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that up in any other passage of Scripture,
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I encourage you to read the book of Jonah, and I encourage you to listen as
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we begin to unfold the truths that God has given us,
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because God's call may be difficult, but disobedience never leads to true freedom.
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You're not going to get what you're looking for by doing different than what God says.
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So as we look at that opening passage that I read in your hearing about Jonah's
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disobedience, we see that God's call must be obeyed.
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In that passage of Scripture in verse 2, he tells Jonah to arise and go to Nineveh. He's very clear.
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He gives Jonah a very specific command.
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There wasn't any doubt on what God was asking him to do.
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There wasn't a shadowing of what is it that God expects of me?
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No, God spoke directly to Jonah in a clear, articulate manner,
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and Jonah knew exactly what God was asking him to do, and he didn't like the assignment.
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Again, part of it was he was afraid. The big part of it, in my opinion,
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was he didn't think those people deserved God.
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Now, before you again hop up on the saddle of your high horse of spirituality,
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check your heart for its love, because I'm certain there are certain people that you know.
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That you pass every day on the street. That you don't stop and give them the
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message that Jesus loves them. God is for them.
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There's a hell to shun and a heaven to gain.
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Maybe you're afraid they'll hurt you physically. Well, so was Jonah.
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Or maybe you just think, whatever puts you in that condition,
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whatever choices you have made, you've made your bed lie in it.
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And some of you might even be so religious as to say, Galatians 6,
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7 says, For whatsoever man sowethetheth shall we also reap, and yes,
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it does, and yes, it's true.
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But it's not meant as a rock or a heavy burden on your head.
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It is a caution to be careful how you live.
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And so Jonah has this same problem.
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Those people God is telling him to go to scare him, and those people God is
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telling them to go to, he's not at all in favor of them finding restoration in Jesus.
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So Jonah deliberately disobeys.
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Instead of going toward Nineveh, he flees toward Tarshish.
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His problem had nothing to do with confusion. It wasn't that he didn't know
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what God had asked him to do.
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It was absolute rebellion.
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Jonah was attempting to run from the presence and the purpose of God.
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He did not want to be where God was because he wasn't wanting to be in the center
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of God's will for his life.
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And I ask you this question, are you willing to trust and obey.
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Delayed obedience is still disobedience. I'm more of the one in that category.
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I'll just linger a little. And we all know what lingering does.
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That's what Eve did with the serpent. She lingered and had too many conversations.
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And the next thing you know, we're all sunk.
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Because sin is very rarely isolated to just the one that commits it.
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It oozes all over everyone in that person's environment.
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You cannot follow God while intentionally moving in the opposite direction.
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I don't care how many hallelujahs you say.
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I don't care how many worship songs you sing.
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I don't care how many Bible verses
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you've memorized. I don't care how many times you've helped the poor.
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If God is telling you to go east and you're going west, then you are absolutely,
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positively disobeying God.
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God is going to call us to difficult people.
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He calls us to uncomfortable places, and he certainly will call us to a ministry
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that costs us something, perhaps financial, emotionally, physically, maybe all of the above.
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But God's way is right, and we have to be obedient, not sooner or later, but when God calls us.
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We are to be instant in season and out of season.
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We are to love him so much that we want to be at his beck and call.
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We are to be so prayed up, so studied up, so close to the King of Kings
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and the Lord of Lords, and to have him in our life as master of who we are in
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such a way that when he calls, we're excited since we say, here am I, send me,
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because we want to be on the front lines.
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Not because we want notoriety or because we want fame or because we want people
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to think that we're holier than thou, but because we love him and we want to give.
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We want to give to him. We want to be his hands extended. We want to be his
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eyes. We want to be his feet.
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But this wasn't Jonah's real heart. Jonah's heart was we don't want anything
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good to happen to those Ninevites.
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And Jonah's disobedience brings a whole lot of trouble.
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As you begin to read Jonah 1 verses 4 through 16, you watch how costly disobedience is.
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It cost Jonah money.
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He had to find a ship in Joppa that was headed to Tarshish, and he had to pay
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a fare to board it to flee from God.
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To go from where God didn't want him to be, it cost him a whole lot more than
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it would have cost him just to follow where God provides and God leads and God directs.
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It cost him his peace.
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While he was at sea, God sent a strong wind that threatened to destroy the ship,
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and it disturbed Jonah's sleep, which is a whole other situation that we'll talk about.
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It also cost him his safety.
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Again, trying to make a plan of his own and not following what God said,
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when the winds and the waves, they hit, and the pagan sailors that are on the boat,
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are concerned and are trying to figure out what's going on, and finally,
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Jonah confesses that he is the one that has sin in the camp,
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he wants them to throw him overboard, because he'd still rather do it his way and die than God's way.
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And have gone to Nineveh. And it didn't just cost him problems.
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If you look at verse 5, you'll see that his disobedience nearly cost the other sailors their lives.
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As I said earlier, sin is not isolated to you.
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You will destroy yourself, your family, your home,
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the people around you it is a.
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An absolute wrecking ball sin is a wrecking ball disobedience is a wrecking
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ball nothing good comes from disobedience,
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so as you look at this beginning in verse five there's a storm that comes.
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And God sends a great storm. And I want you to see in this passage of Scripture
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that we're talking about in
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the first two chapters of Jonah and in the beginning of Jonah 3, the sovereignty of God.
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In this passage, we see God using the winds and the waves to inflict turmoil
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upon this ship at his command.
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You're also going to see that he's so powerful that even the things of the devil
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he is using to get his will done.
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The casting of the lots was what revealed it was Jonah who had caused this great
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tragedy and event to happen to these people in the boat.
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God is greater than everything. He's greater than your sin. He has authority over your sin.
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The winds and the waves, they obey him.
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And God is above all things. All things are under his feet.
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Jonah's sin begins to have a very terrible negative effect on the pagan sailors.
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Because Jonah was running from God, Jonah's disobedience put them in grave danger.
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See, private disobedience often produces public consequences.
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Galatians 6, 7, as I spoke to you earlier, says, Be not deceived,
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God is not mocked, for whatsoever so a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
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God is giving you warning to follow his commandments. He said,
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Daily take up your cross and follow me.
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As i was speaking to you about as this scripture unfolds the big storm comes,
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the pagan sailors are praying to their gods and and absolutely positively nothing
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is happening they're starting to toss over the boat
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anything that they don't absolutely have trying to make the boat more safe for
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their passage trying to get
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out of this storm safely to the other side.
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But Jonah is asleep.
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This is a very strong picture of what happens to someone that runs from God.
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They become insensitive to the work of God. God had caused this storm.
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God was trying to get Jonah's attention.
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But Jonah was asleep. He was insensitive to what was going on around him.
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He was spiritually indifferent.
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See, sin makes a person not immune to sin, just immune to acknowledging the effects of sin.
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You don't care anymore. Running from God makes hearing from God extremely difficult.
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Running from God makes a hardened voice of God.
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God's speaking, but your ears aren't hearing. God is speaking,
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but your life isn't responding.
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God is speaking, but you don't care.
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You won't even acknowledge his presence and the ways of God. He was asleep.
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Running from God can make us apathetic to the world around us.
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We become hardened. See, God is love. And when we don't have God,
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the love of God isn't coursing through our hearts and our lives.
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And things that would cause our heart to break and be tender,
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things that would cause us to tremble because of the sympathy are gone because
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we're apathetic, because we've hardened our heart to God and the things of God.
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Those pagan sailors who were serving gods that were not powerful,
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that were not real, because there's only one true living God,
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and Jonah was the prophet of the one true living God.
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These pagan sailors had more concern for what was going on around them than Jonah did.
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How about you? Is it your four and no more?
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Your little family's okay you pass that homeless person day in and day out you
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know of the cares and the woes of that elderly couple,
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you know of the hardship that medical expenses and and problems have caused
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that family in your church yet you go nose blind eye blind ear blind,
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and you're just completely insensitive,
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because as God has knocked on your heart's door.
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You've done like Jonah and not heeded his word.
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But as you get further into this passage of Scripture, you see that Jonah finally
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acknowledges his guilt.
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He confesses that he was fleeing from the Lord, and he accepts responsibility for what's going on.
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But I want you to know that only happened after they cast lots.
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God used that to reveal who it was.
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But God says in 1 John 1.9 that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just
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to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
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True repentance begins when we stop blaming everyone else for what is going on and we admit our sin,
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when he awakens from the boat and he sees all that is happening,
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he admits because he's being told this is what the casting of lots say that it's you jonah
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and jonah realizes that his private sin has now become public,
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and so he owns up, but then he repents, and that's the entire chapter,
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of Jonah 2.
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God's sovereignty was on full display when they cast the lots and they reveal,
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that Jonah is the one with the sin that's causing the Lord to mete out such judgment.
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But in Jonah 1, verses 17 through Jonah 2.10,
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You see, God's mercy meets Jonah in his deepest, darkest hour.
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They toss Jonah over, but God provides this great fish. He's always providing protection.
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He never gives up on those he's called.
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God's will for Jonah's life, as you'll see repeated later in this book of Jonah,
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never changed just because Jonah wasn't getting it right or just because Jonah wasn't accepting it.
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God did not give up or alter the plan that God had for Jonah's life.
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Jeremiah 29, 11 tells us that there's a plan that God has for each of us,
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and it's a good plan to prosper us and to give us a hope.
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That fish was not merely an instrument of judgment, but he also was an instrument of preservation.
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When he went into the water, he had no hope, but God showing up with the belly
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of a great whale, a great fish, who swallows Jonah,
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provides protection for him.
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God wasn't done with Jonah. And I want you to really look that when God gives
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him a great fish to swallow him,
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this God's discipline for Jonah was to restore him and not destroy him.
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God loves you and your circumstances will not change his love for you.
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Your behavior and your actions will not change his love for you.
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And your status or role in church, your love for God will not make you immune
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to God's discipline if you have chosen to step outside of God's will.
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But you're not forgotten, and you're not lost, and you're not just flailing
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away in life. God is looking at you. He's seeking you.
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He's trying to get you to turn back to him.
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He's doing everything he can to discipline you in such a way that you will repent
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and turn. And this is just what Jonah does.
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Jonah prays from the depths, from his darkness, from his despair, from the pain and agony.
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Every hardship that you go through isn't because you've done something,
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but God will not spare anything to try to bring you back to him when you have done something.
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And this, his circumstances, brought him back to God.
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In verse 1 of Jonah 2, he says, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and he heard me.
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The prayer that he prays throughout this chapter, it reflects his distress.
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It's a confession of what he's done wrong.
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It's a remembrance of who God is, and it's a renewing of his faith.
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Sometimes God uses a place of trouble to awaken us spiritually,
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and that's just what he does for Jonah right here.
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He says in verse 7 of chapter 2 of Jonah, when my soul fainted within me.
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I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came into thee, into thine holy temple.
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God loves you no matter what.
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God recognizes your situation, and he's God in it.
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And sometimes that situation is meant for you to see him more clearly.
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In the belly of the whale, it was there that Jonah saw God as his savior.
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It was there that Jonah prayed unto the Lord God out of the fish's belly.
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It was there that Jonah could remember who God was.
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It was there that Jonah recognized that there is no other salvation but what is in the Lord.
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Acts 4.12 tells us, Neither is there salvation in any other,
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for there is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved.
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Deliverance comes from God, not from any human strength, not your strength,
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not your friend's strength, not some scientific theory's strength,
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not anything other than God.
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Jonah could not rescue himself from the sea. In fact, he was throwing himself over to die.
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But God would not allow him because you are never beyond God's reach.
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You're never out of God's love. You're never out of God's compassion.
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You're never beyond God's grace. You can't do anything to cause him not to love you.
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You can't do anything to alter what he knows he's created and put in you to be.
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No man can stop it. You can't stop it.
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No sin is going to obliterate you until you just go and go and go and will never, ever come back to him.
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But at your last final breath, God will be pleading for you to confess and repent.
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You will be convicted unless you go so far that you become insensitive to the
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call of God, just as Jonah was when he was asleep in the boat.
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When you're not hearing God anymore, when you're putting him off,
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when his whispers become silent to you because you've distanced yourself from him.
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His love is still there. His grace is still there. His mercy is still there.
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But you've cut yourself off because you just simply will not hear him.
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God's mercy is greater than your rebellion. So when conviction comes.
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You can be certain that God will take you in and restore you.
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He may discipline you, but his discipline is because of his grace.
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Do you see that God sent a big fish to swallow,
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Jonah, even when Jonah was still trying to get away from what God asked him
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to do, still trying to do it his own way?
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No one who believes in God is beyond God's reach.
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In the depths of his sin and darkness, prayer is still possible and God is still
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present jeremiah 33 3 says call unto me and i will answer thee and show the
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great and mighty things which thou knowest not.
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God is never through with us,
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i'm going to read in your hearing jonah chapter 3 verses 1 through 3 at this time,
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and the word of the lord came into jonah the second time saying arise go into
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nineveh that great city and preach unto it the preaching that i bid thee so
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jonah arose and went into nineveh according to the word of the lord,
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now nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days journey,
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and in verse 4 he says and jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey
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and he cried and said yet 40 days and nineveh shall be overthrown.
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The repentance that came during that prayer in Jonah's darkest hour brought
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a conviction, a repentance, and a restoration.
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See, God is the God of the second chance, the fat chance, the slim chance, and the no chance.
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God does not give up on his people.
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He gave him a second opportunity. And let me tell you, what he asked him to
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do was exactly what he had intended for him to do when he called him the first time.
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Jonah did not eliminate himself from the presence of God, the love of God,
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the grace of God, the mercy of God, and the call of God.
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God did not discard Jonah after his failure. The Lord recommissioned him with the same command.
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Failure isn't the final chapter when you repent.
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It's the beginning of what God has for you. This time, Jonah obeys.
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And he arises and he goes to Nineveh.
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And I want you to see that his obedience started with just a simple response. He went.
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If you look in chapter 1, when he tells Jonah to arise and go to Nineveh,
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that great city, and cry against it for their wickedness has come up before him.
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But Jonah rose up to flee into Tarshish. But in chapter 3, after the prayer,
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the confession, the conviction, the repentance, and now the restoration,
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when Jonah the second time, the Lord comes to him saying, Arise,
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go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
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So Jonah arose, and he went unto Nineveh.
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Faithfulness often means taking just the next step God has commanded.
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We so often want to know the end from the beginning. There's no faith in that.
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We want to understand the why. The why is God's plan for our life.
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And when we have true faith, true faith, the why is enough just to know God said it.
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There used to be a common phrase when I was growing up that God said it,
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I believe it, so that settles it. It was so erroneous.
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God said it. That settles it.
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And the one who trusts in him, the one who believes in him,
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the one who truly loves him, the one whose life is committed to doing what he
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wants them to do because they just love him so much, they want to be in the
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center of his will, not because of what he gives, but because of who he is.
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That person, all they need to know is God said it.
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They fully trust that he'll take care of them. They fully trust that the plan
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is right. They fully trust that it's the best way.
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Repent. It's not too late.
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I want you to see, I think it's important, and I've said it a few times in our
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time together today, but God's mission remained unchanged.
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God's purpose for Nineveh wasn't altered because of Jonah's sin.
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Jonah caused a lot of problem for himself and for the pagan people on the boat,
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but still, the plan didn't change.
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And just look how much effort God put in to getting Jonah back on the right track.
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He sends the captain to tell him, pray to your God.
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He sends a great fish to protect him and preserve him.
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He leaves the great fish to a place where they vomits up Jonah on a safe, dry land.
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He restores Jonah, and he recommissions him for the same thing he had him to do.
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Again, faithfulness often means just taking the next step God asks you to do.
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God's compassion will always extend beyond those that we love Your for and no
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more isn't all he died for The person you love is not the only people he died for,
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That person you don't love He loves as much as he loves you You may resist,
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But God's redemptive plan continues And I'm telling you Scripture bears it out
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the character of God proves it,
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had Jonah never repented and changed his ways and gone back to Nineveh,
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somebody else God would have used.
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Don't let someone else get the blessings that were meant for you.
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Don't hurt the heart of God by having a hardened heart.
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God's warning in Jonah chapter 3, 4 is, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
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God is calling the people to repentance.
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Jonah proclaimed a brief but serious warning.
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Sin carries consequences, and divine judgment is real.
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Again, Galatians 6-7 has a meaning, not to be the rock you beat someone with,
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but that urgent, sincere, serious warning, Be not deceived, God is not mocked,
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for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
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This entire passage from Jonah 1 to Jonah 3, 4 is centered on God's authority.
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And it predicates upon your faith. If Jonah, the prophet of God,
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had had the right and appropriate faith in God, he would have never gone opposite of what God said.
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If you find yourself contrary to the word of God, you're definitely outside the will of God.
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And it's going to always come down to the root of the problem.
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Is your faith in God due to your love or lack thereof for him?
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Jonah proclaimed what God had commanded, and faithful preaching doesn't modify
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God's message to make it more comfortable to say.
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Clearly, and as you go on to chapter 4, you're going to realize for sure that
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Jonah just is upset because he does not want,
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the people of Nineveh to receive the grace and the mercy and the love of God,
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because they had hurt him personally.
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And just like some of us, he thought he might be just a little so special to
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God that God would do this for him and totally ignore a whole land of people.
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God is not your puppet on a string. God loves all of us unconditionally,
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and he's no respecter of persons.
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And when we have our heart right with God, when it is totally fixed on him and
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focused, then the love of God flows through us, and we love people because God loved us.
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We don't love them for what they can do for us. We don't love them for what they did to us.
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We don't hate them because of what they didn't do to us or what they did to us.
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We love because God is love. And he said, you will know that you are my disciples
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because you have love one for another.
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It's such an incredible, important concept to him that the entire 13th chapter
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of 1 Corinthians is devoted to tell us what love is and what it isn't.
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But that's not what it's really telling us. If you read 1 Corinthians 13 with
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an open heart, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal to you what it means,
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it's showing you who God is.
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It's God's character. It's patient and it's kind.
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Endures all things, the rejection daily of God's will.
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Yet he loves me just the same.
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It's not easily offended.
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It doesn't provoke. It doesn't envy. It's not full of pride. It's not puffed up.
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See, God is love. So 1 Corinthians 13 shows us the character of God.
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And he says, that's who we're to be. And Jonah reveals to us the sadness,
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the dreadful, horrific consequences of not having a heart like God.
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He was asleep in the boat because his heart was hardened.
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God rescues him and preserves him, hears his prayer, he repents and he's convicted,
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and he goes to the people, but in chapter 4,
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he goes and sits watching the city because he thought God was going to destroy
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them, but instead, they heeded his message.
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How hard and messed up was his heart that a preacher would be upset that he
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was successful with what he was preaching?
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It meant more to him to get revenge and for someone he didn't love to be punished
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by God than it was to be successful in his work for God.
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It's something I can't understand. God is love.
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And perhaps nothing from this account of Jonah has affected you in such a way,
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like the fact that your heart has to be right with God. Thank you.
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When judgment is being announced, God graciously calls sinners to turn to him.
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God calls us to obey, not merely to believe. Disobedience harms us and can affect others.
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God can use discipline to bring us back. These are the things that Jonah 1,
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chapters 1, 2, and 3 to verse 4.
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God is waiting to restore repentance servants.
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God's mercy reaches even those we consider undeserving. The rest of three in
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all the fours about that.
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But perhaps the one I want you to get the most from Jonah is this.
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His warning is an invitation to repentance.
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God is disciplining you to restore you, not to punish you.
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Where's God calling you to obey? Are you running?
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Are you resisting his purpose or faithfully taking the next step.
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Here's the truth I want you to think about. The God who pursued Jonah is still
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pursuing rebellious hearts today, and he still calls his people to arise and go.
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Remember, you are loved. Jesus loves you.
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You for joining us for today's podcast. You can find quotes and scripture references
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from this episode in the show notes.
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