Summary
Pastor Safrit walks through Jonah 4:1-10, highlighting Jonah's anger at God's mercy toward Nineveh. He emphasizes that a wrong view of God can lead to despair and a desire for judgment on others rather than self-reflection. The sermon encourages believers to channel their emotions constructively and to seek God's perspective on grace and compassion, urging them to share the gospel with those around them instead of harboring resentment.
Introduction and Overview
Thank you for listening to Pleasant Grove Baptist Church Sermon Audio. For more information, please visit our website, pgbcronda.com, or visit on all social media platforms. Jonah chapter 4.
We'll be finishing up the book of Jonah, but we may still have one more week. I'm still praying about where the Lord's going to lead, but Jonah chapter 4 today, we'll read the entire chapter.
And hopefully you found your place there right after the book of Obadiah. And we've been up and down a little bit, so we'll just remain seated as we read this last passage, the last paragraph, the last chapter in the book of Jonah. The Bible says, Jonah was greatly displeased and became furious.
He prayed that, Lord, please, Lord, isn't this what I said you would still do in my own country? This is why I fled toward Tarshish in the first place. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger,
abounded in faithful love, and one who relents to sin from disaster.
And now, Lord, take my life from me, for it's better for me to die than to live. And the Lord asked, is it right for you to be angry?
And Jonah left the city and found a place east of it, and he made himself a shelter there and sat in its shade to see what would happen to the city.
And the Lord God appointed a plant, and it grew over Jonah to provide shade for his head to rescue him from the trouble. And Jonah was greatly pleased with the plant.
When dawn came the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, and it withered. And as the sun was rising, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah's head so much that he almost fainted. And again, he wanted to die.
And he said again, it's better for me to die than to live. And then God asked Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about the plant? And Jonah replied, yes, it is. I'm angry enough to die.
And the Lord said, you cared about the plant, for which you did not labor and you did not grow. It appeared in the night and perished in the night.
And so may I not care about the great city of Nineveh, which has more than 120,000 people who cannot distinguish between their right hand and their left, as well as many animals.
Lord, I pray that you'd be with the passage of Scripture we read, Lord. How much that Jonah has helped me this past couple of weeks in my study. Lord, my heart is overflowing with excitement, just reinvigorated with where our hearts and minds are this morning.
Recap of Jonah's Journey
Lord, I pray that you'd be with me as I preach this morning. Give me the words to say. Help my mind to have clarity. In your name we pray. Amen.
As we continue to recap through Jonah, we remember back in the very first part, Jonah was commissioned to go and he ran from God. He ran away from Nineveh to the city of Tarshish.
And he wanted to get as far away from what God had for him to do. And as he was on this boat, the storms came and the winds of life came.
And he said, just throw me overboard. It'll be better for you to do that. I'll die in the sea and you'll be safe here.
And God, again, through his mercy and through his sovereignty, appointed a fish to swallow him up and to preserve his life. And after being in the fish belly for three days, he was spit up on the seashore.
And he went to Nineveh and he preached a seven-word message that we looked at last week. And he said, repent,
for the judgment of the Lord is at hand. And we saw that many people, the entire nation, it said, came to know about this man named God who was all supreme over all. And even the king issued a declaration to not do any trade, not do anything.
And now we get to the point where Jonah is angry.
Jonah, I've been titled today, Lessons Learned. Are there any lessons that we can learn? Or did Jonah learn any lessons? Came across a story many years ago.
A senior executive at what was then called the Standard Old Company had made a wrong decision.
Now, if you were in business and you were thinking about decisions in a business or a company, you can imagine that if someone made a decision that cost you a couple hundred dollars, you could maybe overlook it.
But this executive here in this story cost the company more than $2 million. And as J.D.
Rockefeller, who was the guy in charge of this, most people know that name, he was running the firm. And on the day that the news leaked out that they had lost $2 million because of one decision of one executive,
every executive in the company decided they were going to avoid J.D. Rockefeller on that day.
They weren't going to get in his way. They weren't going to get in his path. If they saw him coming or heard he was coming, they were running the other way because they did not want to see the wrath of J.D. Rockefeller.
And so there was one exception. This man's name was Edward T. Bedford. He was a partner in the company. And Bedford was scheduled to see Rockefeller on this day. And as other people avoided him and made reasons to not go and see him, he said, I'm going to go to my appointment,
even though I may be the one that gets all of the backlashing of Mr. Rockefeller's anger. He was prepared to listen to a long barrage of everything that was done, the error in judgment, how we can't stand for this as a company. And he entered the office.
The head of the gigantic Standard Oil Company was bent over his desk and busily rewriting with a pencil on a pad of paper. Bedford stood silently, not wanting to interrupt him, not wanting to invoke any type of anger, not wanting to do anything.
And as he was writing, Mr. Rockefeller looked up and said, oh, Mr. Bedford, you came, you're here.
And he said, I suppose you've heard about our loss today. As any good executive would have good beat of his company, he said, I'm sure you've heard of this. And Bedford said that he had. And he said, I've been thinking it over,
Rockefeller said. And before I asked the man to discuss the matter, I began making some notes.
Bedford later told the story this way. Across the top of this pad of paper was written, points in favor of Mr. So-and-so who had made this decision.
And under that, it was a long list of the man's virtues, including a brief description of how he had helped the company make the right decision on three separate occasions and had earned more than triple the amount of money that he had ever lost in the recent era. Mr.
Bedford stated it like this, I never forgot that lesson. In later years, whenever I was tempted to rip into anyone, I forced myself to first sit down and thoughtfully compile a list of the good points as I possibly could.
Inverably, by the time I finished my inventory, I would see that the matter in a true perspective, and I kept my temper under control.
Understanding Our Emotions
There is no telling how many times this habit has prevented me from committing one of the costliest mistakes any executive could ever make simply by losing his temper.
Our emotions this morning, church, are a tough thing to process. We are made by emotional beings.
God has made us with emotions, and God has given us these emotions, and we struggle with them every single day of our life. Whether it be anger,
whether it be sarcasm, that I'm often told by my wife, you can't be as sarcastic with your kids as you want to be. And my kids, I'll say something, and they'll look at me and be like, yeah, Dad, of course.
Because I'm sarcastic, and they're sarcastic back, and I realize that's an error that I need to work on. Maybe it's your timidness. Maybe it's your overly optimistic. Whatever your emotion may be, we are all programmed with emotions.
And the key is this, to know that God made us in a way that we are to help us to redeem our emotions.
To begin to ask ourselves, God, why did you create me this way? Why are my emotions this way, and how can I redeem them for your glory? I'll give a personal illustration before I jump into the message.
I played football for many years, seven years from middle school to high school, and my ninth and tenth grade year, I began to be able to tap into the emotion of anger.
I began to realize that if I got really angry, and I thought about my sister, who would oftentimes aggravate me, and pursue me to make bad decisions, or do something wrong, and I channeled all that anger into the person in front of me, which was the enemy, that I could excel in football.
Because I would lay them out, and all my energy and all my anger that I had toward my sister was now into this person in front of me.
And so what had happened was, is over the course of a couple years, I learned to channel this, and I learned to funnel it into the football field, but then this really hard thing happened, football ended. November came calm, and November time came, and there was no more football.
So now all this anger that I had built up, and I was able to release in one area, was not able to be released anywhere. And so what happened was, is because I could not control it in the other area, the anger began to come out in other areas.
Mom and dad would say something, I would get angry, I'd lash out. And I began to have the fuse of,
you look at me the wrong way, and my anger was just, it was there.
And going into my 11th grade year, my mom and dad had separated, and the anger that was inside of me began to well up, and I could not control it. Emotions began to happen, and I began to ask the Lord, I said, God, I don't want to have this anger anymore.
I don't want to have this type of anger that I can't control, and I know I can't control it, and so Lord, I need you to give me the self-control that I need. And I know that the only way I'm going to have it is by coming to you.
Now I began to process this, I began to process this over a long period of time, and the Lord began to give me patience, after patience, after patience. It was a really, really hard process.
But the Lord began to work in this time that I used as a way to fulfill my own needs, and God said, no, I'm going to use this in a way that I'm going to be ultimately fulfilled and glorified through this.
Many instances happened in college where someone would get angry at the flip of a hat,
and would even say things to me, and I just kept the cool, I kept calm, and for the most part, I'm a pretty calm guy now. But there are times where my fuse is still long, and that anger of the redhead will come out,
but I tried the best for God's glory to allow God to redeem that.
Because even something as simple as anger and wrath and pouring out that, God can redeem it for a mighty way. And Jonah, in this situation, could not see that, and he struggled with it, ultimately because he had the wrong view of God.
The Consequences of a Wrong View of God
And when we have the wrong view of God, it leads us down a path that will ultimately destroy our life as we see here in Jonah's life. And so I wrote down three basic ways of through Jonah's life of how a wrong view of God will lead you.
The first one is this, it will lead you to think life isn't worth living.
It'll lead you to think that you are so displeased with God that there is no sense in even living. Look at what Jonah says in verse one. He says, I am greatly displeased, and I am angry or furious.
He was so angry that he could scream if he could. He was so angry that he would stomp his foot, and he would get mad all because of what God had did. Because he had a wrong view of God. He said, God, I knew this was gonna happen.
I knew that you were gonna do this, Lord. And I just began, in his mind, he began to get this type of reaction that almost stops us in our tracks.
Like we read this, we read what happened in Jonah chapter three. The entire nation came to Lord Lord, and now in this next, very next verse, Jonah says he became angry and displeased.
I want you to imagine for a moment that I were to get up here this morning, and I would say, you know, have the opportunity to go out into Surrey County, into Wilkes County, and had a couple of different moments to preach the gospel.
Sort of like a Billy Graham crusade. One was on Friday in Surrey County, and one was on Saturday in Wilkes County. And as a result of that church, every single person in Wilkes County, and every single person in Surrey County has come to know Jesus.
About 120,000 people. Would we sit here and be like, oh, great job, Pastor James.
We'd probably be ecstatic. We'd be jumping from the rafters. We prayed for revival. We prayed for God to do a mighty work, and God now does this mighty work, and we get excited, and the Lord begins to move. But Jonah saw this happen, and he says,
God, I can't believe you'd do that. God, I can't believe you would use me to reach a whole nation, a nation of pagans, a nation of people who turn from you, who don't care about you, and this is Jonah's reaction. We would think this would be the silliest reaction that anyone could give,
but yet Jonah gives it. Why does he give this? I wrote down three basic things in this first point, and this is where I'll spend most of my time. He expected consistency from God.
The first thing, he expected God to be consistent. His form of consistency was this. You ready? God, there's a wicked enemy in front of me. Wipe him out.
That's what he wanted. He wanted God to come in. He wanted to preach to Nineveh, them to look at him and say, you're a crazy guy with seaweed wrapped around your hair. You smell like fish. You look really weird.
Why are you talking to us? We don't care what you have to say. And Jonah had already made it in his mind that he was going to go up on the top of this mountain. He was going to watch the destruction of Nineveh. Just like Abraham
watched the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, he said, this is going to be the same thing. God, you're going to show your judgment. You're going to show that you're a true God, and you're going to wipe them from the face of the earth.
That's what I want. That's the consistency that I want of God. And his false view of consistency led him to anger and led him to a sense of just madness toward God.
Why did you do this? Why would you even allow this country to come to know you? And Jonah began to question
every area of his life, even to the point where he began to say, God, are you really the God that you said you were? Which led him to quote exactly from Exodus chapter 34.
I didn't put it on the screen. You can write it down. Exodus 34, 6 and 7 is a direct quote from verse 3. It said this in verse 2, that is why I fled to Tarshish. I knew you were gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger, abounding in faithful love, and one who relents to sending disaster. This is a direct quote from Moses
as he came off of the mountain. As Moses came off of Mount Sadie after spending his quiet time with God, after receiving the Ten Commandments, Moses wrote this down that God was merciful. He was slow to anger. You see, Jonah was angry because God was showing grace to pagans.
He was angry because his enemy was being shown grace.
He says there, I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God. He only wanted grace for his people.
He only wanted grace to be upon his family and his descendants and the people that he thought deserved it. and God said, no, no, no.
My grace is for all people who come to know me. My grace is for all who come and kneel before me and say you are a holy, righteous God and I'm going to serve you. God says that is who my grace goes to.
God's Mercy and Jonah's Reaction
Not only was he angry that he showed grace, he was angry for God's show and mercy. He said, God, you're slow to anger. You are compassionate. You have mercy. It would be like this.
It would be like this in your mind if you can imagine it with me. A mother who has a child who she's nursing and showing love toward and someone were to come along and something bad were to happen and maybe it was a drunk driver riding down the road were to hit that
car head on and that baby in the back seat were to die.
And that mother and her ability to endure someone saw that this other person who was the enemy who killed her child were to say, hey, I'm going to show mercy and grace and I'm going to nurse your child for you.
I'm going to show mercy and grace to someone who did some depraved act who was ultimately a mortal enemy of that woman
would to show love and mercy and grace toward another child that was their enemy. And God says, through Jonah here, that's the type of mercy that I show.
As we are mortal enemies of God, we sinned against God. We caused his precious son to die on a cross for our sins because of our sins.
And God says, I love you so much as we just sang about, oh, how I love Jesus because he first loved us. Not because we loved him first. We rebelled against him.
We looked at God and we said, I don't care what you have for me. I'm going to go and do my own thing.
And God says, that's the people that I want to redeem. That's the people I'm going to send my son for because I am going to show mercy to those who are far from me. Not only does he show grace and mercy, but he shows that he is slow to anger.
See, Jonah came in this and he wanted this to be a quick and painful destruction. He wanted them to pay for what they had done and he wanted the judgment and the destruction of all the Ninevites to be destroyed.
And yet God showed mercy and was allowing him to preach, was allowing him to walk through the nations and to give the gospel to these people. And Jonah said, no, no, no. Just wipe them out, God. Don't show mercy. Don't show kindness to them.
And the last part of this is Jonah was angry about God being faithful to his love toward pagans. You see, he was grieved and he was outright mad that God showed love.
The love that God showed toward his chosen people, he was mad that he was showing it toward people that were against him.
And how often is it in our life where God shows us mercy, God shows us grace, God shows us that he is slow to anger and he loves, he has love that we'll never imagine and then he shows
it to someone that it's our enemy and we get mad. We may not verbally get mad as Jonah did, but in our spirit, we're like, God, really? You're gonna use him? I saw an illustration this week of Billy Graham.
As Scotty was teaching this morning, he used Billy Graham a couple of times and there's a story going around social media of 10 men who were part of the Soviet Union, I believe, who were paid and hired to go into a Billy Graham crusade and murder him to assassinate him.
And he said all 10 of them had their guns tucked in their belt, they went in the right way, they sat in different areas and this one guy gives this illustration that he's sitting there and he's listening to
Billy Graham preach and Billy Graham begins to preach about the gospel and preach about how God loves even the vilest of sinners and the man that had this gun that was paid to be there said all of a
sudden God began to work on my heart and God began to say what are you doing here? Do you not hear the message that man's preaching?
And in that crowd while Billy Graham was preaching he says when the invitation time comes he said I put all of the fears of what I had away and I went down and I gave my life to Jesus
all because of one man who got up and preached grace and mercy toward the people that were there to kill him
and how often if we knew that would we show the same grace and mercy and compassion or would we be like Jonah who stood up and got angry and furious at what is going on here?
The ultimate third thing here is his view of God was inconsistent because of his attitude with the freedom of God to be God
he had an attitude that he was inconsistent with his freedom of God to be God often times we want God to be like us
we have our view of God and we say God I'm going to put you in my box that's nice and pretty I've got a bow on it it's my favorite color and God this is how you're going to
be and God says I'm not confined to your box I have the freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want and to reach whoever I want with the power of the gospel and when God does that we
get angry and we say God this is not what I designed you to be and God said you didn't design me to begin with I designed you look at what Proverbs 19 3 says Proverbs 19 3 a person's
own foolishness leads him astray yet his heart rages against the Lord this is Jonah Jonah's own foolishness led him astray and he began to get angry and rage against the Lord he thought he could control God even though
he had already forgotten about the time that he tried to control God right God said go to Nineveh and Jonah said God I don't really want to do that
I'm going to do what I want to do and you're going to listen to what I want you to do God
and he ran and God said no I don't want you to do that I want you to go to Nineveh and he caused a storm to happen and over and over and over again Jonah is trying to control God and God says no I want you to do this
and often times this is how we are and we get to the point where God says I want you to do this and I'm trying to help you I'm trying to give you this area and yet we get
to the point where we may not say what Jonah says so Jonah makes this death wish where he says that it would better be for me to be dead he were almost to say this ready if my way
isn't done just kill me or I would make a better God than you
now I want you to really meditate on that thought Jonah is literally saying God I would be better God than you are let me be God let me institute judgment upon all of my enemies
because I would be a faithful God you're not a faithful God right now God this is what Jonah is saying
and we may not literally say this but the truth of the matter is when we I'm going to read after what one of the commentators said out of my commentators the truth is that Jonah when we really do
not want God to be anything other than God if the maker of the seas were otherwise Jonah would have been fish food if the Lord failed to be merciful to us as we are to our enemies he would
have perished and would have been angry in a prayer of screaming at him the divine freedom that gives one child an overprotective parent is the same mercy that gives all of us parents at all the mercy that keeps
one marriage from immorality is the same mercy that is patient when your spouse needs great improvement in your eyes that patience that gives you at a house at all is the same patience that will alleviate your financial problems
when God is ready for them to be liquidated often times we get this this mistranslated
misconfused view of who God is and what he is and we want to put ourselves in the place of God and say God I would do it better than you when God says I've got mercy upon mercy and
grace upon grace if only you would trust in me if only you would trust in what I'm doing for you so the wrong view of God leads us to thinking that life isn't worth living the second thing it
Jonah's Desire for Judgment
does is it wishes us judgment on others rather than ourself
as we continue on to verse five and eight it begins to get this point where Jonah would wish the judgment upon others than the judgment upon himself he disobeyed God he did wrong in the sight of God he
ran from God and he would rather God judge the Ninevites who turned to God than God to judge him after he disobeyed and ran Jonah leaves the city just far enough I want you to imagine going up on a hill just far enough to overlook the city
as Roy was telling me there's a house right up here where you can overlook and you can see all of Clingman all of Ronda all of Elkin you can overlook imagine sitting up there and watching the impending destruction upon this city
as he's overlooking the city in this desert place there was began to get hot and Jonah needed the shade that he needed at this time he begins to build a shade booth
I want you to imagine if you're building something has anybody ever built any type of anything in here a couple people okay so Jonah's building this booth the shade booth and as he's hammering the nails in the same portion of time a tree begins to grow up behind it
and the tree is growing faster than he can actually build the booth
okay so you can imagine that this had been a miracle right in front of Jonah's eyes and ultimately this is God showing more mercy to Jonah he didn't have to do this he didn't have to give him shade and God in this moment was trying to rescue Jonah from his own discomfort
just as the Lord appointed the fish he also then began to appoint a very hungry caterpillar if you could with my mind to tear down the shade that was about to give him a heat stroke and God appointed
this this caterpillar to come in and to destroy this this heat choke all because we were going to look at the mood swings of Jonah he gets the shade and he's happy
the shade gets taken away and he's mad he gets the things that he wants and he's happy but when the things that he doesn't want get taken away or get redeemed he gets mad as redeemed Christians following God
we must get to the point where we can forgive others and move on rather than hold grudges and get angry as Jonah does because this is a miserable way to live the way Jonah is showing his life here is a miserable upon miserable way to live
and how often is it that we have this same type of living in our life and yet we don't have the love of Christ you know we often get to the point where we wish that harm would come to someone else that's wronged us we wish that we could be
this all powerful God but often times we're like the ungrateful servant
as Jesus gave the parable of the ungrateful servant where the man who was owed a massive amount of debt that he couldn't pay back his kids couldn't pay back and the Bible even goes on to say that his grandkids would not be able to pay this debt back
and he goes to the person that he owed this debt to and pleaded and said man I can't pay this back I need mercy I need grace and the guy that was in charge of it said I'm going to forgive you all of your debt
you'll not have to pay any of it back and he leaves from that place and goes to someone who owes him ten dollars
and grabs him by the shirt and says give me the ten dollars now if you don't give me the ten dollars I'm going to throw you in jail until you pay it back to me
Heart Issues Behind Anger
and he doesn't give him the ten dollars and he throws him in jail and the master that forgave him all this debt said how could you forgive!
Jonah was shown mercy beyond all other type of mercy beyond even our wildest imagination Jonah was shown mercy and yet he could not bear it to show it to others
it made him angry that the same mercy that was shown to him was shown to another country and he got mad
the wrong view of God often leads us to missed opportunities to be merciful to others
verses 9-11 the last part of this passage we began to see the opportunities that we miss we finally get to the heart of the issue we finally get to what Jonah is truly saying as I stated months ago everything we do stems!
John Calvin says that our hearts are idol factories and our hearts control everything one passage of scripture says that our eye affects our heart and our heart is the mode of everything we do when we get upset it's
a heart issue when we get angry at someone it's a heart issue when we are grieved by something that someone does it's a heart issue and when we want something done a certain way the way we want it done it's the heart issue that has the problem
Jonah finally admits the heart issue here in the last part of this passage and he says I'm angry I'm so angry God that I'm angry enough to die because of what you did to this city and he finally
begins to admit that he's angry at the Lord he's not angry at the mercy he's not angry even at the people of Nineveh that repented and came to know Jesus he's not angry at them he's angry at God for being merciful
and showing kindness to others and you may say Pastor James I'm not Jonah I'm never going to get to this place
I'm never going to get to the place that I'm going to get mad at God I want you to imagine with me for just a moment you're walking down your house you're walking around your house and your child or your grandchild comes up and
accidentally bumps your hand as your cell phone is in your hand
and it falls to the ground and as you pick it up the screen is broken do you get mad at the cell phone company for making that screen break or do you get mad at the child for breaking it
often times we get mad at the person that caused us pain because we are in charge and we think that our way should be the way we are doing it and we're driving around and we're thinking that we're the people that are in charge and all
the God has done for us as the Lord begins to question Jonah we begin to see the self centeredness that Jonah has and how he truly loves himself how he truly loves the things of himself he can only
think about what satisfies him the plant satisfied him and he was pleased in it the things that pleased him made him happy and it grew up and he grew so much of attachment to this plant that was there for less than 24 hours that
when the plant was taken away he was mad because it was no longer about him the plant came up and it left and he spent these days preaching to Nineveh and yet he never came to love the people of Nineveh as much as he loved the plant that God provided for him
and how often is it in our life that God calls us to a place and we get to the place where we love the things of this world rather than the people of this world
and God says I'm giving you this plant to show you the love that I have I both gave you the plant and I took it away in love see he cares for us so much and he was trying
Caring for Others vs. Self
to to die for is so much more important than a plant or your own desires or your own needs
and God was trying to get him to care for Nineveh the way that he was caring for these earthly things that was in this world he wanted him to have that same compassion as Terry comes and plays as I'm concluding my message Jonah was the prophet
of the Old Testament that saw more people turn to Jesus than any other prophet Jonah
it's estimated that in his very first ministry when he went to the king and said king you are doing a wicked thing here in Israel and unless you repent the Lord is going to bring judgment upon Israel it
is estimated between that prophecy and Jonah's prophecy in Nineveh that over 600,000 people repented and turned to the Lord
because of Jonah's preaching because of one man who stood up and said this is what the Lord declares one amazing effort where he stood up between his own people which is hard enough as it is but one going
to a pagan country who was going to kill him and yet at the end of his story it ends with this this is the end of his life as Terry said the last words of Jesus as I preach the last words of Jesus on the cross last words are lasting words
this is the last words of Jonah I would rather my life die
I'm going to complain to you God for what you've done and you've been merciful and you've been gracious and you're not doing the things that I want you to do and this is the last time we hear of Jonah the book is one of the greatest missionary books in the Old Testament
if not the entire Bible it was written to reveal the heart of a servant of God whose heart was not touched with the passion of God
and often times we read through the book of Jonah because we know the book of Jonah and it doesn't impact our hearts
it should strike home often times we're more interested in the comforts and the needs of our own lives than we are for the multitudes of people that are all around us that are around this own church around our home that don't know
Christ and are dying in their darkness that are dying in their sin and they have yet to hear of the precious Savior Jesus Christ we have it we have the gift of eternal life and yet to preach because as often I'm the same way
question for us to ask is are you more content to remain with the gourds of comforts of home and being at home than you are the message of Christ to go out to the ends of the earth to
everyone the Jews and the Gentiles the Greeks the people that don't look like us don't smell like us don't act like us as
horrible home life who we will never experience that type of poverty in our entire life
even if all of our home was stripped away we would still have the ability to rebuild and do something else and yet they have nothing
and how often are we not going to those and sharing the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ with them my message this morning is simple come today and ask the Lord
you lost people in our schools lost people who don't know you in our workplaces lost people who just are simply across the pump as we're pumping gas who don't know Jesus and ask us to turn back to the
Lord and say God give me the desire for the people that are around me like I've never had before give me the desire to not be like Jonah not look and say
for the Lord and saying God I want to be let it start with me as Ezekiel says I'm standing in the need of prayer I'm here I will be going if you call me
Call to Action for the Church
who will be the one that says God send me somewhere God send me to reach someone it may be literally just across the street
it may literally be just literally walking across the street and telling your neighbor about Jesus that could be what God is calling you to do
but let us be a people that leave from here and say God help me not be like Jonah and get angry when my way is not done
whatever your need is this morning come today and trust in the Lord Lord we love you we thank you for what you've done
God I thank you for what you've allowed me to see through Jonah what you've revealed in my own heart as we've looked through Jonah where often times we want things done our way and we don't listen we don't
do what you have wanted us to do and Lord I pray that you would help us to trust in you so much more it's in your name we pray!
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