Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Nearly 300 years ago, Jonathan Edwards, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, was asked to preach the commencement at Harvard University.

This address was viewed as the super bowl for pastors and Edwards preached a message centered on God’s glory in redemption and in saving sinners.

Edwards was the pastor of one of the largest churches in New England, a growing area in the early 1700s, and began preaching on the wonderful work of Jesus in bringing sinners from darkness to light.

Fast forward to 1741 and Edwards was in attendance for a midweek service and he wasn’t scheduled to preach but was asked to do so because the expected preacher was sick - even more reason to always have a sermon up your sleeve if you’re a pastor!

Edwards stepped to the pulpit and delivered one of if not the most read sermon ever preached in our country - Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

If this would have been in the 21st century, Edwards would have had a billion views on YouTube simply because of the title of the message and a billion more based on the content.

Edwards dove deep into the sinfulness of humanity and preached on the just judgment of God towards unrepentant sinners.

Edwards shared that we as humans are spiders dangling over the pit of hell and the only thing saving us is a tiny thread - the thread of redemption.

With one hand God holds back His wrath against sinners and with the other hand, God is calling us to come home because Jesus Christ stands in the place of sinners today.

This message paved the way for the 1st Great Awakening in our country as millions of people turned to Jesus after hearing the Gospel message preached without gimmicks or flare.

It was simply the Gospel - we are sinners in need of a Savior.

Edwards wasn’t afraid to give people the bad news that they needed to hear… But not everyone liked hearing this bad news.

We don’t like receiving bad news either.

Even if it isn’t all that bad, we don’t like hearing messages that go against our way of thinking.

Why is this?

Why do we dislike hearing bad news and why do we hate being the bearer of bad news?

Because of the impact it will have - yet, sharing the bad news is crucial.

If we never tell people that they must repent of their sin and stop living for themselves and instead live for Jesus Christ, they might feel good about themselves but they are hopelessly lost and dead in their sins!

Sharing the bad news isn’t fun, but we must be obedient, as Jonah was, to call people to repent and trust in the One, True, Living God.

Just as our God judges sin and just as sin angers our King - He is also a God who forgives as we studied this morning.

This evening we’re going to look the importance of repentance and trusting ourselves into the hand of our Forgiving God.

Like Jonah, we are Commanded to Preach the Gospel (1-3)

In the opening few verses we see a very similar message to Jonah as we saw back in Jonah 1:1-2.

As we talked last week, Jonah was given a second chance.

He had disobeyed, he suffered the consequence and now he was commissioned to do the thing that he was called to do from the beginning: go to Nineveh and call them to repent.

Aren’t you thankful for second chances?

Aren’t you thankful that God is a God of mercy?

Jonah had received this second chance and he obeyed in verse 3 as he actually went to Nineveh.

If you look at Jonah 1:2

So Jonah is told to arise, go and proclaim.

In chapter 1 we see that he is to call out against the people of Nineveh for the evil and wickedness.

In chapter 3 we do not see specifically what he is supposed to proclaim.

Many scholars note that it is the same message as before in chapter 1 - a call to repent.

This is likely the case.

Think for a moment about our lives as followers of Jesus Christ.

We like Jonah are called to arise, go and proclaim.

What are we supposed to proclaim?

We are supposed to proclaim the truth of the Gospel!

We see a great summary of this in 1 Corinthians 15

Jesus Christ was born, lived a perfect life, died for our sins and rose from the grave.

We proclaim this message to people around us because it is so important!

We discussed this briefly during our Wednesday night Bible study a few nights ago… Our world loves to tell our children that they are perfect - maybe you don’t fall into this category, but seriously there are millions of children who are told daily by their parents that they are perfect and that they never do anything wrong.

To these children who are being told this, what happens as they get older?

Maybe they are invited to church with a friend in Junior High and they are introduced to Jesus Christ who came to die for our sins.

This confuses the student because they’ve been told that they’re absolutely perfect - why would they need someone to die for their sins whenever they’ve never sinned?

Do you see how important it is for us to share and teach what the Bible teaches as Christians?

Don’t tell your kids and grandkids that they’re perfect or that they’re enough on their own - they’re not!

What Scripture shows us is that we are sinners and we need a Savior.

We need to share the Gospel.

Both sides of it.

On the one hand you’re not good enough.

You are bad.

You are dead in your sins and trespasses.

You are wicked.

This is not a fun message to share and it’s not a fun message to think about, but it’s the truth of Scripture - if you don’t repent and turn everything over to God then you’re going to spend eternity in a place called hell.

That’s not being judgmental, that’s being Biblical!

This is the bad news.

But the news doesn’t stop there - we are sinners and Christ died for sinners and He is good enough!

The Lord loves giving mercy to sinners.

The question that we need to ask is do we love doing this as well?

Do we love giving mercy to others?

We love receiving mercy for ourselves whenever we fall short.

We love getting the benefit of the doubt when it’s ourselves.

What do we do whenever it’s someone else, though?

Do we love giving mercy to others?

Sometimes it’s hard!

When it’s hard we must remind ourselves of our sin and how we have received mercy from God that we did not deserve either.

Like Jonah, we Encourage People to Repent (4-5)

As we share the Gospel message with others, this starts with us being the “bearer of bad news” and most of us don’t like that task.

We must encourage people to repent and turn their eyes upon Jesus as the age old hymn puts it.

This is exactly what Jonah does.

He goes to this “exceedingly great city” and we wonder why a wicked city can be called exceedingly or extraordinarily great?

The reason why is because this was a very large and powerful city.

We talked about how the Ninevites were notorious for their torture of others and their military expertise.

This was not only a powerful city but also a populated one.

We see in Jonah 4:11 that there were over 120,000 people in the city.

Scholars debate as to how many people lived in the city and we will discuss this more in depth next week, but this is a place with at least 120,000 citizens or roughly the size of Springfield nearly 2600 years ago.

Big place and scary people who could easily torture and kill Jonah!

What does Jonah tell these people in verse 4? He tells them that the city will be destroyed in 40 days.

In the Hebrew text, Jonah only says 5 words.

Can you imagine a sermon that is only 5 words long?

This would be a dream come true for some of you because you’d get home around 10:45 instead of 11:30!

Adam Bradley shares that Jonah’s words were “amoebic in form by Jurassic in size.”

Truly, though, Jonah says 5 words and we see in verse 5 that the people get the memo and they repent!

How on earth does this happen with 5 small words?

We know that words are powerful, don’t we? Jonah doesn’t get into the deep parts of Scripture.

He doesn’t give a PhD dissertation or preach for hours and debate scholars like Paul did in Athens as we see in Acts 17.

What does he do?

He tells them what God commanded him to.

As we saw last week in Jonah 2:9

Salvation is from the Lord!

The Gospel is the power of God.

The people didn’t repent because Jonah convinced them per say, they repented because they were convicted by God.

They were responsible to repent here and that is exactly what they did.

They believed Jonah’s message.

What was Jonah’s command here?

To arise, go and proclaim this message from God.

What was the result?

The people repented.