Week 3 | Jonah
Notes
Transcript
Jonah’s Mustard Seed
Jonah’s Mustard Seed
Bible Passage: Jonah 3
Bible Passage: Jonah 3
Summary: In Jonah 3, God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh and deliver a message of repentance. Despite his initial reluctance and rebellion, Jonah eventually obeys, and the people of Nineveh respond with repentance, demonstrating God's desire for obedience over human ability.
Application: This passage reminds Christians that God can work through our obedience, regardless of our perceived abilities or shortcomings. It encourages believers to step out in faith and trust that God can use them for His purposes.
Teaching: This sermon teaches that God often calls us to do things that seem beyond our capabilities, but it is not our ability that matters; it is our willingness to obey His call.
How this passage could point to Christ: In this passage, Jesus refers to Jonah in Matthew 12:40, indicating that Jonah’s time in the fish foreshadows Christ’s death and resurrection. Just as Jonah's obedience led to the salvation of Nineveh, Christ’s obedience leads to the salvation of the world.
Big Idea: Obeying God's call transcends our abilities; He equips those He calls to accomplish His will.
Recommended Study: Consider exploring the historical context of Nineveh and its cultural significance using your Logos library. Examine the Hebrew text for nuances in Jonah's reluctance and God's response. Look at Matthew 12:38-41 for the New Testament allusion to Jonah and its implications for understanding obedience in light of Christ's mission.
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Bible in 5 Years - Jonah 3
Today’s sermon is titled, Jonah’s Mustard Seed.
We are going to learn just how much God can accomplish when we have just a little bit of faith.
Jonah was FAR from perfect, as we have been learning these past weeks...
He is consistently portrayed as an upside-down Jesus, the whole story is an assault at your expectations...
But... he has moments of obedience, moments of faith, that spark divine change on this Earth.
This book is trying to tell us that, we too are like Jonah. Broken and imperfect. Turning from the Lord nearly every chance we get.
Yet God...consistently throughout the Bible, tries to remind us that it is our WEAKNESSES that highlights his STRENGTH.
It is when we are the most broken, that God makes us feel the most whole.
It is when we are alone, that we feel heard.
Look what happens to the scales.. when the sins of the world...
Run from the right to the left
Weigh against the grace of God
Billions and billions of lifetimes worth of sin, weighing down the scales against an endless sea of mercy.
Mercy wins, thus God’s power is proven to be stronger than the worst of all humanity put together.
It is when we were doomed to the judgement of sin, that He sent PERFECTION to become a man, and suffer and die for us. Sinners.
Grace.
This is our first point...
1. Second Chances Show Sovereignty
1. Second Chances Show Sovereignty
Lets, VERY BRIEFLY, recap the story so far:
Jonah is called by Yahweh to go to Nineveh.
Jonah flees from the face of the Lord.
Through a series of bad decisions, Jonah finds himself sleeping on a boat caught in a storm that was hurled by the Lord.
He is woken up, and ultimately tossed overboard where he sinks beneath the waves.
The storm calms, but Jonah is swallowed by a great fish or sea monster.
He remains in the belly of the great fish for 3 days and 3 nights, before he prays and is ultimately vomited up by the fish.
That’s where our story picks up today. Turn with me now to Jonah chapter 3.
1 Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying,
2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.”
These first 2 verses show us a few things:
Our God is a God of second chances.
The Lord came to Jonah...a SECOND time.
Somebody give me a hallelujah for second chances.
Second chances show God’s sovereignty over the world, in spite of our selfish decisions.
He is not bound by our sin.
He has the freedom and power to extend us try after try after try.
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
The command that Yahweh gives to Jonah here, is the EXACT same command, word for word, that He gives to Jonah in chapter 1.
What does this mean for us?
This means that...
We serve a God who stays the same.
Though we may turn left, right, backslide...HE remains the same.
After Jonah flight, battle with the storm and his own repentance...after events with the fish...The Lord remained the same.
Arise...Go.
3 So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days’ journey in breadth.
Aren’t you glad that Jesus does not get tired of waiting for us?
But He stays ready to use us when we finally choose to obey Him, regardless of our past reluctance or inadequacies? Or in spite of our current failures?
This leads us into the next verse in the passage:
4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
Okay, we need to park the car here for a minute and become aware of a few things the author is doing here.
Nineveh is a city that is 3 days wide (walking)
Chapter 4 tells us that the city held 120,000 people at any given time.
Nineveh’s patron god was the goddess Nina, of whom NINEveh got its name.
Nina, when depicted in art, was always portrayed with the body of a fish.
The author is linking the story about the great fish (3 days in the belly of a great fish) with the story of Nineveh (3 days to walk through the great fish city)
Jonah runs away from the great fish city, ends up getting swallowed by a great fish.
He’s in the great fish for 3 days and is then sent back to the great fish city, that is 3 days wide.
This really is a second chance.
So the author makes it a point to tell us that the city is 3 days wide, then immediately tells us Jonah’s journey into the city is about how long?
1 day.
Why is that significant?
Well, this can be interpreted in different ways.
This could be showing us that...
Nineveh is EXTREMELY receptive to Yahweh;
which shows God’s sovereignty in second chances.
Jonah is lazy; He doesn’t try very hard;
which shows God’s sovereignty in being able to do divine things through imperfect people.
Salvation is found in 3 days.
What does 3 days symbolize? Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Does salvation stick if you don’t have the 3 days? If you don’t have Jesus?
No, it doesn’t. Just like we will see in Chapter 4. It does not stick here in Nineveh.
There are more ways to interpret this, but we have to keep this train moving.
I think the author did this on purpose, to get us to ponder these things. This is one clear piece of evidence that scripture is living and active.
What’s the rest of the verse say?
He called out, “Forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
Our second point:
2. Simple Words Spark Revival
2. Simple Words Spark Revival
How many words was this jaw dropping sermon?
5 words
In the Hebrew:
Yet
40
Days
And Nineveh
shall be Overthrown.
There is a lot to unpack there, but let’s focus on the substantial size of this prophetic sermon, and the IMMEDIATE aftermath.
5 words that don’t even include the name of God.
One act of obedience during a season of rebellion...and then what?
5 And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.
God doesn’t need you to do any more than you have been commanded. He doesn’t need you to fill in the gaps, HE does that.
5 words
spoken in anger...maybe.
But they were spoken in obedience and in truth to what had been revealed to Jonah.
And Jonah ultimately had faith that God would move on this city, in judgment or in mercy, even if his faith was small.
Matthew, Mark & Luke all share stories that feature a mustard seed, is anybody familiar?
31 ... “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. 32 It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
20 ...if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”
6 And the Lord said, “If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.
Planted: This word means more than just being physically planted in the soil.
Greek: Phytero (foo-tee-ro): Translates as planted.
Root Phyo (foo-oh): grow up, come up
This same Greek root Phyu (foo-oh) is used in the word that is translated as natural, according to its nature.
Greek: Physikos (foo-see-kos): natural, according to its nature
In Greek, as well as Hebrew, words that share a common root are meant to be considered alongside each other.
So Jesus is telling us that with faith the size of a grain of mustard seed, we can tell a living thing, God’s creation, to be planted, or grow up, come up according to its nature, in a place that would previously hold no ability to sustain its life.
I said, I can point at the spiritual ocean, which represents DEATH in the Hebrew Bible… and tell the waters to move...because I’m moving in.
With just a little faith, I can point at the enemy and tell his DEATH to STAY BACK!! There is no room for you here!!
With grain sized faith, I can live in a place that is built to kill me. Built and designed by our enemy, The Devil, the crafty one, the trickster, the deceiver. And not only can I live, I can live according to the nature that God ingrained inside of me. I have been made in the very image of God, I have a nature about me.
In my very first sermon in front of this church, just over a year ago, I spoke on Psalm 22. And the truth of this mustard seed that we see in Matthew, Mark & Luke brings to mind a story I shared with everyone back then.
A story about a woman named, Annie.
If you were there that day, I hope you enjoy hearing this story a second time.
It’s probably the closest encounter I have ever had with the Spirit of the Lord. It’s the time in my life, when I first had faith the size of a mustard seed.
It’s a very real story, where I saw life bloom from a tree that had been planted in the dark salty waters of the ocean., and had forgotten its nature.
Tanner, do you mind bringing some musical color to this story, please?
Annie was a woman that I met on the streets of Los Angeles in 2010. 15 years ago.
I was on a mission trip with my high-school youth group and we were working in Skid Row, a horrible place that was full of so much evil, it was tangible in the air. There was a thickness to the environment that weighed on you.
It’s a 55 block neighborhood in Central LA that has been quarantined off for homeless people to stay.
It is rampant with crime. CrimeGrade.org says that Skid Row is less safe than 99% of all neighborhoods in the United States.
The crime rate is 69% higher than the national average.
90% of women in Skid Row have been involved in sexual violence.
70% of the people there live without any form of shelter.
The enemy has built fortifications in that place. And I looked into the eyes of more than one person...and saw the demonic looking back at me.
It was in this place, that I met Annie. It was in this place of death...that God turned is face toward me and my 5 friends, and changed our lives forever. Never again, would I be the same.
The sun was starting to set, it was about 8:30, 9 o’clock. We had been handing out food and toiletries as a way to start conversations and pray for people. Sharing with them the message of the gospel.
And I heard yelling from down the street. A woman sounded as if she was in distress and needed help.
When she came under the light of a street lamp, I could see that she was approaching us in a wheelchair, pushing as hard as she could go.
When she drew near, I could hear her words more clearly: “Don’t forget about me! I need prayer too, PLEASE don’t forget about me.
As we spoke and shared time together, I evaluated her physical condition: her teeth were black and rotted out; her hands were crooked and calloused; Her nails were dirty and several inches long; Her skin was filthy; She smelt like a sewer on a hot day; She wore a beanie on her head and I could see her short hair poking through holes all in it.;
Her wheelchair was weighed down by ALL of her belongings, mostly clothes and blankets, some knick knacks, things hanging everywhere.
Her legs were nothing but bone, no muscle. They looked entirely too small compared to her upper body.
She told us that she grew up in New York and used to be a professional dancer. She traveled around the country and performed in some of the biggest theaters.
But she developed a severe disorder called Avascular Necrosis. Simply put: her hip joints started rotting away.
That disorder, coupled with a serious car accident, left Annie nearly paralyzed from the waist down.
She spent all her money, down to her last dollar, on doctors in LA. She spent her first night on the streets… 20 years before this story took place. That would have been 1990.
The only family she still had was her son, and he was her protector. But there was a problem: Her son had been missing for several days and she feared he was dead.
Annie told us that a group of guys had previously threatened both Annie and her son, threatening to kill him and take her wheel chair from her.
Annie came to us, begging for prayer, because she was afraid of being left alone, to die in the dirt.
Many of us, I imagine, don’t have many experiences that can relate with this type of fear.
I sure didn’t. I was a high-school kid that had everything going for him.
But I saw her that night. As God saw her, I think.
I saw who she was, and who she could have been, had circumstances played out differently.
And my heart broke for that woman. My heart broke for the state of the world, and the victories that the forces of evil get to have over God’s creation. This should not be. This is NOT the way God intended for us to live in His world.
The next events live in my mind...in near perfect clarity.
When I close my eyes, I can still see her...sitting in her wheelchair...clutching to my arm like a drowning man in a storm.
We all laid hands on her, and began praying over her. Nobody was leading, but we were all praying our own prayer over Annie. It sounded jumbled and totally incoherent, our guide told us after that he could not understand what any one of us were saying.
We prayed like that for a long time, well passed sunset. The light was gone from the sky, but it was starting to burn in my chest. A feeling of heat, like it was trying to burst out from me.
My voice was breaking, not from emotion, but from this fire in my soul. And I felt as if I could pray like this forever. As if THIS was how God wanted to be called upon. On behalf of someone else, someone who was broken in the worst ways.
It was during this prayer, that I felt it. I felt something click. All fear, all doubt, all shame...gone. I could see with 100% clarity. I KNEW...God would do something. I KNEW, with faith the size of a mustard seed...that my Savior was getting ready to take action.
In the midst of the jumbled conference call of a prayer, I spoke with a strength and clarity that did not belong to me.
Words came out of my mouth, and I felt as if they weren’t mine. Someone else was speaking through me, I just needed to commit to opening my mouth...and BELIEVE.
In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, get up and walk.
Every prayer stopped silent in its tracks, immediately. Silence.
I opened my eyes, tears flowing like rivers down my face, and I said it again:
In the name of Jesus Christ, get up and walk.
One by one, each of my friends began to repeat the same command upon her: Get up, and walk. Get up, and WALK.
All around the circle, 6 believers pointed at a tree that was planted in the darkness of the deepest ocean waters...and we told her to GROW, according to her nature as one made in the image of the Almighty God.
We pointed at the mountain of burdens, brought on by her circumstances, and we told them to move.
And church...let me tell you...with full sincerity and honesty...those mountains didn’t just move...They FLED.
They fled from the authority that is in the name of Jesus Christ.
Annie grabbed the arms of her wheelchair and shimmied to the edge of her seat. Then she launched herself out of her chair and stood straight up for the first time in 20 years.
I looked at her legs, and they looked to be in perfect proportions. No longer frail.
She stood there, tall in the night, face pointed toward the night sky. Silence fell upon us, and I felt the Lord urge me to speak once more...
Now dance like David, Annie.
She jumped and shouted and began singing a song of praise to the Lord.
And as she jumped with new found strength, I lost all of mine.
I collapsed into Annie’s arms, so moved by the miraculous wonders of our God, and I wept into her shoulder. I weighed 200lbs and she had been immobile in a wheelchair for 20 years....and SHE was holding ME up, dancing with me.
I danced with her, and the song we sang together was a song I have never heard, either before that day, or since. My 5 friends make the same claim. I believe it was a song of Heaven, one that angels sing, perhaps.
When I get to heaven, I expect to be moved by that song again.
When we said our goodbyes to Annie...she meant it. She said goodbye to the physical chains of her past, leaving her wheelchair and everything on it.
She told us that, OUR faith got her out of that chair, and HER faith would have her walk away from it.
Faith... the size... of a mustard seed.
Simple Words.. Spark Revival.
Some of you here need to be told… no, commanded… to Get Up.
LIVE, according to your nature… even in a place that tries its hardest to snuff out your life.
BE PLANTED by the stream, who’s Waters of Life will always quench, though you may be walking through the shadow of the valley of death.
Some others of you here need to do the telling! You need to do the commanding!
There are things in your life that are keeping you from walking your purpose in Christ, keeping you from doing the very things that is central to the mission of a Jesus Follower:
Preach. The. Gospel. To. All. Nations. Everyone.
Preach. The. Gospel. To. All. Nations. Everyone.
We are called to submit those things. Because...
3. Salvation Follows Submission
3. Salvation Follows Submission
That’s our third point.
While the rest of the worship team comes up here...
Let’s watch this play out with the Ninevites:
6 The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
7 And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water,
8 but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.
9 Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”
10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.
These people, who did nothing but evil...their lives full of nothing but sin...were forgiven.
They were spared Yahweh’s Justice.
Why? Why did God relent on his judgement?
What does the text tell us is the reason?
They turned from their evil way.
They turned from their evil in every way they could think.
Get off of the thrones they have made for themselves
Took off expensive garments
Donning of sackcloth
Sitting in ashes
Fasting
Praying
Ceased violence
They turned...and God relented. Salvation Follows Submission.
I am here to tell you the same thing Jonah told Nineveh.
There is a day that is coming, when Jesus is going to overthrow the powers of this world.
Do not be caught sleeping when that day comes.
Respond. Now. Turn from your sin, and God will stay His hand. He will relent, for Jesus Christ has already taken the punishment of judgement on his back.
Hold Jesus in your heart like like a warm lamp on a dark night. And have faith, even the size of a mustard seed.
And do so quickly, He is coming soon.
Prayer
