Jesus, Greater Than Jonah | Jayson Casper

Speaking of NBC's global efforts, again, with Jonah, we've been highlighting our focus on global missions.

We've had a number of world partners come in and share about their ministries.

We have another one with us here today who's going to be our guest speaker.

That is Jason Casper.

We've supported Jason and Julie for many, many years.

They have a very impactful ministry.

And uh if you don't know Jason, I'm gonna let him introduce himself because I will not do him justice.

And then he's gonna be uh doing a bit of a coda on Jonah today uh and related texts.

So, Jason, welcome.

We're so glad to hear from you this morning.

Thanks, Bob.

Good morning, everyone.

Uh it's nice to be back again.

This is uh a church that has supported us for a long time.

Uh, as you said, many years, Bob, but it goes back to 1998 that we first served overseas, ascent and supported by this church.

When I got married in 2002, my wife Julie was a member of this congregation.

So we thank you guys for all of your prayers.

We serve uh just outside of the city of Beirut, Lebanon.

We've been there for the past seven years, and uh, we do want to give our assurances to everyone that we are safe.

There are bombs dropping 15 minutes from our home, but not in our neighborhood.

So it's a very weird thing to try to describe, but we are okay, and there are contingency plans in place if it ever gets worse.

But God willing, we will be headed back home in uh the end of this month.

And so we invite your prayers in that regard.

My wife Julie has perhaps more of a traditional missionary type of ministry.

She works with moms in prayer and uh out of the school where our kids attend, it's a mixed Muslim and Christian environment, and she organizes all sorts of community events, play dates, hikes in the mountains, baking cookies, and brings together a community in which people, whether they follow God or not, are able to experience his love and come along one step further in that journey.

My own work is less traditional.

I serve as a journalist.

I write with Christianity today, and four months ago I began a new publication, I call it Middle East Harmony, in which I tried to convey the perspectives of the Middle East Church, tell its stories, in a way that seeks to overcome the points of tension that often divide religious groups in the region.

Something that can work to bring everyone closer to peace if we understand the good motivations that often sometimes get misunderstood and drive people apart.

But what we're doing today is continuing the sermon series on Jonah, bringing that to conclusion, but in a way that is going to do just as Jesus did and close it with a focus on himself.

Jesus greater than Jonah.

Now, I do get to begin this sermon with an example from my journalism.

Several years ago, I was able to do a story looking at the prophet and seeing what he was meaning in the Middle Eastern context.

And I did that because I discovered something very interesting in that local history, perhaps legend, says that when Jonah was vomited by the whale, he landed on the shores of Lebanon.

So if you just take a look at this picture, this is amazing beachfront property, now located in the Lebanese city of Jie, which is a mixed Muslim Christian area.

And from here, of course, we don't quite know how it landed or where it took place, but he in the map journeyed northeast, and you can advance the slide.

Joppa, the first circle there at the bottom, is where he boarded the ship on the path to Tarshish.

And then, you know, he landed somewhere, of course.

The fish swam around for a little while, might as well have been that spot.

But then he went about 300 hours walking, maybe on a donkey, God knows, and landed somewhere up in modern-day Nineveh in the top right corner of that screen.

Now it's very nice of Google Maps to kind of show that dog leg between the two circles, that reflects the fact that you cannot go between Israel and Lebanon today because of the war.

And that is also reflected in that second circle to the north in GiA, because there are ancient Maronite Catholic mosaics that have Jonah and the whale just depicted, going back for generations, establishing that for the ancient times they thought that this was the spot.

Now, Jonah is a Muslim prophet also, and so the Sunni Muslims and the Shiite Muslims who live in this contested neighborhood, they can't agree on who controls the property that says he landed.

And so in the middle of all this, Hezbollah took its money and they built themselves a huge mosque and said, it was here.

So if you look at this next picture, that is the mosque in which that rectangle allegedly contains the body and remains of Jonah.

Now there's about four other places in the Middle East that say, no, we've got the real thing.

But nonetheless, Muslims and Christians look to this location and say, yeah, this is at least where he landed.

And now you can't really make it out in the picture, but on the top of that tomb is Arabic inscriptions taken from the Quran that say this there is no God but you.

Glory be to you.

And I, this is the voice of Jonah speaking here, was one of the wrongdoers.

This prayer is prayed by Muslims all around the world whenever they find themselves in distress.

So just like Jonah, wit's end in the body of a whale, this story is in the Quran as well.

And he prayed this prayer and God spat him out to safety.

Muslims today look the same thing with that confession, which is very interesting because it conveys something that the Bible doesn't quite convey.

When Jonah says, I was one of the wrongdoers, this is a statement of repentance.

We don't know in the book of Jonah in the Bible whether Jonah repented or not.

It's an open question.

So in the Quran, Jonah is a hero.

And we look to Jewish tradition, especially in the early periods of Judaism after the uh, you know, the ministry of Jesus, we find something a little bit similar happening too.

Now, in the series that you've found so far, Jonah is presented maybe not in the greatest light.

Now, I think this is an amazing exegesis.

It fits perfectly the way in which the story brings out that he was very ethnocentric, concerned for his own kind, missing God's vision for the nations.

But early Jewish tradition says there's a different reason why Jonah ran away.

There's a rabbi named Rashi from the 11th century.

And basically what he does is says, Jonah ran from God because he was afraid that if the Gentiles repented, the Jewish people would look really bad because they weren't.

And so, in this understanding, Jonah ran away because he was so devoted to preserve the reputation of God's people that he was willing to sacrifice himself and even run from God himself.

That's a pretty amazing testimony.

And by the third century after Jesus, we find the story of Jonah being read officially on the synagogue calendar on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of repentance.

So in both traditions, we get the focus on repentance and we get Jonah as a hero, which is a little different than the way we read them today, in which at least he's kind of suspect.

But this understanding that Jonah was a hero also helps us make sense of how Jesus made use of the character of Jesus when he presents himself as greater than Jonah.

And so let's take a look at that now and let's try to figure out exactly what he meant by this.

So, if we could read the scriptures, Jesus is speaking to the people, and he says, the men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.

For they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now one greater than Jonah is here.

He goes on to say, make another comparison.

The queen of the south, this is Sheba, will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.

For she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here.

This really only makes sense if the people listening to Jesus view Jonah as a hero.

Now we can understand that with Solomon, the pinnacle of wisdom.

But Jonah, yeah, that's how they saw him.

And what Jesus is saying is he's focusing attention not on these characters, but on himself.

I am greater than Jonah.

I am greater than Solomon.

And this fits in the message that Jesus had been given as well, because earlier in this chapter, he says, I am greater than the temple.

He says, I am the Lord of the Sabbath.

And whatever we think of these heroes of the past, Jesus is reorienting their attention onto him himself.

Now this, of course, comes within a context.

Because to understand what he's doing, he's trying to show that no matter what we received in the past, something new is happening here, and I am greater.

How?

Let's take a look at three examples in which Jesus is greater than Jonah.

The first one, he is greater than Jonah in power.

If you remember from the sermons before in the early chapters, Jonah ran from God.

He found himself on this boat and he's sleeping soundly in the hull.

And as the storm is raging and everyone is panicking, Jonah is completely unaware of the danger that's all around him.

Jesus, by contrast, when he was on the Sea of Galilee and a storm raged, he was sleeping peacefully, with no worry whatsoever.

But their responses are dramatically different.

Jonah, when he's stirred from his sleep, has compassion on the soldiers around him.

This isn't their fault, he realizes that, and he says, throw me overboard.

That's the solution to how to bring peace to the sea.

What does Jesus do, by contrast?

Peace, be still.

He speaks the words and there's silence.

Clearly, Jesus is more powerful, greater than Jonah in this aspect.

Now that's not Jesus' main focus.

Jesus' main focus is how he is greater than Jonah in sacrifice.

And here we should read exactly what it is that Jesus said.

So if we go to the next verse, Jesus is telling the people, for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Now, Jonah, the sacrifice that he was making for the sailors on the boat, almost kind of looks like an appeasement of the gods.

You know, get rid of me, and it'll be okay for you guys.

But where Jonah went down for three days into the belly of the fish, God saved him as an individual.

He called out to God, God saved him, it's amazing.

But when Jesus was three days in the belly of the earth, he saved us.

And here again, Jesus is putting that focus onto himself.

I am the one that brings the sacrifice, that brings salvation to all of us.

I am greater than Jonah.

But there's a third aspect in which Jesus is greater than Jonah that maybe isn't obvious from these texts.

And if you follow with me as I go through the rest of this sermon, I think you will see that what Jesus is really showing us that this third manner in which he is greater than Jonah is in righteous anger.

And here, again, you'll have to follow in what I'm trying to say.

But the sermon series so far has established Jonah as a very angry character.

He's angry with God.

And that's okay as far as it goes.

We can be angry with God.

We need to tell him that.

But he's certainly also angry at the Ninevehites.

And that anger is righteous.

They're wicked people.

They're going to come and they're going to destroy Israel.

God, okay, he'll have mercy on them.

Jonah's not very happy about it.

But that anger is pointed outward.

What does Jesus say?

How does he in the Sermon on the Mount tell us to deal with this frustration we have with those around us?

Basically, take the log out of your own eye first.

Then you will be able to see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.

As wicked as those Ninevehes were, that's a speck compared to the sins of the people of Israel.

And Jesus is greater than Jonah in righteous anger because he's pointing his anger in the correct direction at his own kind.

This is what the prophets always did.

Yes, they had messages for the nations, but they were calling the people of Israel to account for their failure to follow God properly, and Jesus did the same.

So, greater in power, greater in sacrifice, greater in righteous anger.

But we have to ask the question, why was Jesus so angry?

Up in the verses so far, maybe we haven't quite seen it clearly yet.

So if we go to the next slide, this is the way that Jesus introduces this sign of Jonah himself being greater.

It's prompted by this question from the Pharisees.

They and the teachers of the law said to him, Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.

Sorry, go back, please.

I think I might have missed a verse.

One Briar?

Yes, this one.

He said of them, in response to this question, a wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah.

And so this is what's introducing the little mini-sermon that Jesus gives here.

But this language, wicked and adulterous generation, it kind of seems unprompted.

I mean, what's the big deal?

They just wanted a sign, right?

Jesus did signs here, he did signs there, he did signs everywhere.

Okay, maybe these Pharisees were late to the game.

They didn't see this one.

They want to see it too.

Might as well let Jesus prove his case.

Well, one of the problems is that Jesus just did a sign, and the Pharisees responded rather cruelly to what they saw.

So if we advance again just a little bit, now we come to the episode itself.

This is the sign that Jesus had done, which flows into him talking about Jonah.

They brought a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute.

And Jesus healed him so that he could both talk and see.

And all the people were astonished and said, Could this be the son of David?

But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, It is only by Beelzebel, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.

Jesus had just performed an amazing miracle.

A child of Israel is now able to talk, able to see, and is freed from the demon that possessed him.

And their response is to say, you are in league with the devil.

I would be pretty mad at this myself.

This is terribly rude, completely unbelieving, and setting himself themselves up in opposition to Jesus and his ministry.

Now, it's even a little bit worse.

Because yeah, Jesus is going to be mad at this, but he's also not in a really great mood anyway.

If we think back one chapter earlier in Matthew 11, Jesus receives a delegation from John the Baptist.

The one who launched his ministry in the first place.

And now John's disciples are coming to Jesus to say, I'm not sure.

Are you the one, or should we expect someone else?

What is Jesus' answer to him?

He says, look at this sign, and look at this sign and look at this sign, I did this, I did this, I did this.

And yet, even John's disciples aren't sure.

In the same chapter, Jesus sends out the twelve disciples to go and preach the same messages that he's been preaching.

And yet, what is Jesus' reflection after that?

He says, Woe to you, Bethesda, woe to you, Khorazon.

If the miracles that had been done in your presence had been done entire in Sidon, they would have repented in sackcloth and ashes.

Jesus has been doing ministry for a long time, and people just aren't getting it.

His own kind are not believing.

Okay.

But he's going to meet this challenge head on.

If the Pharisees are going to come and say that you are working with the power of Beelzebub, well, guys, that just doesn't even make sense, really.

Because a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand.

Right?

I mean, if I'm working with the devil, why am I going to be driving out his other agents who have taken over this guy's life?

Okay, the logic isn't there.

But since I am driving these demons out by the power of God, this shows that the power of God has come into your midst.

But here Jesus then does something perhaps a little unusual again.

Because if a kingdom divided against its stealth will not stand, what is Jesus doing except elevating himself to such a high place, greater than Jonah, greater than Solomon, and saying, I am the one that makes a difference.

And whoever is not with me is against me.

This is division, right?

You follow me or you don't.

This is the message of somebody who's frustrated, but it's also the truth.

If he is greater than all of these other figures and institutions in Jewish history, following him is the choice that is going to determine your destiny.

And the Pharisees, they're choosing the wrong side.

So who are you going to follow?

Division.

Now, be careful here, because this isn't only the way that Jesus talks.

In another passage of the Gospels, there's a different occasion in which there's a bunch of people over here, we don't really know who they are, but the disciples get wind of them because they are also casting out demons in Jesus' name.

And the disciples come back to Jesus to say, hey, should we stop this guy?

He's not one of us.

And Jesus says, Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it.

And then he says, Whoever is not against me is for me.

What's the difference here?

Well, I think it's the same reason why Jesus proves himself greater than Jonah in righteous anger.

These outsiders that are doing good in Jesus' name, this is amazing.

But to the Pharisees and those who are opposing him, if you are not with me, you are against me.

And here Jesus finds himself in that same spirit as the Muslim Jonah, the Jewish Jonah, and of course all the prophets of Israel beside, and he's looking at his own people and he's saying, Repent.

Repent.

Your sins are at Stake here.

And Jesus does something, and he flips the script further on the Pharisees.

He says, You want to talk about the demonic?

Okay.

Let's talk about the demonic.

And immediately after setting himself up as the sign of Jonah, on whom salvation depends, Jesus then launches into this part of his sermon.

Sorry, back one.

One slide prior.

Oh yeah, no, I'm sorry, my mistake.

They brought to him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him so he could both talk and see.

I'm sorry.

One ahead.

Yes, this is it.

Sorry, we'll go back to that slide in a moment.

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.

Then it says, I will return to the house I left.

When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean, and put in order.

Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they all go in and live there.

The final condition of that person is worse than the first.

So this is what Jesus then tells the crowd, tells the Pharisees immediately after, identifying himself as the sign of Jonah.

And basically, he's saying, watch out.

Now, we see this because we have to look a little bit more carefully at the miracle that he did.

And so now we go back to the original slide.

And we find that this demon-possessed man, blind, mute, Jesus healed him, we're not told that this character had faith.

I mean, maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but while the people who brought him to Jesus certainly had faith, otherwise they wouldn't have brought him in the first place, the man himself, well, I'm not so sure about him.

And these sections in which he says, when the demon comes out, the house is swept clean, but yet seven other demons might take his place, the final condition is worse than the first.

And that language, something worse, is not the first time that Jesus has said this.

If you think with me, back to John chapter 5, Jesus was going to the pool of Bethesda.

John 5 · chapter mention

And at this location, there were a whole crowd of people who needed healing.

And they were sitting there waiting for something to happen in this pool, the waters to stir, so that they can go down and find healing.

And Jesus kind of just shows up in the middle of them.

So when we read these verses, this character, this paralyzed man, Jesus saw him lying there, learned he had been in this condition for a long time.

He asked him, Do you want to get well?

Sir, the invid replied, he doesn't know who Jesus is.

I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred.

When I'm trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.

And Jesus said to him, Get up, pick up your mat, and walk.

At once the man was cured, he picked up his mat and walked.

Again, we see a character in whom there's a healing, but not necessarily faith.

Right?

I mean, Jesus just said, You want to get better?

He gives some excuse.

Jesus says, Okay, you're fine.

Here you are, healed.

Pick up your mat and start walking.

It's an amazing story.

And the story continues for a few verses, but again, we wonder that this person might not have faith himself.

So we go ahead, and Jesus then finds him in the crowd, and he tells him this.

See, you are well again.

Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.

Here there's no example of the demon, eh?

The first one, okay, the demons.

Here, that same something worse language is present, demon or not.

And so how we understand this whole demonic thing or not, I think as we move into the application, there is a clear message here for some of us.

If you are in church today because you're a good person, and good people go to church, well then understand there's probably a good bit about you that is not good.

Be careful.

Your house is clean.

Do you want it seven times worse in the days to come?

Just tell God you're sorry.

Or if you were raised in a Christian home and you have the benefits of life in an environment that is lived according to Christian principles, but you have never told God yourself that my life is yours, then beware.

You're swept clean.

But what's next?

Something worse may come.

Now, here I don't think we should focus too much on the individual, because that's not where Jesus puts his focus either.

Let's go to the next slide and see what happens.

We had just read of the demonaic.

We're back in Matthew now.

The final condition of that person is worse than the first.

But here's what Jesus says next.

That is how it will be with this wicked generation.

This blind mute that Jesus healed, he's an object lesson.

Yes, his future is at stake.

But Jesus is making a point to talk to the entire crowd and saying, This generation is wicked for rejecting me.

Now, how do we understand the demonaic here?

I don't quite get it.

Possession, dispossession, repossession with seven.

What about now with the generation?

Is a demon going to inhabit each one of these Jewish leaders and those in the surrounding crowds that are against Jesus?

Or is it more like a spirit or an ethos in which a culture can kind of yield itself to negative impulses?

I'm not sure.

But if we look very clearly at this passage, right now all that's happening with the Pharisees are basically they're calling Jesus names.

They're really mean names.

But how is it that several chapters later, by the end of this story, they're conspiring to crucify him?

I mean, really?

He's a backwater prophet.

He's a minor nuisance.

He has no power, no armies.

Oh, yes, of course, we know he's a greater threat than that for all the reasons you've studied in other sermons, but to kill the guy?

Notice the power of the demonic at work in this generation.

It's phenomenal how rapidly this descended into chaos.

And here we have a second warning, not just for the individual, but for Christian civilization.

For Europe, for America, for Latin America, all these places that have been Christian for generations.

Our houses have been swept clean.

Where are they going?

We can see that this application is legitimate to bring into play because of what Jesus said to the people of his day.

Who's going to rise in judgment against those Jewish people?

The people of Nineveh.

The queen of Sheba.

Take a look at this map.

Sheba today is Yemen.

Nineveh is Iraq.

You want to live there?

Back in the day, these places had thriving Christian civilizations.

In Yemen, there's a city called Nejran, and the people there were famous Christians who endured during great persecution.

Now, eventually, the Muslims rise up after that episode in which they demonstrated the sincerity of their faith through death.

And the Muslims aren't out to kill them, they just make a deal with them.

Like, okay, you guys pay your taxes, we'll leave you alone.

You leave us alone, we'll leave you alone.

The Muslims are focused north.

They want to push into the very rich and wealthy lands of Christian civilization up there in the Middle East.

But in Yemen, it's out of the way, they can leave them be.

It's okay.

So the Christians made a deal.

Within a couple hundred years, their Christianity just completely withered away.

For this reason or that, they converted to Islam.

Now, up in the north, in Nineveh, Baghdad, basically, they made a different choice.

Now, the Muslims there, they were there in force.

This is the capital of their empire.

Baghdad became so eventually.

And the Christians decided to cooperate.

And in partnership with the Muslims, they helped create the most thriving civilization the world had known to that point in time.

The Library of Alexandria, you know, generations before, was certainly rivaled, at least, by the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

And all of the geniuses of Christian civilization joined with the geniuses of Muslim civilization, and they produced this location that basically preserved the entire heritage of Greek philosophy for us today, as they translated it into Arabic.

But before too long, the Mongols came from the East and basically just killed everybody in their path, Muslims and Christians together.

So I'm not trying to make a point on what they did.

In one case, they kind of just kept their distance from society at large and the outstanding culture.

In another one, they partnered with the outstanding culture.

In both cases, they came to nothing.

So Christian civilization today has those same choices.

We might do this, we might do that.

I don't know what's the thing to do.

But none of it really matters if your house is simply swept clean.

Because today, look at these two countries and where they are, despite the heritage that they had.

And where are we going as a nation ourselves?

Repent.

But this isn't perhaps the final application to make.

Now maybe this third warning isn't drawn directly from the text.

But if we have something to warn Christian civilization, aren't we doing the same as Jonah?

And looking out there at all the other people that are ruining this great heritage we've got?

Jesus is greater than Jonah because he directs his anger at the right people.

And so we have to also warn the church.

What is our role in this whole episode of what we do with Jesus?

Let's read the next verses.

We skip to another section of the Bible here.

We're in Revelation now, and Jesus is writing to the seven churches in Asia Minor.

One of them is Ephesus, and he says, I hold this against you.

You have forsaken the love you had at first.

Consider how far you have fallen.

Repent and do the things you did at first.

If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

So here we're talking about a very different situation.

The demonaic or the paralyzed man.

Demon involved, not demon involved, what certainly was in neither of these cases was the Spirit of God.

So we here have the Spirit of God.

We are protected from these worst possible outcomes, seven times worse.

But at the same time, if we have lost our first love, the warning is God's going to come and take our lampstand and be done with us.

He'll find somebody else to work through, sure.

But whatever influence we can have on that wider Christian civilization that we're frustrated by, well, our attention needs to be here.

And where are we failing to follow Christ correctly?

Jesus was, as we are, frustrated with the situation we find ourselves in.

Because I imagine that most of you are leading the types of lives that you're supposed to be leading.

But there's one other aspect of this story that brings it even closer to home.

And here it gets very, very personal.

But to find it, we have to look outside of this passage in Matthew to the parallel passage in Mark.

Because we've got this episode, Jesus is healing a demonaic.

He has been called in league with the devil, Beelzebub.

He responds with this talk about the sign of Jonah.

And then he warns about the house swept clean.

But everything starts off in the very beginning with a different emphasis.

So let's read from Mark.

When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said he is out of his mind.

Even Jesus' family didn't believe him.

And we know that this is connected to the start of the episode because it goes in to this episode about Beelzebub.

And then everything happened as we've done in the sermon so far.

And when all of this is done, guess who's still standing there at the end, waiting to take charge of him?

His family.

So we read the next verse.

Now everything's finished.

We're back to Matthew.

Jesus was still talking to the crowd, and his mother and brothers stood outside wanting to speak to him.

And someone told him, Your mother and your brothers are standing outside.

They're wanting to speak to you.

Okay.

What does Jesus say?

He points to his disciples.

Here are my mother and my brothers.

For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.

Gave a warning to the church before we need to be on our guard.

But here we see that the church is the answer.

When Jesus has had a horrible day of ministry, he's tired, he's opposed, he's frustrated, no one's listening to him.

And now even his family is waiting to take charge of him because they don't believe in him either.

Where does he find his refuge?

In his disciples.

That's us.

And if we are the church, if we are this body of Christ, we can provide Jesus the refuge that he desires today.

If that is what we are.

And how do we know if we are that or not?

Well, he says it very clearly.

Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven, is that us?

Are we doing that?

Well, what is it?

What is the will of the Father for us to qualify into?

We wrap up the sermon here a little bit because as we review the cast of characters from today's sermon, we find exactly what the steps are in being one who is aligned with this will.

First, the people of Nineveh.

Why?

Because they repented at the preaching of Jonah.

I'd say most of you have done that already.

You're part of the body of Christ.

But have you lost your first love?

Do you need to repent again?

We all do.

But that's only step one.

Who do we see next in the story?

The Queen of Sheba.

Why is she highlighted?

Because she listened to the wisdom of Solomon.

The second thing you do with the will of the Father is you listen to God.

You read the Bible.

What's he have to teach us?

Right?

Let us soak ourselves in the scriptures so that we understand what the will of the Father is.

This is wisdom right here for the taking.

Listen to it.

And the third person we'll look at actually gives us two lessons.

The paralyzed man of John.

What did he do?

He picked up his mat and walked.

Why?

Well, Jesus told him to.

And if there is something that God is telling us to do, the will of the Father is that we do it.

If you have something on your heart that is going to make this world a better place, do it.

It's that simple.

That's the will of the Father.

That's what qualifies us as his church.

But yet the paralyzed man had something else that he did.

And this last thing brings us exactly to the point of the sermon series on Jonah, what you've heard week after week for this past summer.

And we read the man went away and told the Jewish leaders that it was Jesus who made him well.

If we have been healed, it is the will of the Father that we tell others about it.

So this is it.

Do we wish to be the church that gives Jesus comfort when he is far more frustrated with this world outside than we are?

Let's look to ourselves.

Let's repent.

Let's soak up the wisdom of God's word.

Let's do what he tells us to do.

And then let's share that message with those around us.

This is how we find ourselves in partnership with the one who is greater than Jonah.

Who three days in the belly of the earth saved us from our sins and all in this world who will believe it.

Thank you guys for listening.

Let's pray together and then worship as we close.

Lord, thank you for our salvation.

And continually remind us all the ways that we fall short of your will, but your love is with us all the same, constantly forgiving, constantly sanctifying us to be more and more like Jesus.

Help us to walk in that path and to share that message with others.

We pray that you would bless this church that has followed Jesus for generations.

And as they seek to do it now, give them the wisdom to know how to give this message into this environment so that those around will be drawn in and see that love that you have for them.

Not angry with the world as is so easy, but loving it as Jesus did himself.

Thank you for our share in this message, and just thank you for this ability to be here today, and may you bless us all as we follow after you.

In Jesus' name.