The God Jonah Could Not Forgive | Jonah 4:1-4 | Pastor Bob Erbig

Well, this morning we're continuing our series on Jonah, running from mercy.

We have come to Jonah chapter 4, and one of the it's it's if you've not read Jonah 4 recently, it is one of the most uh intriguing chapters and conclusions in all of Scripture.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

Uh and if you're just joining us, let me just recap for you.

Uh Jonah, the prophet, uh, was called by God to preach repentance to the city of Nineveh, a major city in the Assyrian Empire.

But instead he runs away.

God stops him with a storm.

Uh he gets thrown into the ocean, swallowed by a big fish, of course, in Jonah.

That fish then vomits him back on the shore, where he chooses to obey God, go and go to Nineveh to preach to them.

Now, last week Pastor Dave covered chapter three, uh, where we saw Jonah's missionary efforts in a hostile culture, and shockingly, the Ninevites turned from their wicked ways and believe in Yahweh God.

Chapter three ends on a high note in verse 10.

We read this: 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.

Now that verse is a majestic picture of God's mercy toward people who don't deserve it.

His mercy and grace are what he offers to us also in the gospel message.

This mercy is what all people need to hear, and it is the cause for which missionaries give their entire lives.

And that was the story of Mer Merilyn Escher.

If you don't know Marilyn, she's a world venture missionary deployed to Senegal, West Africa, uh, focusing on Bible translation.

And also, if you're not aware, MBC has a strategic mission focus on Senegal.

We've been doing that for over 20 years.

Uh, thank you to Paul Wilford for his visionary leadership in those efforts.

Um, we have another trip planned, uh, April 1st to the 11th, 2027, so that's next April.

Uh, save the date.

And if God is nudging your heart this morning or later on to go, uh, please talk with Paul.

He can tell you all the details.

Again, our series on Jonah is focused on missions.

VBS is a way to live out our missionary call locally, and traveling to Senegal is a way to live it out globally.

In fact, I remember visiting Senegal about a decade ago where I met Marilyn and heard her passionately speak about translating the Bible into the dominant language of Senegal, which is Wolof.

Uh, Woloff.

Now, World Venture had begun these efforts as early as 1963.

Marilyn here joined the team in 1972, and so she's been laboring for over 50 years trying to learn the language and lead a team of translators to bring God's word to the Woloff people in Senegal.

The Wolof are notoriously difficult to reach for the gospel, and removing that language barrier would help open doors for Jesus.

Now that translation, which Marilyn has worked on for over 50 years, was finally completed in early 2026.

And Christians across Senegal have been holding celebrations.

You can see some pictures here.

It's a big deal for missions in Senegal.

And Marilyn, now in her 80s, attended these celebrations, marking the completion of her life's work.

A huge missional success story.

The gospel may now explode in Senegal as a result.

Now, how do you picture her reaction at these celebrations?

I suspect you might think there will be joy on her face.

But what if something different happened?

Imagine for a moment that Marilyn stood up holding the finished translation of the Wolof Bible in her hands, listening to reports about the Wolf people turning to Christ, and instead of joy, she became enraged.

She took the Wolf Bible and threw it out the window and then stormed out of the room.

Would you find that startling?

Confusing?

Awkward?

Well, that's exactly what happens in Jonah chapter 4.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

That after the missionary success of chapter 3, you would expect Jonah to be dancing in the streets like King David, praising God's goodness.

But that doesn't happen.

In fact, quite the opposite.

Jonah has some words with God about his character and his goodness and his mercy.

And so Jonah's running again, but this time in his heart.

Now, before we dive into the text, I want to invite you to ask yourself a question today.

What makes you angry?

What makes you angry?

In fact, perhaps there's a listener here today who has never been angry a day in their life.

And if that is you, find me after the service because we could put your counseling skills to work.

But of course, all of us get angry at some point in our lives.

So what makes you angry?

Maybe somebody cuts you off in traffic and waves like it's your fault.

A friend talks about you behind your back and then you find out.

A spouse leaves one drop of milk in the container and then puts it back in the fridge.

See, we live in a fallen, broken, dysfunctional world full of fallen, broken, dysfunctional people, and at some point we all get angry at somebody.

Now let's raise the stakes.

What makes you angry, or what could make you angry at God's mercy towards somebody else?

Now, I don't mean here the kind of anger when life doesn't go your way.

I mean something a little more uncomfortable.

Has it ever bothered you when God has been good to somebody who you think didn't deserve it?

Now I know we're all good Christians here today, and we're not supposed to admit something like this, but I suspect that some of us have felt exactly that at some point in our lives, even if we didn't say it out loud.

Maybe you knew somebody who cut corners or broke rules or hurt somebody along the way, and they end up being blessed anyway.

Right?

That promotion, that reputation, that second chance that you never got, this person got it.

And you say, God, why have you been good to this person?

Maybe it's a parent who was never there, who caused real damage, or simply wasn't present for any of your life, and then they call you from a hospital bed in their final weeks and say they've made things right with God.

And everybody around them calls it beautiful.

And part of you wants to believe that too.

Part of you thinks, though, that this person got 60 seconds of Jesus, I'm sorry, on their way out, and that's supposed to undo everything.

Or if you take it further still, right now in northern Nigeria, there's militants tied to groups like Boko Haram who have burned churches, kidnapped schoolgirls, and murdered Christians for their faith by the thousands over years.

Now put yourself in their shoes.

Suppose you woke up tomorrow to the news that all those people who had done all those murders laid down their weapons and gave their lives to Jesus.

Would your first reaction be joy?

Or would some part of you think, not them, not after what they did.

That's not a small thing to feel.

And it's not new.

It's the exact thing happening in the heart of a prophet named Jonah.

Because here's what we actually do sometimes with salvation without realizing it.

We treat salvation like a privilege instead of a gift.

We love it when God shows us grace.

We're just not always so sure.

We want him to show it to those people.

And that's where we find Jonah in chapter four.

And that's why Jonah's ending is both fascinating and overlooked.

Because it invites us into an uncomfortable question.

Is it possible to know God accurately and still be at war with him?

That's the topic of Jonah chapter four, verses one through four.

The chapter is so interesting, I'd like to split it into two sermons.

The first section unfolds in three scenes.

First, we're going to see an angry prophet.

Second, we're going to see a gracious God.

And then finally, we experience a revealing lament.

So let's pray, and then we will look at our text today.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for each person who is here, for each person who is listening right now, Lord.

And I pray this morning that you, Holy Spirit, would come and meet us where we are.

Meet us in our anger, meet us in our disappointments, meet us in our fears.

And Lord, would you turn all of those things into joy and trust?

And may you get the glory for that, Lord God.

Father, there's a little bit of Jonah in all of us, Lord.

And so I pray that you would remove that, bring us to repentance and a new delight in you and your gospel and your grace, Lord God.

Thank you for your word.

We now give you this time and ask that you would speak to us in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

So Jonah chapter 3 ends with Nineveh's repentance and God's relentance.

Jonah 3 · chapter mention

It's a story made for a Sunday morning testimony of God's grace in somebody's life.

We had a baptism at the end of the set at the first service.

We have another one at the end of this service.

We're going to hear about God's grace in people's lives.

Jonah now is a picture of missionary success.

He courageously preaches, even when his life is at risk.

And it worked.

Right?

Jonah chapter 4 begins this way, though.

Jonah 4 · chapter mention

It says, but, but despite those efforts, it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.

Jonah's angry.

Now, for you Seinfeld fans out there, this verse deserves the Kramer reaction.

What in the world?

Come on, Jonah.

Now to make it even more jarring, a literal translation of the original Hebrew here would read, It was evil.

It was evil to Jonah with great evil.

So he's not just really upset here.

He thinks God's action of saving the Ninevehites is evil.

Make no mistake, Jonah hates what God has done here.

But notice there's a powerful word play at work, right?

The Hebrew word for evil, raha, can refer to wickedness, but it can also mean disaster and misery.

And so in Jonah 4, 1, we see the reversal of this use of evil.

First, it was characteristic of the Ninevehes, and now, now it describes the prophet of God.

It's ironic that that word evil in the narrative has shifted from the pagan city to the covenant prophet here in chapter 4.

So don't miss this shocking reversal in the narrative.

In Jonah chapter 3, God's anger and judgment were laser-focused on Nineveh, but when that changed, it was Jonah's anger that was incited.

Jonah 3 · chapter mention

That word angry can be translated as to burn, and it's a thematic thread in chapter 4.

It begins here in verse 1, shows up again in verse 4, and then verse 9.

Now the natural question you might ask yourself today is why exactly is Jonah so angry?

Jonah, like, dude, chill out.

Why is he so angry?

You might say, I don't get it.

This would not make me angry.

I'd be dancing like David.

But that's usually because we're not putting ourselves in the shoes of somebody who maybe is reacting as a husband, a father, a son, with real people to protect.

So let me just start with your own family.

Imagine you knew, you really knew, that a specific group of people was planning something devastating against your children or your extended family.

Now I'm not talking about evil that's kind of out there that we watch on the news, but a credible threat aimed at your house and your neighborhood and your future.

And now imagine that God comes to you and tells you his plan is not to stop these people from acting, not to dismantle them, but to send you or to send somebody to preach to them and hope they change and then they do.

No visible justice, no reckoning in court, no just just mercy given to the very people you believed were coming for your family.

Now, if you stretch that instinct out to what we see in the world, picture an Israeli parent who lost a son or daughter in an attack.

Somebody who has been buried, who has buried a child and now lives with sirens and rockets and the knowledge that some on the other side want to do it again.

Or a Ukrainian family whose home was destroyed by a missile, whose father or son died in the fighting of the war, for them, the other side isn't an abstract headline, it's the face of the people who shattered their family.

And if those families heard that God had decided to show mercy to those very leaders and fighters, rather than hold them responsible with no trials, no clear justice, just forgiveness, because they repented, would you rejoice?

Or would it feel deep down like God was betraying your loved ones?

That's the emotional world that Jonah is living in.

That when he hears that Nineveh is getting mercy, he isn't thinking about cartoon villains in a children's story.

He's thinking about the capital of an empire who has already torn families like his apart and may soon tear them apart again.

And so if we're honest, when we picture our spouse or our kids or our parents in those Israeli or Ukrainian homes, most of us would feel the same knot in the stomach that Jonah feels.

We look at God's mercy and say, God, for them?

After what they've done to us?

And so that's that's the tension this verse is exposing in our hearts.

How would you respond?

Jonah 4-1 forces us to confront an uncomfortable reality.

Sometimes what delights God can disturb us.

Sometimes what delights God can disturb us.

That God's joy here becomes Jonah's offense.

And have we so quickly forgotten the central theme of Jonah chapter 2, verse 9?

Jonah 2:9

Jonah in the belly of the fish, praise.

But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed, I will pay.

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

See, in the depths of the sea, in the dark belly of a fish, Jonah cries out for grace.

He pleads for mercy.

And it's in that moment that he declares this great truth: salvation belongs to the Lord.

It belongs to Yahweh, the true God above all other gods.

But when that very salvation is extended to those Jonah hated, his heart starts to question God's character.

Now, if you come back to me, come back with me to that opening scene I described in Senegal, Marilyn Escher, this missionary who sacrificed her whole life for the will of people, imagine her leaving that celebration, enraged at the prospect of salvation coming to this people far from God.

It is jarring and uncomfortable when a moment of rejoicing turns to anger and resentment.

And yet, have our hearts ever gone there?

Do the desires of my heart match the desires of God's heart?

That's the question here.

And so I'm gonna ask you to be vulnerable for just a moment, church.

As you sit there before the Lord, hearing his word, would you confess to him?

Would you talk to him?

Is there a person in your life, right now or in the past, whose conversion would test your heart?

Picture somebody maybe you knew in high school who had been unkind to you, who had a dark past.

And then you see them at a high school reunion and you find that they've given their life to Christ and maybe they're a pastor.

Would it shock you?

Would you accept it?

Would you believe it?

Right?

Now I know we're not supposed to admit some of these thoughts, but God already knows what's in our heart.

And if our desires are to match his desires, we must confess the deep, dark places that we ignore or we hide.

Or maybe there's a fellow brother or sister in Christ with whom you're angry right now.

You don't believe they deserve grace and mercy.

Perhaps it's somebody even in our own body, or somebody in your family, or a close friend.

I would exhort you this morning, ask, why am I so angry?

And examine it.

Bring it to the cross of Christ.

Allow his blood to wash you clean and move forward with his love for the world.

Friends, we don't need more angry prophets.

We need more people captured by a gracious God.

And that's point number two, a gracious God.

Now, while verse one is pretty startling, verse two is rather breathtaking.

The audacity of Jonah forces us to look into a mirror and go deeper into our own hearts.

Verse 2 explains why Jonah is angry with God.

We read this.

And he prayed, that's Jonah, to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is this, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country?

That is why I made haste to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster.

Can you sense the vitriol in Jonah's voice as he speaks?

This is a man who may have been obedient to God's command in chapter 3, but his heart was not fully submitted to God's mission.

His actions were correct, but his heart was resentful.

And so I want to spend some time here in verse 2 because it is the heart of this section and it's the preparation for the climactic scene we'll see next week.

Notice first that it says Jonah prayed.

Jonah prayed.

Now we have to give the prophet some credit here because he didn't run off and start complaining to friends about God's actions.

That would be talking behind God's back, but right to his face.

No, he confronts God directly.

That's a good thing.

And I wish more of us would do this because I think too many Christians are afraid to share their disappointments and anger with God.

Perhaps we think maybe we're not supposed to feel a certain way.

Perhaps we think God will punish us if we're completely honest with him.

And here's what I would say: God can handle your honesty.

In fact, he wants it.

He can handle your doubt and your disappointment and your anger.

He is God.

He is God.

He wants to hear from his children.

And here's what happens if we're not honest with God when we pray.

We start to stew.

Is there any stewers out there?

Right?

We shut down, we sulk.

Some of us right now we're walking through life with a constant low-grade anger that explodes when somebody irritates us and you say, whoa, what happened there?

Do you know anybody like that?

Are you like that?

Let me give you an illustration.

Just imagine right now that you're in a group text, right?

And somebody says something that really bothers you in this texting thread.

You say, maybe it feels unfair, maybe it feels hurtful, but you know what?

You don't want to start the drama, right?

So you read it, you get this knot in your stomach, and then you say nothing.

You just leave it on red.

And then those, maybe those three little dots start popping up.

Everybody can see that you're typing, and then they disappear, and then you start it again, it's clear that you're typing, and then you delete it again, right?

Then maybe you go and you draft a really long response in your notes app so you can vent without everybody seeing that you're you're typing this really long note, but then you never send it.

See, on the outside you look calm, you look reasonable in the chat, but on the inside you're angry and you don't want to admit it.

And that's what so many of us do with God, right?

We we read, we read what He's said and done, we feel those three little dots creeping up in our heart, we start to form an honest prayer, like, I don't like this, I'm mad at you, and then we erase it.

We go quiet.

We stay polite in our prayers, in our church answers, but the real message is never sent.

And it's Jonah in this chapter showing us what it looks like when somebody finally stops deleting the message and actually says to God, I'm angry about your mercy.

See, we need honest reflection with God in prayer so his word and his spirit can correct our wrong attitudes of our heart.

Because Jonah has a grievance with God here.

What does he say?

He says, God, I told you this would happen.

This is why I got on that boat to Tarshish back in chapter one.

That's why I tried to flee from your presence.

Now pause there.

That's a crucial setup for what Jonah says next.

I want you to notice that his grievance and his anger, as we've examined in this book, are not irrational.

Right?

Jonah had a real reason to fear the Assyrians.

He had a real claim to justice against the atrocities they committed against his people.

He had a reason not to go to Nineveh.

And his words reveal that maybe he even resented God for even sending him.

Have you ever resented God for something he asked you to do?

For someone he called you to forgive.

Again, I know, I know, I know so many of us, we don't want to admit this because it's not the right theological answer, but it is a real human struggle.

And the only way to overcome is to confess, is to remind ourselves who God is.

And that's what the second half of verse 2 does.

Jonah says, For I knew that you're a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.

So Jonah, listen, Jonah is not a newbie prophet.

Jonah is not a brand new believer who knows little about the scriptures.

He knows who God is.

And it's here in Jonah 4, 2 that he gives a direct quotation from Exodus 34, verses 6 and 7, which involved God's self-revelation to Moses after the scene with the golden calf.

Exodus 34:6

Do you remember?

Right?

Moses, after the nation of Israel passed over the Red Sea, they stopped at Mount Sinai, they spent some time there.

Jonah, I'm sorry, Moses goes up to Mount Sinai, he talks to God, God gives him the law, the Ten Commandments, which were to be a guardrail for his people.

Moses then descends from the mountain to present the law, and what does he find?

Well, while he was up there talking to God, God's people quickly fashioned a false God, a golden calf, and they forgot their God, Yahweh.

And so Moses breaks these tablets in righteous anger.

And then he goes back up the mountain to meet with God again, and God graciously gives Moses two new tablets, and he reveals himself to Moses.

And so it's worth looking at the original text, Exodus 34, verse 6.

Exodus 34:6

It says, The Lord passed before him, that's Moses, and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.

But who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

So this is God's self-revelation to his people.

And if you read the Old Testament, verse 6, Exodus 34, 6, in particular, is the most repeated theological formula in the Old Testament.

It functions as Israel's core confession and creed.

And so a devout Israelite like Jonah would have memorized this in his heart.

It would have been the bedrock of his theological life.

Now, perhaps the modern equivalent for us would be something like the Apostles' Creed or the Nicene Creed.

It's a statement about who God is.

Or think of the soaring words of the question one of the Heidelberg Catechism.

What is our only hope in life and death?

That I am not my own, but I belong body and soul to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

The point that I'm making here is that Jonah is a theologian.

Jonah knew who God was.

But notice when he brings it up in chapter 4, verse 2, he's missing the mercy and grace of God.

He misses the part about God being slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

Instead, Jonah wants to focus on the second half.

Right?

God will by no means clear the guilty.

Oh yeah, we like that.

That's right, God.

You get him.

But friends, God is both merciful and just.

And he demonstrates that on the cross through the sacrifice of his son, Jesus Christ.

Mercy and justice meaning.

Jonah misses it.

But that's not the worst part of this.

If you look back at Jonah 4, 2, before he quotes this theological formula, he prefaces it with three words.

He says, For I knew.

In other words, I knew who you were, God.

Oh yeah.

He takes that core theological statement, that self-revelation of God, and he turns it now into an accusation to God.

How dare you, God, actually show mercy?

See, Jonah's a pretty complicated character.

And so are we.

How many of us would have reacted the same way as Jonah?

How many of us are holding a grudge against our creator and our Savior in certain areas?

How many of us have cursed the very name and character of God in our hearts because he dared to act in accordance with his character?

The Lord! The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin.

That's who God is.

I'll give you another illustration.

Some of you may have followed the news about Charlie Kirk's murder trial these past couple weeks and maybe watch pieces of the courtroom proceedings.

Now imagine sitting there in the courtroom, not as a distant observer, but as his wife, Erica, or a close family member, and you're listening to this graphic evidence, you're reliving the worst day of your life, you're hearing every detail of what happened to the person you loved, and part of you longs for clear, decisive justice.

Let the truth come out, let the jury see, let there be a reckoning for what he's done.

And another part of you, as a Christian, is painfully aware that even the accused is not beyond the reach of God.

That salvation belongs to the Lord, that no one is too far gone, that the cross is big enough for victims and perpetrators alike.

So you sit there in the courtroom feeling the tension of God's love and his justice pressed right up against your grief.

That's the tension of Jonah 2.9, Jonah 4.2.

That in chapter 2, Jonah can say, salvation belongs to the Lord.

He loves the mercy of God when he's sinking into the sea, but in chapter 4, when that same mercy is now applied to the people he believes deserve judgment, he's furious.

He knows God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and that's exactly what bothers him.

He wants the courtroom without the possibility of pardon.

He wants justice without the threat of grace.

What kind of God do you believe in?

What kind of God do you love?

Would you go anywhere on mission for the God who is gracious and merciful?

Or does God's mercy offend your sense of justice?

Friends, I would challenge you today.

Is God's mercy something we discuss during our in-depth Bible study, but resist when the rubber meets the road?

When you're sitting emotionally in the courtroom listening to the evidence about what was done to you or your family.

Because when you really and truly understand and experience God's mercy, it will transform you from the inside out.

And some of us maybe need a deep transformation today.

We believe, but we're still fighting with God.

We're still silently arguing with his mercy in the gallery of our hearts.

That's where Jonah was.

Is it possible to know God accurately and still be at war with him?

I think Jonah shows us yes.

He was an angry prophet who encountered a gracious God, and now that encounter finally produces a revealing lament.

A revealing lament.

So verses three and four are really intriguing verses that leave us on this cliffhanger for next week.

So verse 2, Jonah uses God's character against him, and then in verse 3 and 4, Jonah's heart is exposed, and then God responds.

Look at what Jonah says in verse 3.

He says, Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it's better for me to die than to live.

Now, friends, is this a head scratcher for anybody else?

Again, if I recap this whole scene, just we're all on the same page, at the end of chapter 3, Jonah has tremendous missional success with the Ninevehes preaching repentance and destruction, real fire and brimstone stuff, and they respond.

They repent, they give their lives to God.

God shows them mercy.

And it's in the midst of that success that Jonah then gets angry at God, demeans his character, and finally he asks to be killed.

What are we supposed to do with this guy?

Can somebody come and talk to Jonah?

The reaction shows us that Jonah was obedient but lacked true submission to God.

Or if I put it another way, it shows us that God's mission was not Jonah's mission.

God's mission was not Jonah's mission.

Jonah's heart was not aligned with God's heart.

Jonah does not want God's love extending to the Ninevehes.

It seems that Jonah went to Nineveh, assuming his preaching would bring about their destruction.

But when God had something different in mind, salvation, it made Jonah say, I'm angry and I feel as if life is not worth living.

So verse 3 here is a classic prophetic lament genre.

Throughout the Psalms, if you read them, individual laments frequently address Yahweh God.

And here's the formula.

Usually, there's a complaint about the situation, there's a confession of trust, there's a request, there's words of assurance, and then there's a vow of praise.

That's how it usually works in the Psalms.

But here Jonah addresses God, he complains, and then he requests to die.

So notice he misses the part about trusting God and praising him.

Now, to be fair, Jonah is not biblically alone in his death wish.

The prophet Elijah also had a death wish request in 1 Kings 19.

We read this: but he, that's Elijah, himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree, and he asked that he might die, saying, It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my father's.

And then even Moses, Moses, right, the man who met God on the mountain and received the Ten Commandments, had a death request.

Speaking to God, he says, If you will treat me like this, kill me at once.

If I have found favor in your sight, that I may not see my wretchedness.

Now, here's the major difference between Elijah and Moses and Jonah.

Elijah and Moses were lamenting rejection and failure, but Jonah, Jonah was lamenting missional success.

Jonah was upset at a revival.

Now, if I put that in modern terms, over the last few years, there have been numerous reports of revivals happening around the country on college campuses, Asbury University, Auburn, Florida State, others have told stories of numerous baptisms, people coming to faith.

In fact, national data shows that there's an increase, increasing interest in Christianity among Gen Z and millennials who now attend church more regularly than older generations for the first time in decades.

Here at NBC, we've started an event called the Night of Revival each January to lift up our eyes to God as we begin the new year.

Now, again, imagine walking on a college campus or into a night of revival event and shouting in anger as the worship music is playing or as the preacher is speaking.

Imagine going home after an event like that, locking yourself in your room and then shouting in anger at God because people were coming to Christ.

Imagine wanting to end your life because others were being saved.

If that happened, would you be able to look in the mirror and say, God, something's wrong in my heart?

Is it possible to know God accurately and still be at war with him?

I think Jonah shows us yes, because Jonah's real crisis wasn't that he doubted God's character, it was that he resented it.

Jonah's crisis wasn't that he doubted God's character, it was that he resented it.

Does that resonate with anybody today?

Don't raise your hands.

But in a room this large, and when people are listening from afar, I suspect there are some angry people.

I suspect that somebody out there today has a beef with God.

I think some people are angry at who God is and what he's doing in somebody else's life.

And you think God has not given you the life you wanted.

And that's where Jonah was.

He was resentful.

He hated what God asked him to do.

He didn't like the outcome.

But God sees his heart and he shows mercy and grace to Jonah even now.

Look at verse 4 now.

And the Lord said, Do you do well to be angry?

Do you do well to be angry?

That's a pretty profound question.

In fact, it might be a question I think somebody here today needs to hear.

Because somebody out there might really be angry at God, and He's speaking to you right now through His Word and through His Spirit, and He says, Is it good for you to be angry?

Friends, can I lovingly suggest that the reason we become angry is because we've forgotten our past?

That all of us here today were former Ninevites.

Now some of you might say in your heart, oh Pastor Bob, how dare you?

I was never as bad as those people.

But you don't have to have committed the atrocities of the ancient Assyrians to be a Ninevite.

And what do I mean by that?

Well, the Apostle Paul wrote a letter in the New Testament to the church at Rome, and he told them, hey, you guys have a problem.

You are an enemy of God.

And you say, What?

Me?

An enemy?

Yes.

Because all of us have rebelled against God in our hearts, and we need the saving work of Jesus Christ.

We love grace for ourselves, but not for our enemies.

Jesus told a whole story about that.

And Paul writes a letter to the church at Corinth.

He makes it even clearer.

He says this, 1 Corinthians 6, verse 9.

1 Corinthians 6:9

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?

And such were some of you.

But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of our God.

And such were some of you.

And you were washed.

And if you get that, you should want everybody else to experience that cleansing as well.

We are all former Ninevehes trying to reach current Ninevehes.

We have the saving power of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Yesterday you were Nineveh, today you're a missionary.

Jonah 4 shows us that it is possible to know all the right answers but miss the grace of God.

It's possible to speak about God's grace and his mercy, but not experience joy when others receive it.

God doesn't want that for you.

He wants you to share the mercy and grace that you've been given, to bring other more people into his kingdom, but you have to leave that anger at the foot of the cross because God says, it's not good for you.

It's not good for you, and I love you.

As the worship team returns for one final song, I would just invite you this week to take two actions.

First, we need to name our resentments.

Some of us today are dealing with some things very deep in our soul.

We're angry.

But some of us also have to be honest about the fact that that anger is really at God.

And so I would invite you, just as Jonah did, to pray, to bring it to God, because He can handle it, to spend every day this week naming and confessing your anger and resentment to the only one who can really heal it.

And then, second, you embrace God's mission.

Now that is only possible if you take that first step, because if we're resent, if we are resentful of God and we don't get our hearts right with him, the mission will be hindered.

But when you experience the mercy of God yourself, you will be on fire for him.

People who have received mercy and get it, they display mercy.

And so here's what this might look practically like this week.

Join us for our October missions conference.

You can save the date, October 2nd through 4th, where we'll hear stories of people sharing God's mercy around the world.

And before that, I want you to do one specific thing.

I want you to think about one person, just one, that you can show mercy toward this week.

Not in general, not someday, but this week, name it and act.

You gotta name your resentments, embrace God's mission, and through that may He receive all the honor and glory.

I want to close by bringing you back to Merilyn Esher one more time.

When the Wolf Bible was finally complete, she didn't stand up and take credit for 60 years of her life.

What she actually did at those celebrations was stand in front of the crowd and celebrate.

Because the word of God was now in the hands of the Wolf people, and God's mercy could now extend further into Senegal than it had before.

And here's what she said.

She said, in the long run, this wasn't my idea, it was God's.

It is his project and his grace that enables.

It was God's idea to save people, not ours.

And our job isn't to gatekeep the mission, it's to align our hearts with his.

And so let me close with the words of Psalm 67 and receive this blessing.

The psalmist writes: May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us.

That your way may be known on earth, your saving power among the nations.

And let the peoples praise you, O God.

Let all the peoples praise you.