Jonah - One Greater than Jonah

We've been in a series for the last four weeks on the book of Jonah, called Embracing God's Mission, and today we're going to finish this series up by looking at the words of Jesus as he references Jonah in the New Testament.

It's really a powerful passage.

So if you're there, matthew 12, verse 38 through 41.

Matthew 12:38–41

One day some teachers of religious law and Pharisees came to Jesus and said teacher, we want you to show us a miraculous sign to prove your authority.

But Jesus replied only an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign.

But the only sign I will give them is the sign of the prophet Jonah.

For as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the son of man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

The people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it, for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah.

And now someone greater than Jonah is here, but you refuse to repent.

Let's pray together, father, in the name of Jesus, I thank you for this day.

Lord.

God, I thank you for this word that you've given me to speak, and I ask that you would cause these words to produce life within the people that are listening to them here in this service and also online.

And, father, we just pray that those who are not yet saved, father, that today would be the day of salvation, that they would repent of their sins and believe on the Lord, jesus Christ.

And for the rest of us, lord, would you help us, through Jesus's example, to embrace more passionately the mission of God here in this earth.

And, lord, we ask that you would take these words of mine and cause them to come alive and to be used by you to be transformative in each of our lives, and we thank you for it in Jesus name.

Amen.

Have you ever met a one-upper?

You know what a one-upper is Somebody that you're having a conversation with and you're telling them some of the highlights of your life, some of the best moments of your life and some of the worst moments of your life, and that person has better moments and worse moments, and as soon as you get finished, or maybe even partway through, they stop you to tell you about how bad their life has been or how great their life has been.

Right, and I was going to ask for a show of hands, but I decided against it.

For those in the room that might be one-uppers yourself Like you might find yourself in those conversations thinking about your own life experience and kind of trying to interject into other people's conversations.

I discovered this a lot.

I've been in the ministry for 31 years and I've been to a lot of pastor's conferences, and in pastor's conferences you meet a lot of people you know.

You see people you know, but a lot of people you don't know.

And so you're sitting around in circles, around tables and you're talking with each other and dialoguing and pretty soon one guy starts talking about the size of his building, another guy how many people are attending their church, how great their last sermon series was.

You know all of these different things and all of the other guys around the table are finding points of interjection so that they can one up the other person and before long it gets to be a little bit ridiculous, right?

It's like seriously, is that true?

It could be true.

But I was cured of this at one pastor's conference because this is a massive church and we were there, and so we went to one of their church services and the lead pastor showed up on the stage as a hologram, not even kidding.

So he had preached the sermon the night before and they were trying a new technology which had cameras that took all different angles to images of him, and so on the stage it appeared like he was standing there speaking to us, but he wasn't there.

It was really interesting watching this, and as he was giving his message, as a hologram, he talked about the fact that they were open in their 82nd church campus, you know.

He talked about the fact that they had cured world hunger and then next week they were actually going to send missionaries to Mars, just in case, because we never know if the gospel is needed in Mars.

Right, and obviously I'm joking, but in comparison, looking at what they were doing and considering what we were doing and the scope of things, it cleared me up from any kind of one-upness that I was a part of before that right.

So obviously we look at that as a negative thing most of the time, but how many of you know, the only person who could one-up somebody else and it be holy, is Jesus, and he does here.

In this passage he says now, someone greater than Jonah is here, and he's speaking of who?

He's speaking of himself, right, if you've been following along with the sermons on Jonah, you might be tempted to think, well, that's a pretty low bar, jesus.

I mean Jonah isn't exactly somebody that you'd put on a poster, as you know, somebody who's just a really faithful servant of God, or that you would invite to your missionary conference to be the keynote speaker.

You know, jonah learned a lot of what he learned by doing the wrong thing.

Right.

Aren't you glad Because I am Jonah in a lot of ways, and so I'm so grateful that God chose to put this in the Bible so that we can learn and we can have hope for our own lives as well?

So it's not.

We understand that Jonah's testimony was not that stellar.

So, in comparison, obviously Jesus is much greater than him, but it's important because of who he's talking to here.

Jesus was using an old Testament example.

When Jesus walked on this earth, do you know?

They didn't have a new Testament.

The people that he was speaking to only had what the Old Testament, and some of them only the Torah right.

So they had the Old Testament and that's what they were leaning on or were relying on in order to understand who God was.

So Jesus is using their own knowledge, their own information that they had based on childhood.

I mean, how many of us discovered Jonah in one of these ways?

You either discovered through flannel graph any flannel graffers in the room that remember Jonah in the Sunday school, right?

Some of you discovered Jonah through puppets Anybody discover through puppets.

Some of you discovered Jonah through veggie tails, right, yeah, baby, lots of veggie tailors in the room, right?

But so you can imagine these Jewish people that Jesus was speaking to.

They would have heard the story of Jonah spoken to them, recited to them from the scriptures, probably many times over, and so Jesus is using this as an example, as a symbol.

Right, here's something that we need to remember the Bible is one big true story, from beginning to end.

It's not separated.

It doesn't need to be separated out.

I grew up in a church where the Old Testament was considered kind of outdated, right, we didn't really need to use that very much.

We focused primarily on the New Testament and understand why that was and all of that.

I'm not trying to get into the weeds on that, but it's important that we understand the Old Testament because it points to.

Everything in the Bible points to Jesus.

When you read your Bible, I encourage you to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to show you the road to Jesus in whatever passage it is that you're reading.

And there's a road to Jesus found even in the book of Jonah and in the story of Jonah, and Jesus is telling his listeners about that.

We're going to examine four ways that Jesus's life and ministry was greater than Jonah's right.

But before we get to that, let's look at some context from this passage.

So by the time the events of Matthew 12 occurred, jesus has already been in ministry for like a year and a half to two years.

So he's already done a lot of things.

He's already called 12 disciples to follow after him and he's pouring into their lives and teaching them and training them.

He's preached the greatest sermon ever preached, which was the Sermon on the Mount.

He's already done that.

He's healed the sick, cast out demons, calmed a storm and on and on and on.

In fact, the book of John at the end of John, it says that there's not enough paper or ink to write down all of the things that Jesus said and did while he was here in this planet.

So what we get in the gospels are a sampling, a small sampling of the work of Jesus, the ministry of Jesus while he was here on the earth.

Now, the Jewish religion was regulated by experts in the law of Moses.

These were lawyers, they were Pharisees and Sadducees.

They were part of the Sanhedrin and, like any such group, not kept in check.

They tended toward self-righteousness and requiring others to obey rules that they exempted themselves from.

That's religion, that's law, right.

They required others to obey them.

They considered their traditions equal to God's word and enforce them with vigor.

If they said that something was true, then other people needed to believe that it was true and they needed to follow along, even if it wasn't necessarily found in scripture, because they were the ones that understood these things right.

So Jesus bursts onto the scene.

He speaks much more about the heart of man than the outward expression, in other words, what we do outwardly and how we obey on the outside.

This was an assault on what the religious leaders stood for.

They preached daily doing this you must do this or you must not do this.

There were rules and regulations that were to be followed, but they did not consider or talk about the heart of mankind, especially their own hearts.

Right, jesus flipped the table.

He did something completely different.

He came to talk about the heart of mankind.

So the supernatural workings that accompanied his ministry were unnerving to those that used control.

They controlled people through fear and through their words, and they were unnerved by Jesus's miraculous moves.

Jesus's last encounter right before the passage that we read with these guys was when he cast the demon out of a blind mute, a man who could not see and could not speak.

And what was their response to Jesus's great miracle?

They said you cast out demons by Satan's power.

That makes sense, right.

Why would Satan cast his own demon out?

That doesn't make much sense, right?

Because he sent that demon there for a reason.

So, but anyway, that was the excuse that they use, and that's what they were trying to promote to people and to try to create a divide.

That's why it's so curious that they begin this section or this passage by calling Jesus teacher.

Another word for teacher is rabbi or master, so they're using a term of endearment here.

It's like they're trying to butter him up as they ask him this question.

They complimented Jesus with the title of master, pretending respect for him when they intended to abuse him.

All are not truly Christ's servants who call him master, and I just want to speak to all of us here in the room this morning and I had to come to this place in my own life of understanding that just praying a prayer as a child is not all that it's about.

If we are to be truly followers of Jesus Christ, there must be marked change in our hearts first, and then in the way that we live.

That's going to be a direct result of being a true Christian or a true follower of Jesus Christ.

And if you have not yet experienced that in your life, you may have prayed a lot of sincere prayers, but you are not saved unless the Holy Spirit brings about not perfection but continual change, growing and becoming more and more like Jesus.

They went on to show their true hearts, these Jewish people.

They demanded that he show them a miraculous sign to prove that he isn't using Satan's power but is truly sent from God.

It didn't really mean that they were trying to trap him.

They were trying to trick him.

They were trying to get him to do something just because they asked him to, and then they were going to try to flip it to use it against him.

They were falsely implying that they would believe.

We will believe if you only do one more sign and one more miracle.

How many of us in our own lives cry out to God for signs and wonders and miracles, and yet he's given us the greatest sign and miracle of all in himself and the relationship that can be restored with Jesus, with the father, because of Jesus.

So their creator, god, a unique person combining absolute deity and perfect humanity, is standing in their midst, speaking to them, and they dared to ask him for a sign.

Show us something, wow us, amaze us.

The demand for signs is evidence of unbelief rather than faith.

Do you hear me?

The demand, the requirement of seeing a sign, is evidence of unbelief instead of faith.

It would have been wrong for Jesus to have given them a sign.

Why?

Because that would have catered to their unbelief and allowed them to set the standards of faith.

In other words, we can direct God.

How many of us in our lives have made the mistake of attempting to be God's boss?

And how's that working for you?

It's not working for you, right?

God is in charge and we have the privilege of.

Should we pray for miracles?

Should we pray for signs and wonders?

Should we pray Absolutely?

We do all of the time, and yet we understand that God's the one who ultimately is in control, and we put our trust and confidence and hope in him, regardless of if we ever see another miracle in this life again.

So, no matter what miracle Jesus performed, it would not have pleased them.

And Jesus goes on to say only in an evil, adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign.

See, jesus goes past the outward and all of the actions and he confronts the condition of these people's hearts.

He calls them out for their evil intentions, their wickedness in their hearts.

Their hypocrisy was transparent to Jesus.

It was not hidden from him.

If they had not believed as a result of the many wonders and miracles and signs that Jesus had done up until this point in time, why would one more be able to be the thing that convinced them?

Are you and I still waiting for a sign?

I'm here today to tell you that Jesus told them and he's telling us as well.

The sign that he's given us is himself, is himself and we're going to look at that.

The word adulterous that he uses here was a metaphor frequently used in the Old Testament for spiritual unfaithfulness, in other words, placing other things in the place of God, worshiping idols maybe not bowing down to idols, but putting things in the place of God, right?

So sign seeking can be an idol for our lives.

There are some people that all that they do is try to run from one high to another.

High in the kingdom, they look for signs and wonders, and they'll travel to and again.

God can do anything at any time.

I'm not trying to convince us of anything less than that, but if that's all we're seeking after and not the heart of God, if we're just looking out for his hand, if we just want to see his hands and not his heart or his face, something's wrong.

Something's wrong.

You see, the attitude that demands miraculous signs as a condition for belief does not please God.

It goes on.

Jesus goes on to say the only sign I will give them is the sign of the prophet Jonah, for as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, so will the son of man be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

Jesus promised them a sign, but he also pointed them backward to another sign or symbol that was in the Old Testament.

The fact that Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of a fish was a precursor or something that pointed forward to Jesus himself.

Spending three days and three nights in a tomb.

Jesus' own death, burial and resurrection from the dead were the greatest sign.

It is the greatest sign of all the ages.

So let's get into four ways that Jesus' life and ministry was greater than Jonah's.

Number one a greater obedience, a greater obedience.

So what do I mean by obedience?

Following God's commands his way, right away and all the way.

That's obedience.

Those who are training children, who have ever trained children, how many of you know?

This is a good definition for obedience, right?

So Jonah was called by God to go where, to go to Nineveh, and to declare to them the judgment that was going to come upon them if they didn't repent of their sins.

Right, that was his job, that's what God called him to do.

There was only one problem.

What was the problem?

Jonah hated Nineveh and he hated everything that was a part of Nineveh.

The Assyrians were enemies of the Jewish people and they were cruel in every way.

And Jonah knew God and he knew the mercy of God, and he knew that if he went and even declared judgment to these people, that there's a chance that God might have mercy on them.

And he did not want to take the chance.

He would rather lose his own life avoiding being obedient to God than obey God, because he knew enough about God to know that God might be up to something.

These people were pagans.

They did anything that you can think of from a sin standpoint.

They were involved with and they embraced it.

But Jonah rebelled against the call of God and it's interesting, it says that he tried to flee from the presence of the Lord.

Where are you going to go to hide from God?

You can go to the highest mountain, to the lowest valley.

You can jump to the highest fountain, to the lowest valley.

You can jump into the sea.

You can anything that you can imagine.

You cannot get away from God.

He is everywhere.

So Jonah rebelled against the call of God and in doing so his life began a downward spiral.

Right, we talked about this in week one.

He went down to Joppa to get on a boat and when he was on the boat he went down into the inner part of the ship.

When the storm came, so that he and he slept he was sleeping through the storm he went down into the belly of the great fish and all of these things.

He went down into the sea first, and then he went down into the belly of great fish.

All of these things are not a coincidence.

It's a statement about what happens when we disobey God's call.

When we are disobedient to the call of God on our lives, our lives go downward.

The rest of the book of Jonah thankfully tells us that he, finally, was obedient.

But was his heart in it?

No, his heart was not in it at all.

Now, jesus, on the other hand, was perfectly obedient to the mission that his father asked of him, and this began with his willingness to leave the comforts of being in the presence of his father and the Holy Spirit to come to this earth to give up his privileges of Godhood and to become a human being who was literally born to die Philippians 2 describes it so well who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men and being found in human form.

He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Was Jesus obedient?

He was obedient to everything that the father asked of him and in fact in John 6, 38, jesus says of himself for I have come down from heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.

Jesus's obedience led him upward instead of downward.

He came up out of the waters of baptism, as we've just seen here this morning, and when he came up out of the water, the Holy Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove.

Heaven opened up and the Father God said this is my son, whom I love and whom I am well pleased.

He went up on the mountain to spend time in prayer with the Father.

He went up to Jerusalem where he would be delivered to death.

He was lifted up on an old, rugged cross so that he could draw mankind to himself.

He was raised up from the dead on the third day, defeating death, hell and the grave.

He ascended upward into heaven, where God in Philippians 2, it says therefore, god has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that, at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

To the glory of God, the Father.

When Jonah went downward because of disobedience.

Jesus went upward because of obedience.

Aren't you thankful that Jesus was obedient?

Secondly, we see that Jesus had a greater sacrifice, a greater sacrifice, and the word sacrifice means finding acceptance with God by means of an acceptable substitute offered in the place of the sinner.

You remember in the Old Testament that when God gave Moses the law, he also gave a prescription that could be used, which would be the raising of spotless animals that would be sacrificed and their blood would be shed, not to remove the sins of the people, but to cover over them.

To cover over them so that they could still have some semblance of relationship with God, even though a just God could not look upon sin right.

And so that's what they did.

They prescribed this.

So obviously, with Jesus, we know that he was a much greater sacrifice.

But when Jonah found himself in the storm of his life, asleep in the bottom of the boat, the sailors, who didn't know God at all, cried out to their own gods.

And finally, what did they do?

They kicked him awake and said pray to your God, maybe he'll save us.

And Jonah, in his state, was so angry with God and was so rebellious that he didn't even pray.

But he offered a solution.

He said to them throw me overboard, because I would rather die than obey God.

It's interesting that the sailors were more godly in their behavior than Jonah was.

Because the sailors didn't want to throw him over, because they were afraid of God.

They were afraid of the God of Jonah, even though Jonah wasn't afraid of the God of Jonah.

They were afraid of him.

They didn't want to do it, but they finally did, and as soon as Jonah's body hit the water, the storm subsided.

You know what the sailors did?

They worshiped the God of Jonah.

That's what they did.

His sacrifice, jonah's sacrifice, as selfish as it was, led to the sailor's salvation.

God used it in spite of him.

In this scenario, though, it was Jonah's sin that caused the storm, so his sacrifice couldn't come from a place of perfection or purity.

His sacrifice was based upon his own wrongdoing, but, on the other hand, jesus' sacrifice was greater in every way.

Unlike Jonah, he didn't deserve death.

He hadn't done anything wrong.

Can you imagine living 33 years in this life with never having a wrong thought, never having a wrong attitude or motivation, never speaking a wrong word, never performing any kind of action that was sinful against God?

That's what Jesus did, and our Lord's death was that of a sacrifice.

The same people that just a week earlier, a few days earlier, had cried Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, were now screaming crucify him, crucify him, the Lord, were now screaming, crucify him.

Crucify him.

He was betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, this perfect man, falsely accused, beaten, mocked, nails were driven into his outstretched arms and for six hours he hung in misery.

As I was considering these words this week, in this passage, I was reminded of something that grieves me, because it was my sin and my guilt and my shame that nailed Jesus to the cross.

Each and every one of us, starting with Adam and Eve, except for Jesus.

We have cheated, we've stolen, we've lied and every other sin that can be named.

We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and the wage that we deserve because of the sin that we've committed is death or separation from God.

That's what we, that's what I deserve, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

This is the good news.

On the cross, jesus offered himself to God in our place, taking our sin, our guilt, our shame upon himself.

And what did he say from the cross Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing.

And finally, his final words from the cross as he's breathing his last it is finished.

The price had been paid for our redemption.

Jesus paid it all.

In doing this, he satisfied God's just demands against us and gave us a chance to be free from the consequence of sin and to be reconciled to God.

Why would he do such a thing?

He did it because of his love for his father first, and because of his love for us.

His blood listen to me carefully the blood of Jesus is enough to cover our past sins, our present sins and our future sins.

His blood is enough.

And it seems like we could stop there and be good.

But point three is that there was a greater resurrection.

Resurrection means to be miraculously brought back from death to life.

In Jonah's case, it appears that he was only figuratively brought back to life, in the sense that God sent a great fish to swallow him up.

For three days and three nights he was held in the prison of that fish's belly.

For two days he remained silent Can you imagine that?

And on the third day he cried out to God.

It's interesting that in his prayer in Jonah 2, he doesn't say he's sorry, he doesn't acknowledge that he's done anything wrong, but he does acknowledge that God is the only source of his help, and he finishes his prayer by saying salvation belongs to the Lord.

So what does God do?

God causes that great fish to point its nose toward Nineveh.

And on the beach, all of the sudden, the great fish hurls Jonah upon the beach.

I would give almost anything to be a fisherman on the beach that day.

I mean you can imagine no airplanes, no, they had none of the technological breakthroughs that we've had that you could consider would create something like this.

But to be there and to observe this, I mean this would be a story that you could consider would create something like this.

But to be there and to observe this, I mean this would be a story that you could tell generations, your children and their children, their children, on and on and on.

There was one day I was on the beach and this great fish showed up and out of its mouth came this bleached blonde from the acids in the stomach.

And can you imagine the stench of squid being your constant companion, rotting next to you?

So you can imagine when Jonah arrives in Nineveh, of course they're going to repent.

I mean, this man looks crazy.

That's not the reason, obviously for those of you who think I'm being serious, but it's interesting to think about God causes the fish to put him back on the way to Nineveh.

Aren't you glad that God showed kindness to Jonah?

Aren't you glad that God showed kindness to Jonah Even though he didn't deserve it?

How great is his compassion and kindness toward us who are in the same boat, literally, and don't deserve it.

And yet God is a good God.

Now Jesus, on the other hand, died and was buried in a borrowed tomb In the example that he was giving to the Pharisees.

He's comparing the sign of Jonah to himself.

Think about the ways that you see the comparisons.

The grave was to Christ, as the belly of the fish was to Jonah.

There he was thrown as a ransom for lives, ready to be lost in a storm.

There he lay, as in the belly of hell, like Jonah described his own experience, and he seemed to be cast out of God's sight.

Jesus went into this with a promise from the Old Testament that I guarantee you he was holding close.

The promise was this that God would not abandon his soul to hell or let him see corruption.

Jesus was able to do what he did because he understood his relationship with his heavenly father and he knew that his father had a plan and that this was going to work.

You see, to die for sin is one thing, and we could spend so much time talking about martyrs and those who laid down their lives for the sake of other people, but to be raised from the dead proves that sin has been defeated.

How many of you know, in Genesis, chapter 3, when sin came into this earth because Adam and Eve disobeyed God that there was, that God cursed Adam and Eve and also the serpent who had convinced Adam and Eve to eat the fruit.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

And in that passage it says that the serpent will strike the heel of the seed, which is Jesus, but Jesus will stomp the head of the serpent.

What was Jesus doing while he was in that grave?

I believe he was stomping the head of Satan over and over.

This was a dance party.

He was stomping in a spiritual way.

Obviously, his physical body was dead.

On the third day, jesus, the Son of God, rose from the dead.

Matthew 28, verses 1 through 6, just a few chapters after our passage this morning goes on to say.

Matthew 28:1–6

Early on Sunday morning, as the new day was dawning, mary Magdalene and the other Mary went out to visit the tomb.

Suddenly, there was a great earthquake for an angel.

The Lord came down from heaven, rolled aside the stone and sat on it.

His face shone like lightning and his clothing was as white as snow.

The guards shook with fear when they saw him and they fell into a dead faint.

Then the angel spoke to the woman.

Don't be afraid.

He said.

I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.

He isn't here.

He is risen from the dead, just as he said would happen.

Come see where his body was lying.

My friends, this is why we're here today.

This is what we are here to celebrate the fact that Jesus was dead, but he's alive again.

He lives forever more.

Amen, that's the good news.

He lives forevermore.

Amen, that's the good news.

I visited Israel myself and I went to the tomb that they said that Jesus's body was laid in, and I investigated.

I felt of it, I looked at it from every angle, I took pictures of it.

I I breathe the air that was in it and I'm here to tell you it's an empty tomb.

Jesus is not there, he is alive forevermore.

Romans 1.4 says and he was shown to be the Son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit.

He is Jesus Christ, our Lord.

I love this quote by Henry Morris.

The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the crowning proof of Christianity.

If the resurrection did not take place, then Christianity is a false religion.

If it did take place, then Christ is God and the Christian faith is absolute truth.

How many of you know the resurrection matters, and that's why we're here today and that's why we're celebrating it.

And fourth and finally, jesus had a greater message than Jonah.

Message in this context is telling others what has been given to you to speak.

Jonah's message was very limited and he limited it to one characteristic of God's nature and who he is, and that is judgment or justice.

How many of you know that there?

To one characteristic of God's nature and who he is, and that is judgment or justice.

How many of you know that there is an arm of God, that is the arm of justice and judgment?

In order for him to be holy and perfect and pure, he has to have a holy stance towards sin and anything that is against his will or his way of doing things, and that is his arm of justice and judgment, and we know that that is a part of who he is.

So Jonah's sermon was five words in the Hebrew language.

In English it said in 40 days, nineveh will be overthrown or overturned or destroyed.

That was his message, remember?

He hated Nineveh.

You know what?

What God did?

God opened the hearts of these wicked people, revealed himself to them and the people of Nineveh believed God, repented of their sins and God showed them mercy.

God showed them mercy, you would think by this point.

Somebody pointed out earlier that Jonah was the most successful prophet in all of the Old Testament, because he said five words and all 120,000 people radically changed their lives.

So on the surface, yes, he was the most successful prophet, and yet his heart was so messed up he actually climbed to a hill so that he could sit down, hoping that somehow either God would change his mind or the Ninevites would change their mind, and so then he could watch fire come down from heaven to consume them and destroy them all.

And God took time to be merciful toward Jonah even in that context, and to train him and to teach him about who he is Now.

Jesus' message is what we call the gospel, or good news.

It includes God's wrath and judgment.

We must have that as a part of the message that we're speaking.

But thank God it doesn't end there.

Thank God it doesn't end there Because Jesus took the wrath of God upon himself for the sins of the world.

He took my sin, my shame, my guilt and all of ours.

He took it to the cross.

We have a chance to experience the other side of God's character and his nature, his mercy and grace, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him will not perish, but what have?

Everlasting life.

This is the good news that we are here to declare to you today.

Jesus is alive, he's risen and he paid the price for us to be believers in him.

The New Testament is all about this.

That's why we love the New Testament as well as the Old Testament.

In Ephesians 2, it's one of the greatest passages and see if this isn't your testimony and you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were, by nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace, you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus, for by grace you have been saved through faith.

This is not your own doing.

It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You see, god wants us to experience our own resurrection, those of us who find ourselves in a condition of being dead in our sins and trespasses.

God wants to make us alive unto him, so that we can be made that we may have eternal life, that we may live with him forever and ever.

Mark 1 14,.

Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Repent and believe in the gospel.

This is the fitting response to all that I've been talking to you about today.

It is for us to acknowledge our own need for a savior and to acknowledge that and to talk to him about it.

To acknowledge the fact that we've broken his law, that we've sinned against him and that we want to change, that we want to follow.

After that, we believe in Jesus and the sacrifice and the resurrection.

The people of Nineveh.

Jesus goes on in Matthew 12,.

The people of Nineveh will stand on.

In Matthew 12, the people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day and condemn it, for they repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah.

Now someone greater than Jonah is here, but you refuse to repent.

The people of Nineveh repented.

Jesus was making the point that these Jewish religious leaders were seeking a sign from him, but unless they paid attention to the sign of Jonah and turned and believe in Jesus, there was no hope for them.

They were going to face judgment, and even Nineveh itself would stand in judgment against these people.

Let this not be our story, let it not be said of us when Jesus returns which he is going to return and if you're watching things happen in this world around us, you have to acknowledge that he's coming back sooner than ever before.

Jesus is coming soon, there will be a day of reckoning when the righteous judge will judge the world and he will separate all of humanity, throughout all of time, into two groups, and those who are his will be on one side and they will enter into his rest, and those who are opposed will be sent into a place of eternal punishment called hell.

So many people wonder what is it that sends a person to hell?

What is the sin that a person must commit that makes their sin so great that God can't forgive it?

What is that sin, if you had to name it?

Is it murder?

Is it rape?

What is it?

The sin that's going to send people to hell is the sin of unbelief.

It's refusing to believe in Jesus Christ, refusing to put faith and confidence and hope and trust in a Christ that died and was buried and rose again.

Let us, like the Ninevites, recognize our need this morning, this afternoon, now, and look to Jesus.

He's the only one who can raise us from the dead and give us eternal life.

He's the only one.

So this message I had two things in mind.

One was, if there's anybody here this morning, or anybody that's watching online, that has never taken the opportunity to put your faith in Jesus Christ, I believe that today is your day.

We have been praying for you.

There's a lot of people that have been praying for you.

You probably have people in your past and your family that have been praying for you, even if you don't know it, and God is offering you an opportunity to lay aside the old way of living your old life and to accept the life that he's offering you because of Jesus Christ, and to be born again.

There are going to be people up here in just a minute that would love for you to come and spend some time with them and pray together and ask Jesus to come into your life and to change you from the inside out, and he will do that, and then we can have another baptism service.

We can do it right now, or we can do it next week or a couple of weeks, whenever you're ready.

Please don't leave this service today just thinking well, it was just another sermon by another preacher.

Please let God do his work in your heart, open your eyes and see that this is the truth.

This is the truth.

And secondly, jesus came to set an example for us, not only as a replacement, in other words, to stand in our place to take upon himself all the things that he took upon himself, but he did it as an example to us.

Jesus was obedient to his father so that he could give us the ability to be obedient to his father.

That's what grace is.

Grace is God's ability in us to do what we can't do in our own strength.

So, unlike Jonah, my prayer for each of us as we end this series is that we will learn to embrace the mission of God in a similar way to what Jesus did, and that we'll look at this not as something that's difficult or something that we're running from, but we will embrace it and we will spread the love of Jesus everywhere that we go.

Are you with me?

Let's pray together.

Father, I do pray now, in the name of Jesus, that by your spirit, that you would awaken those who find themselves dead in sin and trespasses, that by your spirit, that you would walk up and down these aisles and that you would knock on the doors of hearts and that you would cause people to recognize their need and that they would turn their hearts and their eyes and their lives to you, that they would acknowledge their need for a Savior and that they would be born again.

If that's you this morning, I just encourage you.

Just talk to God.

You don't have to have the right words, just tell him you need his help.

It's you're tired of trying to do things on your own and ask him to save you and to change you.

Lord, I also pray for the rest of us that we would more fully embrace the mission of God, that we would unlike Jonah, that we would embrace the people that you're calling us to reach in this world around us and, father, also, that we would have your same passion and heart and we would deliver the message that you've given to us to deliver.

We thank you for these things in the mighty name of Jesus, amen.

I want to close this morning with just a request.

The elders have been praying.

We pray, we try to pray a lot, but we've been praying recently about the state of affairs in our nation especially and this is within our government and also within the church, and we have prayed about it and we feel like that the Lord is asking us to set aside the next 30 days as a time of prayer and fasting for the US and for the churches that are represented in the US.

We believe with all of our hearts that God is not finished with America yet, but it's going to take people standing together and asking God to be merciful.

The verse that we're using is 2 Chronicles 7.14, a powerful verse that really spells out for us if you want to see revival in your life, this is how you begin.

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, I will forgive their sins and I will heal their land.

Now, what does it look like to have 30 days of fasting and prayer?

Don't worry, we're not asking everybody to just drink water for April, okay, but we are asking that you would fast something that is important to you.

So maybe it's certain television shows, maybe it's video games, maybe it is.

Well, let me just say this what it's not, it's not spinach if you don't like spinach.

It's not called fasting if you just don't eat something that you regularly don't eat, right?

So let's choose something seriously.

That means something to us.

Maybe you'd fast for a day of each week, or maybe you would fast a longer period of time.

That's between you and the Lord.

Okay, we would also ask that you would take time each day through the month of April to pray, to pray for our nation, to pray that we would return to God and, secondly, that you would pray, especially for the church and the churches in America, that we would not bow our knee, that we would not turn back from truth and from what God has called us to be and to say and to do.

Okay, I don't know what's coming on this earth.

There's been a lot of prophetic things that have been spoken recently.

This is not a fear-based thing.

We're doing this out of obedience to God, because we feel like he's asking us to thing.

We're doing this out of obedience to God because we feel like he's asking us to.

So we're asking you to join us.

If you're a partner here at TCC, we ask that you would join us, especially in doing this.

Will you agree to do that.

Amen.

All right, we'll talk more about it as the month goes on, next month goes on and you'll be receiving an email with more details, but please let's go ahead and start tomorrow and let's ask the Lord to move mightily in our country once again.

All right, let's stand to our feet.

Thank you for being patient this morning, for being here being a part of the service.

If you don't have a church home, we'd love to have you visit with us again and see if this is where God might have you.

Like Derek said, we really want you wherever you're supposed to be, so if that's in another church that's preaching the gospel, that'll be fine too.

So may the Lord bless you and keep you.

May he cause his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.

May he lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace In the mighty name of the resurrected Savior, jesus Christ.

Amen, amen.

God bless you guys.

Have a great rest of the day.