Jonah - Salvation Belongs to God

Father, thanks for being such a great God.

Such a loving God.

Being loved itself.

You are love.

And thank you for adopting us as your very own children.

We praise you for that.

And Holy Spirit, thank you for being our teacher and our counselor and our guide.

And please teach us this morning that each of us would leave with something that we know was meant for us and from you.

And Jesus, we just uh praise you.

We thank you for saving us.

Thank you for being our friend.

And it's in your great name we pray.

Amen.

Well, this morning we're gonna finish talking about the book of Jonah.

Uh two Sundays ago, we kind of finished up talking about the events in the uh in the story of Jonah.

But uh this morning we're gonna kind of see, make sure we grasp, I guess, the overall message, the overall theme that runs through the book of Jonah.

If you haven't been here, I want to catch you up real quick.

Uh Jonah, as you probably know, was a big-time prophet.

Well known.

He'd always been right with his prophecies.

Uh God asked him to go and warn the people of Nineveh.

Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, which was the big enemy of the Israelites.

Uh Jonah happened to hate the Ninevehes, and uh the Ninevites uh didn't like the Israelites either.

So when God tells Jonah uh to go warn the Nineveh, he just refuses to do it.

He goes in the in the opposite direction.

He finds a ship that's heading as far away as possible.

He gets on the ship.

Um God causes a big storm, the ship is in trouble, and at Jonah's request, they throw him overboard.

The whole experience just so deeply moves the crew on the ship that they uh turn to God and worship God.

And then comes the most famous part of the story.

Uh it's when Jonah's just moments away from drowning.

He's sunk all the way down to the bottom of the ocean.

Then he cries out to God, and God saves him, and he brings a fish into the fish swallows him and protects him for three days and then spits him out uh on the beach.

You know, I could just play the Vegitales movie.

It might be uh a little quicker.

But there's Jonah on the beach, and God doesn't even mention all the trouble and all the drama.

He just says, Hey, we got to go to Nineveh.

And so this time Jonah goes.

And he shares God's message with the Nineveh, and the response is overwhelming.

And Jonah 3 and verse 5 says, The people of Nineveh believed God's message, and from the greatest to the least, they declared a fast and put on burlap to show their sorrow.

Even the king of Nineveh put on uh a sackcloth and he fasted to show his sorrow.

But most importantly, they all immediately changed how they were living.

And God blessed them.

And that could be the end of the story.

You know, the a crew has been saved, Jonah's been saved, a whole city has been saved, everyone can live happily ever after, except everyone's not happy.

It's Jonah.

Jonah's ticked off about the whole thing.

Um says in Jonah 4, this change of plans greatly upset Jonah, and he became very angry.

The change of plans was that the super prophet had announced the destruction of Nineveh, and the opposite had happened.

That God had saved the city.

And it made him look bad, and he was upset about that.

And he goes outside the city because he wants to watch, he's still hoping God might uh destroy the city, and so he gets a good a good seat to watch all the action, and it's uh it's hot there where he's watching, and God causes a plant to grow up and it gives him shade, so he's pretty happy about that.

But overnight God causes the plant to die, and now the shade's gone, and he's really upset and miserable about that.

And it's then that God starts talking to Jonah about the way he's thinking.

You know, maybe maybe he's not thinking right.

Maybe his reputation or maybe his comfort is not as important as the 120,000 people in the city of Nineveh.

And then the book ends with the challenge.

It's a challenge for Jonah, it's a challenge for us.

What is more important than people?

Is it our reputation?

Is it our comfort?

Is it our sense of fairness or justice?

It's the same challenge Jesus gives when he says to love God with all your heart, mind, and soul.

But the second thing is equally important, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

And then Jonah doesn't tell us how he responded.

It's kind of interesting that he wrote the book, but he stops right there.

And so we don't really know from the book how he responded, but history tells us that he went back and lived the rest of his life in the city of Nineveh.

And that's the story.

And we learned kind of different important things along the way.

A few weeks ago, Ben Sykes sent me an email, and it kind of got me thinking about the overriding message in the book of Jonah.

There's so many different, you know, kind of small messages, but what's the overriding, overall theme in the book?

And I thought I might kick it old school a little bit.

You know, in the in the early church, there we get together and they'd read a letter from St.

Peter or from St.

Paul, and so I thought I would read an email from St.

Ben this morning.

We've been talking about Jonah this Sunday after church, and then on that Thursday, he wrote, Okay, I had another thought on Jonah.

You knew I would.

I was reading again the end of Jonah's I Am Currently Stuck in a Fish Prayer.

He says, But I'm worship worshiping you, God, calling out on thanksgiving, and I'll do what I promised I'd do.

Salvation belongs to God.

I think that the lesson Jonah struggled with learning, but not fully learning, is that salvation belongs to God.

Salvation doesn't belong to Jonah.

He can't dole it out to those he thinks are worthy.

He can't dole it out at all.

He can't even save a single plant.

Salvation doesn't belong to any ethnic group or any nation or any intellectual movement or any collection of good intentions.

It belongs to God.

God owns it.

He doesn't just excel at it more than others.

He isn't just the go-to guy every time we get swallowed by a fish.

He is the beginning and the end of salvation.

But even after Jonah makes his confession, he still tries to grab salvation back so he can own a peace.

But Jesus gets it right.

And it isn't easy because he expects God to be generous and recklessly loving.

That's just who God is.

Ben Then mentions a story that's uh in Matthew 20.

And I thought it'd be worth looking at the story real quick.

It's Matthew 20, starting in verse 1.

It says, For the kingdom of heaven is like the landowner who went out early one morning to hire workers for his vineyard.

He agreed to pay the normal daily wage and sent them out to work.

So this is a farm community back then, and and they would do like we do sometimes now, is that if if somebody was looking for work, they'd gather in a specific area and uh a landowner would come and and and get them and they'd go work for the for the day.

That started six and then finish uh they start at six in the morning, they'd finish about uh six in the evening.

And so this landowner goes six in the morning, finds some people, and sends them out to work.

At nine o'clock in the morning, he was passing through the marketplace and saw some people standing around doing nothing.

So he hired them, telling them he would pay them whatever was right at the end of the day.

And so they went to work in the vineyard.

At noon, and again at three o'clock, he did the same thing.

Jesus was talking to his followers, and here is where they're probably like shaking their heads a little bit.

They could tell that the story was taking an unexpected turn.

Because in the Middle East, you just didn't hire anyone for less than half a day.

You know, so it might make sense to hire someone at six in the morning, and it might make sense to hire someone at noon, but you would never hire someone at three in the afternoon.

Uh and what's next is uh is even more shocking.

At five o'clock that afternoon, he was in town again and saw some more people standing around.

He asked them, Why haven't you been working today?

They replied, because no one hired us.

The landowner told them, then go out and join the others in my vineyard.

It's five o'clock.

So the landowner goes and gets these guys, they're gonna stop working at six.

You know, by the time they walk out to the vineyard, the day's pretty much done.

You know, why would anyone hire workers at five o'clock in the evening, knowing the day's done at six?

That evening he told the foreman to call the workers in and pay them, beginning with the last workers first.

It's an important detail because it that hadn't been mentioned, that there's a foreman.

You know, and in this story that Jesus is telling, he's describing God the Father as the landowner and describing he himself as the foreman.

And the foreman is going to pay everyone in front of everyone else, and he starts with the people that had just gotten there.

When those hired at five o'clock were paid, each received a full day's wage.

When those hired first came to get their pay, they assumed they would receive more.

Okay, so the people come at the very end, they get paid a whole day's worth for working less than an hour.

And so the other people start getting excited and excited because if you paid them that much, I mean, how much are they gonna get?

Um But they too were paid a day's wage.

When they received their pay, they protested to the owner.

Those people worked only one hour, and yet you paid them just as much as you paid us who worked all day in the scorching heat.

He answered one of them, Friend, I haven't been unfair.

Didn't you agree to work all day for the usual wage?

Take your money and go.

I wanted to pay this last worker the same as you.

Is it against the law for me to do what I want with my money?

Should you be jealous because I am kind to others?

So the landowner representing God says, Should you be jealous because I am kind to others?

Or as the message version says, are you going to get stingy because I am generous?

Jesus taught the same thing in the story of the prodigal son, uh, where the older brother, if you remember the story, uh, was upset because the dad had thrown the party and had forgiven and lavished on uh the younger brother.

So why was it why did Jesus feel like it is so important to make this point over and over and over again?

Well, it does a couple things.

One is it helps us to understand God.

We just can't naturally comprehend a God that is so loving and so generous.

I mean, his ways are far above our ways.

It also helps us to look inside ourselves.

You know, it's a real gut check.

It's a real gut check when we think about God's generosity and whether or not we ever get frustrated when we see someone else blessed.

You know, we might have trouble celebrating someone else's promotion at work if we're looking for a job.

We might have trouble getting excited about somebody's new car when our car's barely running.

You know, deeper things, more difficult things, like resenting someone else getting pregnant when we're so badly wanting to have a child.

Or being tired of hearing about someone's great marriage when we're struggling so much in ours.

As Jesus asked, should you be jealous because I am so kind to others?

Now, the reason God wants us to get past those things is because He wants us to feel joy.

You know that inexpressible joy that the Bible talks about.

So we don't get zapped with it.

It doesn't just happen.

We're all of a sudden we're just crazy joy, happy all the time.

We come more, we become more and more joyful as God changes our hearts to be more and more like Him.

And if there's one thing that our God is, it's generous.

He is a generous God.

And the deeper truth in the story of Jonah and the story of the jealous workers and the prodigal son's older brother is not about wells and it's not about vineyards and it's not about parties.

All three stories are about salvation, about how generous God is with salvation.

Or as Jonah says, salvation belongs to God.

Quoting Ben again.

See, he just says this so much better than I ever could.

I just thought I'd just read what he wrote.

God is so much more than fairer, he is generous.

It is this generosity of God that drives us crazy.

It exposes our anger and greed and stinginess.

The last are not sometimes first because God is just trying to be tricky.

The last are sometimes first because God is wildly generous.

He is not angry and petty, hiding at a distance in heaven.

He is generous and forgiving, running to the weak.

Maybe it's a good thing that salvation belongs to God.

And then he finished the email.

He said, Thankfully, we'll finally get this in eternity.

In Revelation 7 we sing Jonah's song.

They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands, and they cried out in a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

Imagine seeing every possible country and tribe and personality, finally realizing that none of us cornered the market.

God was up to something so much bigger than any of us could have imagined.

When we try to envision eternity, we often get distracted trying to understand how it will be fair according to this standard or that.

And we rack our brains trying to balance the scales.

But I think this misses the point.

In eternity, all envy is dead forever.

For the first time, we're able to look God's generosity towards us and others squarely in the eye and feel no need to control it or own it.

It is just joy.

Salvation belongs to God.

And that is the overriding, overwhelming theme of the book of Jonah is that God is generous, that salvation belongs to Him.

He gets to decide.

And thankfully, He loves everyone.

There's a couple things I think that I can really apply when looking at the book of Jonah.

The first is for me to ask God to help me be more like Him.

A lot of times when we think about, you know, we might use the word godly or being like God, we think about things that we we shouldn't do or should stop doing.

And there's certainly plenty of those, and those are good.

But often, the Bible talks about things that we should be doing, like generosity.

In 2 Corinthians 9, it says, for God is the one who provides seed for the farmer and then bread to eat.

In the same way, he will provide and increase your resources and then produce a great harvest of generosity in you.

See, that's what I want.

A great harvest of generosity where it comes natural when I think like God, you know, when I feel like God, when I'm excited when other people are blessed, the same way God is excited as He blesses other people.

To be like God is to be generous.

And so maybe this week God will give us each an opportunity to stretch ourselves a little bit.

You know, stretch ourselves in the area of generosity.

Maybe we can give a waiter or waitress a tip that they didn't really earn.

Or maybe we can forgive someone even though they don't deserve it.

Or praise someone even though they might not think they need it.

Or be happy for someone when they are especially blessed.

Being generous is like is being like our father.

And another takeaway might be just to accept God's generosity.

You know, many of us feel like we don't deserve God's love.

You know, because we've messed up too much or we've we've turned away for for too long.

Um don't feel like the Lone Ranger.

That that actually is the whole point.

That we don't deserve God's love.

That was the point that God was making to Jonah.

Of course the Ninevehes didn't deserve God's love.

But neither does Jonah.

Salvation belongs to God.

In Romans 5 it says, when we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners.

Now most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good.

But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.

And John 3, 16 and 17 says, For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

God sent his son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.

That is exactly what Jonah said.

Salvation belongs to God.

It is a God thing.

He is the saving one.

It's the overriding theme of the book of Jonah: God's endless love and generosity.

Twenty eight hundred years ago, he famously showed that love and generosity by sending the reluctant prophet Jonah to save the Ninevites.

If the worship team will come up, we'll uh we'll stop here in a second.

800 years after that, God really outdid himself when he sent Jesus to save the entire world.

Jesus called himself the one greater than Jonah.

The one greater than Jonah is what Jesus called himself.

And he was.

You know, Jonah ran away from the Ninevites.

Jesus runs to us, you know, with reckless abandon and love and generosity.

To turn to Jesus is just to accept that generosity.

And we do that in our own words, in our own way.

Jesus, help me, save me, forgive me, change me.

You know, whatever it is, he does all those things.

He fills us with his spirit and he strengthens us and he teaches us.

And then he does with us what he did with Jonah.

Changes us from the inside out.

Helps us to know him, helps us to be like him.

You know, Jonah didn't really know God.

Jonah didn't really know God's heart.

Jesus is God's heart.

The living word, the loving one.

The overriding message of Jonah.

Salvation belongs to God.

So let's pray.

Stand with me if you would, and we'll get ready for the last song.

Father, we praise you.

Literally, thank God that you are the one that decides.

Thank you for being the saving one.

Thank you for being the generous one.

Thank you for being the loving one.

Thank you for giving us and everyone so much more than is fair, so much more than we deserve.

We praise you.

We ask you, God.