Runaway Prophet

Sermon Transcript

Tonight we’re just going to be looking at Jonah 1, but the book itself records what is probably one of the greatest revivals of all time where God decided that He was going to move on the hearts of a very brutal, sinful group of people; and they would hear God’s call, and they would believe the message that they heard, they would humble themselves and repent of their sins, and this mass revival would take place. What’s interesting about it is that it would begin from a very unlikely source, a man who actually wanted no part of it. He was not interested in the people to which God was sending him to. They were not a people he wanted to preach to and it was not a message that he wanted them to hear because, as we will see, he really didn’t want to see this group of people have their lives changed by God. He would rather see them judged by God.

There are stories in the Bible that I think sometimes we think that they are there maybe for the primary purpose of giving us some stories to tell our children in Sunday school class or in their children’s Bible that we would read to them at home. This is one of those stories about a man who was swallowed by a whale, and it would follow along with other stories like Daniel and the lions’ den or Moses taking Israel through the Red Sea, and some other stories that might really resonate with young minds. But I want to assure you that this book and this story is not just for the kids, it is for us. They are stories that we need to know because they have a message for each one of us. Though it might be a familiar story to you tonight because maybe you have shared it many, many times with your own children, I want you to listen with some new ears at what God might want to say to you, and to me, because we’re living in troubled times.

We look around and see so much that is going on, the moral decline that is taking place. You can’t watch the news very long before you see just the escalation of lawlessness that is happening within our society as well as it seems an ever-increasing attack on the Christian faith and on those that follow after the Bible, this rapid erosion of what is good and what is right and what is true. There was a statement that I came across a while back that really resonated with me because I think it really spoke the truth about what is taking place in our country right now and why it was happening so rapidly.

I’m not sure who authored it in the beginning but I think that it bears repeating, and I want to share it with you. Why is our world like it is today? Because first we overlooked evil, and then we permitted evil, and then we legalized evil, and then we promote evil, and then we celebrate evil, and then we persecute those who still call it evil. You know, there are a lot of people that are lost in this world. They’re blinded by the god of this world, Satan. They’re following after the desires of their own heart, but they’re still loved by God, and there’s a reason why God has left us here on this planet—those of us that know Christ—so that we can be a light into the world in which He has placed us.

Unfortunately, oftentimes we are responding to that call in the wrong way. Some of us may have a tendency to want to criticize the darkness that is around us. We look at what’s going on in our world and we have just an unending list of words to describe how awful it is so we’re always criticizing those that are in the world and those that are of the world. Sometimes we are the people that are insulating ourselves from the world. We don’t want to be stained by the world’s influence and the world’s culture, so we withdraw from the world. We don’t want to have anything to do with them. We don’t what them to touch us, and we’re not going to touch them either. Then, some of us might have a tendency to actually become more like the world that is around us. Rather than shining our light, our light grows dim as the darkness takes a hold of us as well.

All of those would be wrong approaches, and I think that Paul shared some words with his young protege, Timothy, things that I think that we really need to take to heart. These are words that he said to Tim, but words that we need to hear. It’s found in 2 Timothy 2. You don’t need to turn there, but I will just read them for you. This is what Paul said to his disciple, “And the servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, 25 in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, 26 and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil . . . .” Three things that are said there by the Apostle Paul to Timothy: 1) is that he would be a proclaimer of the truth so that people 2) would come to their senses, and 3) decide that they would repent from their life and turn their lives over to Christ. That, in a nutshell, is the message I think that Jonah was sent to give to the city of Nineveh.

Jonah was sent to a people who were living in rebellion against the Lord, and we too are living at a time where our world needs revival, but I will tell you revival often happens not with the people that are in the world but the people that are in the church, that it is the house of God, the people of God, that need their hearts revived first so that we then can be the light of the world and have an influence on those that are on the outside that they might know Christ. That is really Jonah’s story.

We look at the book of Jonah as a great revival, but in our minds the revival is taking place with these Ninevites, these Assyrian people. But we are going to see that the revival begins not with them but with God’s prophet himself, Jonah, a man who did not have the heart of God, at least at that time, and did not want to do the will of God.

Let’s get our feet wet into the passage. We’ll look at the first three verses, Jonah 1:1, “Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.’ 3 But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.”

Jonah was one of the prophets, one of the many Old Testament prophets, that you can read about. Most of these Old Testament prophets were sent to the people of Israel. They were sent to the Jewish nation because God had a message for His own people. But there are a few, and Jonah is one of them, that were not sent to the Jewish people, God’s people, they were sent to other nations; and Jonah in particular was sent to the nation of Assyria, in particular their capitol city which was the city of Nineveh. It tells us in verse 1 that “the word of the LORD came to Jonah . . . .” That really was a calling upon Jonah’s life. God was calling him, putting a message within his heart and sending him to a particular place to preach that message, and the message was simply, “Cry out against the sins of these Ninevites.”

Why was that necessary? We need to have a little bit of background to understand who these people actually were. Again, Nineveh was simply a city, the capitol city of an empire at that time. The Assyrians were a great empire. In fact, there was a time period where they were the most powerful people on planet earth, and the city of Nineveh was itself very impressive. It actually tells us in verse 2, it’s addressed as “ . . . that great city,” which meant that it was great in size as well as its power. The city itself had a wall around it that was pretty substantial. It was between 60 and 90 feet tall and believed to be about 45 feet wide. It’s said that three chariots could race side-by-side on the top of the wall there in Nineveh. This wall expanded around the core of the city, which is about 7-1/2 miles, but the suburbs spread from there about 60 miles around, and there were some six hundred thousand people that lived in the inner city as well as the suburbs that were around it.

These people were a brutal people. They were known for their cruelty. Because they were a strong people they would go out and conquer other cities and other nations, but their intent was to put fear, not only into the people they were conquering at that time, but that word would spread around to other peoples at how brutal that they actually were. For example, when they would conquer a people group, they would often take the skulls of the people that they had killed and build pyramids out of these skulls so the people that would pass by would see their brutality. At times, they would take those that they had captured and place their bodies on poles in the city until they died. They would sometimes cut off the ears or the nose or the tongues out of the mouths of the people that they had conquered just to simply humiliate them. This reputation began to spread around to other cities, and some would decide to commit mass suicide rather than have the Assyrian army come up against them.

There were occasions when the Assyrian army would approach a city or a nation only to find they were all already dead because they would rather kill themselves than face the Assyrian brutality. It wasn’t just how brutal they were, it was how immoral they were as well. Drunkenness was rampant; sexual immorality was pervasive among them. You would imagine that to speak against such a group of people would probably be easy for a prophet. If they were given the assignment to go preach against what they are doing, that maybe many would say, “Yes, I can absolutely do that because I agree. What they are doing is atrocious.” Instead, what we find is that Jonah decided to run away from that calling.

It tells us in the first few verses here that Jonah was planning on going to a city by the name of Tarshish. He would board a ship that was on the way to Tarshish, and I want you to know that we don’t really know for sure exactly where Tarshish is or was. There are some places that scholars have speculated about, but there are many places, at least a handful of places, that could qualify as the actual place that he was trying to flee to.

The word “Tarshish” actually means smelting place which meant that it was a location that was known for extracting metals out of the rocks that were around that place where they would melt it down and gain the metal ore out of the center of the rocks and you would make things out of it, of course. There were actually several cities that did just that back in the day, and the names of these cities were often some derivative of that term “smelting place.” We’re not really sure exactly which one of them is the right place, but there was one particular place that most scholars believe is the most likely. That was a city that was in what is present day Spain. To give you some perspective, that was about as far away as a person in the then-known world could possibly go. That was seen as the uttermost, the outer banks, as far as you could possibly go, which would make sense because it seemed that Jonah had that intent. He wanted to get as far away from God’s call upon his life as he possibly could.

We need to ask ourselves, “Why?” Why was it that he was so reluctant to follow God’s lead, to do what God had asked him to do? There are several possibilities. One is that he didn’t feel qualified, and maybe he felt like he was not the right person to do this type of a job. I mean, I’ve just described to you how big Nineveh was. I mean, if there’s six hundred thousand people, and you are one voice, and there’s no tv, no internet, no radio, you’re just a dude that is standing on a street corner shouting as loud as you can hoping that the people around you are going to hear, you might feel very insignificant like you’re not qualified to do this particular job.

You know, Moses didn’t feel qualified to do what God called him to do. If you remember his story back in Exodus 3, as God is speaking to him through the burning bush telling him that He wants him to go speak to Pharaoh because Pharaoh needs to let My people go. Moses came up with a whole list of excuses, reasons why he was not the right guy, “You know, I’m not very good with words. I don’t talk very well.” God didn’t accept that as a good excuse, so Moses went on to another excuse, “There’s gotta be somebody else, Lord, that could do this better than I.” He just didn’t feel qualified. But God isn’t looking for people that are qualified, if you didn’t realize that. He doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called. If God places a call on your life or on mine, He’s going to equip us to respond to that call, to do exactly what it is that He is calling us to do.

Another reason that Jonah could have decided not to go is that he was paralyzed by fear. Maybe he was just afraid knowing full well what the Assyrians were like, what those in the city of Nineveh had done to other cities and other nations, that he was simply too afraid to respond to that call.

Esther found herself in a situation like that. If you remember the story of Esther, she lived at a time that there was a great persecution against her own people. She was a Jewish woman, and the Jews at that time were being persecuted by the Persians. Her uncle, Mordecai, came to her and said, “You are in a unique position where you can do something about this.” You see, she was the queen. She was actually married to the king of Persia, and he urged her to go to her husband to say something about what was going on. She was fearful to do so. Why? Because nobody, not even the queen, could approach the king unless they were invited. If somebody had the gumption to approach the king without being invited, he had the right to put that person to death. She wasn’t sure she was willing to try that out, but her uncle spoke to her and said, “You know, maybe God raised you up for just this moment; and I will tell you, Esther, that if you choose not to do this, God will find somebody else. But who knows if maybe this is the very purpose that you are here.”

Let me tell you, all of us have a calling upon our life, something that God wants us to do. The Bible tells us that every believer has been gifted by the Holy Spirit in some way, that He has given you a gift that He wants you to use for the edification of the body of Christ and to be a light to the world. You know, oftentimes we can do one of two things: either we can excuse ourselves by saying that we don’t feel qualified or we can be too fearful that we will fail if we try, so we decide not to.

Remember the parable that Jesus told, the parable of the talents, where there was a master who was going on a journey and he entrusted his belongings, his possessions, his wealth, to his servants. To one, he gave five talents; to one he gave two talents; to one he gave one talent. They weren’t all given the same, but that didn’t really matter because the only thing that the master was interested in is that they were faithful with what they had been given. All of us, I want you to know, we have been given some gift or gifts by the Lord that He wants us to use. We can’t say that we’re not qualified because He has qualified us; and we might be fearful, but we can’t allow fear to keep us from doing what God is calling us to do.

In Jonah’s situation, he is running away from what God has called him to do, and it could’ve been fear, but I tell you, it was not. It could’ve been that the thought that he wasn’t qualified, but that really wasn’t it either. What it was is actually found in Jonah 4. If you want to turn to Jonah 4, we find out the very reason why he wanted nothing to do with going to Nineveh. I want you to know that by chapter 4, and this is a spoiler alert in case you don’t know this story or have never read the book of Jonah, by this point Jonah has already gone to Nineveh. The Ninevites have heard him, believed his message, repented of their sins, and gotten right with God.

If you look at the last verse of chapter 3, verse 10, I’ll start there. It says, “Then God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God relented from the disaster that He had said He would bring upon them, and He did not do it. 1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. 2 So he prayed to the LORD, and said, ‘Ah, LORD, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm.” Jonah said, “I knew that this would happen. I knew that if I went and preached to them the message that You gave me to preach and that they responded, You actually would show them mercy. You would forgive them!” and that’s not what he wanted to see happen. Jonah didn’t want to see these wicked people turn to God and be forgiven. What he wanted was for them to be judged. He wanted them because they were guilty to face the wrath of God, not the love and the mercy of God.

I wonder if you’ve ever wanted to see somebody judged, that there’s been somebody in your life that you have been so angry at or bitter towards, or you have seen the things that they have done that you really wanted to see their life fall apart or God to judge them. Maybe you’re driving down the road and you see somebody who’s just driving totally recklessly, and you’re just hoping that there’s a cop nearby that’s going to pull them over, and if you’ve ever had the chance, you know, and you’d better confess it right now, that you drove by as a cop has them on the side of the road with a big smile on your face because that’s exactly what you wanted to see happen. Or, you’re in a store and see somebody that is shoplifting, and you want them to get caught. You want them to get busted. Or, you’re going for a walk through your neighborhood and see somebody that’s walking their dog. Their dog walks into somebody’s lawn and squats, so you stand there and see if they’re going to pick it up or not because if they don’t pick it up…you know, we sometimes want to see people get judged. We see what’s going on in the world and we wish that God would unleash His fury on what many are doing, the choices that they are making, the havoc that they are wreaking.

David, in the Psalms, at one point thinking about the evil that was going on in the world, made this comment, “Lord, break their teeth in their mouth.” There are what’s called imprecatory psalms. There are eight, nine, or ten of them. Imprecatory psalms are psalms that are actually asking God to come and judge, and that is exactly what Jonah wanted. What he wanted is to see Nineveh judged. He would’ve loved if fire and brimstone came out of heaven where he could sit far enough away to be protected on a hill that gave him the total view of that city as it burned. That would’ve been fine with Jonah. But, see, that isn’t the heart of God. Jesus came to seek and to save the lost, and that isn’t just in the New Testament. Oftentimes, people look at the God of the Old Testament as an angry God and the God of the New Testament as the gracious and merciful God, but that is simply not true. All we have to do is look at the story of the Ninevites. God wanted to show them mercy, but He needed someone to go there and tell them the truth so that they could believe the truth and turn from their wicked ways.

There was a time in the New Testament when two of Jesus’ own disciples who had been with Him for a while, came to Him on a day in particular that the people, the Samaritans in particular, had been rejecting Jesus. James and John came to Jesus and said, “Jesus, do You want us to call down fire from heaven and consume these people?” Jesus responded to them, “You don’t know what spirit you are of because I have not come to destroy but to save.” You see, the heart of God first and foremost is to seek and to save those who are lost. There will come a day when God will judge, but that day is not today. Today is the day of grace, the day of salvation, the day of grace and mercy where God has put a message in our hearts that we are to share with our generation that salvation is available. We speak the truth, but we speak it in love. We give them the gospel in hopes that they will turn, not in hopes that they will reject and in some way be judged by God.

Jonah is on the run, but I want you to realize who he is running from because the text, going back to chapter 1, does not tell us that he ran from Nineveh. It actually tells us he was running “ . . . from the presence of the LORD,” and it doesn’t tell us once, it tells us twice. Verse 3, again, “But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.” And, if we didn’t hear it the first time, at the end of the verse it tells us again, “ . . . and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.” He wasn’t running away from Nineveh, he was running away from God. He was running away from God’s call upon his life, and let me tell you there are consequences in our lives when we run from the Lord.

Something that I want you to notice is how it describes Jonah’s actions as he was running from God. In verse 3, it tell us, “He went down to Joppa,”—and again—“ . . . and went down into”—the ship. In verse 5, it tells us, “But Jonah had gone down into the lowest parts of the ship,” and if we were to read up to verse 15, we would find then that he was thrown into the depths of the sea. You see, Jonah was running, and in his mind he is better off going in the direction that he was going, but every step that he was making was a step down; and so it is when you turn away from what God wants you to do, it will always be a step down. We often think that we know better and the direction that we’re going is actually going to improve our situation; but I guarantee you, if it is a step away from what God has called you to do, it will always be a step down.

The second thing we need to realize about the consequences of running from God’s plan for your life is it’s always going to cost you. You may notice in verse 3 it also says that Jonah, “ . . . paid the fare . . . .” He had to pay to get on that boat to get away, so it cost him; and it will cost us as well. Anytime that we choose our way over God’s way, it will in some way, it is going to cost us. We will pay the consequences. But even so, what we need to see is that God was not done with Jonah simply because he was making a bad choice, simply because he was resisting what God was doing in his life. The Lord was going to pursue him. Look at what it says in verse 4, “But the LORD sent out a great wind,”—now this is Jonah, he’s already on the boat there in the middle of the ocean, and—“the LORD sent a great wind on the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship was about to be broken up. 5 Then the mariners were afraid; and every man cried out to his god, and threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten the load. But Jonah had gone down into the lowest parts of the ship, had lain down, and was fast asleep.” Interesting.

The Bible tells us in so many places that when people are running from the Lord, God goes after them. He is a God who pursues. We see from the very beginning when Adam and Eve had sinned against the Lord that God came looking for Adam in the Garden. Then, God later would go after His people who were slaves in Egypt. God was always in pursuit of His people culminating and sending His only begotten Son into the world so that we could be saved. He is a God who pursues, and in this book He is pursuing His prophet, which is interesting because the prophet himself ought to have been one who was following after the Lord. I think sometimes we think that since we have given our life to Christ that God no longer needs to pursue us. That is a fallacy. There are many times in our walk with the Lord that God has to pursue us again because we have decided to go running off in our own direction to do our own thing.

David said, “ . . . thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” Those were often instruments that a shepherd would use on his sheep to get the sheep where they needed to go. God will still pursue you, as He was pursuing Jonah back in the day.

God pursued Jonah by sending this storm, and God will often bring storms in our life for that very purpose—to get our attention. That’s what I believe that God was trying to do with Jonah at this particular junction, the storm was simply to gain his attention that Jonah would realize that this was because of him, that God was allowing this storm because he had made a bad choice and needed to do a u-turn. He needed to get back to his call that what God had called him to do. But that’s not what we find Jonah doing. We find that while this storm was going on, and while the others that were on the ship are on the deck throwing things overboard in order to make the ship lighter so that it doesn’t sink, he’s not helping. He’s going down to the depths of the vessel, lying down, and falling asleep. I don’t know how restful that could’ve been.

I’ve got to imagine that every clap of thunder he was hearing was to him the voice of God saying, “You know what? You’re going the wrong way,” but he’s now trying to drown that out. Remember, he is running from the presence of the Lord. He’s trying to get away from God. He doesn’t want to hear God’s voice because he doesn’t want to have to obey that voice.

I think sometimes we face storms, and it’s simply the attempt of God to get our attention. But we have the capability of hardening our hearts and not listening, not heeding the voice of God. If we don’t respond to the storm, maybe the storm intensifies, as we are going to find in this situation, and I believe, and I don’t know this for sure because the text doesn’t say, that Jonah, down there at the bottom of the ship, decided to put on headphones so that he could drown out any hint of the voice of God trying to speak to him in that moment.

Have you ever been in that place before where you wanted to do what you wanted to do. You knew that God was speaking to you, but you didn’t want to hear that voice, you wanted to do what you wanted to do, so you did everything you could to drown out the voice of the Lord.

Jonah is in that spot in this moment trying to sleep, trying not to hear the voice of God. What a stubborn prophet he was, and it goes on. We continue the story, verse 6, “So the captain came to him, and said to him, ‘What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call on your God; perhaps your God will consider us, so that we may not perish.’ 7 And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this trouble has come upon us.’ So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 Then they said to him, ‘Please tell us! For whose cause is this trouble upon us? What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?’ 9 So he said to them, ‘I am a Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’ 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said to him, ‘Why have you done this?’ For the men knew the he fled from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.”

Verse 11, “Then they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you that the sea may be calm for us?’ —for the sea was growing more tempestuous. 12 And he said to them, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will become calm for you. For I know that this great tempest is because of me.’ 13 Nevertheless the men rowed hard to return to land, but they could not, for the sea continued to grow more tempestuous against them. 14 Therefore they cried out to the LORD and said, ‘We pray, O LORD, please do not let us perish for this man’s life, and do not charge us with innocent blood; for You, O LORD, have done as it pleased You.’ 15 So they picked up Jonah and threw him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. 16 Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice to the LORD and took vows.”

If you followed that, here are the men on the ship that are all calling out to their own gods. At that point in time, there were many nations, many people from different places, and each place had their own gods, so it was believed that if anything bad like this was happening in a situation, that one of the gods is angry, and we don’t know whose god is angry, so everybody needs to call out to their god, ask for forgiveness, find out what they need to do to get things right in order for, in this case, the storm to go away; so everybody is calling out to God, except for Jonah, which is interesting because all of their gods didn’t even exist, but the one guy who believes in the true and living God is the one who is not calling out to his God. He doesn’t want to talk to God, so the unbelievers, in that moment, had greater faith in their false gods than he had in the true and the living God.

What an example this guy is setting. On top of that, he says contradictory things. He tells us, verse 9, that he fears the Lord; and in verse 10, that he is running from the Lord because he doesn’t want to do what God wants him to do. How can you simultaneously have a fear of God and not do what God tells you to do. If you’re not doing what God calls you to do, then you’re not fearing Him, at least not in that moment; and if you fear God, it’s very difficult to tell God, “No.” But here he is, explaining his situation, “I know that this storm is because of me because I’m running away from God. I fear Him, but I sure don’t want to do what He’s telling me to do,” and he gives them the solution. He says, “Throw me overboard,” but they’re too afraid to do that. They’re thinking, If you really do belong to the true and the living God, and this is a storm that He sent, and we throw you overboard, then He’s going to be mad at us, and He may kill us all. They were trying as best they could to not throw him over, but when it got worse, they decided their only recourse was to get rid of Jonah. So, they actually prayed to the God that Jonah worshiped and said, “God of Jonah, forgive us for what we are about to do. Don’t hold his blood against us. We’re not the ones that are disobeying You,” and they threw him overboard.

I’m thinking about Jonah hitting that water and beginning to sink into the waves with a smile on his face saying, “I won, Lord. You can’t make me do what I don’t what to do.” I imagine God responding saying, “We’re only in chapter 1, dude. I’ve got three more chapters to change your mind.”

Verse 17, “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” That’s the part of the story we know. What we might not have known is all of what led up to Jonah being swallowed by a great fish. He was a man who did not want to do what God wanted him to do, and because God is the way that God is, He didn’t kill him off and say, “I’m going to find somebody who will do what I want him to do. I’m done with you, Jonah. You’re not worthy to follow My call.” That is not what the Lord did. God was going to work in the Ninevites, but He needed first to work in His prophet, so He was going to put His prophet in a situation that was going to be about the most uncomfortable situation you could possibly be in—in the belly of a fish.

God is very persuasive, I want you to know. You can fight God. You can put on the headphones so you don’t hear His voice. You can try and ignore Him when He talks to you, but He is very persuasive, and He loves you enough that He will continue to show you patience and mercy and kindness even at the time that He is making your life as uncomfortable as He possibly can.

Are you in that place right now? There might be some of us in here right now that our life has become very uncomfortable. Now, I wouldn’t say that every time your life is uncomfortable is because you’re doing something wrong, but it should be something that we should ask ourselves, “Lord, am I running away from You? Have I rebelled against You? Is there something in my life right now that is out of whack and this is what You have brought against me to get my attention.” We ought to ask that question. The answer is not always, “Yes, you’re the problem.” Sometimes it’s simply a trial that He is allowing in our life because He is going to perfect our faith through it, but I will say that we need to ask that question. If we’re going through the hardships, “Lord, is this because there’s something that I am doing wrong that I need to get right?”

In this case, one of God’s children did not have God’s heart. God’s heart was to seek and to save; the prophet’s heart was to judge and condemn. Let me ask you, in the time that we are now living right now, what does God want to do? Has God given up the seeking and the saving? Well, when we read the end of the book, we know that there is a time of judgment that will come, but even when the judgement is coming, God is still seeking and saving because in the book of Revelation while the Great Tribulation is unfolding, still the voice of God through angels is being proclaimed. The message is going out because God has a heart to seek and to save the lost.

Do you know what that means? Is that as bad as the world is around us right now, there is a call on your life and on my life. We have an individual call, I want you to know. There is something that God wants you to do, some gift that He has given that He wants you to use within the body of Christ. But I’ll tell you something else, and this is a calling that is upon every one of our lives, we call it the Great Commission, but it is the final words that Jesus was giving to His disciples at the end of the gospel of Matthew when He tells them, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them . . . all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” That’s our call. Our call is not solely to criticize the world for being as evil as it is or to withdraw from the world to protect ourselves so that we don’t get stained by it or to become like the world. No, our job is to be the light of the world.

Let me ask you, have you run from that call? Have you ignored that call? Let us be people that respond to God when He gives us a job to do. Amen?