Running To Win 15 Minute Version

Dave McAllister: Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. Many of us have dogs who won’t do what they’re told. Only when they’re put on a leash will they go where we want them to go. Jonah finally preached to the Ninevites, but only through clenched teeth. Do we ever fight God this way? Stay with us.

From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Today, Erwin Lutzer continues his series on Brokenness: How God Gets Us to Say Yes, studies in the book of Jonah. Turn to Jonah chapter 3 as we watch the prophet barely give a lackluster message.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Not only was there a limitation in terms of the method, but the message itself: "Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." Jonah, where is grace here? Where is something about God's forgiveness? Where is something about God's compassion? If he told them about that, the text doesn't tell it. The main part of his message must have been that one statement, "Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." So, you have the limitations of a message.

You also have the limitations of the messenger. Jonah did not want to preach this message. Probably went like this: "Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown," and he hoped to God that it would be overthrown. So, that's the way in which he preached. He preached with anger, shall we say? And he needed a course in anger management, which God tries to give him in the next chapter.

But he resents, he resents this idea that maybe they'll repent and God will be merciful. So, God tries to grind down his stubbornness. First of all, by where he was sent, the very place he did not want to go. His feet took him where his heart was not. Secondly, God ground him down, if we can use that expression, by what he saw. Oh, he did not want to see this.

You'll notice it says in verse 5, "And the people of Nineveh believed God, and they called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them." Fasting. Who told them to fast? They somehow knew that if we're going to get in touch with God, we want to show our desperation, and so they fasted there. Here at Moody Church, we have a day of fasting twice a year, and it's hard to get people to fast for a whole day. Feasting, well, that's a different story.

When we call a feast, we have people show up who we thought died during the days of Ironside. I mean, everybody's here when we have a feast. But when you have a fast, the attendance is a little lower. We have more people in the supper room than we do the upper room. We've noticed that. And then these people, they put on sackcloth. Sackcloth, my friend, was goat's hair. Now just think about that. That was prickly. It was terribly uncomfortable.

What they were saying is, "We want to show our desperation in God's presence, and we even rid ourselves of creature comforts so that we can call on God and God knows how serious we really are." In fact, it says in verse 6, "The word reached the king of Nineveh." We don't know whether or not this was like the mayor or whether or not it was the whole king of the Assyrian Empire. And he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, sat in ashes.

Could you imagine Mayor Daley going back to Grant Park, sitting in ashes, and then giving the city of Chicago a proclamation? Now, I've been to many of these prayer breakfasts and so forth where there is a proclamation from the president, from the governor, and from the mayor. And if I may be a little bit facetious, it reads something like this: "Whereas prayer is not a bad idea, and whereas there's some religion in our previous history, and whereas we're into tolerance, and whereas we're a relatively free country, we exhort anybody who wants to to say a prayer today." Something like that.

Notice this proclamation. Wow! Verse 7: "By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish." Now there's a proclamation.

You know, when God sends revival, everybody's on the same level: the mayor, the king, those who are in positions of authority, the president. They all bow in the presence of God. They all acknowledge their sinfulness. And here we have this universal revival taking place in Nineveh. And we read it and we say, "Could this really have happened?" I mean, even they put sackcloth on the animals. The animals were supposed to have repented.

I remember a dog in our neighborhood who should have repented. And we had a cat or two that I tried to get to repent. Wasn't very successful. You know the difference between dog theology and cat theology. A dog says, "You feed me, therefore you must be God." A cat says, "You feed me, therefore I am God." Isn't that true?

You see, these people realized that their sin was affecting even the animal kingdom. And the animals, I'm sure, didn't know what was going on because they never understood Jonah, they never understood the message. But they said, "We are so desperate that we're even putting sackcloth on animals, and we're forcing them to fast so that we might turn to God."

You know, it's interesting that this is not recorded in any of the various annals of Assyrian history. And so, some people have said, "Could this have happened?" Maybe it was a temporary repentance. Maybe their repentance ended when their fear ended. We don't know. We don't know the depth of their repentance, though as we'll see in a moment, Jesus Christ did acknowledge this as a great moment in history.

But the people repented. And because they repented, we read in verse 10, "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it," which was exactly what Jonah thought might happen. How was God trying to get him to say yes? By dragging him to a place where he didn't want to be. And maybe you're there today. Maybe your vocation, maybe your situation, is exactly the place where you do not want to be.

And then secondly, God says, "I'm going to have you see something that you don't want to see. You do not want to see this city repent because you're so full of resentfulness when God blesses those whom you think he should not bless." And then God says, "I'm going to get you to say yes, or at least work on you, by the way in which you feel." And that's really next time's message, but you'll notice in chapter 4, verse 1, it says, "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was angry."

Do you know what the Hebrew text says? The Hebrew text says, "And it was evil to Jonah with a very great evil." That's the literal translation. He was very—I mean, he was steamed. And he says, "That's just what I thought. A terrible thing happened. I preached and everybody repented. What an awful thing." And because they repented, you're not going to bring them the judgment that they so richly deserve. They deserve nothing but judgment, and here you display nothing but grace.

What kind of a God is this? He says, "That's what I know." He goes on to say that "You're compassionate and you're loving, and that's what I feared." You know, it's interesting in the text we find that the Ninevites, they certainly repented. God repented. You know, when it says in verse 10, when the Lord saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way... By the way, when it says that they turned from their violence, when the king says that, the Hebrew word is hamas. You'll probably recognize that as a terrorist group today. Well, they turned from their terrorism.

And it says in verse 10, "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented." The word actually is he repented. Now, that doesn't mean that God repents the way in which we repent. What it means is that Jonah's message was a conditional message. When he said, "Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown," he should have added, "unless you repent." And so God says, "Okay, you are repenting, I will not bring the calamity that I promised you because it was a conditional message."

But isn't it interesting that the Ninevites, they repent, and God even has a form of, quote, "repentance," but the one man who will not repent, who will not bring himself to the end of self-interest and self-advantage and self-protection, is Jonah. And he remains stubborn. There's some lessons I think that this passage of Scripture teaches us. First of all, our attitude should follow our obedience. It was good that Jonah went. It was much better that he go to Nineveh than that he stay home. We can be assured of that.

It was good that Jonah went. But his heart wasn't there. You know, he said like the little boy who was told to sit in a corner: "I'm sitting down, but in my heart I'm standing up." In other words, if this is what I have to do, this is what I'll do, but I will grin and I will bear it, and I will consider it my duty because, after all, God can do such things as create fish and put me in difficult circumstances, so here I am. But his heart was out of sync with God.

My wife and I have on a number of occasions been in Weimar, the seat of the great German Enlightenment, and there is a statue of Goethe in Weimar. And in that statue, Goethe is looking at the university, but his feet are taking him to the tavern. Part of Goethe's problem was he could never quite decide where his loyalties were. In that case, his feet were going to his real loyalty, namely the tavern.

In the very same way, it's possible for us to serve God and we say, "Yes, I'm serving God out of obedience. If this is what God wants, if this is what he has for me, I will do it." But your heart is out of sync with God because you have not been willing to embrace God's will as something good and perfect and acceptable, and you chafe against it and you fight against it, and God says, "I want you to say yes."

You know, my friend, it is often difficult for God to get us to the point where we are willing to say yes and live with the consequences. I'm holding in my hand a book entitled Dorie: The Girl Nobody Loved. It's a story of a girl brought up in a home where she was rejected, taken to an orphanage, experiencing abuse. But the reason that God ended up using her is that she laid down her bitterness and she said yes to God.

Eventually, through a series of events, she met her husband, and as a result, they were married and really opened the gospel of Jesus Christ in New Guinea. The reason I want you to have this book is this: It gives hope to those who look at their past and think they are defined by it, to understand that God has a future for them if they are willing to lay down their bitterness and say as Dorie did, "God, you've got all of me."

For a gift of any amount, as I like to emphasize, we're making this book available. Most assuredly, you know someone who needs this story to help them to understand that the past does not need to define them. God has a future for those who are willing to say yes, no matter the pain, no matter the hurt, and have faith to keep going on.

Dave McAllister: You’ve been hearing Pastor Erwin Lutzer with part two of "Death to Self-Interest." Next time on Running to Win, join us for more teaching on obeying God for the right reasons.

Dorie: The Girl Nobody Loved. It’s a heart-wrenching story of how God took a child abandoned in an orphanage and gave her a whole new life. Written by Pastor Lutzer, this book will demonstrate that there is hope even when no hope is visible. Dorie: The Girl Nobody Loved will be sent to you as our gift when you give a gift of any amount to support Running to Win.

Call us at 1-800-215-5001. That’s 1-800-215-5001. Online go to offerrtw.com. That’s offerrtw.com. Or write to Running to Win, Moody Church, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is a ministry of the Moody Church.