Running To Win 15 Minute Version

Dave McCallister: Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. God wants His servants focused on God's agenda and not their own. It has taken some extraordinary measures to get Jonah back on the road to Nineveh. But now he's going, in body, if not in heart. Today, Jonah's lessons continue, as do ours.

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 three and join us now as we hear a message on death to self-interest.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Some people find it difficult to swallow the story of Jonah. But Jesus evidently believed it, and if Jesus believed it, that's good enough for me. One of the things that we see very early on in the story of Jonah, and you may turn to it in your Bibles, is that Jonah was very stubborn. He was a very stubborn prophet and you and I are stubborn prophets.

But we read in the third chapter of the book of Jonah, "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, 'Arise and go to Nineveh.'" God is the God of second chances. God is the God of new beginnings. There are some people who will not give you a second chance as they look at you through their own homemade microscope. But God is the God who gives people a second chance and so the word of the Lord comes to Jonah.

You'll notice in verse three it says, "So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh." It does not say "but." If it had said "so" back in chapter one, verse three, "So Jonah rose to go to Nineveh," the whole story would have been different. But back there, Jonah had a "but." He was willing to stand against God. And then it says in verse four, "But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea." And now Jonah is finally willing to give in to God, having spent 72 hours in the belly of a fish.

Sometimes we give the impression that Jonah was spewed out by the fish in the suburbs of Nineveh. And then when he did is he arrived in the city and he was wearing very smelly clothes, very smelly clothes as a matter of fact. And we think that he had some seaweed still wrapped around his head and his body was white because of all of the gastric juices that he had encountered in the creative learning center.

But actually, that's not the way it happened because if you look at a map, you'll notice that Nineveh is at least 400 miles from any place in the Mediterranean. And so it may have been three weeks or a month later that Jonah arrives in Nineveh to preach his very short message. Now, Nineveh was this great city and Jonah was intensely nationalistic and filled with hate toward those people.

He knew that Nineveh had a reputation for violence and he also knew that the Ninevites might come against Israel as they had plundered many other countries. And so because of this intense nationalism, he greatly resented the fact that God was going to possibly be gracious to these evil people who really deserved judgment. They didn't even deserve a chance. Judgment would be like you being asked to go speak to the terrorists who are blowing up cars and blowing up American troops and preach to them and say that there's going to be judgment and then God converts them and makes them stronger than ever.

And so Jonah resents it. There were 120,000 children in the city of Nineveh, but Jonah did not care about those children. And there are more than 120,000 children in Chicago and the question that we have to ask, particularly in the next message in this series, is do we care about those children? All right, what God does now is He gives Jonah a lesson in compassion. Jonah is going to deeply resent that.

He didn't mind if grace and compassion is given towards him or towards those who he deemed to be the people of God. That was understandable because they were worthy of that kind of compassion and concern. But he deeply resented the possibility that God might be gracious to wicked, evil, sinful Ninevites. So how does God get him to say yes? We're not sure if He ever really got him to say yes. I guess I should change that and say how does God try to get Jonah to say yes?

First of all, by where he was sent. The Bible says that he goes back to Nineveh and Nineveh was an exceedingly great city. It says three days journey in breadth. Verse four, Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey, and he called out, "Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." You'll notice that when he was running from God, he was running from God because of Nineveh. God brings him back to Nineveh.

The very issue from which he was running, the reason why he was running, God says, "Jonah, you can't be in my stream of blessing unless you go back in your detour to where we began. I am directing you to where you should have gone in the first first place." Listen, when God gives us a second chance, He brings us back to those issues that caused us to run from Him in the first place. And it is those issues that we need to deal with, whether it is resentment or anger or disappointment or situations. God says if you want to be in My blessing, you go back to where you were supposed to be.

And so Jonah arises and goes to Nineveh. Three times the Bible says that Nineveh was an exceedingly great city. It was great geographically, three days walk through it. People say, well, that's not possible because the inner city was actually quite small. It had a wall of a circumference of about nine miles. But we're told that the wall was nearly 100 feet high and was 50 feet wide on top so that you could have several chariots going on on the wall at the same time. Those walls were huge fortifications. When it says that it was a three days journey, maybe what we should understand is that that includes all of the outlying areas. There was also a further wall and beyond that there were various towns and various settlements and maybe that's what took three days to walk through.

But Jonah goes one day's journey and he begins to preach. Yes, it was great geographically. It was also great culturally, by the way. In fact, archaeologists tell us that there was a library in Nineveh at that time. Clay tablets, thousands of them. So that they had culture and they had advancement and they had education. It was great culturally. It was also great in terms of its wickedness. I will not in a public setting give you the details of everything that they did, but the Ninevites impaled children. They skinned people alive and a host of other things that you don't want to hear about.

They were really cruel. They majored in cruelty and in evil and in violence. Now, those are the Ninevites, the Assyrians of many, many generations ago. And as I like to point out, this has no relationship to the Assyrians that we know, Assyrians who are here today worshipping with us. But these were the people to whom Jonah was sent. And you look at this business of being sent there and you find out that God did an incredible miracle as we shall see in a moment because there were certain limitations. We'd have never expected God to do that.

Think about it for a moment. First of all, the limitations of method. Jonah came to the city and he didn't have advanced personnel. He didn't have cottage prayer meetings before he arrived. He didn't have television. He didn't have radio. He didn't have newspapers to pick up the story so that others could hear about what God was doing. He didn't even have a flannelgraph board, as far as I know. He simply went there and began to preach. And maybe it's the way in which he looked, maybe it's because of what the Ninevites were going through. There's some stories there that they were at a very pivotal point in their history. They began to respond to this message.

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's grace here? Where's something about God's forgiveness? Where's 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. It 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 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 five, "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.

You know, my friend, there are times when we have to seek God with all of our hearts, and God leads us to the point of desperation so that we recognize our great need. I want to emphasize that frequently we have come to understand that only desperate people really pray.

You know, when I think of the ministry of Running To Win, I visualize thousands of people throughout the world supporting this ministry. And let me tell you why it is such an encouragement. I'm holding in my hands some letters from listeners from different countries in different languages. For example, someone who's a listener in West Africa says, "Thanks to you, I have learned that I can stand strong, making the right decisions even in the midst of darkness."

You know why we can be in West Africa? By the way, here's a letter also from East Africa. We can be in these places because of people just like you who become our supporters. Would you consider becoming what we call an endurance partner? After all, the Bible says that we should run the race of life with endurance. Would you at least investigate what that means?

I sure hope that you have a pen or pencil handy because I'm going to be giving you some contact info. Here's what you can do. You can go to offerrtw.com. Of course, offerrtw is all one word. Offerrtw.com, click on the endurance partner button. Or if you prefer, you can call us at 1-800-215-5001. Thanks so much for helping us.

Dave McCallister: Erwin Lutzer with part one of Death To Self Interest, the third message in a series on brokenness, How God Gets Us To Say Yes, studies in the book of Jonah. Next time, more on the terse message Jonah finally gives to the Ninevites.

All four messages on how God gets us to say yes can be yours on CD as our thank you for your 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. Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McCallister. Running To Win is a ministry of the Moody Church.