June 23, 2024, Message by P. Kevin Clancey
So we are going through the Bible here in a year, kind of the chronological Bible. And so tonight we’re going to be in Jonah. All right. And Jonah is unique.
Jonah is included in the section of the Bible known as the Minor Prophets, which is the last section of the Old Testament. You have the major prophets. Anybody know who the major prophets are? Isaiah, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel. And then it’s a trick. The fifth major prophet is not another prophecy. It’s just another book written by one of the major prophets.
And that’s lamentation written by Jeremiah. Then you have the twelve minor prophets. A little tougher. A little tougher. If I want to take a shot, Jonah is one. There you go. Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Nahum, Micah, Habakkuk, Zechariah, Haggai, Habakkuk, Zephaniah. Right. Or disciples, Zechariah. And then the final is the Italian prophet, Malachi.
So those are the twelve minor prophets. And Jonah is included in the minor prophets, but he really shouldn’t be. Okay, here’s what Jonah is absolutely unique among the prophetic books. Every other prophetic book is this.
It is the words of the prophets prophesying to Israel. It’s the prophets being covenant lawyers over Israel and basically saying, God established a covenant with you, you have broken it. And if you think God is not patient, it’s been about a thousand years of breaking the covenant. All right? A thousand years.
A lot of people say, oh, God is so harsh in the Old Testament. No, God is pretty merciful in the Old Testament. A thousand years, Israel chases after idols and worships other gods and fails.
And they have bad king after bad king before God finally enforces the covenant. But the prophets are coming and saying God is going to enforce the covenant.
By the way, if you don’t think God is patient, you should have grown up in my house. God gave Israel a thousand years. You know what the time limit was in my house? One, two, three, right? Anybody got the one, two, three as a kid? All right, go to bed. One, two. All right. There was no two and a half.
There was no two and a half in my house. No two and a half. You better be moving by after I’m done with two.
So anyway, God is patient, but Jonah is different in this way. Jonah is not the book of Jonah, the prophet, speaking to Israel. In fact, the only prophecy Jonah ever speaks is about eight words: In 40 days, Nineveh will be overturned. I think it’s five words in Hebrew. In 40 days, Nineveh will be over. That’s his prophecy. That’s his big sermon.
And so really, if you ask me, and the people who put together the Bible back in the day, they didn’t insult me. I wasn’t around.
And if you ask me, Jonah doesn’t really fit in the prophetic books. It fits more in the historical books because Jonah is not a prophecy as much as a story about a prophet. And Jonah is a bad prophet. And we’re going to find that out.
I’m going to cover the whole book tonight. I’m just going to do an overview. It’s four short chapters.
All I’m going to read to you is chapter four. But then we’ll talk about chapters one, two, and three as we lead up to chapter four. But we’re actually going to start at chapter three, the last verse, verse ten.
When God saw what they had done and how they had put a stop to their evil ways, he changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction he had threatened. That’s Nineveh. This change of plans greatly upset Jonah, and he became very angry. So he complained to the Lord about it. Didn’t I say before I left home that you would do this? Lord, this is why I ran away to Tarshish. I knew that you were a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You were eager to turn back from destroying people. Just kill me now, Lord. I’d rather be dead than alive if what I predicted will not happen. The Lord replied, is it right for you to be angry about this? Then Jonah went out to the east side of the city and made a shelter to sit under and waited to see what would happen to the city. And the Lord God arranged for a leafy plant to grow there, and soon it spread its broad leaves over Jonah’s head, shading him from the sun. This eased his discomfort, and Jonah was grateful for the plant. But God also arranged for a worm. The next morning at dawn, the worm ate through the stem of the plant so that it withered away. As the sun grew hot, God arranged for a scorching east wind to blow on Jonah. The sun beat down on his head until he grew faint and wished to die. Death is certainly better than living like this. He exclaimed. Then God said to Jonah, is it right for you to be angry because the plant died? Yes, Jonah retorted, even angry enough to die. Then the Lord said, you feel sorry about the plant, though you did not even put it there. You came quickly and died quickly. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people living in spiritual darkness, not to mention all the animals. Shouldn’t I feel sorry for such a great city? (Jonah 3:10-4:10, NLT)
14 Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Psalms 19:14, ESV)
Okay, Jonah is a bad prophet. There’s only one other place where Jonah kind of appears in the Bible. It’s in 2 Kings.
14, 23, 25. When Jeroboam, one of Israel’s worst kings, Israel, the northern kingdom, had no good kings, but Jeroboam was one of the worst. He called the prophets together because he was planning a warfare against his enemies and wanted one of the prophets to basically tell him that he was going to be successful.
Jeroboam was treating the prophets like somebody might go to a psychic or a medium today. He wasn’t really looking for the voice of the Lord.
He was hoping for some encouragement and hoping that if they said it would be so, it would be so. And so all the prophets, including Jonah, said, yeah, go to war. You’ll be fine.
And then Jeroboam. And then Jeroboam had allied with the king of Judah. And the king of Judah said, isn’t there another prophet? Let’s hear one more view of Jeroboam. What is this guy Amos? You know? And he always prophesies bad stuff. I don’t want to listen to Amos. He says, well, bring in Amos.
And Amos comes in and says, oh, yeah, you’ll be fine. And Jeroboam says, come on, tell me what God’s really saying. And Amos says, you’re going to die. It’s not going to go well for you. And Jeroboam went anyway, and he died.
And so Jonah was not a good prophet. He was a bad prophet. But God gives Jonah a chance to redeem himself, and here’s the chance. He says, go to Nineveh. Go to the capital of Assyria, Israel’s enemies, and ultimately the country that would come and exile Israel, and preach them repentance.
I’m about to bring judgment upon them. And Jonah, the bad prophet, continues to be a bad prophet, and he runs away.
Nineveh was to the east, Spain, the Mediterranean Sea. To Spain. Tarsish was to the west. God said, go east. Jonah went west. He paid passage on a boat, a bunch of sailors going across the Mediterranean Sea. He got on the boat, took a nap, and a mighty storm came up.
These sailors are not Israelites. Israelites were not renowned for being sailors. These sailors were pagans, but they knew enough to know that something was amiss.
This storm was the wrong time of year, or whatever it was. Maybe it was just pagan superstition, but they believed that the gods or God was angry with them, and so they wanted to find out why.
So they began to cry out, who’s done this? Who’s brought this calamity on us? And Jonah wakes up from his nap and he gets up and he says, it’s me. It’s me.
And here’s what the bad prophet says. The bad prophet knows the truth.
He says, look it, I’m a prophet of the Lord God who made the heavens and the earth, not one of your pagan gods. I’m a prophet of the real God, and I’m not doing what he wants me to do. And I’m the reason that this storm has hit you, and therefore I’m guilty.
And they said, well, what should we do about it? And Jonah, you might think this is noble, but actually it’s kind of cowardly because he could have told them this. He could have said, turn the ship around.
Turn the ship around and drop me off, and I’ll go do what God wants me to do. But instead, Jonah says, throw me into the sea. Instead, he says, I would rather die than love my enemies. I’d rather die than do what God’s calling me to do. Just throw me into the sea.
And the sailors didn’t want to do it. They said, no, we don’t want to murder you, man. That wouldn’t be right. And he says, no, do it. Do it. So he finally talks them into it. And they pray to God.
They pray to Jonah’s God and they say, God, don’t hold this against us. This guy wanted it done this way. And they threw him away, and the storm stopped. Then the pagan sailors began praising the God of Israel.
You see how this story is setting everything upside down? Israel, the prophet of Israel, is the bad guy, and the pagans are the good guys. And God is saying in this story, I’m not just the God of Israel. I’m not just the God of this group of people. I’m the God of that group of people.
And maybe that group of people doesn’t hold your values or doesn’t agree with you on this or that, but I’m still their God and I still can touch them.
I want you to go to Nineveh and speak to those people that they might be saved. No way. I hate them. I want them to die. I’d rather die than they live.
But God is persistent, all right? Jonah gets put in the belly of a whale. The sailors have a revival, and Jonah gets eaten by a fish, but he doesn’t die.
And finally, Jonah comes to his senses, at least a little bit. When you’re in the belly of a whale, pray. All right? Remember that, Kathleen. If you ever get eaten by a whale, pray.
And here’s what Jonah prays in the whale. He says, all right, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. And if you read his prayers from Jonah 2, they all come from the Psalms. All of Jonah’s prayers come from the Psalms.
And I don’t know how, as 40 years of the pastor, there’s things you hear a lot, right?
All right, number one thing you hear a lot. My husband’s an idiot. No, that’s it. Might be in the top ten. That’s not number one.
Number one thing you hear a lot is this. I just don’t know how to pray. I don’t know how to pray. Whenever I pray, I start, and in three minutes, my mind wanders.
All right, anybody have that experience? You just start praying and you think, okay, I’m gonna. You know, you make a commitment, Lord, I’m gonna pray 15 minutes a day, or I’m gonna pray a half an hour a day.
And you start to pray. And as you start to pray, all of a sudden your mind wanders, and you can’t do it. And I want to tell you something. I don’t know of anybody who can pray that way. I don’t know of anybody who silently can pray for a half an hour of uninterrupted, spontaneous prayers from their own thoughts. Maybe there are people out there who can do that. I mean, I’ve met people who say, oh, I just love to get up in the morning. I pray 3 hours a day. But I need help.
Jonah needed help, and Jonah knew what to do as a good Israelite. Well, they want a good Israelite, but as an Israelite, you know what to do. Pray the psalms. Pray the psalms.
Look, if you can’t pray, there’s a prayer book in the Bible. Pray the psalms. I pray three, maybe five psalms a day, and it helps me to pray. Why? Because I find myself in the psalms.
You ever felt abandoned? Psalm 22:1. Eloi, eloi lama sabakti. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
You ever felt like God was taking too long on some agenda? Psalm 13. How long, O God? How long? How long is this going to take?
You ever felt exuberant and, like, praising the Lord? Read the last five psalms. They’re all jumping up and down and praising God and instructing us to praise God.
You ever want to spend a long time meditating on how important God’s instruction and His word are? Read Psalm 19 or 119.
Excuse me. If you want to discover the wonders of, pray about the wonders of creation, then read Psalm 19.
Pray the psalms. Jonah prays the psalms from the belly of the whale, and God delivers him. It’s a fairly gross deliverance, but Jonah had been grossly disobedient. The whale pukes him up on the shore, all right?
And so somebody said, well, he probably stunk when he got to Nineveh. Well, he was back in a time of history where hygiene was different. He probably stunk anyway by our standard. But he got puked up on a shore.
And by the way, there’s this debate, right? Is Jonah really a historical book?
Could a man really survive three days in the belly of a fish? You know that’s impossible. Science says that can’t happen. Listen, I want to say two things about that. First of all, every miracle is something science says can’t happen. That’s what makes it a miracle. All right? That’s what makes it a miracle.
So, a sovereign God who created the heavens and the earth can drop into the natural laws that He created and do something in those natural laws that does not conform with those natural laws according to His will and purpose and His desire. It’s called miracles. They happen. They happen all the time.
So, we know that there can be miracles. So, yes, Jonah could survive in the belly of a fish. The other way we know that is Pinocchio. We’ve all seen it. It happened.
All right. Jonah goes to Nineveh. His sermon is short.
40 days, and Nineveh will be overturned. He walks from one end of the town to the other, and best we can know, that’s all the Bible records. Maybe he said more, but all the Bible records, he said this: 40 days, and then it’ll be overturned. Hey, you. 40 days, and then it’ll be overturned. Where’s the king? 40 days, and it’ll be over. Just walk three days. Walk through the town. 40 days, and it’ll be overturned. He probably says it with a smile on his face. He wanted Nineveh to be overturned.
He didn’t like the Assyrians, and there were good reasons not to like the Assyrians.
Kingdoms in those days, as cruel as kingdoms and powers can be in our day and age, they weren’t nicer back then. People were brutal. It was a brutal, harsh world that people lived in. Kings, power-hungry kings, were brutal to their enemies. They were cruel. They invented wicked forms of death. It was a harsh world.
The Assyrians were harsh. These weren’t good people. But the Israelites weren’t good people. The Babylonians weren’t good people. The Egyptians weren’t good people.
God came to save not good people. Forty days, and then he’ll be overturned. He doesn’t even tell them what their sin is, though I think they can probably figure it out. He doesn’t even tell them Yahweh. He doesn’t even mention Yahweh’s name. He doesn’t even tell them to repent. He just announces forty days and then it’ll be overturned.
You know, some of the most effective sermons can be the shortest. And you’re thinking, well, try it, Kev. Maybe I will one day. Maybe I will. All right. So Nineveh got it. And ironically, they were overturned.
Jonah wanted them to be overturned by the judgment of God, but they, in fact, were overturned by repentance. They turned around. That’s what repentance means. They turned around. They turned a new leaf. They changed their direction. They stopped their evil ways, at least for a generation.
We know later the Assyrians were cruel and domineering again. But God saved a generation of Ninevites because the prophet said he didn’t even call them to repentance. He didn’t even say to repent.
But the king had enough sense to say, maybe, Yahweh, the God of Israel, and we know about Yahweh. We’ve got our gods. They’ve got their God. We don’t know why Yahweh doesn’t always act on their behalf. But we do know whenever Yahweh does act on their behalf, he’s a pretty impressive guy.
I mean, all those countries still knew about the story of Moses and Israel going through the Exodus. They all knew the story about Israel’s amazing victories. They would attack Israel, hoping that Yahweh wasn’t going to rise up and be on their side.
But they knew. They had all these different gods, but they had a hunch that Yahweh was a pretty impressive God. And so the king had enough sense to say, you know, we better change our ways. We need to repent. We need to turn around. And they did. And they did.
And then we get to chapter four. God loves to show mercy. God loves to show mercy. God is always looking to show mercy.
When my kids were little, I wanted to be what I am now. Now I’m a grandpa, so I am 100% nice.
You know, their mom will come over to pick them up and say, how’d it go? They were great. Yeah. Even when you said no, we didn’t know you had to do that. We said no. Of course we’d say no.
Can I have an ice cream sandwich? Well, dinner is almost ready. You can only have one. But I always wanted.
I told my kids when they were in high school, I said, look, I want to be the nicest dad. I said, I will always say yes until you give me a reason to say no.
I said, but when you give me a reason to say no, I said, the hammer is going to fall. And they said, well, what’s the hammer? I had no idea what the hammer was, but it was impressive. The hammer is going to fall. What’s the hammer?
So my answer, I didn’t have any idea what the hammer was. So when they asked that, I just said, you don’t want to know. That’s how I got out of it. But I wanted to say yes. God wants to say yes.
Jonah prays in anger toward God because God shows compassion. Beware of despising the mercy of God when he extends it to those people. You don’t want him to extend it to you, because it’s that same mercy that he extended to you.
And I guarantee you there was somebody out there who didn’t want God to show you mercy. God, pay that person back. Pay that jerk back.
You see, there’s something true about each one of us. We’ve all been sinned against. We’ve all been hurt by somebody else. There’s no doubt about it.
Somebody has treated us unfairly. Somebody has treated us maybe cruelly. Somebody has victimized us in some way. Somebody’s taking advantage of us. Somebody bullied us, made fun of us, whatever. We’ve all been hurt by somebody else.
There’s nothing that’s true about everybody in this room. We’ve all been the other person in that equation. You’ve all done that to somebody else. And the Bible says, forgive one another, just as God in Christ has forgiven you.
Jonah was angry that God shows compassion. I’m sometimes afraid that we will be angry when God shows compassion.
And then the second thing is, Jonah is full of self-pity. I just want to die. It’s so hot out here. God, I just want to die.
I says, why are you upset? Why are you feeling sorry for yourself? I gave you a shade tree. Yeah, but you took it away. Yeah. Had it for a while. You didn’t deserve it. You didn’t earn it.
What did I do? What harm have I done to Egypt? Well, you didn’t kill my enemies. So what? It’s not fair.
Listen, we are in a. I don’t know if this is.
This is probably true of all cultures and all times, but we are in an epidemic of celebrating victimhood. And again, I get it. We’ve all been victims. Life ain’t fair. We’ve all been hurt.
But I also know this. When I come across some guy and he’s gone through five jobs, and he just keeps telling me, I say, well, why’d you lose that job? Oh, I had a bad boss. Five bad bosses in a row. I start to wonder. I start to wonder, you know, what’s the common denominator in all these broken relationships?
What’s going on here? Let me tell you something about having a job. Some days it’s going to be a bad job. Some days you’re going to have a bad boss.
You think I want to be self-employed? Then I can be my own boss. You don’t think you’re a bad boss? There comes a point where personal responsibility steps in. It’s like, suck it up, buttercup. Go to work, do your job. Take care of your family. Love your neighbor. It’s not easy.
I just want to die. Let’s go. Butter don’t melt when the heat’s on.
I mean, really, life is hard. God is good. His love endures forever. The struggle lasts for a while. The glory and rewards are eternal.
Keep putting the right foot in front of the left and the left foot in front of the right. And if you find yourself grumbling and complaining, turn it around with the biblical antidote, which is thankfulness.
I’m just going to warn you guys, Nick, you’re excluded from this because you have exceeded me. Grumpy old men’s syndrome is a real thing. Grumpy old men’s syndrome is a real thing.
The older you get, the easier it is to get grumpy. Get off my lawn. All right. It’s just. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s the drop in testosterone. I don’t know if your back hurts and you just don’t feel like dealing with it. I don’t know.
But I find that, you know, I’m in Christ. I should be growing more patient, but I find that I have to fight impatience at minor inconveniences, which is really childish. I had a victory the other day. Because I hate traffic.
And I was coming back from the other side of the Hood Canal bridge. I had an appointment out there with somebody. I was driving back, and there was an accident on the Hood Canal bridge where there’s no other way to go. You know, just sitting there in traffic. And I did good. I did good. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t turn into Joe, I want to move somewhere else. I didn’t do that. I’ve done that, though. And I just saw a guy, and something good came up. The Internet.
I saw a guy on the Internet. He said, you know what kind of people complain about traffic? And I thought, yeah, people who live in crowded places, like Seattle. He said, people with cars. Quit whining. Twelve percent of the world has cars. You got two. You got one for you, one for your wife. When we had kids, we had four cars. Quiet. Be thankful.
Jonah, the God of the universe, is talking to you and just used you, a bad prophet, to speak life and save 120,000 people.
Why don’t you turn it around and thank God he delivered you from drowning. Yeah, but it wasn’t a fist. Well, he delivered you. What choice did you give him? You could have just told him to turn the boat around, or you could have just obeyed him to begin with.
There is no greater path to your destruction in mind than a life of victimhood and self-pity. There is no greater doorway to as much blessing and happiness as you can experience in this world, eternal blessing and happiness, than a life of faith and thankfulness.
And every situation, dear ones, you can turn around every situation. There’s no manure in your life. And I know some people have had terrible things happen, but I’m not minimizing that. But I am saying that the Bible says, not Kevin. The Bible says that God causes all things to work for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
There’s no manure in your life that God can’t use to fertilize a garden. And the way we get there is through trust and thankfulness. Jonah wants to die because God took his shade away.
God shows mercy on Jonah. He removes it from Jonah. And God is looking for a way to show mercy even to animals.
And I would extend that. Listen, this is how merciful and great God is. I would say that God is looking to extend mercy even to cats. That is how deep his mercy goes. Yeah. Amazing grace.
He has extended mercy to us in Jesus Christ, and he desires for us to show mercy to those we want to judge.
Now let me make clear something about judgment, because the world will yell at us when we say wrong is wrong. They’ll yell at us and say Jesus said, don’t judge. No, no, no. We get to call balls and strikes. We get to call balls and strikes.
Murder’s wrong. Anybody got a problem with that? Murder is wrong. All right. Rape is wrong, all right. Theft is wrong. God’s got a list of ten. There’s wrong. That’s not being judgmental. When you call wrong, wrong. When you call broke, broken.
Here’s what being judgmental is.
I don’t do that particular sin, so I’m better than them. That’s what Jesus forbids.
Or here’s the other one. I catch myself doing this all the time. I know why they did that, right? Putting motives into somebody else’s mind and heart that you don’t know. They did that because they wanted this and this and this. It’s like you don’t know that. You don’t know that.
And so we can call balls and strikes and never be buffaloed, never be bullied. The voice of the enemy wants to silence the church from just speaking the truth.
And so we slip into codependent enabled, and we call broke, fixed and wrong, right, so that we can appear loving. It’s not love.
Now, there are people who are mean and judgmental, and some of them sit in churches. Some of them don’t sit in churches. Anybody ever met an unbelieving pharisee? I met lots of them.
Go to an inclusive, tolerant university and see how inclusive and tolerant they are. Once you start speaking about Christian sexual ethics, let’s say on campus, all right, you’ll find some very non-judgmental people who appear to be fairly judgmental.
So it exists all over the place. And here’s the deal. We have to walk the path. We have to.
When the Bible says it, right, we have to speak the truth in love. The people who don’t like love are going to call us soft. They’re going to say we’re compromisers. No, I haven’t changed one thing. I haven’t changed one thing about what the Bible believes. I’m just saying that God accepts sinners, and the people over here are going to call us haters because we still call. We don’t call wrong, right?
And we don’t call broke things. You say, well, you’re just mean. You’re just intolerant. You’re haters.
And here’s what we have to do. We have to stand there and continue to be obedient and loving. Dear ones, don’t whine about it. Bear the reproach. Bear the reproach.
Not everybody’s going to like you if you follow Jesus. Let me say it again. Not everybody’s going to like you if you follow Jesus. He said that, all right. You don’t have to go on social media and try to make everybody like Christians.
You don’t have to do that. And you don’t have to go on social media and be a jerk. There’s an election coming up. There’s no time where we give ourselves the license to hate more than an election to because we want to align ourselves with particular values. We do the right thing. And here’s the right thing. You should vote. You should, and you should look for candidates, and none of them are going to be perfect, and none of them are going to support your values perfectly.
But you should look for the ones that most align with the values that you believe to be true about what God is doing and saying in the world, what the scriptures say.
You should align yourself with those and you should vote. Don’t be passive. You should vote. You should do that.
You should prayerfully seek that out and align yourself with whatever side, with whatever candidate, with whatever person best reflects the values that you support and hold.
And then the other thing you should do is, when your side and your guy loses, you should pray passionately and compassionately for the other guy or the other woman. You should not tear them down again.
You can tear down their ideas. That’s called balls and strikes. You can say, hey, that person believes in this, and I believe that that does not align with the values that the God of the Bible has taught me. But you can’t say, you know, we ought to shoot them or we oughta, or whatever.
They’re terrible or, you know, they’re. They just are wicked, evil people. You don’t know their motives. You don’t know. You don’t know their starting point. You don’t even know if you’re right. You’re just doing the best you can, and that’s good.
And you know what the Bible says? Here’s what the Bible says to do with your, with your political enemies. Pray for them. Not that God would smite them, but that they would serve well and justly.
And you think, well, that wasn’t written for, you know, this political party or that political party or for that adulterer or that demented leader. I’m speaking hypothetically. Just, hey, pray for them.
Well, the people that Paul wrote that to were under the thumb of Roman caesars, far worse than anybody you’ve ever had sitting in the White House. They would burn people like you alive. All right. Hasn’t come to that, has it? You’re good. Yeah, but they made us wear masks. Well, you got over it. You got over all right.
Dear ones, love your enemies.
That’s what the book of Jonah is trying to tell us. As God has extended mercy, so extend mercy.
Will God bring judgment? Yes. The Bible is very clear on that. In the end, all who don’t repent will be judged.
And listen, I’m no softy on this. There’s no middle ground. There’s no neutral. There is life and death. All right? You are walking toward death until you turn and face Christ, and then you are walking toward life. And the Bible is very clear, if you remain an enemy of God, then you are heading toward death.
You’re heading toward destruction. That is your future. And if you are heading toward Christ, you are heading toward life, abundant and glorious.
What God had intended from the beginning, the re-Eden, earth, all of creation, renewed purpose and meaning and joy forevermore. Kathleen will even be happier there. Hard to believe she’ll even be happier.
But some people, sometimes I get the idea that we want Christ to return and all the good things to come. But, you know, some people, I can hardly wait for Christ to return. I’m kind of ambivalent about that.
It’s like, well, why don’t you want Christ to return? Because my sister doesn’t know him yet, and I haven’t seen revival in Kitsap County. I prayed for revival in Kitsap County, and I prayed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
So if it’s all the same with you, God, wait a little longer. Wait a little longer.
What does the Bible say in 2 Peter 3:9? It says, God will bring judgment.
And people back then were asking, why isn’t he bringing judgment on the Romans who were feeding us to the lions and the people who were stoning us and killing us? Why isn’t he bringing judgment?
And Peter says, because God is patient and he’s desiring that all should come to repentance.
Love your enemies because God does, and endure the suffering that comes your way because of that, for a short period of time, for a glory to be revealed in you and to you and through you that you cannot yet imagine. You can do a tough thing for a reward.
And don’t think that’s being self-serving to say, yeah, I can do this, for God tells us to do that. He says, hang in there for the reward. Hang in there for the reward. It will be good. It will be.
In fact, here’s what he says.
He says, Paul says this. He says,
18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. (Romans 8:18, ESV)
And again, that’s Paul, beaten by whips 39 times on several occasions, stoned nearly to death, thrown into dirty dungeons and prisons, falsely accused, chained to a Roman guard, imprisoned, ultimately having his head cut off in Rome.
And he says, the glory to be revealed through us and in us cannot be compared to the present suffering, or the present sufferings can’t be compared to the glory to be revealed.
And so, dear ones, love Jesus. Love your enemies. Don’t quit. You got a right foot, put it in front of the left. You got a left foot, put it in front of the right.
Say your prayers. Go to church. Read your Bible. Hang out with Christian community. Be strengthened by one another. Experience God’s encouragement through the miracles and powers and signs and wonders that the Spirit brings, demonstrating what? There’s a kingdom.
And every day that kingdom is breaking in until it will cover the whole earth as the water covers the sea.
And we’re on that team, and that team’s going to win. And that team loves its enemies.
And I’m done. I am done. Jonah. I don’t know if Jonah’s gonna be in heaven, man. I hope so. I hope he’s up there going, yeah, yeah, I finally got it. Jonah’s not my enemy. The Ninevites are not my enemies.
Mick, even the Yankees aren’t my enemies. Or Yankee fans, even though sports is a fantasy world that I pretend they are. Not really, they really aren’t. I like Aaron Judge. All right. The Red Sox, too.
I have to go through everything. Kathleen, you were looking at me like, yes, I’m assaulted, guy. I was thrilled. I was thrilled. Tell your husband I’m happy for him.
All right, dear ones, God showed mercy to you. Jesus Christ came into the world to seek and save that which was lost. Right on the night that he was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it, gave it to his disciples, and he said, my body, this Passover meal, this is about my body, which is going to be beaten and nailed to a cross, broken for you.
He took out the bread or the wine. He poured it out, gave thanks to his father and said, this is my blood. This is going to be poured out upon the earth. And it’s the blood of the new covenant.
You are a new covenant people. You do not live under the old covenant. Nobody brought in a spotless goat or ram or bull tonight to be slaughtered. All right? We’re not in the old covenant. We don’t have to do that. We are new covenant people.
That means through what Christ has done, by faith in him, our sins are forgiven. His spirit now lives in us to empower us to do the ministry of Jesus and to grow in the character of Jesus.
That’s what it means to be living in the new covenant. We’re the new covenant community. We’re all in this together. And he says this blood seals the new covenant. And the entry point is the forgiveness of sins.
So tonight, take this meal. Really simple meal, but powerful meal. Just be thankful.
Say thank you for making me a new covenant. Thank you for what you did. Thank you for who you are and what you did. And I receive it every time you take communion.
It’s not. Listen, I’m not saying, you know, I’m not that Arminian. You got to be born again. Born again, born again, born again. Every time you sin. I’m not saying that. But it’s a reminder, right? That my sins are forgiven and that Christ lives in me.
And I believe when we remember that, and when we take this meal, it actually feeds us the fat treat.
So take it, eat.
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