SPEAKER_01: Hello, I'm Pastor Creighton, and thank you for tuning in to New Sun Churches Podcast.
SPEAKER_01: We're a gospel center church in Port Perry, Ontario, proclaiming the true and life-giving word of Jesus as we love and serve our neighbors.
SPEAKER_01: May God bless you today through his life-giving word.
SPEAKER_00: Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth.
SPEAKER_00: Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey, and he called out, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
SPEAKER_00: And the people of Nineveh believed God.
SPEAKER_00: They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.
SPEAKER_00: The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.
SPEAKER_00: And he issued a proclamation and published throughout Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything.
SPEAKER_00: Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God.
SPEAKER_00: Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.
SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
SPEAKER_00: God may turn and relent and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.
SPEAKER_00: When God saw what they did, how they turned away from their evil way, God relented of the disaster he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks be to God.
SPEAKER_01: Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.
SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
SPEAKER_01: God may turn and relent, and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Gracious Lord, by your word and Holy Spirit, would you increase our deep sense of need for your forgiveness and grace?
SPEAKER_01: That our assurance of your generous and fatherly heart towards us would also increase to your glory and to our great reassurance.
SPEAKER_01: May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be always pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Please be seated.
SPEAKER_01: At the risk of outing myself as a millennial, I'm going to share with you one of my most frequent ads on social media.
SPEAKER_01: You know how the algorithm works, right?
SPEAKER_01: Somehow it figures out what ad corresponds to your demographic and then just bombards you with that ad and similar ads.
SPEAKER_01: The thing I probably see most frequently, I wonder if you see it too, uh, are ads that that uh start off with something like, you need to be in therapy.
SPEAKER_01: And here's seven reasons why.
SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
SPEAKER_01: Do you ever get those ads?
SPEAKER_01: No, that's just me?
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: The algorithm probably knows me better than I know myself.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I I want to be mindful in how I uh talk about these ads, because uh I've had I've had tremendous experiences in therapy and counseling that have been extremely helpful.
SPEAKER_01: So by no means do I want to just paint with one brush here.
SPEAKER_01: But there is, I might suggest, a very kind of popular form of therapy that's often advertised on social media that um is popular for a reason.
SPEAKER_01: And I wonder what that reason is.
SPEAKER_01: Here's my theory.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna share with you my theory.
SPEAKER_01: I'm still working on this, so you can help me craft it.
SPEAKER_01: My theory is the thing we desire to hear is someone in authority say to us with authority, it's not your fault.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Uh someone in authority to say with authority that your guilt is put away.
SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
SPEAKER_01: And so I wonder if if part of our appetite for a certain kind of therapy is our desperate need to hear those words and to see guilt expiated and sent away.
SPEAKER_01: Because I wonder if if we're honest with ourselves, we have an indelible and impossible to erase guilt that we feel existentially.
SPEAKER_01: There is something broken or wrong in the center of my being, and somehow that needs correction, and I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_01: And so I wonder if part of our appetite for this therapy that so frequently pops up on my social media is that need to hear your guilt has been put away, because we feel that guilt inherently, indelibly.
SPEAKER_01: What do we do with that guilt is the question.
SPEAKER_01: We've been going through this book of Jonah, and we've discovered Jonah to be a very reluctant, rebellious blockhead of a prophet.
SPEAKER_01: He has done his best to resist God's call upon him, which is you need to go and preach to the people of Nineveh.
SPEAKER_01: You know the people you think are the worst sort of people who exist.
SPEAKER_01: You need to go and speak my word to them.
SPEAKER_01: And Jonah does his best to outrun God, but of course we know that even though we can try to resist God, we cannot outrun this God of grace.
SPEAKER_01: And so God finds him, and so God has him hurled into the sea.
SPEAKER_01: And in the depths of the sea, swallowed by this fish, Jonah is forced to reckon with God his creator.
SPEAKER_01: And he's forced to admit to God his wrongdoing, and in the depths of the sea, he comes to place his hope in the only one who can raise him back up to life again.
SPEAKER_01: And so, hilariously, Jonah gets spewed back up onto the beach in the direction he was supposed to be going this whole time.
SPEAKER_01: God's grace goes deeper than we can sink and brings us back from the very brink of death itself.
SPEAKER_01: And now we left Jonah last week on the beach with a choice to make.
SPEAKER_01: And as he makes his way to Nineveh, here's what we're going to see in chapter three God's word proclaims death to sin, but life to sinners.
SPEAKER_01: God's word proclaims death to sin, but life to sinners.
SPEAKER_01: And so if you can resonate with that deep existential sense of dread and guilt, perhaps there's good news for people like you and I.
SPEAKER_01: Because perhaps the gospel gives us permission to be honest about that guilt we feel so deeply, but gives us hope for seeing it truly and completely put away in a way we cannot do for ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: So I want us to reckon, pardon me, I think the author of Jonah wants us to reckon with the reality of repentance, but the great gift of assurance of forgiveness of sins.
SPEAKER_01: One Puritan preacher Thomas Watson puts it this way the two great graces essential to a saint in this life are faith and repentance.
SPEAKER_01: These are two wings by which the saint flies to heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Let's make a heavenly flight today.
SPEAKER_01: Let's dare to do that.
SPEAKER_01: Open up your uh order of service, your Bibles, uh Pew Bibles to page 727, and let's look at Jonah chapter 3 together.
SPEAKER_01: God's word proclaims death to sin, but life to sinners, and this is good news.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what I want us to see: three things.
SPEAKER_01: God's word announces God's anger against sin, God's word awakens the sinner to repent, and God's word assures the repentant sinner of grace.
SPEAKER_01: These are three things that God's word works.
SPEAKER_01: It announces, it awakens, it assures.
SPEAKER_01: Point number one, God's word announces God's anger against sin.
SPEAKER_01: This is a challenge to be honest, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Verses 1 to 4.
SPEAKER_01: Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, because remember, it's come to him in chapter 1, and we know what Jonah did with that.
SPEAKER_01: It's now come to him a second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.
SPEAKER_01: So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, we're told, three days' journey in breadth.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey, and he called out yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pause right there.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pause that there and remember what Nineveh represents to Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: Nineveh is not full of nice, kindly people, is it?
SPEAKER_01: The Assyrian Empire is a brutal empire built on warfare and expansion.
SPEAKER_01: Those who live in Nineveh could not be more politically or ideologically opposed to Jonah and what the people of God represent.
SPEAKER_01: These people in Nineveh represent to Jonah surely the very worst of sinners, the very least deserving of God's grace.
SPEAKER_01: They are the worst of sinners to Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: What are sins?
SPEAKER_01: Here's how our catechism defines sin.
SPEAKER_01: Sins are intentions, acts, or failures to act that arise out of our corrupted human nature and fall short of conformity to God's revealed will.
SPEAKER_01: I want to return to the second half of that definition, but let's pay attention to that first half for now.
SPEAKER_01: Intentions, acts, or failures to act.
SPEAKER_01: That's what sins are.
SPEAKER_01: It's what's opposed to God's good will for us.
SPEAKER_01: And even the king of Nineveh is going to have to admit that the people have been up to no good, violence, and evil ways.
SPEAKER_01: So Jonah is called to go to the very least deserving, to the very worst of enemies, and call out in the middle of the city God's message for that city.
SPEAKER_01: And what's God's message?
SPEAKER_01: Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
SPEAKER_01: Now, maybe this is a summary statement of a much longer sermon that Jonah gave in the midst of the city.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe several sermons that Jonah gave in the midst of the city.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe, and I wonder if this would be in keeping of Jonah's character, maybe this is the bare minimum Jonah can do to check that box of what God is asking him to do in Nineveh.
SPEAKER_01: Either way, this is the message, the essential message that God has for Nineveh.
SPEAKER_01: It shall be overthrown in 40 days.
SPEAKER_01: It will be thrown down.
SPEAKER_01: It will be done away with.
SPEAKER_01: This is the same word overthrown that's used to describe the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the book of Genesis.
SPEAKER_01: Sin, it's clear, provokes God's wrath.
SPEAKER_01: God is angry with sin.
SPEAKER_01: He is angry with the things that contradict his good will for his creation.
SPEAKER_01: And when God's word is announced in the midst of sin, it proclaims death to sin.
SPEAKER_01: It announces God's anger against it.
SPEAKER_01: This is pretty sobering stuff.
SPEAKER_01: And it's sobering because it comes with a responsibility, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01: For those of us responsible, we Christians responsible to handle God's word rightly and to make his word known rightly, we have to confront the reality of the confrontation of God's word with sin.
SPEAKER_01: Do we take sin as seriously as God does?
SPEAKER_01: Because God takes it very seriously, doesn't he?
SPEAKER_01: And the answer is surely not.
SPEAKER_01: Surely we don't take it seriously.
SPEAKER_01: I don't take it as seriously as God does.
SPEAKER_01: Surely.
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if we have a habit of defining sin purely in kind of moralistic terms.
SPEAKER_01: Sin are those, you know, maybe it's minor piccadillos, maybe it's those more serious acts of immorality, you know, your murder, your embezzling, whatever.
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if we do our best to expiate this guilt we feel as a result of sin by either trivializing it or minimizing it.
SPEAKER_01: But God's word does neither.
SPEAKER_01: God's word addresses sin for exactly what it is: those actions, those thoughts, those deeds, those words that contradict God's good will for us.
SPEAKER_01: But even more than that, do you remember that second half of that definition of sin?
SPEAKER_01: They arise from the corruption of our human nature.
SPEAKER_01: It's not just we chose to do the bad thing instead of the good thing, it's that choosing the bad thing arose deep within us from something that is so profoundly broken and rebellious against God, so so self-determining, so idolatrous, that we have put ourselves on God's own throne in our life and make these determinations for ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Something is broken deep within the fallen human person that we cannot choose the ultimate good even if we desire it.
SPEAKER_01: Something is so broken.
SPEAKER_01: This is this means sin is less like um less like choosing to eat junk food when we could have eaten good food, and more like a spiritual cancer that eats at us from the inside, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: It's like a condition.
SPEAKER_01: And God hates sin in the way, perhaps, that we might sit by the bedside of a loved one dying of cancer, and hate that cancer that is eating away in the in their eating their body away, withering them away.
SPEAKER_01: So God hates that sin that eats us away, that corrupts us, that tears us away from him and his grace and his love for us.
SPEAKER_01: When God announces his anger against sin, it is an anger against that thing that corrupts us, that destroys us from within, that promises us the life that we desire for ourselves, but never delivers.
SPEAKER_01: And God is jealous to win us back for his love and his goodness and grace.
SPEAKER_01: He will not abide by the sin that Nineveh is committing anymore, because it's time, Nineveh, to turn back to me.
SPEAKER_01: That's the announcement that God is giving.
SPEAKER_01: God cares for the Ninevehites, surely.
SPEAKER_01: Because if he did not care, he would not call them back, would he?
SPEAKER_01: God's word announces God's anger at sin.
SPEAKER_01: God takes sin very seriously, do we?
SPEAKER_01: But not only does God's word announce God's anger against sin, that he will not tolerate it, that it's time to put it to an end, God's word also awakens the sinner to repent.
SPEAKER_01: Did you see this?
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at verses 5 to 9 here.
SPEAKER_01: And the people of Nineveh believed God.
SPEAKER_01: They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.
SPEAKER_01: And not just the people.
SPEAKER_01: The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackloth, and sat in ashes, and he issued a proclamation, and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither men nor beast, herd nor flock taste anything.
SPEAKER_01: Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God.
SPEAKER_01: Let every one turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.
SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
SPEAKER_01: God may turn and relent, and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah in the midst of the city announces that Nineveh shall be overthrown as a result of the ongoing rebellion and sin that Nineveh is committing.
SPEAKER_01: And the people hear this word, and believe it or not, they believe it.
SPEAKER_01: They receive it.
SPEAKER_01: And they say, we gotta act on this.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's pretty mind-blowing stuff, especially I gotta think of your Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: Like, imagine Jonah's reaction, seriously.
SPEAKER_01: The people of Nineveh hear and trust the word that Jonah delivers from the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps there are circumstantial reasons for that.
SPEAKER_01: Some scholars talk about how this is a particular point of political upheaval or weakness for Nineveh.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps it's time for them to reevaluate their own moral framework.
SPEAKER_01: One commentator puts it this way, and I gotta say, this is the single greatest phrase I've ever read in the Bible commentary, so I just really want you guys to hear this.
SPEAKER_01: There may well have been something about Jonah that drew many after him, his bearing, his dress, or his quote, gastric juice tan from the fish's belly, as he strode towards the center of the city.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's circumstantial reasons that the Ninevites are saying, okay, we got to take this guy seriously.
SPEAKER_01: But the commentator nails it when the commentator concludes with this but the word of the Lord worked the miracle, not Jonah or his commentary.
SPEAKER_01: What's happening here?
SPEAKER_01: God is working by his word in the way that his word works with power.
SPEAKER_01: In whatever is going on in the life of these Ninevites, politically, socially, what have you, God has clearly already been at work preparing their hearts and minds to receive the word exactly when they received it.
SPEAKER_01: And now it's time.
SPEAKER_01: Now it's time to return to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Chesterton has a great phrase about the twitch upon the thread, as though God has a thread attached to each and every one of us.
SPEAKER_01: And at the right time and the right way, he just pulls us right back to himself.
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't matter how far we run.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what's happening in the life of these Ninvites.
SPEAKER_01: It's time.
SPEAKER_01: It's time to deal with our sin and return to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And so they fast and they put on sackcloth, right?
SPEAKER_01: This is a symbol for mourning for sin.
SPEAKER_01: They're realizing as grievous as sin is to God, it needs to grieve us to our core.
SPEAKER_01: James chapter 4 tells us to draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.
SPEAKER_01: Cleanse your hands, you sinners.
SPEAKER_01: Purify your hearts, you double-minded.
SPEAKER_01: Be wretched and mourn and weep.
SPEAKER_01: Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.
SPEAKER_01: Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
SPEAKER_01: When we realize how grievous sin is to the Lord, it grieves us to our core.
SPEAKER_01: And we are ready to turn to Him.
SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what the people do.
SPEAKER_01: It's what the king does.
SPEAKER_01: He issues this proclamation that we're going to do this on a municipal scale.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to have far-reaching social reform in accordance with God's word.
SPEAKER_01: And the rationale that the king gives is crucial.
SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
SPEAKER_01: God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish.
SPEAKER_01: God's word works repentance.
SPEAKER_01: It orients the sinner away from the death that results from the wrath of God and turns us towards the life that He offers to us by grace.
SPEAKER_01: That's the invitation of repentance.
SPEAKER_01: Again, our catechism writes of repentance.
SPEAKER_01: Means that I have a change of heart, turning from sinfully serving myself to serving God as I follow Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: I need God's help to make this change.
SPEAKER_01: So too with the Ninevites, so too with all the great saints through history.
SPEAKER_01: So too, I hope for you and I.
SPEAKER_01: I was just rereading Augustine's confessions earlier this week, and Augustine, to make a long story short, is an amazing genius of a man, but he is trying to fill a desperate restlessness with intellectual pursuits and with sex, frankly.
SPEAKER_01: But in all these ways they don't deliver on their promises, and in the right way, in the right time, the twitch of the thread happens, and Augustine hears Romans chapter 15 being read.
SPEAKER_01: Pardon me, Romans 13, let us walk properly, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to gratify its desires.
SPEAKER_01: And believe it or not, that's the twitch of the thread.
SPEAKER_01: And Augustine says, this is the God I need to turn back to.
SPEAKER_01: I need to turn away from all of my vain pursuits and turn to Him for life.
SPEAKER_01: This is the heart of repentance.
SPEAKER_01: Do we mourn for sin?
SPEAKER_01: Do we grieve our sin as God grieves?
SPEAKER_01: Do we grieve it because we desire more of life and his life and the life that he promises us?
SPEAKER_01: And we so quickly turn to vain and false substitutes.
SPEAKER_01: Repentance is always an invitation, an invitation to come to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, when you first put your faith in him in conversion, but on an ongoing basis, day to day as a Christian, turning away from false promises and towards the truth, towards the God of grace.
SPEAKER_01: This is why we confess our sins as a church Sunday for Sunday, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Because we recognize our hearts so easily go astray, prone to wander.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, I feel it.
SPEAKER_01: But even greater is his grace towards us.
SPEAKER_01: God's word announces God's anger against sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's true, and that's sobering.
SPEAKER_01: But God's word awakens the sinner to repent and place this his or her trust in God's mercy.
SPEAKER_01: So therefore, here's where we want to land.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the third thing God's word works.
SPEAKER_01: God's word assures the repentant sinner of his grace.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at verse 10 really quickly.
SPEAKER_01: When God saw what they, the Ninevites, did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.
SPEAKER_01: Two really key verbs here.
SPEAKER_01: Did you notice those?
SPEAKER_01: God saw, and God relented.
SPEAKER_01: God saw the Ninevites turn away from their sin and towards him, much as God saw Jonah in the belly of the fish, in the very depths of the earth, in Sheol itself, turn to him.
SPEAKER_01: There is no repentance God overlooks.
SPEAKER_01: No matter how far we have gone from him, no matter how terrible our sin may be, God beholds the repentance, the turning away of a sinner towards him.
SPEAKER_01: God saw, he beheld, he considered their repentance.
SPEAKER_01: And God relented, is our second verb, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: Some translations say this that God had compassion.
SPEAKER_01: He is responding to their response to his word.
SPEAKER_01: And as surely as the sinner repents, surely the sinner will be forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: This is the unstated premise in Jonah's preaching.
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah chapter 42 gives us a very vivid illustration of God's heart for the repentant sinner.
SPEAKER_01: A bruised reed the Lord will not break.
SPEAKER_01: A faintly burning wick he will not quench.
SPEAKER_01: He will faithfully bring forth justice.
SPEAKER_01: God is not in the business of breaking bruised reeds that turn to him.
SPEAKER_01: God is not interested in putting out our faintly burning wicks, and we do have faintly burning wicks, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: No, God protects us.
SPEAKER_01: He cherishes it, he cultivates it, he calls us back to himself and assures us of his goodness and grace, because God works life to sinners.
SPEAKER_01: God's word offers us what we can't achieve or attain for ourselves, and that is grace, forgiveness, the expiation of our guilt.
SPEAKER_01: Because God Himself has put it away.
SPEAKER_01: One sinner who experiences this, we meet in Luke chapter 7.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus has been invited over to the table of a very important person, Simon the Pharisee.
SPEAKER_01: And in walks a very well-known sinner, and she is weeping, and she anoints Jesus' feet as an expression of her repentance.
SPEAKER_01: And this Pharisee, Simon, doubts Jesus because he knows this woman's reputation, and Jesus ought to know, no, he ought to know this woman's reputation.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus responds by giving a parable of two debtors and declaring that the one with greater debt, the one who experienced greater forgiveness, responds with greater love.
SPEAKER_01: This woman understands the grace that God offers her.
SPEAKER_01: Simon does not.
SPEAKER_01: And so Jesus says to this woman, your sins are forgiven, past tense, they're done away with.
SPEAKER_01: And he declares, Your faith has saved you, go in peace.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, when we bring ourselves sinners as we are, bruised reeds as we are, faintly burning wicks as we are, we do not hear Jesus' harsh word towards us.
SPEAKER_01: We hear the Lord Jesus say to us, your sins are forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: Your faith has saved you because you've put your trust in me.
SPEAKER_01: Go in peace.
SPEAKER_01: That is assurance we cannot give to ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: Only God Himself can pronounce that to us.
SPEAKER_01: And that is exactly the assurance we see through the cross, where God bears our sin upon himself and puts its power to death in his death, so that we can have the forgiveness that he is won for us by his resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: There is now therefore no condemnation, no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, for those who feel existential guilt that we would rather just ignore or do away with, that is the word we need to hear, and we need to hear the Lord say it to us.
SPEAKER_01: God's word announces his anger against sin, that's true.
SPEAKER_01: And we need to repent and put it away.
SPEAKER_01: It awakens us to the reality of repentance, but God's word does not leave us anxious or uncertain.
SPEAKER_01: God's word assures us of his grace towards repentant sinners.
SPEAKER_01: He alone can embrace us for exactly who we are, without any hiding, without any masks.
SPEAKER_01: It erases our guilt.
SPEAKER_01: It puts it away.
SPEAKER_01: Because God's word proclaims death to sin, but life to sinners.
SPEAKER_01: But notice this.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 10 is a word to the reader, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: It's an assurance to the reader who's reflecting on the story.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah doesn't pronounce that same assurance to the Ninevites, does he?
SPEAKER_01: What does he say to the Ninevites?
SPEAKER_01: He says, Yet forty days the Nineveh shall be overthrown, and it leaves them wondering, who knows?
SPEAKER_01: God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish.
SPEAKER_01: Boy, we hope for the best, and our only hope is in God's mercy, so I think that's the best place to put it.
SPEAKER_01: But friends, we in Christ, we know that assurance that Jonah failed to proclaim, don't we?
SPEAKER_01: We know that God has turned the fullness of his fierce anger not upon us, but upon our Lord Jesus Christ, who was our willing Savior and substitute, so that you and I may not perish, but have everlasting life.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, if you are in Christ, that is your reality today.
SPEAKER_01: That is who you are.
SPEAKER_01: And that is the assurance you can cling to as you come to the Lord's table and hear God's word of grace proclaimed to you all over again.
SPEAKER_01: There may be some here who know that in their heart of hearts there is sin that they've yet to repent of, that they need to turn themselves once again over to the grace of God in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Would you do that today?
SPEAKER_01: Would you speak that to the Lord as we confess our sins together?
SPEAKER_01: But, friends, there are those here who are unsure, anxious, or crippled by that guilt that nothing else can seem to do away with.
SPEAKER_01: Friends, you need to hear that assurance that there is no condemnation.
SPEAKER_01: And that is what we have in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Repent and believe the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: We hope that you've been blessed by God's Word today.
SPEAKER_01: If you live in the Port Perry area, we hope that you'll come and worship with us in person on Sunday at 10 a.m.
SPEAKER_01: If you'd like to learn more about Newsong Church, we'd love to connect with you.
SPEAKER_01: Please find our contact information at newsongportperry.ca and reach out to us.
SPEAKER_01: Newsong's ministry is entirely funded by the generous giving of those who worship and journey with us.
SPEAKER_01: If you feel called to support our ministry with a financial gift, please go to newsportperry.ca slash giving to make your contribution.
SPEAKER_01: Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.