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Pray with me right now, Father in heaven. God, that's what we are chasing after this morning. We want your peace. We want to feel the sense of your presence among us. God, we want your power in our lives. So I pray as we study your word that you would speak to us clearly, that your presence would be with us, that your power would be within us. And I pray, God, that you would speak to us clearly through the power of your work. We pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright, you may be seated. Thanks so much to Pastor Christian and our entire worship team for leading us in worship this morning. It was uh awesome to have Anna Claire up here on the platform and celebrate her and uh so many like her who have gone through our residency program, who are serving so faithfully here at Family Church Downtown and really across our family of churches this morning. Some of you ought to think about getting connected to our residency program. Some of you have seen us uh celebrate people who have done that and celebrate launching people out of our campus into other gospel ministries across our family of churches, and you've resisted the call of God on your life. Some of you should think about relenting to that and pursuing that. Uh I'm excited to be with you here today. I was really, really inspired uh by Renan's baptism earlier. I'm thankful that we have a Thursday night expression of family church that meets so that people like him and others that can't regularly gather on Sunday morning can go to a place where they can learn the Bible and celebrate the Lord's Supper and get baptized and get saved and build their families. I'm so grateful for Pastor Jonathan Ramatar and for Chris Kish and the team that leads that service. I'm really excited to be with you this morning. Uh, Pastor Jimmy's our normal uh Bible teacher. If we haven't had the chance to meet yet, my name is Derek Simpson. I'm one of the pastors here. Pastor Jimmy Scroggins is our lead pastor. He ordinarily teaches the Bible here on Sunday morning. We have a leadership transition that we're going through up at our Palm Beach Gardens location. So he's spending a little bit of time this summer helping uh launch Pastor Tyler into his new role as uh he was just uh selected as the new pastor at a large and important church in Jacksonville. Pastor Jimmy's up at Gardens today. He'll be back next week. I'm excited to be with you. Go ahead and take your Bibles out, turn your Bibles on to the Old Testament book of Jonah. We're studying the book of Jonah today. We're taking this summer and we're walking through each one of the what are called the minor prophets. They're not minor because they're unimportant, they're just minor because they're smaller than some of the Old Testament uh books and some of the larger prophet prophetical writings in the Old Testament. Of all the minor prophets that there are, Jonah might be the most familiar to most of us in the room. It also might be the most misunderstood of all the people in the room. Um, it is uh it's famous for Jonah being swallowed by a giant fish. It's a really fun uh Bible story to teach to children. Uh and uh it's gonna be a lot of fun for us to study here today because I think there's something that everybody in the room can grab a hold of, something that God wants to teach, and uh teach every person in the room. I think there's some things that you will learn. Just a little bit of the background of Jonah. We don't have a lot of time to go into it, but uh he we we know that he uh he his his ministry took place in the 700s uh A.D. it's uh there's a there's a little bit of reference to him in 2 Kings uh chapter 13 and chapter 14. Uh we know that he uh he was a prophet to King Jeroboam II. Uh we know that he was a successful prophet. He had some experienced some ministry success in his life and in his ministry. We'll talk about that um later. But um the book of Jonah is really about God's pursuit of broken people. And in the story that we're about to read, we're going to see, and one of the things that you're gonna discover is that everybody can identify with somebody in the story, and everybody, everybody in the story is broken, and everybody in the story is in need of God's love and God's forgiveness. And that's something that we can all relate to. Whether you, whatever station of life that you're in, whatever season of life that you're in, whether you are a SEAL team, six special forces, here every Sunday, here early on Sundays, kind of Christian, or whether this is your first time here, we can all identify with a need to feel and to sense and to experience God's love and God's forgiveness because all of us are broken. Let's start at the very beginning. Uh, I'm gonna read, here's what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read some selected verses. We're gonna kind of hop through the book of Jonah. I'm gonna hit some of the highlights, I'm gonna fill in some of the gaps with some commentary in between. So you're gonna have to keep your device on or keep your Bible out, you're gonna have to turn some pages. It's not that much work, and it's okay. It's church. It's like what we came here to do. We came here to study the Bible. So uh let's start in verse one, and this is the word of the Lord, and this is what it says. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Ahmadi, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me. But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid his fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. So here's the scene. Jonah was a prophet of God. Jonah was not an independent contractor. He wasn't, uh he wasn't allowed to just kind of pick up jobs that he wanted and to pass on others. Uh God chose him to be a prophet. He responded to the call of God to be a prophet, and God gave him uh his assignment. God was giving him a command. He was not asking him, hey, do you want to go to Nineveh today? He was saying, You need to go. You have to go to Nineveh, and you have to tell the Ninevehes that I'm not pleased with them. I'm I I uh my my wrath and my judgment is going to be poured out on them. Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. It's near modern-day uh Mosul, Iraq. It was a large, developed uh cultural and political hub. It was uh it it had a double-walled city, we know from archaeologists today. Uh it's where the treasury was, so all of the all of the kingdoms and all the countries that the Assyrians uh would would would capture, uh all the all the tribute and all the taxes they would collect from all their outer uh conquests would come back to uh this city. So it was a beautiful and large and developed city. It was also entirely Gentile, and it was indescribably evil. It was a violent and wicked place. But God cares about the Ninevites, and so he decides to send one of his top prophets to bring a word of judgment against them because of their commitment to evil and to give them an opportunity to repent. And Jonah, Jonah isn't, um, I don't think Jonah's scared for his life. He certainly had reason to be scared, but but Jonah doesn't, he's not scared of his life, he's not scared of the Assyrians, he doesn't want to go. And so he goes down to the sea, he goes in the opposite direction of Nineveh. He goes down to the sea and he catches a boat to a place called Tarshish. We have a map of uh of of Old Testament um Israel. So you see, he's uh he's in Israel, he goes down to Joppa in the opposite direction of Nineveh, and he gets on a boat to sail to Tarshish, to the edge and to the end of the known universe. This would be like if you were in Fort Lauderdale and you had the option to get on I-95 and you were told to go to Miami and you said, you know what, I'm just gonna head towards West Palm Beach. But instead of going to West Palm Beach, I'm gonna go to New York City. Actually, New York's a little bit too much like Miami. I'm gonna go to Boston. I'm gonna go as far as I can possibly go in the opposite kind of direction and as far as I can go to the end of the known world. Why was he doing this? Because the Bible says he was trying to run from God and trying to run from God's presence. And so what God does is God causes a great storm to come up. A great storm is so great that the professional sailors, the crew that constantly and regularly runs this route from Joppa to Tarsus, they wake Jonah up and they discover that he's a prophet of the one true and living God. And the Bible says that Jonah actually says, he identifies himself as one who fears the God who made the sea and the land. That's how he talks about himself. Jonah tries to quit his mission and tries to convince the Gentile sailors to throw him overboard, and they refuse because they fear God. And so they start trying to row Jonah back to shore. But the storm intensifies. God causes the storm to intensify so much that they literally can't make any progress, and they probably feel like they're about to die, the ship's about to break up. And so they cast themselves, the Bible says, they pray to the living God, they cast themselves on the mercy of God, and they throw Jonah overboard, and the Bible says that the seas become calm. Jonah's willing to die so that he doesn't have to go to Nineveh, and then so he doesn't have to obey God in this mission. And um, so Jonah's in the sea, but God doesn't give up on Jonah. God sends a giant fish to swallow Jonah up. Pick up in verse 17. The Bible says, the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Now, if you ever had a chance to get a chance to teach the Bible to little children, this is one of the most fun stories that you can teach to little children because you can just imagine. It doesn't, there's a lot of things you can't imagine if you're a little child, but if you're you you can imagine what it's like to be in the belly of a fish where it's dark and it's squishy and it's slimy, and there's seaweed and there's salt water and there's stomach acids and there's you know partially chewed up fish and there's half-digested, you know, uh squid or whatever, and then you can just kind of imagine the cranped, dark, confusing, disorienting place where Jonah is. But as an adult, you read this story and you start to get a sense of the intensity of God's love. You feel God's love for Jonah. You feel God's intensity of his love, his relentless pursuit of the Nineveh's, his relentless pursuit of Jonah and Jonah's heart. I don't know your story, but maybe you can identify with how Jonah probably felt. Cramped, trapped, disoriented. Almost like the world is suffocating you in every direction. Paralyzed. Not in control of what's happening to you. Maybe you feel like you're too far from God, too far for Him to reach. Maybe you feel like you've been struggling with the same sin over and over and over for too long. Maybe you feel like you've made too many mistakes. Maybe you feel like sometimes life, just too much life is happening to you all at once. Things that you can't control. Family members are letting you down. People that you thought you could trust have violated your trust. People that you love have gotten sick, and some of them died and gone to heaven. Hey, listen, God will go to great lengths to accomplish his purposes. God will go to great lengths to accomplish his purposes in your life. God will go to great lengths. He will send a fish if he has to to swallow you up in the ocean to accomplish his purposes in your life. And Jonah spends three days in the belly of the fish. It takes him three days to get to the place. He is so resistant to this mission that God has for him. It takes him three days to get to the place where he's stubbornly considering his options and realizes God's just going to keep me in this fish, I think, until I finally repent. And he finally cries out to God and he agrees to obey God. And we're going to pick it up in verse 9 of chapter 2, the very end of this song that he sings to God. He says, I I but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed, I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. Continuing chapter three. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. That's it. That's his message. And the people, the Bible says in verse 5, and the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast, they put on sackcloth, and from the greatest of them to the least of them. So Jonah exits the fish, the same command as before. He goes to Nineveh. He does the absolute bare minimum that he could possibly do. You don't get the impression that Jonah is really giving it his all here. But he was there. He did say the words that God told him to say. And he tells them, if you don't repent, he doesn't actually say if you don't repent, he just says, hey, you have 40 days. You have 40 days. But God might spare it. And so he gives them 40 days. There was a running back in the NFL named Marshawn Lynch. He's famous for a post-game press conference where he said, I'm just here so I don't get fined. That's the vibes you get from Jonah. I'm just here so I don't get fined. I don't want to go back to the fish. I don't want to go back to the sea. You guys need to straighten things out. You got 40 days. And what happens is Jonah's simple message of judgment begins a grassroot revival among the people. Where people start to repent of their sins and people start to turn and start to trust the one true and living God. And that revival, word of the revival, actually reaches the king. And the king declares a nationwide fast. Nothing, nobody in nothing is allowed to eat. So that they can focus their attention on their repentance and their response to God's judgment. Not the people, not the children, not the animals, nothing. It's earnest. They really believe God. If you look at it, you go, you look at it. They believed the promise of God's judgment. It's universal. Everybody in the country, from the greatest of these to the least of these, it says, it's biblical. They turn from their evil, they repent of their evil ways, and they turn to God and they start following and trusting in God's commands. And God responds with incredible compassion and God relents. It's not at all characteristic of how God is sometimes portrayed. Sometimes God gets characterized as this cold, dispassionate, kind of compassionless, heartless, outside entity. And here you see this very much more realistic picture of who God is. God loves these people, he sees them and they're evil. He sends the prophet. When the prophet doesn't want to go, he captures the prophet and he redirects the prophet and redirects the heart of the prophet and he gives them an opportunity to repent. And when they repent, he relents and he withholds his judgment. His desire for us to repent, his love for you is far greater. It is far greater and far more intense. He sees you, God, the God of the universe, sees every single person individually in their brokenness, in their sin, and desires for them to repent. 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. This is the power of the gospel. This was true in the Old Testament, this is true in the New Testament, it's true today. When you come face to face with the ugliness of our sin, when you and I come face to face with just how completely and utterly broken we are, when we come face to face, when we really admit how powerless we are to do anything good in and of ourselves, the depth of our brokenness, and when we see the beauty, when we see the holiness, when we see the majesty of God, the one true living God, and the beauty of Jesus, who stepped out of heaven and because he loved us, came to this earth and lived a perfect life and died on the cross for our sins. When you see that, when you sense that, when you experience that, and you repent and you trust in Christ, God wants to forgive you. God is glad to forgive you, and God desires to forgive you. And so you would think that Jonah would be pleased. But chapter 4, verse 1. But it displeased Jonah exceedingly. And he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, Oh Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore, now, O Lord, please take my life from me. For it is better for me to live, for to better for me to die than to live. Alright, here's the deal. Preaching is really hard. It's really it's really hard. It's a really hard thing to know like if you're good at some of you do jobs and there's things like you can know if you do a good job or not. You have real life feedback, like you either did the job well or you did not. Preaching is kind of like not like that at all. You hardly ever know if you're doing it good. Sometimes you get immediate feedback, but most of the time, the most immediate feedback that you get from preaching is like it's not good. You see people fall asleep, people start checking their phone, people stand up and leave and just get bored and just walk out. Every now and then you get an individual piece of nonverbal feedback where you go, hey, you know what? I actually think something's happening in that person's life right now. Even in the balcony. Balcony people, I can see you up there. It's amazing. You can see me, I can see you. I see people on the balcony. Hey, I saw the balcony. How do you know I was in the balcony? I can see you, you can see me, I can see you. Jonah gets this incredible real life feedback. He sees a grassroots revival transform an entire city. And he's mad about it. He's mad about it because there's a judgmental part of who he was. We learn in chapter 4 why he's so resistant in chapter 1 to the call of God on his life. Because earlier in his ministry, God had used Jonah to restore the boundaries of Israel. Jonah had actually come face to face with the compassion and the mercy of God, even when the people did not repent. But the difference was those people were Israelites. Look at 2 Kings chapter 14 and look at verse 26. In verse 26 of 2 Kings chapter 14, uh here's what it says in the Bible. It says, For the Lord saw the affliction of Israel was very bitter, for there was none left, bond or free, and there was none to help Israel. But the Lord had not said that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, so he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam, the son of Joash. And who was the prophet? To the king Jeroboam, the son of Joash. It was none other than Jonah himself. And so Jonah knew about the character and the heart and the mercy and the compassion of God, but he he only wanted the compassion and mercy of God to be extended to the Israelites. He didn't want it to go to the Gentiles. So Jonah goes out onto a hillside to pout and to see, and I think to kind of even maybe just hold out hope that maybe God would change his mind again, and maybe God would destroy Nineveh like he had Sodom and like he had Gomorrah. So God causes a plant, he builds a little tent for himself, and God causes a plant, a miraculous plant, to grow up out of the ground to give shade and comfort. To Jonah, and then overnight God causes a worm to come and to eat that plant and the plant to die and for Jonah to suffer the next day under the heat. But God said to Jonah, Do you do well to be angry for the plant? And he said, It's unbelievable. He said, Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die. And the Lord said, You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow. Which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that grand city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left. And also much cattle. The whole point of the story isn't about a great fish. It isn't even really about Jonah. The hero of the story is God. And God's the one who controls the seas. God's the one who controls the fish. God's the one who causes the plant to grow. God's the one who hears the prayers of the sailors. God's the one who hears the prayers of Jonah and the fish. And God's the one who hears the repentance and the prayers of the Ninevehes. God's the one who heals the brokenness. God's the one who is, in the very words of Jonah, a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. God is in relentless pursuit of people who are broken. If you want to take some notes or write some things down, three things you can write down and fill in the blanks. Number one, don't run away from God. Don't run away from God. Jonah tried to quit. Jonah tried to quit on several occasions. Jonah tried to quit in spectacular fashion. There have been several news and noteworthy people who have done so in recent days and recent months. There's been TV anchors that have quit on live TV. There's been flight attendants who have quit over the intercom, grabbed a couple of adult beverages, popped the emergency slide, just jumped out of the plane. That's happened. There's been all kinds of people. Some of you have experiences and you've seen people quit in spectacular ways. Jonah is not only trying to quit his job, he's trying to run away from God. He's trying to run away from the presence of God. Hey, some of you in the room, you're trying to do the very same thing. You're trying to run away from God. There's something in your life that you're trying to hide or to keep from the presence of God in your life. Stop running. You can't outrun the presence of God. You can't outrun the presence. God is everywhere. He's in the brokenness of your relationship. He's in your addiction. He's in your calendar and your priorities. He's in your budget. He's in your stubbornness. He's in your relational dynamics. You can't outrun the presence of God. He's everywhere. He's God. He sees it all. He knows it all. He's sovereign over all of it. You cannot run the presence of God in your life. I try to be a good dad. I try to do good things for my kids. I feel like sometimes they're missing things from their life that they need to be introduced to, and so I try to introduce them to good things. Several years ago, I introduced them to what I think is one of the best TV shows ever created on planet Earth. The TV show Cops. I love the TV show cops. I absolutely love it. We've watched way more, way more episodes of Cops than I should probably publicly admit. I think you learn a lot by watching cops. You see people at their worst. You sometimes see people at their best. They're usually the ones who are wearing the uniforms. My favorite, one of my favorite things that happens on the TV show cops is when people run from the cops. I love it. I mean, I just love it. And they always put that one, you know, they always put that one right in the middle, so you're hooked, you know. They tease you with it, and then you stay the whole episode. But I love the chase, I love the foot chase, I love my favorite is when they get the helicopter involved. Because they get the helicopter involved, and they get the dogs on the ground, and they go infrared on that thing, and they got a guy hiding under a bush or under a boat or in a shed, and they're like, dude, I see you, I see you, I know right where you are. Hey, God sees you. Stop running. Stop trying to hide. God sees you. He knows, He knows. If you've never repented, if you've never believed in Christ, you should be like the sailors, you should repent. You should be like the Nineveh, you should repent. You should be like Jonah, you should repent, but you should do it for real. The Bible says if you confess your sins with your mouth and you believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, that you will be saved. You saw a picture of it today with Renan. It's a changed God, it's a changed life. Why? Because he's so great. No, it's not because he's great, it's because he's broken. He trusted in Christ. Trust in Christ. Point number two on your notes: extend God's mercy to all people, to all kinds of people. Jonah didn't believe that the mercy of God should be for all kinds of people. Jonah fancied himself as a career prosecutor that God said, Hey, now I want you to switch sides and now you're gonna become a defense attorney, and now you're gonna you're gonna do the exact same job, but for a totally different cause and for a totally different kind of group of people. The truth is, God loves every kind of person. God wants every kind of person to repent of their sins and trust in Christ, to build their lives around the truth of the gospel, to build their families, discover and pursue their design for his life. And so God loves every kind of person. That's why our church loves every kind of person. That's why our church is on mission to join God in his relentless pursuit of every kind of person in South Florida for every kind of socioeconomic class and for every ethnicity and for every language and for every every kind of educational background and for people who work in all kinds of different fields and all kinds of different industries. They all need to experience the mercy of God. They all need a neighborhood church with a neighborhood pastor who speaks a neighborhood language with a neighborhood school they can send their kids to and build their faith and hold their family together. That's what God cares about. That's why we're on in relentless pursuit of every kind of person in every kind of place in every neighborhood in South Florida. There's a difference between mercy and grace. And what God offers the Ninevehes and what God offers you and me is first and foremost mercy. Mercy is not getting what you deserve. The Ninevites deserve to be destroyed. They were evil, but God relents, and God doesn't give them what they deserve. But then God goes one step further. Grace is getting what you don't deserve. God not only offers mercy, he relents from his judgment, but he gives us grace. The Bible says that we experience mercy so that we can receive grace. God is so rich in mercy, and it is by his grace that we are saved. It's not of our own merit, it's not because of our faith or anything that we do, it's because of our faith. It's not because of anything we do, it's because of our faith in Christ that God extends grace to our life and gives us things that we don't deserve. God gives us mercy and he gives us grace. Point number three on your notes. Run to Jesus. Run to Jesus. He receives repenters. God loves to give people second chances. He gave a second chance to Adam and to Moses and to Jonah and to Peter and to me and you. God gives people second chances. If you're a lifelong SEAL team sixer, you're a professional Christian, you've been doing this most of your life, you don't outgrow the need to repent. This is your first time here? Your first time hearing the claims of Christ, first time studying the Bible? The Bible says that you need to repent. There are no unbroken people. There's no temptation that you can experience that Jesus didn't live. He was like you and he was like me in every single way. But the Bible says that Jesus never sinned, not once. Bible says that Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to God. He humbled himself to the point of death, even death on a cross. And Jesus paid the price. He paid the penalty for your sin and for my sin so that we could receive the mercy of God and the grace of God and be saved from the judgment of God. And Jesus, the Bible says, was raised from the dead. One of the reasons that I believe the story of Jonah really happened, just like it said it happened in the Bible, is because Jesus talked about Jonah as a real person, as a real man, as a real story that God did real miracles to and through. Jesus had this very kind of pointed, intense conversation with a group of religious leaders that wanted him to kind of basically perform some miracles on command so that they could test and know that he was really the Son of God. And Jesus in this exchange in Matthew chapter 12 says, Hey, listen, I don't want to do miracles because you've actually been exposed. You've seen it, you actually've heard the stories of miracles before. And he cites Jonah in particular. He says, You already have the sign of Jonah, you didn't believe. Jonah was as good as dead in the fish for three days, and God raised him up. And he compares Jonah to himself. And I want you to see in Matthew chapter 12, look at what he says, starting in verse 39. He says, An evil and an adulterous generation seeks for a sign. But no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a great fist, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here. The sign of Jonah, the big fish, the plant, the reprieve of God's judgment, it's a great sign. But the sign of the resurrection of Jesus is an even greater sign because Jonah is an example of the mercy of God, but Jesus is the ultimate example. The cross of Christ, where Jesus was crucified and bled and died for your sin and for my sin is the mercy that God delivers to us. And it's the forgiveness that God extends to us. How gracious of God, how merciful of God that He gives us a way to remember. Every time we gather, shed blood, broken body of King Jesus. And the Lord's Supper. How you might be running from God, where you might need to experience the mercy and the grace and the forgiveness of God in your life, and how you might turn and repent and trust in Christ this morning. As we sing together, then we'll take it easy just a minute.