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Hey, how's everybody today? You guys doing alright? Hope y'all had a good fourth. Amen. A couple things I would recommend. I would highly recommend the uh Young Washington movie. I would highly recommend that. Anybody else see it? You see it? It was good, right? It was really good. And I think it's, you know, there's always artistic license taken in that, so there is some, but oh the overarch of it is pretty good. Uh, and the history is pretty good from what I can tell. I also would um recommend to you how many of you have heard the podcast or the YouTube thing called Socrates in the City? Anybody heard that? Everybody's heard of Eric Mataxis? All right, one of the books that I suggested that we read is a new book. Um he's written on the American Revolution. Came out in honor of the 250th anniversary. He has a podcast and it's also a YouTube channel called Socrates in the City. And what it is, it's him discussing matters of the day or history or whatever at a pretty thoughtful intellectual level with high-level intellectual people that like know stuff, right? Um, and so it's a fascinating deal. You if you hadn't ever watched it or listened to it, you ought to. Uh, but there was an incredible one uh leading up to 250th anniversary, um, a conversation with an author and uh political thinker named Oz Guinness. How many have heard of Oz Guinness? Anybody, okay? Oz is an incredible guy, he's a believer. He uh was raised in China. Uh he's British. His family is British by heritage. He was raised in China, his family was run out when the communists took over. I mean, he's seen all these things. He's a strong believer, he's a really rich intellectual thinker, written a lot of books. And he he had an incredible um interview with Metaxis on one of Guinness's books, where he talked about the um, when we talk about the Christian beliefs and the theological beliefs that impacted the um the development of our nation, a lot of that is really rooted in uh the Israelites coming out of Egypt and God beginning to teach them how to build a nation. And they're like, well, if God's going to teach somebody how to build a nation, that must be how you build it. And so there's so much of this that is built specifically on that structure. And that's also the structure of um like William Blackstone, who um you don't codify common law, but he wrote the treatises that everyone acknowledged as the common law in Great Britain that was adopted here, and he had the same principle. Much of it was built on uh Ten Commandments and Deuteronomy and all that. And so Oz has a great book on that, but there's a really good conversation. It's about 45 minutes long between Eric Metaxis and Oz Guinness, and I would highly recommend that to you as well. It was really, really, it was really good. So uh good. All right, let's pray. Lord, thank you for today. Uh we do thank you for the heritage that we have, your hand that was on our country that created a um a deep belief in the freedom of religion, which gives us the freedom to come and do this today. I pray you'll bless these guys, thank them for being here and return to us and to them, especially the time that they've spent here today as you teach us from your word. We thank you for Jesus and salvation in his name. And everybody said uh also I'm fighting my summer, uh, my annual summer sinus infection. So I apologize for my voice, or if I break out in sneezing fits, you guys can forgive me. Um we are gonna get back to our chronological reading, and uh we are hitting uh all of the minor prophets, and they're not minor because their messages are minor, they're referred to as minor because their books are really small. So uh Obadiah and Jonah and Micah and Nahum, Habakkuk, all the kind of stuff. And uh and so this week we hit Jonah, and so uh Jonah is one of my favorite books, and I really um would spend a lot of time in Jonah if I had time, uh because there's just a lot to read there. And if you listen to the podcast that is part of supporting what we're doing, on that podcast, every time you hit a new book, they um they have a little video introduction, it's a little video overview of each book. And if you've not watched those, they're really good. They're they're very well done. And uh and the guy uh on the Jonah one referred to Jonah as a mirror. It's interesting how Jonah is written. It was written during the, you know, after the um the twelve tribes had split into two, you know, the ten in the north and the two in the south, and all of that, and you got all the northern kings and they got all this evil going on and all this kind of stuff, and this is during Jeroboam the second reign, is when Jonah was a prophet. Assyria was in its heyday, and they were um great enemies of Israel and were for a long time. And uh and you know that the story God called Jonah to go to Nineveh. And Nineveh was such an impressive, huge world city, capital of Assyria, uh, wealth and all of that, that the um the gates of Nineveh are in the London Museum, or portions of the gates of Nineveh are in the London Museum. And many of our teams that have been to London to work with our partnership there have been and seen the gates of Nineveh there. It's a pretty incredible thing. Uh and so you have this massive country that's the enemies of Israel, and God calls Jonah to go and preach the gospel to them. And Jonah reacts, and we find in the back of the book why Jonah reacted so negatively. Um he actually tells uh in chapter four, he preaches, you know, this whale, story of the fish, right? Spits him out, he goes and preaches, revival breaks out, he goes up in a hill, he's looking down over the city of Nineveh, and he's mad that people are getting saved. Like he's mad. Now, why is he mad? Because they hate the Assyrians. This is their worst enemy, right? And so uh it displeased Jonah exceedingly, the Bible says, 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 flee to Tarshish. For I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. Now, when we preach the gospel, we preach about the gracious, forgiving character and nature of God, right? And he's hacked off that people are getting saved and is mad, and then he goes from that accusation to God to say, just kill me now. And this is like this is like multiple times now he said, Well, just kill me, and I want to be here for this, right? And the book ends in a strange way. And the Lord challenges him and he says, you know, you know the story, sitting here whining, and so God trying to comfort him, trying to get through, and also trying to teach him a lesson, causes this gourd to grow up miraculously, and it gives him like a shade tree. And he's still sitting there pouting, mad, and all that. So then God causes a worm to eat the thing and it dies, and now he's hot again, and God's trying to teach him a lesson here, right? You're more concerned about this dumb gourd shade tree than you are people who are going to die and go to hell. And so this is the way the book ends. And he said, Yes, I'll do well to be angry and angry enough to die. That's what he says to God. And the Lord says, You pity the plant for which you did not labor, not, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? And then it ends with this rhetorical question. That's the end of the book. That's the last statement in the book. There's no resolution, there's no understanding what happened, there's no anything. And it's written this way, I believe, to challenge us all to understand that God's heart is for redemption. That's what the whole Old Testament is about. It's pointing to the process of bringing the Redeemer into the world, identifying him through prophecies and a process so we would know that that's the Redeemer when He came. And then the New Testament is Jesus came, rose again. Here's salvation, the starting of the church and the expanding of the gospel and the promise of eternity that God says, All these things I've promised you will come to pass. The whole thing is about the redemption and the passion of God to save people, to bring the process of redemption and forgiveness into the world. And yet, why aren't there, why aren't more churches and Christians and everybody else seeing rampant revival? Well, I think as we look in this mirror of Jonah and the way it was written, to end with this rhetorical question, we are asking the question, is my heart like God's? And in Jonah's journey, we see a number of things that identify some of the things we struggle with why we don't see a lost world the way Jesus does. Now I want to give you this perspective. Done my notes a little bit different today. I want you to keep this in mind. This is Jesus saying the same thing. He had been preaching, he had been healing and all that. The Bible says when he saw the crowds, he felt compassion for them because they were weary and worn out like sheep without a shepherd. Listen to what he says here. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left? You see that? God's heart is for people who don't know. Lost people are lost because they don't know where to go. We use that illustration, and Jesus used that illustration because they have to be found and they have to find their way. And this idea of sheep, you know, in Isaiah, it says, All we like sheep have gone astray, and we've turned everyone to his own way. And we need to learn and be reconnected with this idea of how God sees people who are lost, and his heart breaks for them, and he wants to call them to himself, and that's who Jesus is. And he said to his disciples, we're supposed to have the same heart. Why don't y'all see what I see? It's the theme of Jonah. Why don't Jonah, why don't you see what I see? He says, the harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest. That's the call of God on all of us. And when we got saved, we all got saved. We all got grafted into the flow of the gospel. And our responsibility is to share Jesus in the way he called Jonah to do it, and the way Jesus grafted all of us into it. And so here's a couple of things that I think if you read the story of Jonah, that you quickly will begin to recognize. Now it's an interesting story. It's kind of satirical in some ways, because you, you know, like Jonah says, kill me twice and all that. But you know the story. God says, go to Nineveh, which is in Assyria. He hops a boat to Tarshish, which on a map is the opposite way. He's going the opposite direction of what God's will is. And we see in chapter 4, as we just read, he's going because he wanted to get them saved. He didn't want them to get saved. He hates them. He's a Jewish guy, he hates Assyrians. You know, they've invaded Israel, all this kind of stuff going on. I mean, we don't know all the depth of his hatred. I tend to think maybe his mother-in-law was Assyrian, and that's one of the reasons he probably hated Assyria. And so you you get this picture. He gets on this boat, and you know the story, boats traveling, and uh and all of a sudden God sends a storm. And God is constantly working in this in the story, trying to create in Jonah a heart to see what he sees. It's the same call that Jesus gives to his disciples. Y'all need to see what I see. And so the guy, the sailors who are pagan sailors, they're throwing stuff overboard and all that, and they're and Jonah's asleep in the bottom of the boat, which is kind of amazing. He's sleeping through God's judgment. There's a picture from modern-day America. And he calls him up and he said, What's going on? And he says, Well, I can tell you what's happening. I am a Hebrew and I worship the God of creation, God who made the land and the sea. And these guys are like, you know, what's going on then? And he says, Well, I'm running from God, and you know, I know that I've put you all in this terrible spot to be in this storm where the ship's gonna sink. So if you just throw me overboard, God will leave you alone because this is about his judgment on me. And they try to save him, it's against their will to do that, and they finally give up and they throw them overboard. And the sea is calm. The Bible says he created a great fish, swallows him, he's in the belly of the well three days and three nights. Like you're in the belly of a whale. What took you so long? Like, why are we staying there that long much longer, right? And he eventually decides to confess his sin. I don't think if you break that down, it's much of a prayer of repentance. It's basically, I'm miserable and this is awful, and I will do what you asked me to do. I'm sorry I didn't go do what you wanted me to do. But it is not a repentance that touches his heart, clearly, because then when the whale spits him out, he goes to Nineveh, and his message to Nineveh is pretty incredible. Now you think about in your church, if you're one of our guys that attends with us and you go to another church, or you think about hearing we give the gospel. Man, we're talking about for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, and all of us are sinners, but Jesus loved us so much, he took God punishment for. I mean, all those invitations you hear, right? Here's here is Jonah's revival message. Um so he goes and he says, Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. That's it. That's the whole thing. God's gonna kill all y'all in 40 days. Like, where's the for God so loved the world, where's the Lamb of God, where's the promise of redemption? Where's he like he didn't care? Like he really doesn't care. He like y'all are all gonna die. I mean, that's his message. And yet, because God is at work, God, and revival breaks out, and then we have what we talked about. So let me show you a couple things I think that help us in this mirror of the book of Jonah to recognize our own struggle with this. Uh, it doesn't take a long time because we're all gonna relate to these. First is we're just going about our own business. We're doing what we do. We have a picture of what life looks like, we have a picture of what we're doing. We think this about these people, we think that about that, these people, we're doing what we do. We're comfortable in our place where we're doing this thing, and you know, and God interrupts and calls us to loss people, and we don't want anything to do with it. Or if it's gonna interrupt our whatever we think or are doing, we just don't respond to it, right? Or we tell God no, and so you know, you see that in Jonah's heart. The failure to see the tragedy of lostness. Anybody knew that Nineveh was a massive city, and anybody in Israel knew that they were lost and had pagan gods. God's perspective is there's 120,000 people there who don't know me and don't know how to find me. And Jonah's picture is so what? Or even worse, lost people are the enemy. The enemy. And if you listen to our debates as church people, if you listen to some of the things that we do, we argue with lost people about we're right. And we saw that a little bit in the Elijah thing we talked about in church last week, if you were here, or two weeks ago if you were here. We argue about those things. How many how many times I get people who talk to me about people at work? And I was in a secular office, and I understand how it is. I worked in an office that one third of it was Jewish, like Old Testament Jewish, right? And um, and and they don't, we're not there to argue with them. We're there to bring hope. We're there to give testimony of Jesus and God's redemption. And yet we treat it like the enemy. We're offended that somebody disagrees with us and we want to prove we're right, and all we do is offend them more, and they're at further risk of dying and going to hell unless there's somebody else that God calls that pays attention. And so we don't have this picture of lostness. Last week was incredible when we combined everything, and he talked about all those people who are being saved and all the needs that are there and all of that. Man, it's important that churches hear those kinds of things to remind us that this is not a belief system or a philosophy that we have. We have been saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ and have the hope of the world, and our job is to go out and take it into the world so that Ninevites can be saved. So that Ninevites can be saved. Um we don't, I don't think we mean to, I'm not trying to be critical of these things, but I think again, this book is a mirror, and as you walk through the struggles that Jonah has and his reactions like throw me into the sea or kill me or whatever, it just gives a stark picture of what that struggle is and where it comes from. And so I don't think we mean to do that. We just get caught up in things, and I don't know that we spend enough time doing what Jesus said, seeing a harvest that is bountiful and praying over it like we're harvesters, right? I remember I may have told the story, so forgive me if I did, but at the 4th of July service a few years ago when I was a pastor at Cabot, we were talking about citizenship and all the things the Bible commands us to do as citizens wherever it is that we're planted. And one of those was pray for the government and pray for the king in 2 Peter. And so I said, okay, we're gonna practice that as a church family. And this was during the reign of a particular uh democratic president, which I don't want to get into the thing, but we were more of a conservative type church, right? And so I'm just trying to set the stage for that. And I made the point that look, it doesn't matter what anybody's party is, we're here to pray for them and be obedient to what God did. So I uh there are like four sections in the floor. And so I said, this section, y'all gonna pray for the mayor, and this section, y'all gonna pray for uh y'all gonna pray for our senator, and this section right here, y'all gonna pray for the president. And before anybody knew what happened, the entire section of that deal goes, Oh like, why did you give us that guy?

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And then you hear that, and then you hear everybody start laughing, right? Because they're like, Yeah, okay, we get it. We we get it.

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We got to fix our paradigm of this and what we're doing, you know. And they immediately got that point. But it's funny, we don't mean to, we just get there, right? These things matter, these things are passionate, and we just we forget that lost people are the point, they're not the enemy. And we forget that we are called to this massive lostness to attack that with the gospel. Here's another thing I think is important. When he gets in the boat, and these guys who are sailors, and they're used to storms and all that, so if the sailors are freaking out, then you know this is a bad storm, right? You know it's bad. And they finally get Jonah and what's going on, and they're casting lots and they're doing everything they know to try to figure out why this is his way, because they've never seen a storm like that. And Jonah says, I believe in the God of Israel, the creator God of the universe, he made the land, he made the sea, and I'm running from him, and this judgment is about me. Throw me into the sea. Now, let me ask you a question Who is concerned about the salvation of that boat? Crew. Right? In fact, those guys are at risk because of Jonah's sin. The person of God and the chaos that he was creating was affecting them and creating barriers to their trusting the Lord. Also think about the testimony that he's giving of who God is. These guys are not Jewish. They heard all these things and they know sort of the rumors and all the different whatever, because they're well traveled, because they're sailors. I mean, they're sailing as far as Tarshus. They're guys on the open sea and all that. And so they know he's heard all that. But here they've encountered a Jewish man who claims to worship the Lord. And his behavior does nothing to warrant their trusting in the Lord. Isn't that right? Now you think about where we are when we're non-evangelistic in our walk with the Lord. What kind of testimony does that establish for the people who need Jesus around us? What kind of credibility does our message have if we don't even bother to believe it enough to speak it to people? Right? But he's so wrapped up in his thing and what he's doing and his paradigm of life, and they're pagan evil, they're awful. We don't want to go there. I don't want them to be. I know God's going to save them. I know that's what he does. And I don't want him to do it there. And he's all wrapped up in what he thinks and what he's doing and how he's running, and he's frustrated that he can't get out of God's hand and all of that, so he's like, throw me over and kill me. What kind of testimony is that? I mean, really, are those guys ever going to trust the Lord after meeting Jonah? No, and it's damaging. It's damaging to our testimony. And then spiritual awakening. Let me do these two. Spiritual awakening is not our goal. That relates to the losses of that. We just don't have a passion for spiritual awakening. We would be spending a whole lot more time praying for that if we did. Here's the one to end with failure to repent fully does not align his heart with God's heart. The failure to fully repent does not align his heart with God's heart. Now, the beauty of who God is is he forgives sin. We love and should and depend on 1 John 1 9. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Why? He cleanses from all of that, so he draws us to his heart and he can continue the transformation process and turn us into be more like him. Jesus' work is the same thing. He tells them, listen, I want you to pray for work, I want you to see the harvest and pray over it and pray for workers because you believe there's such a harvest. We're going to need a whole lot more people here working this field because it's so exciting to be saved. And so, how is it that we go from where Jonah was to where Jesus is? It is a repentance that's repentance that is deep enough that it doesn't just generate grit your teeth, clench your fist, obedience so you don't get thrown in another whale. Which is where a lot of times we spend our Christian life, right? I know I'm supposed to do this, I don't want to do this. Which is worse, being in the doghouse or actually doing this? And we make that calculation at times, right? And we think, well, doghouse is not that bad, I'll keep pushing a little while until it gets worse. Instead of a repentance that is fully before God, I see your heart and I understand, and I am sorry, and you're gonna have to build that heart in me. Will you build that heart in me for me to see Nineveh the way you see Nineveh? Or Jesus telling his disciples, you're running around in this crowd and you're missing the needs in this crowd, fellas. I want you to look at this crowd and not see stuff you got to do and stuff you got to meet, and I'm overwhelmed, and how am I gonna feed all these people and all that other stuff to get into? And I want you to see right here a harvest. My heart is broken because they're not there, but I also, Jesus says, see this as a harvest. And I want you to see all of this need and brokenness creates the opportunity for people to see who God is. And so I want you to pray over this harvest because it's going to change your heart and it's gonna realign you to see what I see. It's gonna create a repentance that I am not where I should be. I don't see the way Jesus sees. I can't understand, I can't understand why he wants to save 120,000 Ninevehs, but it is no question that that's what God wants to do. And God saved me. And if he can save me, he can save anybody. And I may not understand that, but I am so changed by what God has done. I'm in, God help me understand it in an even greater way. In an even greater way. And so as we move into July, as we move forward, starting tomorrow night, we're having an emphasis in our church about soul winning. And we're gonna do some training, and we've got some online training with an EE program. And Wednesday nights, Matt and I are gonna be teaching a thing, and we're gonna try and encourage the church to go through it. We're gonna be podcasting all those lessons. But a lot of it just comes back to motivation, and I think this is a powerful mirror, not in a way that beats on us. Like we don't ever want to be Jonah and throw me into the sea, right? What we want to do is we want to have our heart changed so that we can participate in the harvest. And those are some of the, I think, struggles we have that this mirror shows. Let me pray for you guys. Lord, thank you for today. And Lord, I thank you that we just like every time we come to your word, we're astounded at how well you know us. And the issues in our life and the things we struggle with. And so you give us a story from Jonah's life, but structured in a way where you use the lesson you're trying to teach him to teach us the lesson that Jesus was trying to teach his disciples. And so I pray, Father, that it'll stir our hearts in a good way. We'll pray for the harvest. We'll repent of our lack of engaging in the harvest with a desire for you to change our heart and help us to see what you see and feel what you feel, and a desire to participate in the harvest that is abundant. Thank you for these men and the time we have together every Tuesday. I pray you bless them, encourage them in Jesus' name. Amen.