Who Knows? -- God May Turn and Relent | Jonah 3:1-10 | Jarryd Cole

Pastor Jarryd kicks off a new series, inviting us through the story of Jonah to repent and appeal to God's mercy. 

CONNECT WITH US!
Visit our website: https://ambassadormke.org
Instagram: https://instagram.com/ambassadormke/

GIVE:
https://ambassadormke.churchcenter.com/giving/to/general

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to the Ambassador Church Podcast, a church in the city for the city, on Milwaukee's east side. We pray this message meets you where you are, challenges your faith, and draws you closer to Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

Well, hey, we're gonna jump right into uh our series today. And we're starting a brand new one, okay? It's called Who Knows? And for the next four weeks, this is kind of where we're gonna be. We're gonna be camping out in this series as we head into the summertime. And I want to let you know a little bit about this series, okay? There's actually four instances in the Old Testament where this phrase pops up, Who Knows? And it's used as like a word that's denoting this reality where some people, these characters, uh, they're kind of stuck in between this place, um, this kind of place of faith where they're saying, Hey, this is what I know, and this is what I don't know. And what we're tempted to do as humans, when we're stuck into that place, especially as the people of God, like we often tend to want to shrink back. But what we see is these characters actually leaning in and doing the right thing, even when they don't know what's on the other side of that. And so there's four instances, they're all in the Old Testament. And so we're gonna spend this time looking in the book of Jonah. We're gonna be looking in 2 Samuel with King David, we're gonna be looking in Esther, and we're going to be looking in Joel. So if you have your Bibles, today we're gonna be in the book of Jonah. You can find that. Um, it's towards the back end of your Old Testament, it's a little bit hard to find. We're gonna be in chapter three of Jonah, and as you're looking forward, I'm just gonna give us a little more info on this. Here's what we need to know about this phrase, okay? I mentioned you're kind of in this space where you're stuck between these two things in this kind of faith. I know this, don't know this. And the press is for these next four weeks is we want to be people who kind of lean into that space, not shrink back from that space. These two words literally embody what it means to live a life of faith, that there is a God, and we should serve him as the people of God. We're not him, and he will do actually according to his own will and purposes, on his own accord and timing and his doings. Here's what we have to know are always good and they're always right, and they're always just. And as his people, this is something I'm convinced that our hearts and minds have to be aligned with and in tune with, no matter the outcome. And we'll see, like some for some of these characters, as they're doing this, things turn out well for them, but for some of them, they don't turn out very well. But before we get into the meat of today, um, I think it's worthwhile for us to explore a topic that's actually kind of at the heart of um our day and age right now, it's gaining some steam. And we've discussed this before at Ambassador Church, and so I hope this isn't like jarring to you, but it's this concept of justice. And so while this term has just gained steam over the last handful of years, it's been kind of thrust into the spotlight. We have to know this first and foremost about justice, that it's a concept that's not first birthed from our culture, but it's a concept first birthed by the scripture. The Bible has a lot to say about justice. Justice actually appears as a word explicitly over 300 times within our Bible. But it's even discussed more times than that. It is discussed and explored as a concept over 2,000 occasions in the scripture. And this shouldn't surprise us for a couple of reasons. The first one is this is that the idea of justice is literally birthed from the God of the Bible. Like behind this idea of justice, whether we're talking about racial justice or justice for the unborn or justice for the marginalized, justice for the underprivileged, those who are being taken advantage of, behind that is this idea that people possess this inherent worth, this inherent dignity, and this inherent value, even a value that surpasses the rest of the created order. You gotta be asking where do we get this notion from? Like, like, why does a righteous anger tend to fill us up when we see other human beings be can take be taken advantage of? And here's the truth: we find our answer, not when we look to the world, we find it when we look to the scripture. In fact, we look to the beginning of it, Genesis chapter 1, verse 27. It says, So God created mankind in his own image. He created him in the image of God, he created them, male and female. So the answer to why we feel that is this like translation, like God put that inside of you, and he did it intentionally. So, for those of you who have never had this verse explained to you before, this means that God quite literally placed a part of himself inside of you. God put something divine in you, along with every human being on this planet. And no other part, hear this, of the created order can even claim this. This is what separates us from the rest of creation. So the reason that there's something that naturally wells up inside of us when we say, hey, wait, you can't do that, or wait, that shouldn't happen. Like when you see someone being taken advantage of, it's because of that worth that God has uniquely and intentionally placed inside of you. See, our entire basis for justice comes from the presupposition that every person has value. And so here's the deal. And while we're starting with this this morning, if you try to dismiss that God, like you lose that God, your creator, the God that we worship around here at Ambassador Church, the God of Jesus, then you are in turn losing the very being that we get our entire sense of justice from. By the way, it's probably worth mentioning that God doubled down on this notion when he would send his son Jesus to die for us so that we might have an opportunity to be restored. That's how much God sees value in us. So if you lose Jesus, you lose this very fact that every person has value. And if every person does not have value, then we're actually left with finding justice out on our own. We're left with my justice and your justice and like KKK justice and Nazi justice and ISIS justice, majority justice, street justice, power justice, rich justice. Like we don't have any definition for it. Because remember, if we've pushed God out of the door, like we really have nothing to appeal to then. So the second big reason why it shouldn't surprise us that justice is so near and dear to the heart of God, and it kind of attaches to the first reason is this is there's nothing that God cares about more than his kids. This is what's true. We are God's most prized possession. And it's why I'll remind us again he sent his one and only son to rescue us. See, when God speaks about justice, and when you and I speak about justice, that's really what we're getting at. People kind of being treated fairly, getting what they deserve, uh protecting the marginalized, the vulnerable, people not being taken advantage of. Like, of course, God cares about that, right? Like you're messing with his kids. Here's an illustration. If you want to know the fastest way to get on my bad side, take advantage of one of my kids. Okay. Like, and we just had all these families come up here parading and they all had their wonderful, beautiful kids with them. And I bet they would say, if you've asked them the same thing, you know the quickest way to get on their bad side? Mistreat one of their kids. But conversely, like, if you want to get on my good side, here's what you can do: you can do something good for one of my kids. Like, do something nice for them. And I'll probably love you forever, okay? You take them for ice cream, you come over and say, hey, I'll take them off your hands for go ahead, right? I'll love you till eternity. This is just much truth. See, every parent in this room, Krishna or not, knows exactly what I'm talking about here. And the same is true for your heavenly father. And here's why I bring all this up and why I think it's exceedingly important that all of you at least have a head knowledge, a head level understanding of this, is because this is at the crux of what we're gonna see with these people who say this word, who knows? Because each of these four instances are occasions of God's justice being exercised or even about to be exercised. And in each of these instances, none of the individuals involved in this account they call God's justice into question. None of them do that. Like none of them pound their fists and declare, hey, God, this is unfair. They don't look at God about to do this, his justice, and say, no, no, no, no, that's not right. Not even the ones who actually stood opposed to God, as we'll see today. They all recognize that what God was about to do was absolutely justified. They were merely appealing to his mercy. And this, if we're honest, isn't the route that we like to go here in 2026 America, is it? Like we, rather than taking our cues from our biblical heroes, we want to and appeal to God's mercy, we go on the other side, we go on the offensive, we accuse God of being unfair. We let our ignorance, our arrogance, and our entitlement kind of win out. And in fact, we kind of do consult the justice of God, but when we do, we do it only to how we see fit, right? We want justice for them, not for us. But when the hand of justice is headed our direction, that's when we start chirping out amen. Like this is unfair. Paul says this in 2 Corinthians 5, verse 10. He says, For we all must appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each may be repaid for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil. And you want to know what this shows us this morning? That when we come to grips with the just God, we get a little nervous. Like even as I'm talking about this, some of us are even squirming in our seats right now. And we don't get nervous for any of the terrible criminals you can think about, the evil people, so to speak, who are out there. No, we get nervous for ourselves because we get welled up with the sense of, man, I know I'm in trouble if there's a perfect God. But when we start to come to terms with the just God that we worship around here, like it moves us away from a spirit of entitlement and towards a spirit of humility. Because here's what's true: every time that you have sinned, and the justice of God has not immediately fallen down on you, that is a moment of mercy exercised by the Almighty God and living God, who even has the right to exercise that justice. And like clockwork, when that starts to get into our bones, y'all, it moves us from a place of expectation, entitlement, and then to a place of humility, gratitude. And ultimately, here's the word I want to land on for us this morning: it's repentance. We move to a place of repentance. So now, if you're in Jonah, we're gonna jump into this. Okay, if you're not familiar with this story, here's a quick rundown of what goes on in this book that bears Jonah's name. Okay, uh, there's a neighboring city to Jonah called Nineveh. Um, and Nineveh was this kind of city that wasn't exactly what you would want cities to be. Um, they were an evil city by all stretches of the imagination. And what God does in the beginning of Jonah is he calls Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and He's like, Oh, preach the gospel to this city, have them repent so that I can love and show mercy on them. Okay, he doesn't give them that full glimpse, but Jonah even knows this to be true. And so what you know what Jonah does? Instead of going to Nineveh, he gets the first ticket on the first flight that's not Nineveh. Okay. He's like, How can I go to a place that's the furthest away from this place as possible? And so he hops on a boat, he gets on a boat, he goes away, and he's with these sailors, right? And he's on this boat, and the waves on the water tend to get so bad that the the sailors are like, Man, I don't know what's going on. What's happening here? This dude must have brought bad luck on us. And Jonah's like, hey, it's it's me. Just throw me over the edge. And I love this detail in the text because um, we can quickly read over this. The the the the the people who are sailors on this boat, they were actually Gentiles. They didn't even believe in God. Okay. But the reality is this, they had more faith than Jonah even in that moment. Because their response wasn't immediately, yeah, let's throw you over the edge. They first were prayerful. They first were like, hey, God, you must be the God of like the waters and the waves and all that kind of stuff. Like, would you not hold it accountable to us, what we're about to do to Jonah? Like they were even prayerful in that moment. Jonah was just like, I'm making rash decisions, I'm going away from nine of us, throw me over the edge, whatever it might be. I think we can learn a lesson about that. That there's sometimes people who don't claim God who can sometimes be even more faith-filled than we are. But here's what's true Jonah gets thrown over the edge. God sends a fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah at the bottom of the fish, he comes to this place of sorrowful repentance. Okay, and God says, Hey, I'm gonna give you another chance. He was in the belly of the fish three days. Get spit up, and what we know to be true was that God gives Jonah a second chance, does he not? And so he tells him again, I'm letting you off the hook for the whole announcement to judgment on Nineveh thing. And so get moving, get to the city I told you to go to from the beginning. And check out what happens here at the beginning of chapter three. So the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. Says, Get up, go to the great city of Nineveh and preach the message that I tell you. And so Jonah got up and he went to Nineveh according to the Lord's command. And now Nineveh was an extremely great city. It was a three-day walk. And Jonah set out on the first day of his walk in the city and proclaimed in 40 days Nineveh will be demolished. And here's what happened next. The people of Nineveh believed God. Underline that in your text. And they proclaimed a fast and dressed in sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least. Y'all, this is incredible. That an entire evil nation begins to repent after the worst sermon ever created was preached. Jonah essentially comes to the city and says, Hey, repent or else. And so, in short, here's what we see from Nineveh. Like they actually recognize that they messed up. And here's the crust of what we're getting to. Rather than making excuses or telling Jonah how unfair God was being, they immediately, let's turn to our word again, they repent. And that word about this would eventually reach the king who is most responsible for leading this nation into such rebellion against God. And in these scenarios, scripture tends to lay out, like leaders can typically respond in one of two ways when this tends to happen. And unfortunately, the first one is the most common. The first one is this they tend to double down on their rebellion. Take Pharaoh, for instance, if you know your scripture, right? Like Pharaoh, uh Moses goes to him and demands that the people of Israel be let go when Pharaoh doubles down and he says, No, no, no, not on my watch. Right? Like the result is even more of a beating up on Pharaoh than uh would have happened before had he just listened to what the voice of God was saying. But before we're quick to judge someone like Pharaoh, like we should be know this that unfortunately, this is actually the more popular path for most people to go when they're confronted with their own sin. Instead of listening to God and repenting and doing what he asks us to do, we tend to double down, we get defensive, we accuse, and in turn, we throw fire on the issue instead of letting God extinguish the issue. The second way we tend to respond is this we recognize the error of our ways and repent. This is the less popular way. Why? Because pride, which we all struggle with, has a way of pushing us towards path number one. But y'all, don't we know that path number two was always the wiser and better choice? Look at this next part in Jonah, verse 6. It says, When word reached the king of Nineveh, he got up from his throne, he took off his royal robe, he covered himself with sackcloth, and he sat in ashes. And then he issued a decree in Nineveh by order of the king and his nobles. Here's what the decree said: No person or animal, herd or flock is to taste anything at all. They must not eat or drink water. And furthermore, both people and animals must be covered with sackcloth, and everyone must call out earnestly to God. Each must turn from his evil ways and from his wrongdoing. And who knows? Here's our word God may turn and relent. He may turn from his burning anger so that we will not perish. And as you read this text, we have to know this is a refreshing way for evil to respond to the commands of God. Rather than the usual open-handed, this prideful defiance, the king of Nineveh instead chooses the path of humility and again repentance. And we have to know the significance of this. Because if you know the history of Nineveh, Nineveh would have been a city. It was the power of the day. Okay, people were afraid. Terror ruled and reigned throughout Nineveh. And people who got word of Nineveh knew this about Nineveh. They were this kind of people who were like, they they lived in brutality. They inflicted extreme brutality on people that they were around. And when they captured people, like they put them through this element of systemic violence, they tortured their captives. Like some rumors have it, that they would flay their captives alive. They would impale them on poles, they would amputate their hands and their feet. Like this was the reputation of Nineveh around the known world at the time. But look at this. Instead of doubling down on their pride, Nineveh, the entire nation, the king included, they decide to repent. Now, one of the things I wanted to take note of is something I mentioned earlier. Notice that the king does not debate Jonah. He doesn't start arguing his case. He doesn't start comparing himself to the other kings around him. He's like, hey, we may do this, but we're not as bad as homeboy over there, or like bad as this nation over here. Or more simply, here's what's true to the king Nineveh. He never calls God's justice into account. He sees just holy God and he's like, hey, we are a sinful, rebellious people. The fun the punishment fits the crime. He's like, I deserve this. We deserve this. But then he even gets as far to this other point with the words that we're looking at today. He says, Who knows? Maybe God, out of the overflow of his mercy and compassion, maybe, just maybe, he will relent. And I want us to harp on this for a moment, y'all, because here's the crux of the idea. God's justice isn't called into account, but an appeal is made to his mercy. And there's a big difference in this. Have you ever been pulled over for a traffic violation before? I've been pulled over for many traffic violations. Okay, I just got a parking ticket the other day sitting outside the church. All right, so like I'm not new to this. Um, I'm actually no stranger to this. Back in the day, I used to be a speedy driver. And uh back in the day, I played basketball for the University of Iowa. And it had been back in 08-09. Okay, your boy is kind of aging a little bit. Uh, but I was on my way back to Kansas City, that's where I'm from. And uh I have a metal foot, y'all. And I was going down, I was going down the highway, I-80, getting on I-35. I'm making my way down to the Missouri border. Next thing I know, I see these lights coming behind me. Okay, woo, woo, woo, woo. Pull me over. Your boy was going 100 in a 70 mile per hour zone. And here's what's wild, y'all. Okay, for a long time, okay. I played basketball. I was, you know, four-year starter, three-year captain of Iowa Hawkeye basketball team. Normally, if you put a name like that into Google, something like, oh, this award or this accolade pops up for years. I don't even know if it's true right now. Maybe one of you guys can tell me. I don't know if it's true yet, still. But you could type in my name in Google, and the very first thing that pops up is Iowa Hawkeye star Jared Cole uh pulled over and licensed suspended for reckless driving in Iowa. Okay. Like this is this is my this is my story. Like I I would fit in with all the reckless drivers on North Avenue. Okay, I'll just put it that way. Um, one of my friends in here calls like what they do on North Avenue, the Milwaukee slip, by the way. Okay, if you've ever been recklessly passed on that street. But here's what's true. Every time I've gotten pulled over in my car, okay, um, there's one of two ways that this could really go. And more often than not, here's the way that it went. The officer would come to my door, I'd roll down my window, and I would begin making my case. I would call into account their justice. I would bypass the reality. Hey, I passed a stop sign when I should have stopped. Hey, I was going way too fast in this speed zone. I bypassed all of that. And I'd be like, no, no, no, this is this is your fault. Like the the people were going faster than me. You could have got somebody else, right? All this kind of stuff. I called into account their justice. And you know what happened every time I'll call into account their justice? Ticket, write up, pay. Dude, when I got my license suspended, I had to go to court. Okay, like you don't want to do that for a traffic violation. Like this is this is what tends to happen. But we also know this when you don't call into account their justice, and you take fault, you say, I broke the law, I was in the wrong, and you appeal to their mercy, right? Hey, I know I was speeding, I shouldn't have been going that fast. Like so many different things. When you do that, Like you know, something different tends to happen. Even if you get punished, often the punishment isn't as harsh as it could have been. And I would often do that too and try to get away with that. And listen, this isn't like a rule book on how you can get a good boy with breaking the law. Okay, so don't take this as that. But it does work. But the lesson here isn't, hey, how to schmooze an officer when you get pulled over. But here's the lesson, okay? Is that you tell the truth, you appeal to mercy, and you don't call into question justice. And parents in the room, don't we know this? Like on a real practical level, when you catch your kids red-handed and doing something that they know they're not to do, and when they fess up and they come clean and they're not making all these excuses along the way, like, don't you know that you are more willing to give grace? You are more willing to give mercy. And if that's true for you, then why would we expect something different from God? Our Heavenly Father, humility beats pride every single time. And if we're honest, y'all, it's only in this country, in America, we have so much and are so grossly entitled that we have the audacity to call into question the justice of the Almighty God. Which brings us to the hinge point of the message today. There's a thing that often lacks in our lives when we find ourselves doing wrong, and that surprisingly, the king of Nineveh gets right, and it's repentance. Repentance has largely been forgotten within the American church. And I don't think we as a church are exempt of that. But here's a quick theology lesson for us. When you read about the first century church, and more important, the call that Jesus places in the life of someone who chooses to follow him, it's a conversation that centers around submission. Like when you choose to place your faith in Jesus, you are choosing not only to say, Hey, I want someone to save me from something, but you are choosing to submit to someone. You are giving yourself over, you are giving up your life. No longer your will be done, but his will be done. And in our world of autonomy, you do you above all, and my will be done. Like that narrative doesn't sit particularly well with us, does it? Especially here in this cultural moment. And hence why this whole repentance bit has been edged out. We're gonna keep talking about this. Like when we think about submitting to Jesus, and we recognize many of you are still trying to sort this out even in this room. Some of you are Christians in the room, some of you came in, you're just trying to sort this Jesus thing out. Maybe that's you. We're glad you're here. And I want to kind of break this down of you because when it comes to submitting to Jesus, there's two elements we have to submit to. One, Jesus as savior, and two, Jesus as Lord. Now, candidly, I would say that the savior part is the easy part, right? Like the toughest pill to swallow on the savior end is this. It's like the whole coming to terms with the fact that you're a sinful person, you tend to do wrong, and you need someone to save you from your wrongdoing. Okay. I've heard it said this way it isn't until you see yourself as a sinner that you will see the need for a savior. Which if we're honest, we should raise our hands and say, that's not very hard to do, okay, given the week I just had, given the morning I just had, given the night I'm probably about to have, right? Like, I don't know. It's it's that's easy to see. That's not hard, right? Like you know you need that. You don't need anyone to tell you how wrong you are, how bad you can be, how terrible that you can be, or how bad of a savior you are of yourself, how bad of a Lord you are, even of your own life. Like you don't even follow all the rules that you make for yourself. Like this is what's true of us. And a lot of the mistakes you make, they aren't accidents, are they? They're actually intentional. Like you willfully do these things. Scripture has a name for that, it calls that sin, which makes you a sinner. But good news, Jesus has already come to your rescue. So submitting to Jesus as your savior, this isn't the difficult part. But unfortunately, most American Christians, we tend to stop right there. We tend to say a quick prayer. We ask Jesus into our hearts. We maybe make a couple of mild tweaks in our lives. We tend to make the vow to go to church more often, and maybe we even show up to do that. We say, hey, we're gonna stop getting drunk as long as it's not like too sunny in the summertime outside. It's not the fourth of July, right? Like other, like we make exceptions for that. But I'll stop looking at porn, right? Like I'll basically stop doing all the big sins. I took those off of my list, at least for the most part, right? This is kind of what we do. But here's where the second part comes into play: the whole Lord thing, right? And it's the Lord part that led Jesus to say things like this, gonna pop up here on the screen in the gospel of Luke, chapter 14, verse 27 to 33. He says, Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. And in the same way, therefore, every one of you who does not renounce all of his possessions cannot be my disciple. Like this is your savior Jesus speaking. And just think about this logically. If Jesus was merely referring to some like minor lifestyle adjustments, just claiming him as savior, and then uh just like doing a little bit of you know workshop on your life, why would he offer up such strict of a warning right here? It's because he wasn't merely referring to submitting to him as your savior, but also submitting to him as your Lord. And when someone is your Lord, it means that you submit to him in every area of your life, not just the stuff that makes sense to you, not just the stuff that you want to give him, not just the stuff that right now you're presently comfortable with. It means that you do things like tithe, giving 10% of your income to the church because he isn't your financial advisor, but he's the Lord of your finances. And you, if he's Lord, he's already told you this. You know what you should do. It means you do things like flee from sexual sin. You literally put filters on your electronic devices, you delete streaming service, you cancel gym memberships because you keep on looking a little too long, right? You, when Jesus is your Lord, you take radical steps like that. He becomes Lord, not just over what you want him to be Lord over, but Lord over your sexuality, even. It means you serve in the local church and in your community, not because you have too much time on your hands, but Jesus has told you plain and day, like you need to leverage your life for others. And since he's Lord of your life, y'all, this isn't up for debate. And it means you get baptized, even if you're not totally comfortable with this. Why? Because Jesus, as your Lord, commanded you to do so. And you want to know why so many of you claim to wear the label of Christian, but you find it so hard to musl at the willpower to do any of these things that I just mentioned here. And trust me, this isn't an exhaustive list, y'all. It's because you believed in Jesus and you just stopped there. You believed in Jesus, called on him as savior, but you did not call on him as Lord and begin the repenting process. Repentance is a forgotten value in the American church. And repenting is an intentional turning away from the old way of life and turning to the new way of life in Jesus. You turn away from the old way of life pre-Jesus, right? Remember, he's Lord now, and so he calls the shots. You turn away from all rebellion, you turn in away from yourself, giving over to consumerism and greed and selfishness and pride and all these things. And you don't merely commit to believe in Jesus as your savior, you decide to follow him as your savior and your Lord. And now finally, I want us to see how God responds to repentance when we do this. Look at verse 10 in Jonah chapter 3. It says, When God saw that they what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. I love this response because we can clearly see God's response to true heartfelt repentance. See, when we look at the testimony of scripture, when we recognize the abundance of mercy poured out daily over our lives, remember every time you sin and God's justice is not enacted, that is a glorious display of his mercy. It helps us remember that repentance is a chore. Or is not a chore. Rather, repentance is a response to God's kindness. It is his kindness that leads us to repentance. So if you're in the room today and you're struggling with this reality of repenting and what you need to repent from as you're going down one way in the call of God to say, Hey, submit to me as your Savior, submit to me as your Lord. What that means is you turn the other way and you go another direction and you pursue Jesus and all the things about him. If you're struggling with that this morning, here's what you need to know: you don't repent from a heart that fears punishment. This is what we learned from the king of Nineveh. You don't repent because you're afraid, you don't repent because you're scared, you don't repent because you want to direct some sort of outcome. No, it should come from a heart of gratitude, realizing how utterly hopeless you were before Jesus, and with joy, you come up with Jesus and with joy, like you turn to him. Why? Because with joy, Jesus came to you. You turn to him with thanksgiving in your heart, you turn to him with joy, choosing to follow him. You turn to him with joy, putting down all the things that you used to say ruled your life. You turn to him with joy, saying, I gladly laid this at your feet, and now I want nothing more than to desire and love and follow King Jesus. You, like the King of Nineveh, fully understand what your rebellion deserves. You don't negotiate, you don't state your case, you don't make the excuses for your sin, you don't appeal, or you don't uh call in to question the justice, but you make an appeal to the mercy of God. And here's what I know about hearing messages of repentance. It's not always easy. But I also want to submit this that I think messages like this are some of the most important messages that we can hear. They're the most important for your life, and more importantly, they are most important for your afterlife, where you spend eternity, whether with Jesus or apart from Jesus. And to the non-believer in the room this morning, I don't know what you've heard about the Christian faith, but if you're wondering what it means to be and be in this thing that we call Christianity, this is it. It doesn't start with some process of preparation to join a church or take the sacraments or get confirmed, but it starts with a faith in Jesus and your humble submission of repentance that Jesus is God. You are not asking to take away your sin and you vow to follow him for the rest of your life. This is what it means to live for Jesus. And what you'll know for sure is that at the end of your life, you will spend your eternal days with God. But you can also say with the king of Nineveh, who knows? Who knows what else he could do for you in this life? Who knows? He can save you from your addictions, he can help you forgive the people who hurt you, he can restore a broken heart, and he can do many other things. Who knows? So, would we be people who submit to God in repentance, trusting in that his actions are always good, right, and just and we don't call into question his justice, but we can make appeals to his mercy, and yet we still take a step, you know. If we do the right thing, we repent and call on God, holding him as Lord and Savior of our lives, not our own. See, this is the greatest kind of message you can hear for the state of your life and your future, and not only yours, non-believer, but for the entire faith community here at Ambassador Church. If we want to live as unleashed, transformed people, this is our mission to represent Jesus to a watching world. It actually starts right here with repentance, a community of people like the king and the entire community of Nineveh, falling in humility before an almighty living God and begging for mercy. And so, in just a minute, I'm gonna pray. But before we pray, I want us to go into a moment of reflection. You can close your Bibles, you can close your notes, you can bow your heads and close your eyes with me for just a minute. And I want us to ponder in our hearts. If you're wondering, if you have something in your heart that you need to give up to God, something that you need to repent from, I would venture to say that yes, there is something there, and I want you to call it into account this morning. Where has God been poking and prodding and you continue to blatantly ignore him? What hidden sin exists in your life right now? Would you bring that to mind in this moment? Would you bring it to God before him? Would you ask the blood of Jesus to come and cover that for you? Maybe even for the first time this morning, maybe anew. Maybe right now you surrender to Jesus for the first time in your life and you say, Hey, I'm done ruling my life, I'm done being the wrongful savior and lord of myself. And I trust this and trust this to Jesus and say, Hey, would you come in and would you be the savior and Lord of my life? If you already follow Jesus, would you do the deep soul searching and say, Hey, I've grabbed on to this other thing. Jesus has become one of many things in my life, and I no longer want that to be true. I want to submit all the things that I hold higher than Jesus in my life to the feet of Jesus and reclaim Jesus as the Savior. And not only that, but the Lord of my life. Repent to Him. I'm sorry for doing my own will. I'm sorry for neglecting you, King Jesus. Would you recapture my heart? I want to give you some time to sit with that this morning. So, Father, we're grateful for you. We are honored for who you are. And we're thankful you've sent your son. And we're thankful that you grant us the gift of repentance, that we can be people who turn to you in spite of all we've done. None of us are perfect, all of us have something that we put before you, and yet you allow us to come to you time and time again and lay those things at your feet and repent of our wrongdoing. And Father, we ask that you receive that this morning. Would you receive our hearts? Would you receive our prayers? Would you receive our thought prayers even? You know before we even ask, you know. Will we feel you tangibly this morning as we come before you and we say, Hey God, we want you to rule. We don't want to rule anymore. We repent of the ways that we've tried to be savior and Lord of our own lives. And God, we want nothing more than for you to be our Savior. And we want nothing for you to be our Lord. And who knows what you will do, God. We know you're mighty, you are strong, you can overlook all things. You can make something extremely dirty and something extremely clean. And you can do something different. But would that not change who we are and what we do before you, a holy God, when we continue to surrender and repent and fall at your feet, God as the Lord and Savior of our lives, no matter what you do, but we also appeal to your mercy. Would you also be kind? Would you be with us, guide us, and comfort us? It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen and amen.

SPEAKER_00 38:41

Thanks for listening to the Ambassador Church Podcast. To learn more, visit ambassadormke.org or follow us on Instagram at Ambassador MKE. And if you're in the Milwaukee area, we'd love to see you this Sunday at 9 or 11 a.m. at 2308 East Bellevue Place. Grace and peace.