In Flight
Sooner or later we’re going to realize that there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. And the choice is ours.
We begin a new series on the book of Jonah with this introductory message. Maybe we’re familiar with this story or maybe we’re not. But, we will all find it not only fascinating but also life-changing in its content and message. We’ve spoken often at Christ First about the power of telling our story.
John Eldredge wrote in the Sacred Romance, “Our lives our lived in story and our unique lives our inserted in to the Story of Christ.” It’s much easier to see our lives as a story in retrospect. As we look back on past events we see seasons of life unfold like a story. The real power comes when we can see our story unfolding in the present moment and participate with God as its happening.
Stories in Scripture — like the one about Jonah — are powerful because they show us how God and people just like us intersect with God. Those stories help us live our own lives more faithfully. So, what we’ll discover over the next seven weeks is first, Jonah will help us appreciate our own story. Secondly, Jonah will remind us that who we are and what we do matters.
When I was kid, like most kids, I drove everywhere with my parents. And often as we drove, I’d spot a truck carrying cars to a dealer. You know the trucks I’m talking about. I’d think to myself, “Gee, couldn’t they just spare one of those cars? I mean who would miss one?” When we think of how many people there are in the world and how small we really are, it’s easy to start thinking about people like I use to think about the cars on the truck. “I mean, what’s ONE person? Does one person really matter?” Of course we know that every person is unique and every one has a unique story. Jonah will teach us that each life and the hearts and actions behind each life really matter.
Dallas Willard put it this way. “Human beings cringe at the idea that they are just another one of those.” We long to be unique. And Jonah reveals how God works in unique ways with each of us.
Third, Jonah will help us locate ourselves in the drama. Though we all have unique lives, we do share commonalities. These are cycles and patterns and rhythms we all experience. These would include things like suffering and grief, joy and difficulty, depletion and renewal. So, when we can see these themes in another person’s story, it helps us locate what season we’re in at the time. We’re able to insert our lives into theirs and it helps us understand and appreciate our own lives.
A Reluctant Messenger
The book of Jonah is one of the most relevant books for the present time. It not only helps us locate ourselves, but it is also analogous to the modern church. It presents a story that ominously parallels the situation which now exists in our culture. Like Jonah, the church is in flight. Instead of advancing the gospel of Jesus Christ it is retreating.
The church has an inferiority complex, and like Jonah, who ran toward Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, has determined to run from God and go in another direction.
The opening words of our story are found in Jonah 1:1-3…
1 The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 “Go to the great city Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD.
God is going to disclose to us from the story of Jonah that individuals, congregations, denominations and churches are keeping their own possessive concept about God and spirituality. God told the prophet to go to Nineveh and preach to the people there. But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. So he went down to Joppa, found a ship, which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. The prophet Jonah had his own concept of the Lord and his mission. He considered God as the Lord of Israelites and that of only Israelites. The concept of his God is simply that God is not supposed to do any good to the non-Israelites. The inhabitants of Nineveh were non-Israelites and Jonah could not conceive the concept of God redeeming them or safeguarding them. He himself was determined that he would not preach to non-Jews even if it is the command from God. Ninevites were not worshippers of God and so they should not be saved. They should not receive the message of the Gospel. According to Jonah they should be punished and destroyed. No mercy should be showered upon them. The Lord wanted to teach the lesson to Jonah against his concepts. “You are not the only one of mine. These people also belong to me.”
So in this message, let’s just set the table for this series, looking at Jonah’s story by centering upon two things: the characters in the story and the core message of the story.
Who are the characters in the story of Jonah?
There are three major characters in Jonah and a few sailors who play a cameo role. The first main character is God. The second is Jonah. And, the third character is the people of Nineveh.
1. God—the pursuer
We see God and God’s character come out in the story. Here are a few characteristics.
First, God is active. God is alive in the world and in Jonah’s life. God, as we’ll see, pursues Jonah. God is also pursuing us in our stories. Here’s a question we’ll wrestle with in the days ahead: When we think about our daily lives, how might God be pursuing us?
Second, God is impartial. The book of Jonah reveals that God loves all people and wants to know all people. We’ll also see that God seems more interested in our heart than in beliefs floating around in our head.
Third, God is compassionate. There are several times in Jonah where we’ll see God withholding judgment. God is longsuffering and that is a wonderful gift God gives us. The book of Jonah will reveal God’s great compassion that leads us to real and lasting change. Now that’s good news.
2. Jonah—the prodigal prophet
Jonah in this story is a prophet. Prophets often played the role of a mirror in the community. The prophet reflected God to the people by the way they lived. The message they would send the community is, “see God reflected in me.” In fact, that’s a great prayer for us to pray. Prophets reflected the community back on itself. This message was, “see yourself.” The prophet showed the community both its value and corruption points that needed reformation. Jonah was called to do this kind of reflection. He was an advocate.
Now Jonah is the only book in the Old Testament where the story is mainly about the prophet. Most of the time the stories are mainly about the community and God’s message with occasional peeks into the life of the prophet. It’s just the opposite with Jonah.
Because of this, Jonah shows us that obedience matters. And, he also shows us that there is hope for blockheads. Jonah is definitely a blockhead. He’s slow to listen and act and at times downright rebellious. But God still loves and uses him. The reality is we’re all blockheads in the boat with Jonah. The story of the Prodigal son in Luke 15 affirms the truth that God loves and uses us even with our flaws and frailties, even in the midst of our willful disobedience. God uses weak vessels. This is also good news.
3. Nineveh—the perverse people
Nineveh will teach us that non-covenant people matter to God. People who don’t know God are still loved by God and pursued by God. There is no “in-crowd” with God. The message Nineveh gives to Jonah, the more you know God, the more easily you can fall prey to exclusivity and legalism — until it’s just we four and no more. And pretty soon the “in-crowd” communicates that God loves ONLY people who look and act just like them.
Chuck Swindoll puts it this way in his book entitled The Grace Awakening…
“There are killers on the loose today. The problem is that you can’t tell by looking. They don’t wear little buttons that give away their identity. They don’t carry little signs warning everybody to stay away. On the contrary a lot of them carry Bibles and appear to be clean living, nice looking law abiding citizens. Most of them spend a lot of time in churches and a lot of them in religious leadership.
They are so respected in the community their neighbors would never suspect they’re living next to a killer. They kill freedom, spontaneity and creativity. They kill joy as well as productivity. They kill with their words and their pens and their looks. They kill with their attitudes far more than with their behavior. There is hardly a place where this danger does not lurk. The amazing thing is that they get away with it day in and day out without being confronted or exposed. The bondage that results would be criminal if it were not so subtle and wrapped in such spiritual sounding garb. They are grace killers.”
Nineveh will teach Jonah and us how easy it is to fall in the trap of grace killing. In the New Testament we find this concept in 2 Corinthians 3:6: “The letter of the law kills, but the spirit of the law gives life.” What we’ll discover over these weeks is a legalistic heart bent on condemning Nineveh—a perverse city, and God’s work in that heart that begins to change it. This is more good news.
What is the core message in the story of Jonah?
The core message of Jonah is radical change. When Jesus encountered a group of people or an individual with the words, “follow me” he was offering people a choice between kingdom service and self-service. The heart of the gospel is to follow Jesus in such a way that it radically changes our everyday lives. Jesus never promised that his disciples would have a made-to-order life with roses coming up everywhere. More often than not, to follow Jesus turns the culture of this life upside down. However, along with that upside down life comes an abundance that we’re all hungry for receiving.
The invitation of life change is the invitation of the gospel. It means, as Jesus put it, we take up our cross and follow him into the adventure of the unknown. This is exactly what God called Jonah to do. And Jonah’s response isn’t atypical. We all tend to (initially) bemoan the prospect of real life and true change. Why? Real life and true change require us to wake up — and that’s not easy. Both Jonah and Nineveh will have to decide if they want to change through repentance. And we too have to make the same decision — again and again.
Let’s look at the circle of change (diagram) upon which the core message of Jonah’s story is built.
Let’s focus on the New American Standard Bible translation for the rendering of Jonah 1:2…
2 “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.” (NASB)
1. Arise—Get Up
The first step in change is to “arise.” To arise is to “wake up and pay attention” to life and God. It’s so easy for us to fall asleep in life and miss the life God has for us. That’s a travesty. Repentance invites us to move from a sleepy life to an enlivened one, where we participate in God-stuff.
2. Go—Get Out
Then God says, “go.” This is the second part of change. God invites Jonah to wake up and then go. Implicit in this invitation to go is a turnaround from the sleepy life to the God-filled life. It’s from that place of God-intoxication that we can find what it is we’re here to do. To go is to “move onto a different path.” And again, this is what Jesus meant by the words, “Follow me.” He invited people to choose a different road, a different path of meaning, purpose and action. First, we arise. After we arise, we have some place to go.
3. Do—Get On
The final word is “do.” Now for Jonah the “do” was to preach or to cry against. Who knows what the “do” will be for us. But, we must make no mistake that once we’ve decided to awaken and to go; we will be called to do things with and for God. The core message of the story is that radical change is a call to see life in a new way, to walk a different path and then to deposit life into the hearts of those around us.
This is the circle of change. The key to the circle is the point where we give away what God has given us. This is the part Jonah didn’t want to do. He didn’t want to share what God had freely given him.
Let’s note the concluding words of our passage in Jonah 1:3…
3 But Jonah ran away from the LORD and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the LORD.
Jonah intentionally knew the direction in which he was running from God. Jonah ran in the opposite direction of God’s calling, paying the fare and sailing for Tarshish. (map) Nineveh is east. We might guess where Tarshish is? West, far west. It is as far as our money and a boat would travel during this time. It was in Southern Spain, the end of the world for Jonah.
We are “in flight” as well regarding so many areas of our walk with Jesus. Like Jonah, we pay the fare to the place of our disobedience—the end of the world for us, and wonder why God doesn’t bless us. Yet, real repentance implies that the gift of life is passed to those around us through an act of obedience to God’s call. That idea is central to Jonah and to the gospel.
In his recent book entitled “They like Jesus But Not the Church,” Dan Kimball shares about a younger generation today (ages 18-35) who find Jesus attractive but don’t care for organized religion. His insights help us to respond truthfully, caringly, and engagingly to concerns of the emerging church. He shares a pattern of what happens to many Jesus-followers. It’s the transformation from excited missionary into citizen of the bubble. He describes this transformation in four phases.
Excited missionary to citizen of the bubble:
Phase 1: We become Christians. New believers place their faith in Jesus, understand the grace of God, and experience the excitement and joy of learning new things from the Bible. They tell approximately twenty people from among their family and friends about Jesus in the first year of becoming a Jesus-follower.
Phase 2: We become part of church life. We, as new believers, get involved in church life, we make Christian friends and participate in church activities with them. We tend to slowly lose touch with non-Christian friends and become more immersed in Christian activity with our new Christian friends.
Phase 3: We become part of the Christian bubble. We, as believers, slowly withdraw from ongoing relationships with those outside the church. Instead of spending time with people and talking with them about Jesus, we transform into citizens of the bubble—like sport teams that are in the final qualifying position but could be replaced by a lower-ranked team.
Phase 4: We become Jonah
After citizens of the bubble, we begin to complain and point out terrible things happening in the culture. Like Jonah, we don’t want anything to do with those who aren’t following God as we are. We get into a retreat mentality in which we think of the church as a protection-from-the-world social club. We lose our touch upon lost people.
A good question to ask ourselves is: “What percentage of our time each week do we spend out among people who aren’t part of our church, listening to them, observing them, and talking with them?
City Harvest
Each week we will be challenged as Jesus-followers at Christ First to reach out to our “Nineveh.” There is a harvest waiting for us to cultivate and reap in the Covina Valley and beyond. It would be good for us to connect with unbelieving neighbors, coworkers or fellow students. We can support one another at Christ First in our age-group settings, classes, and small groups. Since lost people matter to God; they also matter to us.
Week 1—On Common Ground
Our assignment for the first week can start as simply as finding and sharing common experiences with unbelieving neighbors, coworkers or fellow students. As we search for common ground, we take the spotlight off ourselves and shine it on others to discover what makes them tick. We get to know their likes and dislikes, dreams, struggles, spiritual experiences, and what they’re excited about. Here is an exercise to help us begin. [This exercise is available at the exits to our worship center or in the church office.]
“On Common Ground” Guidelines:
Make a list. List one to three nonChristians you want to build common ground and know better in the weeks during this series on Jonah.
Create a plan to cultivate a relationship with each person on your list. Pray for specific opportunities to talk to them. Then start thinking about your common interests (such as hobbies, music, sports, etc.). What questions could you ask to find a connection?
Take a Look. Be observant when you visit your neighbor’s house or a coworker’s office or fellow student’s turf. Observe what magazines and books he or she reads. Check out the type of music he or she listens to. Look at the photos and plaques on the walls. Items like these tell you about a person’s interests and priorities. Ask a question about a specific item (such as “Where was the photo taken?”), and start a conversation based on your common interests and experiences.
Assess the results. What happened when you took an interest in your nonbelieving neighbor, coworker or fellow student? Where did you find common ground? What was most challenging about the experience? What surprised you most? Where did the conversation lead?
In conclusion, the book of Jonah comes down to one message – “Sooner or later we’re going to realize that there is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Change is about walking the path. And the choice is ours.
When Jonah—a reluctant messenger—rose up in flight from the presence of the Lord that might have been the end. When Jonah paid the fare to go to Tarshish that could have been the end. We might not have known that there was any more to the story; that when we have disobeyed, when we have rebelled, when God has said one thing and we have done another; that could have been the end. But that was not the end of the story of Jonah. God stayed with him.
The church in many respects is like a reluctant messenger, Jonah, who paid the fare to sail on a ship going in the opposite direction from what God demanded. The world asks many questions—the church offers few answers. However, no matter how far the church has run from God, he is not finished with us. God stays with Jonah, and he will also stay with us the church in proclaiming the gospel to our “Nineveh”—the Covina Valley and beyond.
We have found that God is not finished with us personally and as a church. We have gone our way but we have been miserable and we have been making it miserable for everybody else and we have been accusing others and blaming others. As the next message in our series will affirm, let us learn to accuse ourselves and thank God, in his mercy, that he sends out the great wind and he begins to bring us back from “in flight”! Amen.
