Thanks for listening to Fauntercast. This sermon is from our series, Whopper, living a big life in the book of Jonah. Faunterie meets every Sunday at 10am at Starlington High School, and we would love to see you there. Ever.
You're going to shake your heads of course, Jasmine asks us this. If you ever watched Man vs. Food, I remember reading that guy, I had to go on a serious diet about halfway through that show because his habits got so unhealthy. In a couple of months I told you, my friend Mike, the trash compactor, Lancose, and we went to Big Texan in Amarillo.
And I've been thinking more and more about that this week because we're talking about big growth. We're talking about big things today. And that was the biggest mistake I've ever seen in my life. If you ever gone to doze before, and there's the two-pound bone-in rib eye that's designed to split for two people, two sides and two salads and all that, I went one time and I saw a guy get it by himself.
And I got jealous that I didn't think about doing that first. But I got water bottle real quick. That's a lot of food. Now you can look at somebody like me and you can assume that I can put down a lot of food really quick, but I really can't.
My wife, no merit is trained for the Texas Iron Man, and she can put down a lot more food a lot quicker than I can. I just don't have the ability. What's amazing, you see those like the Man vs. Food guys, you're going to eat 53 cupcakes in 53 seconds.
And they do it. How on earth do you do it? Something that much, that fast. Think about it.
When we think about things that are big, we typically don't attach a quick amount of time to it, do we? Well, they were talking about that very thing. When we first started the series out on Jonah, I told you all, if there was a word that shows up all throughout Jonah and Hebrew, the word is Godol. It means big, immense, large.
It doesn't mean numbers like a bunch. But it's just there's something about Jonah. And in chapter 3, which we're talking about today, there's just Godol all over the place. Just this concept is just as big.
It's huge. It's wild. And for some reason, the writer of Jonah is just convinced that there is a part of this story that is immense and it is great and it is big and it has to be communicated towards us. Today, we see that size thing, but we also see it happen over a really quick amount of time.
We're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how it applies to our own life and see a lesson that's there that might possibly be hanging us up for years. But this is the thing I want to think about is this, that the size of our sin does not dictate the speed of our surrender. So think about that.
We're going to read, and we're going to talk about this as far as like a transmission and what transmission and what sin looks like. And not transmission is like you transmit the flu virus to somebody because everybody has to flu right now. But like the transmission in your car, like what does it look like to come to terms with God in a direct way and a quick way and also in a way that doesn't call skips or misses. So let's read Jonah 3 and let's just jump into this story of big and fast together.
Now the Lord spoke to Jonah a second time. He said, get up and go to the great city of Nineveh and deliver the message that I have given you. And this time Jonah obeyed the Lord's command and he went to Nineveh. A city so large it took three days to see it all.
On the day Jonah entered the city, he shouted to the crowds, 40 days from now and Nineveh will be destroyed. The people of Nineveh believe God's message and from the greatest to the least, they'd create a fast, they'd put on burlap to show their sorrow. Then the king of Nineveh heard what Jonah was saying and he stopped down. He stepped down from his throne and took off his royal robes and he dressed himself in burlap and he sat on a heap of ashes and the king and his noble sent out this decree to all of the city.
No one, not even the animals from your herds and flocks, may eat or drink anything at all. People and animals almost wear garments of mourning and everyone must pray earnestly to God. They must turn from their evil ways and stop all of the violence. Who can tell?
Perhaps even yet God will change his mind and hold back his fierce anger from destroying us. And when God saw that they had done and how to put a stop to their evil ways, he changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction that he had threatened. So Jonah 3, this is the part of the story we don't hear about, right? It's kind of hard to make a plush toy to illustrate Jonah 3.
The whale story is kind of fun. We get to think of a cute Christmas present to give for that. There's a lesson to it. We can, chapter 1, it's all fun.
This is the part of the story you don't get at VBS. Jonah sent to Nineveh and I try to find a way all this week to talk about Nineveh because Nineveh, it's the great big Godole. It's the great big thing in scripture. It's called the great city of Nineveh.
And not great because it's good or great because it's amazing. In scripture, Nineveh is the city we hear the most in Old Testament about being the enemy of God, about where the enemies of God dwell and where the things that are not of God are coming from. They call it the great city because, and we read about it in Genesis 10, they're already calling it that, that it has been looming over God's people for hundreds of years. It's about 500, 600 miles away from where Jonah came from.
It took him a month probably to get there, but it casted shadow that far over him. You can see Jonah begin thinking about that. I mean, these are my enemies. Just me being there is going to get me killed.
I learned this lesson about obedience, God, but I know what's going to happen here. I'm not excited about this. I'm going to say one sentence. The only thing we hear coming out of Jonah in this whole chapter is that he says in 40 days, God will destroy Nineveh.
It's the only thing he says. I can imagine Jonah's mind because the last two chapters, the last two weeks we've been talking about Jonah fleeing the presence of the Lord and realizing he needs to be in and with the presence of the Lord. I can see him right now saying, listen, God, I learned my lesson. You're everywhere.
I get it. But you can't be here. You can't be in this place. How and why and when and what I don't understand this.
Just going in there, just this shadow over him. There's also this bit that takes him three days to deliver this message. He went around Nineveh for three days. And there's some people will get into it and figure out how long to take three days to walk around and try to draw a grid and figure out how big Nineveh is.
But also think about this. Last week we talked about how he spent three days in the belly of the whale if you were here. Remember the hamburger of chaos, the drawing? Now three days in their worldview and their cosmology, the way they believed the world worked.
Three days is the amount of time it took for someone to die on earth and then to go to the place of the dead. Okay, you can't. I don't think that we can mistake that part of this story of Jonah saying, I'm going to go here and it will take me to the place of the dead. This will kill me.
The great city of Nineveh. What we find is something entirely different. When I was reading this a couple of months ago starting for operation, the first thing I realized was, man, this was quick. Like all Jonah says in 40 days, Nineveh will be destroyed.
Like you had figured they wouldn't, they laughed at him and kill him, right? Something happened. And what we see is this story of repentance. That is unlike anything that we're used to.
We don't know what to do with this. We weren't the size of our sin. It doesn't take the speed of our surrender. Oftentimes we think I've done a lot of really bad stuff so you need to be patient with me.
It doesn't take me a long time to get this sorted out. Or, you know what, I've just done a little bit wrong. I'm a pretty good person for the most part. So you know what, I'm just going to kind of hang on and I'm not going to worry about God until I really need to.
This is going to be pretty quick. I can fix myself for the most part. I'll just do the last few percent. It won't take that long.
We get all mixed up in thinking about what we do in this time and how and in all of this. And when we see Nineveh, this city looming, this destruction, the absolute worst enemies of God's people, the place furthest from his presence that Jonah could imagine in three days, the entire whole city. And even the animals, the animals put themselves into a posture of forgiveness before the Lord. The size of our sin doesn't dictate the speed of our surrender.
So we have three gears. My grandfather had a baby blue F-100, three on the tree. You all remember those? He could drive it with one arm and like change out the eight track from Earl Haggard to Wayland Jennings.
It was also kind of twisted his arm inside the steering wheel and could grab it like that. We have three gears to worry about. We see all three of these gears inside of this story. And it's just one idea that we see it pops up.
Jonas call that God gives him to respond back again. Three one. The Lord spoke to Jonah a second time. Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh and deliver the message I've given you.
It's the exact same thing he told Jonah in chapter one. Like if you pull the original language out, it's like transparency paper on top of each other. The exact same thing. Scripture says that then Jonah obeyed the Lord's command.
We're used to this idea of obey. This word where obey here is one of the most complicated ideas that we find in Scripture. But it's the way we see this repentance thing happening. Because it means to make deliberate action to intentionally set out to be purposeful with what you're doing.
Jonah's purpose was to obey God. Jonah obeyed God and he went. When you think about this, let's think about honesty. How do most people behave when they're confronted with the truth of who they actually are?
Think about that time, maybe the first time in your life that somebody actually managed to like get their finger on top of your heart and tell you about what you were doing. How you reacted. I was 15 years old. I was on a paintball trip.
I was disrespectful to the guy who was the science teacher at the Little Tiny Christian School I went to. He drove us to go play paintball and rust in two and a half hours away from Alexandria back then. And that smart office said something stupid to him. And the guy who, the college guy who owned the paintball field, blew it into me.
This guy had known me for 20 minutes. And I've never heard anyone speak more truth in my life than he did in about five seconds. He busted me. I did not know what on earth that feeling was like.
Think about what happens when somebody actually has you figured out and speaks that truth in your life because you're acting in a way that's hurtful or dangerous towards others. There's a couple ways. We can blow them off. That's what I did.
That's what I did to this guy. This is actually a good friend of mine now reconnecting with him like 15 years after this. We can just blow them off. Oh, they're doing what they're doing.
They're talking about it. I'm doing just great. We can take it. We can kind of realize, oh, I was a little bit of truth and that now I'm embarrassed and go hide.
We can recede. Maybe try to avoid that person or avoid those people in that situation. Hope that we never get into that place again. So nobody busts us.
Nobody finds out who we really are. Well, rare times. So someone does it to us. And for some reason, maybe we respect them.
Maybe it scared us. Maybe the we just had the right thing for lunch that day. We listened to them. That happened to me when I was like 23 years old.
And it was Chris. And he did the exact same thing. And I remember it freaked me out again because he figured me out. See, Jonah realized he even figured out this whole book of Jonah has been about humans and their ability to create deadly situations and God's ability to get them out of deadly situations.
But for that to happen, we have to recognize who we are. That's this first year. We recognize who we are. The second one is repentance.
This is the one that we're familiar with. We've talked about this every week for the last couple of weeks for pendants in scripture. It means to turn. It's a pretty simple.
It's an action of movement to turn from one thing to the other thing. I meant to Jonah. This transition, he said for the second time God told him this. Now, Jonah had a pretty good reputation before this.
He was a well-known prophet. He was good at his job. He had a great back story. And now his back story is, well, okay, he was a great prophet.
He didn't do what God said. He sent some time out of fish. And then through God's grace, he called him to do this again and to go to this new place because he repented. He realized he was wrong and he intentionally turned towards the direction that God was asking him to go.
And he walked out and acted in obedience. And then in Nineveh, we see this repentance happen super, super quick. All people from the greatest to the least are from the gudole to the least gudole. Everyone in the entire city, even the animals.
And what's funny is this practice of putting on a sackcloth, a burlap, sitting on ashes, putting on your head. We hear people talk about that. That's kind of hit our common language for when we feel bad about something. But that's like a distinctly Jewish pattern of repentance.
These are Assyrians. And they did not do that. That's not a common cultural thing between the two of them. They're even repenting like God's people now.
That's even more mind-blowing. Verse 4 in John's prophecy, this is in 40 days, God is going to destroy Nineveh. The word destroy there is a little bit of a misnomer because the word actually means overturn. An overturn can go two ways.
It can destroy and completely overturn. Or it can completely overturn you. John's prophecy was right. 40 days, God's going to overturn you.
Either the destruction or to a complete new way of life. And we see the Ninevehites exercising this out in front of us with these patterns of repentance. It's the second year. The king arose from his throne.
It says in verse 6, he willingly stepped up. He made it to the liberal action for him to repent and to lead his people into repentance. The size of our sin is not to take the speed of our surrender. That's an amazing example of it.
But the last one is this. These first two years are here. But the word arose is interesting because there's another meaning too. I got told you.
This is one of the most complicated words in Scripture. This additional definition, we don't necessarily find in Jonah 3. But this is what it means. It means to rise up, which is a typical definition.
That's what the king did. He rose up. With the back half of it as this, to rise up by bringing back to life. This is the very thing that Jesus did.
For us, he arose. This third year of repentance is that. It's just an action of rising. And this is why it's important to us because our transmissions sometimes get stuck.
How we all have ever had a beat up old card had transmission problems. I had, when I was in seminary, I had a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee that paid $3,000 for that joker drank a quart of transmission fluid a week. My mechanic said, you can either do this or pay me $2,000 and we can find the leak and get it fixed. I was like, okay, I'll go on Amazon or the case of transmission fluid every month.
And went through it and went through it. Your transmission, it starts to slip. And the problem, so many times, I really feel, and this is time and time again of talking to people, we forget about this last year. Or we don't even know we have it.
My first motorcycle told you about it before, it was a Yamaha SR250. I weighed more than it did. It sounded like an angry lawnmower. Its model name was the Exciter.
If you can pick up your motorcycle and press it, it's probably not a good bike for you. Just give you that tip. So the Exciter had four gears. But the fourth one would never engage.
And I remember I lived back in Simmsboro, back behind Antioch on the glass plant exit. I was working in Ruston. And I would take the back roads because this thing would not get up to interstate speeds. So I'd mosey on around north of Grandma on my way home.
And I remember one night, I'm coming home, I'm going down a hill. I'd never gotten this bike to go into fourth gears. Never done it before. And I'm topped out going downhill at 50 miles an hour because I weigh more than motorcycle does.
And for some magical reason, I always try to wishful thinking. For some reason, that bike went into fourth gear that night. Let me tell you what that terrified me. Because the difference between third gear on that bike and fourth gear on that bike was night and day.
That thing went from a junkyard to Mad Max Fury Road. Instantly. Because that final gear worked. This last a rise rising.
The last a rose here. This is that final gear that so many times I don't think we think about. It's in theory, we know we have it. But for some reason, we can't get it to engage.
If Jesus gets to rise from the dead and he forgives us of our sins and he offers us the Holy Spirit, then this last gear of repentance is us having the ability to rise up as well. I've said before that we serve a God who does not leave us on our knees, but he stands us up on our feet. That he rises us up. We serve a God who when we get ourselves into deadly situations, that his business is getting us out of those situations.
The size of our sin does not dictate the speed of our surrender. And friends, we've got janky transmissions. We do. No matter how new your car is, trust me.
You have that thing long enough? Yeah, you're going to need it. I can tell you exactly right now how much a transmission of 2005 F-150 costs because I got one three months ago. We've got janky transmissions.
For some of us, we might be really good at this repentance thing. You know, we might every night, Jesus, I'm so sorry, I know exactly what I did. We've got that piece of it down. What we might be failing to do is to recognize what we did to get ourselves into that mess.
Like, we don't see how we repeatedly get ourselves into those deadly situations. We might fully well know who we are and not just apologize for it. I'm hard to get along with this to deal with the Jesus loves me. You got to mess up first gear, friend.
You recognize who you are. You're first clutch slipping. You can't get into second. There's some of us that never got hurt a third gear.
And we need third gear really bad. We need third gear like we need anything and everything. Or we might be feeling like we're missing one of them. We might be trying to win with two and three.
You pop that clutch straight into second. See if you can chirp the tires a little bit. Make people think you got a little bit more going on than you actually do. Make people don't realize you've not come to terms with your own mess.
You just fake it really good. John, oh, babe, God, he arose even on that mission. King of the end of a herd this. He rose up from his throne until he is people into repentance.
Jesus rose so that we can rise. Chapter three of Jonah has all the marks on this. And we can come to God as quickly as we can be aware of ourselves. Aware of what we've done.
But aware of what he is leading us in towards when we stand and walk and we rise up because of him. Let's pray. God, we want to thank you for the ability to rise up. How you've risen up with us and you've risen up for us.
How you've taken us into your own. So Lord, as we continue and worship, as we think about these things, help us to understand what this state and what this attitude of repentance looks like for us. To experience it fully so that we can experience you fully and so that we can be with you fully and we can be in this world fully and be everything that we are supposed to have been. And we pray.
Amen.