4^th Sunday after Pentecost at Epiphany on June 28, 2009

Grace, mercy, and peace to all of you whom God has called to be his disciples and created into fishers of men. Amen.

Jonah 3:1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: ² "Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you." ³ Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very important city-- a visit required three days. ⁴ On the first day, Jonah started into the city. He proclaimed: "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned." ⁵ The Ninevites believed God. They declared a fast, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth. ⁶ When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. ⁷ Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh: "By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let any man or beast, herd or flock, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. ⁸ But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. ⁹ Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish." ¹⁰ When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.

God Calls You To Repent

The Mexican man who loaded the scrap metal from a southern Arizona junk pile into his beat-up pickup truck bed was excited. This big haul would mean food on the table and money in his pocket once he transferred the metal into cash at the scrap metal recycler in Mexico. As the truck pulled onto the highway, little steel balls from an antique dental X-ray machine began to drop onto the ribbed bed of the truck. These tiny, radioactive marbles bounced among the shifting sheets of metal and rolled back and forth in the truck bed.

After the scrap metal had been exchanged for pesos, the man hurried back to his village, those metal balls still rolling in the grooves of his truck bed. In no time at all the children of the village discovered the shiny, bright treasures that looked just like marbles. The game of marbles was very popular in that village. The balls were a coveted addition to any child’s collection of glassies, cat’s eyes, peewees, and jumbos.

Before long, many in the town began to complain of similar symptoms: red rash, fatigue, loss of hair, vomiting. After many months and several deaths in the village, the truth was discovered: dozens of people were suffering from severe radiation poisoning.

The pretty little balls that were held, traded, and treasured, turned out to be both delightful and deadly. Sin is a lot like those little metal balls. Although it often appears to be harmless, innocent, and fun to play with, sin is always a deadly poison. Sin meant death and destruction for the people of Ninevah. Sin causes desolation and devastation in our lives as well. By looking at the story of Jonah preaching a message of repentance to the people of Ninevah, we see that God is also calling for you to repent.

Jonah had run away from God’s divine call to preach to Ninevah. A violent storm caused the heathen sailors to throw Jonah overboard. God then sent a great fish to swallow Jonah. By God’s grace, Jonah lived in the belly of that fish for three days until the fish vomited Jonah onto dry land. As amazing and exciting as these events are, the point of the book of Jonah is the conversion of the entire heathen city of Ninevah.

God called to Jonah a second time: “Go to the great city of Ninevah and proclaim to it the message I give to you.” Ninevah was one of the capital cities of the mighty Assyrian nation. It was a large, influential city that may have had as many as half a million inhabitants. Jonah was sent to preach because its wickedness was so great before the Lord. The Assyrian nation was noted for its violence and cruelty. The prophet Nahum calls Ninevah “the city of blood, full of lies,” where people stumbled over the corpses without number piled up in the streets (3:1-3). The King was said to take great delight in the high mound of human heads he erected after his military victories. But Assyria’s chief wickedness in God’s eyes had to be her detestable idolatry in worshipping gods like Assur, Anu, Bel, and Ishtar. Her continued rejection of the Lord with its accompanying evil rose up before the Lord, like dirty dishes piling up in the sink, until God’s patience finally wore out.

Jonah entered the city and found people in the doorways, shops, street corners – wherever they were – and proclaimed, “Forty more days and Ninevah will be overturned.” With these words God was expressing His righteous anger against their open and idolatrous sin. Jonah revealed God’s clear intention of punishing the people for their sin at the end of forty days. God was showing that He does not trifle with sin. He deals with it simply and directly. He will punish sin with His holy wrath and His eternal judgment. He will hold nothing back. That is the message of God’s holy Law.

But there is another message in Jonah’s words – it is the message of God’s loving Gospel. You might think, “God is threatening to punish these poor people. Where is God’s love in that?” The love is that God is giving the people forty days to repent of their sins. He is offering them the opportunity to be forgiven. This was a special act of patience by the Lord. As stern as His warning is, it carries with it a built-in reason for hope. God could have punished the Ninevites immediately, and He would have been fair and just to do that. However, out of His great love for these people God gave them another chance.

I knew a Navy officer who would call to stop his young son from doing something naughty, “Donny. One.” Then Dad would spank. Most of us will show grace to the count of three. In this Navy man’s eyes, grace was the call of the name and then the count to one. God’s grace was to call out to Ninevah through Jonah and then count to forty!

How did the people respond to this stern warning from Jonah? The citizens of Ninevah trusted this prophet who was once as good as dead inside the fish and now was alive again. They believed that God would either punish or He would forgive. The Lord’s message worked quickly and they repented of their sins. They were sorry for their great wickedness. They displayed their sorrow by fasting and by wearing rough sackcloth, which were ancient symbols of mourning over sin.

Now God is calling you to repent of your sin, your great wickedness before Him. What is your response going to be? First of all, you should feel sorrow for your sin. It isn’t just sorrow brought on by the fear of being caught and punished here on earth. True sorrow means that you realize that your sin offends your holy God and can bring eternal punishment in hell.

You should have the same disgust over your actions that God has. A good way to see if you are truly sorry for your sins is if you keep going back to your old wicked ways, like a pig to slop or a dog to vomit, as Scripture says. (2 Peter 2:22) When we confess our sins on Sunday morning and in our own prayer life, we often lump all our sins together in a pile and confess them en masse. That’s not too painful or embarrassing. Take the time during your confession to take your sins out of the garbage pile one by one and call them by name. Tell God specifically, “I’m sorry for what I said to my wife this morning; I apologize for not putting you first in my life; I regret how I acted in school or at work the other day,” or whatever you need to confess.

Call your sins by their true names. You’ll find this to be truly embarrassing and extremely painful. But when you admit your true sorrow for offending your holy God, when you acknowledge that you have committed grievous crimes against Him and against others, your conscience will be cleansed. You will be flooded with relief that God has a forgiving nature. You will be assured that God does love you. He does forgive you. For the Bible says of God: “The LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Exodus 34:6-7)

You will know that God doesn’t love you because you repent of your sins. He loves you before you repent. That’s why He gives us the opportunity to repent. Your obedience to God’s will doesn’t put you right with God. You are put right with God because Christ died for you. Jesus has put you into a right relationship with your God. By the miracle of God’s grace you stand justified of anything you have done because of what Jesus has done for you. Now, out of thanks to Jesus you don’t want to continue to live a sinful lifestyle. You don’t want to be a wayward child of your heavenly Father any longer. You are disgusted by the thought of wallowing in the filth and returning to the vomit of your decadent former life. God’s grace, forgiveness and compassion have changed you.

God called the people of Ninevah to repent. They were to feel sorrow for their sin and then turn from their former wickedness. There was power in God’s Word for, “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” The Lord gave Ninevah forty days, but the city didn’t need that long to repent. Jonah had been preaching for only one day when “the Ninevites believed God.” Jonah couldn’t have reached the entire city in one day. Those who heard his message must have carried word of it to others. The news spread like a wildfire.

Here is the greatest miracle of the book of Jonah and one of the greatest in all of Scripture. Jonah being able to live in the belly of a great fish for three days is awesome, but this miracle is greater. An entire heathen city is brought to repentance. Perhaps a half-million people “from the greatest to the least” were led to confess their sins and in faith turned to the Lord in forgiveness! They stopped committing their atrocious, idolatrous sins. What a miracle of mercy!

Now God calls for you to repent. “Repent” means “to turn.” God calls you to forsake your sin – a wholehearted turning away from all that is evil. This isn’t a gradual process but a complete stop to a sinful lifestyle.

A man comes to me for counseling and admits that he gets drunk every week and wants to be changed. Shall I say, “Don’t be in such a hurry. I believe in doing the work gradually. Here’s my advice: Don’t get drunk and knock your wife down more than once a month.” Wouldn’t it be refreshing to his wife to go a whole month without being knocked down? Once a month, only twelve times a year! Wouldn’t she be glad to have him converted to this new way! Only get drunk a few times on their wedding anniversary, at Christmas, and birthdays, and then it will be effective because it is gradual!

That kind of counseling is ludicrous. Repentance leads to an immediate turning from sin. The Bible tells us: “Go and sin no more. Leave your life of sin.” (John 8:11) God didn’t tell the Ninevites to gradually stop worshipping false gods, slowly put an end to their violence, and progressively stop rejecting the one true God. He told them to repent and change their lifestyle. Let us do the same.

Why was God willing to give the Ninevites a chance to repent and be rescued? Why is He so devoted to us, His wayward children? Why did God pierce His Son’s hands? Moses tells us: “So you would know that the LORD is God.” (Deut 4:35) The apostle Paul says the same thing: “God is kind to you so you will change your hearts and lives.” (Rom 2:4) What is the purpose of God’s patience? Our repentance. And when we repent and turn from our sin, God will do for us what He did for the Ninevites: “He had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” God will have compassion on us and He will not destroy us in the eternal fires of hell, but He will forgive us and give us the eternal glories of heaven that Jesus has won for us.

Wabush, a town in a remote portion of Labrador, Canada, was completely isolated for some time. But recently a road was cut through the wilderness to reach it. Wabush now has one road leading into it, and thus, only on one road leading out. If someone would travel the unpaved road for six to eight hours to get into Wabush, there is only way he or she could leave—-by turning around. Each of us, by birth, arrives in a town called Sin. As in Wabush, there is only one way out—a road built by God himself. But in order to take that road, one must first turn around. That complete about face is what the Bible calls repentance, and without it, there’s no way out of town.

As Christians, we sometimes stumble, stagger and go in the wrong direction. Don’t be satisfied you’re your ungodly behavior. Repent! Feel sorrow! Turn from your sin! Accept Christ’s forgiveness and live for Him! Leave your life of sin! Amen.

God has had compassion on us and does not give us the destruction we deserve – all because of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.