Allergic to God: The Other Way to Run

Called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he got up from his throne, removed his robe from himself, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the dust. And he issued a proclamation, and it said, in Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, no person, animal, herd, or flock is to taste anything. They are not to eat or drink water, but every person and animal must be covered with sackcloth, and people are to call on God vehemently, and they are to turn each one from his evil way and from the violence which is in their hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his burning anger so that we will not perish. When God saw their deeds that they turned from their evil way, then God relented of the disaster which he had declared he would bring on them. So he did not do it. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. — Jonah 3:5-10

I want to give a couple of nods to a couple of books that I've used in this series. If you're interested in reading more, there's a book by Tim Keller called The Prodigal Prophet that's really good and very readable, and another one called Surprise by Grace which has helped shape a lot of the content of this sermon today.

The Army of One

A few years ago, the US Army had a new slogan that came out called "an army of one." Now, that one replaced "be all you can be." Remember that one? And it also replaced "army strong," which lasted about a minute. But this one, "army of one"—everybody was like, oh, this is going to be great, right? This is like trying to capture the dreams of young men and women who just want to see the world. You're going to be an army of one. But they quickly realized that kind of undercuts the Army's value of teamwork. So it didn't work so great, and they quickly got rid of it.

I know that when we read this kind of passage, some of you are probably already thinking ahead. I know some of you are very smart people. You read a passage and you're like, I know where we're going this morning, right? This is the "army of one, be all you can be" sermon. You too can be a city changer, right? Like, this is going to be an all-out-for-the-mission sermon this morning. And truth be told, I've preached that one before from this passage several years ago, back in Philadelphia.

The Inner Journey

But as I've been studying for this time, looking at Jonah, I'm really struck that that's not what the book of Jonah is about. I think it's not so much about the outer journey. We've talked already a lot, and we're going to talk about it again today—this journey that Jonah's on, that God has put him on this mission. But the reality is the whole book of Jonah is about an inner journey.

Think about this: we know a lot about outer journeys and not so much about inner journeys. How many space movies have you seen? You can't even count them, right? So many space movies. How many movies have you seen about going to the center of the earth? I can only think of one book—Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth—and I've never seen it made into a movie. I've never even read it, right? But there aren't many of those.

That's true on a lot of levels. The outward, we can understand; the inward, not so much. Psychologically, there are lots of movies about people going on a quest. I can only think of the Pixar movie Inside Out, which is about the journey within. That's what made that so unique. We're good at the outward. We don't know as much sometimes about the inward.

I think this is such an important book—this book of Jonah—about this inward journey for Lent. Now, if you're not familiar with the church calendar, the church calendar is just a suggestion. It's not somewhere in the Bible. Churches don't have to follow it, but we choose to because it helps us order our year and make sure we're emphasizing all the things, right?

During this season of Lent, it's the time when the church has traditionally focused on the inner journey. We ask questions like: Why is it that I need a savior? Am I going to live forever? No, I'm going to face my own mortality. I have to think about what's inside of me, what's going on in my heart. That's what Lent focuses on. And truth be told, I would much rather preach and talk about the outward than the inward. That's just how I'm wired, right? You know this.

If you've been hanging around our church, I just want to talk about church planting and biblical justice and cross cultural discipleship and all those great outward things that our elders have identified as part of our vision for our church. Those are true, but the other part of it—the roots in which all that fruit grows—is the inward. It's gospel deep transformation in the gospel. It's our deep rootedness, our hearts growing in Christ.

Now, I love the outward. My wife, who's a counselor, loves the inward. And some of you maybe are people who love the inward, but for me, I'm kind of allergic to it. So just true confessions of your pastor this morning—this is kind of hard for me. This is not my normal go-to. But this past two years, God has done something in my life. When COVID hit, suddenly everything was shut down. I was left with me and Jesus and my heart. And that was really on display. Maybe that was on display for you too. There are a lot of ways we struggled as people with depression and anger, frustration, loneliness. And I felt like during that time the Lord was saying, you have to look at the inward.

Jonah is such a great book for me, and I'm hoping for you. I know some of you probably are similar to me in that way. I may be the only weirdo here like that this morning who doesn't like to look inside and doesn't know how to do it very well. But this book—if that's you, if you're like me—this book is for you. Because what's on display again this morning as we look at Jonah chapter three is that God is inviting you, just like God's inviting Jonah, to an inward journey.

So I want to look at this. If you take notes, here are my notes for this morning: the bad guy and the only good guy. So let's do that.

The Bad Guy

If you are just joining us this morning and you're like, "I don't know what you're even talking about," let me just review quickly. The book of Jonah is about the worst prophet in the Old Testament. God calls him to go preach to the enemies of Israel, the Assyrians. Now, the Assyrians—modern Nineveh is modern-day Mosul. I mean, terrorist state. They make ISIS look tame. This is what would have been in the heads of the people of Israel: what you're seeing in Iraq right now. Bodies in the streets. That's what they're thinking when they hear Nineveh. That's what comes to mind visually for them, mentally for them.

So God says, "Go to Nineveh." Those are our enemies who are beyond redemption. Those are the worst of the worst. And so Jonah hears this call from God and he goes the opposite way. He goes west towards Spain, not east as God has called him. He goes down and gets in a boat. There's a superheroic hurricane. The sailors throw him in the water. He is swallowed miraculously by a giant fish. We talked about this last week. And then in the great middle schooler moment of this, Jonah is vomited by the fish onto the land. You can picture it—here's Jonah, bleached and hairless from his time inside this fish, vomited up on the beach. And you can see the little kid is like, "Mommy, mommy, look what I found in the surf." Right? Nasty. Disgusting.

And so here, where we're picking up the story this week, Jonah is recommissioned by God to go do the same thing again. God says, "Go and do the same thing again," and he preaches every pastor's dream sermon. It's eight words in English. It's only five words in Hebrew. He preaches the shortest sermon to maximum effect. A hundred twenty thousand people repent. I mean, don't worry—you're not going to get a five-word or an eight-word sermon from me anytime soon. I don't do that. I can't say anything under thirty minutes. You all know this. So not going to promise that. And I'm waiting around for my 120,000 people to repent one Sunday. That's like every pastor's dream. That would be awesome.

But what I actually want to highlight in this is what is not said in chapter three. Sometimes we learn more about what is missing or absent or not said in a text than what is said. So I want you to notice what is not said here. God doesn't scold him. God doesn't remind him of his past disobedience. God doesn't say, "I'm going to give you a second chance to get it right, and if you don't get it right, I am done with you, buddy." There is no God reminding him, "Hey, remember, this is the second time we've had to do this. Don't make me fill in the blank." None of that. That's what's bizarre in this passage. None of that is here.

And that tells us something about gospel grace. It tells us something about God and God's gospel grace to us. Grace is the contradiction between what you deserve and what you get from God. Grace is not you get a second chance to get it right this time. I think that's something that a lot of people who've been raised in the church think—like God is mad and He's sort of waiting for you to get it right this time. You keep screwing it up. I'm gonna give you one more chance and then I'm done with you. But notice God doesn't say any of those things. He doesn't cajole. He doesn't berate. He doesn't even remind.

And I just want to remind you about this aspect of God's character and His heart toward you. His heart toward His people. If we just needed a second chance to get it right, that would mean two things. First, it would mean something very silly and superficial about sin, and it would mean something very silly and superficial about God.

About sin, it would mean that sin isn't a condition of my heart. It's just sort of breaking some rules. It would mean that sin isn't about breaking God's law, but about disappointing Him. And God is so disappointed, right? That's how we would think about that. It would mean that we have within us the goods for moral perfection if we could just try harder and get it right this time, but none of that is gloriously true.

It also would mean something very silly and superficial about God. It would mean that God is not holy. It would mean that God's will for the universe is not perfect shalom and oneness with God. It would mean that God's desire for you and His plan for you is that you are going to be perfected into the image of Christ. It would mean that God just wants us to sort of get along better and not bother each other so much or hurt each other's feelings so much.

See, what it would mean is we don't need a cross. If we have within us all that stuff, we don't need a savior. We need a second chance and maybe a third and a fourth. And you'd have this God who's like, I'm going to wait. Please get it right this time.

No. God doesn't come back to Jonah because he deserved it. God came back to Jonah because he didn't deserve it. God doesn't keep coming back to you over and over again because you deserve it. God keeps coming back to you gloriously because you don't deserve it. That is His grace. That is so important that we hear that.

No More Cops and Robbers

Alright. Second point. There's probably a better title for that section of the sermon, but here's my point. Growing up, all kids seem to play games in moral categories. Like, there's the good guys and there's the bad guys. I used to make my little brother—I was always Luke Skywalker. He was always Darth Vader, right? Like, always he was the bad guy and I was the good guy, right? We had very clear moral categories. The people with the white hats and the people with the black hats. And there's always the good guys and the bad guys.

But in Jonah three, those categories don't line up so great. You know, here's Jonah. And he finally does what God asks him to do. Go preach to the city, Jonah, and tremendous response. But wait, let's think about how well he did this. How big is that city? How many days does it take to walk across Nineveh?

Three. Three. And so how many days did Jonah go across? One. He's not like, oh, I need to make sure I hit all the streets, right? He's not putting cards in all the mailboxes. He's like, technically obeying God, right? I mean, this is checking the box, obeying God. Like, yeah, I'll go do it.

So let me ask you, if you're a parent, if you're a teacher, or you're a coach this morning, I want to ask you this question. Do you want this kind of obedience on your sports team, in your classroom, and your family? Heck no, right? No. We do not want this because obedience by definition, right, it's supposed to be immediate and total and willing. If you're a coach and you're like, hey, get in the game right there. Get in the game and the person's like, well, I'll get around to it when I feel like it, right? That is not going to work for your team. You've already lost the game, right?

This is what we see in Jonah's so-called obedience here. It's not immediate, total, and willing. It's halfhearted. It's delayed, and it's unwilling, right? He is just barely checking boxes. This is very technical.

So let me ask you this question. Does it take great character and integrity to obey God when you don't want to? No, not really. I'm not saying only obey God when you really, really feel it. I'm not going to baptize that idea this morning. But don't equate sullen obedience with something that God we should all celebrate. Like, that's awesome, Jonah. You did it.

Even Jonah's so-called obedience here shows us how much he needed a savior, doesn't it? His heart is not at all turned toward the Lord. His feet are now navigating the right way, but his heart is turned away still. He doesn't want to go and this is evident in chapter three. It's going to be brazen next week when we look at chapter four. This is just on full display.

Jesus had this quote about the same thing. He quoted from Isaiah 29:

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. — Isaiah 29:13

That's a great description of me many times. Sure, praise songs, honor God with my lips, heart's not in it. So in obedience, a third of the way across the city. Check the box technically.

In 1992, James Carville coined this phrase: "It's the economy, stupid." You might remember that, right? He was working as a strategist in Bill Clinton's campaign to defeat the incumbent George H. W. Bush. It was meant to be a sticky idea that stuck in the head of all the campaign staff—everybody would say, "It's the economy, stupid." He's running on change to the economy.

I think the book of Jonah could be summarized this way: It's your heart, stupid. It's your heart. That's what God is after in the book of Jonah. Where in the world do we get this idea that if we do what God tells us to do with our hearts that are far from Him, that's something to be proud of? I'm not saying that's the worst thing ever, but I'm not saying it's something to celebrate.

The Parable of Two Sons

Jesus tells us a parable in Luke 15 about two sons. The younger son, often called the prodigal son, says to his dad, "Give me my inheritance now. Let's pretend like you're dead. I want half of the estate." He goes and spends all his money and runs away and has this riotous time. Finally he comes to the end of the cash and comes to his senses and turns around and comes home.

When he gets home, there's the older brother who's been watching this whole thing. He gets really upset because Dad is excited to see pigsty brother returned back home. He rejoices and puts the best clothes on him and has a big feast. The older brother just stands in the field. He won't come in. He's so mad at the repentance of his brother.

What's funny about this story is that Jonah sort of toggles back and forth between the two sons in that story. In chapters one and two, Jonah is like, "Woo hoo, running from God. I am free at last, right?" He runs, but he doesn't have that moment where he says, "Oh, I've sinned against God and against you and I'll come back home." He doesn't have a moment where he turns and repents. God actually has to kind of catch him and bring him back.

Then Jonah in that moment turns to be like the older son who's dismayed. We'll see this especially next week. He is dismayed at the repentance of the Assyrians—from the king all the way down to the donkeys, as it describes here. All the animals are supposed to put on signs of repentance.

The Response of Nineveh

Notice how the Ninevites respond. Their response is immediate, total, and willing. That's obedience, right? The city of Nineveh immediately responds. They don't even ask for more information. They don't say, "Jonah, can you clarify a few of those eight words you just said?" No. The king mandates an entire citywide repentance and theirs is an entirely willing submission to God, sorrow for sin.

Doesn't that contrast with Jonah? It really contrasts. Who's the good guy here, right? The supposed good guy—the prophet—going to the really bad guys. Picture Ukraine, bodies in the street. He goes to them and the bad guys repent and the good guy is standing outside really angry about this.

We put people in categories of good guys and bad guys. God looks at the world as if it's filled with bad guys, but guess what? He's really good to the bad guys. God is really good to the bad guys. And that's the scandal of gospel grace, right? This is the scandal of this whole passage: God good to the bad guys. The good guy is mad about it because you're not supposed to do that.

When God accepts the repentance of these Assyrians, Jonah just bristles with self-righteousness in the passage. And I just want to say this to us: you know that you're messing up the gospel when you have a PhD in other people's sin, but you have a GED in your own, right? You've taken advanced courses in studying other people's sin. You're really good at identifying that.

You're good at knowing who the bad guys are in the world, but you have this rudimentary education about yourself. I mean, what does Jonah need to do? He used to go back and read the Old Testament. This is the character of God. This is who God reveals himself to be. See, Jonah has to make God someone silly and send something superficial in order to hold this together. And that's why he thinks that if he does what God tells him to do technically, if he obeys technically, that's somehow something to be celebrated. That's something good. And we think the same—that if we do what God tells us, feet walking in the right direction but heart turned away, that's somehow great. I mean, it's not the worst thing ever, but it's not what God really is after.

See, again, Jonah 3 underscores for us that the whole point of this mission is not Nineveh. That's just collateral salvation God's doing out there. They're like drive-by salvations. What does God care about in this passage? He cares about Jonah on the inside. Mission Jonah. That's what this is about. Jonah's heart. So God wants all Jonah, and it's this entire restart, reset again. It's just another opportunity where God's being gracious—gracious to say, come on, Jonah. Look in the mirror. Come on, Jonah. Look in the mirror. And this is an invitation really to what God is most after with Jonah. This is what we see in verse nine and ten. He is after repentance.

The Call to Turn

Now, I know that is not a word that a lot of us use all the time. So I'm going use the very simple Bible word: turning. Over and over again in this passage and in the Old Testament, there's a word. I'm going to teach you Hebrew today. You ready to practice Hebrew? Here's your Hebrew word for today. It is shuv. Say shuv. Now say it again like you really are Hebrew. Come on. Shuv. Right? Shuv means to turn, and that word is repeated over and over in verses nine and ten in this passage. In fact, it's like if you're reading this in Hebrew, it's just like shuv, shuv, shuv, shuv, shuv, shuv. Right? So let me read this for you and put the Hebrew word in this way. This is the king saying this:

God might shuv and relent and shuv from his burning anger so that we will not perish. When God saw their deeds that they shuved from their evil ways, then God relented of the disaster which he had declared he would bring on them, and he did not do it. — Jonah 3:9-10

That word shuv is all over that. It means to turn away. Now this is not saying God can repent. God has no sin. But it is saying something about us and about God's response to that. Right? In this passage, the call is: hey Assyrians, would you shuv from your wickedness? Turn away from it so that the Lord will turn away from the disaster he has threatened you. And the implication is: Jonah, will you shuv from your hard heart? Will you turn?

See, this is what God wants from his people more than anything else—that we would be people who learn regularly, not just one time but over and over, that this is what it means to be a Christian. It's not just coming to church or just reading your Bible, but that our church would be defined by people who love to shuv. Right? Who love to turn. We have soft hearts that turn regularly away from our sin and toward the Lord all the time.

The Chicago River

Over a week ago was Saint Patty's Day. Don't know if any of you all celebrate that, but it's funny how the city of Chicago celebrates it. I don't know if anybody's been there. I learned about this when we went on an architecture tour of Chicago a couple years ago. So apparently, the local plumbers union on Saint Patty's Day takes vegetable coloring and goes to the mouth of Lake Michigan and dumps the dye in and dyes the entire Chicago River green. You might have seen this. You might have been there.

So some of you all have seen this, and it flows all the way down around all the buildings through Downtown Chicago. It's apparently a great celebration. But the real magic isn't the dye. The real magic about that is the flow of the river. The Chicago River flows backwards away from the lake, and it hasn't always been that way. In the eighteen hundreds, when the city was booming—Industrial Revolution—the city noticed that all the filth was coming out of Chicago and into the pristine waters of Lake Michigan. And it was becoming disgusting, and that was the water supply for Michigan. It was a real problem. So desperate to find a way to clean up the river, city officials came up with maybe the most amazing civil engineering plan of our country. It's this: a 28-mile span of land separated the south bend of the Chicago River from the Des Plaines River, which flowed toward the Mississippi.

On January 2nd, 1900, after eight years of digging by 8,500 workers, a crane scooped up the last bit of dirt and the water flowed through, changing the direction of the river away from the lake. So the water which had been going into the lake now flowed away from the lake. In 1999, the American Society of Civil Engineers chose this project as the civil engineering monument of the millennium.

Now, why am I saying all this? Because to shove is to do what they did with the Chicago River, and it actually is much more miraculous than an engineering feat. It's the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of normal believers where God helps you wake up, convicts you of sin, and you turn away from it. And it may not be obvious to the outside world, but if people get close to you, it's like watching the dirt in the river move the opposite way—the way it's then supposed to work.

See, everybody expects all the pollution that comes out of our hearts just to dump into the water supply for everybody else. That's what we're used to in this world. But when people see, "Wait, the water is flowing backwards in your life," they get up close and they're like, "You're weird. Something turns in you a different way." And this is God's longing for all of our hearts. This is actually the whole point of this book.

Repentance and Belief

Verses nine and ten. Not just that the Assyrians would shove, but that Jonah would see it and go like, "Yeah, that's what it means to know God." To be a person who has a soft heart that doesn't just have feet that are walking the right way, but has a heart that is turned toward the Lord. Turn toward Him and His purposes. Turn toward Him and His gospel grace. Turn toward Him when you see other people receive gospel grace. This is the whole point of this book.

This is not just a one-time thing. Maybe you grew up in one of those churches where they want to talk about repentance one time—that's when you become a Christian. But this is all over the Bible. Shув is one of the most important and regular words in the entire Old Testament, and that word repentance is all over the New Testament. This isn't just like a thing that Christians do every four years. This is an everyday thing.

A friend of mine used to call it the two-step of the gospel—like Texas two-step. Repent, believe. Repent, believe. That's what we do all the time. This is our dance: repentance and belief. We can do this because of the only good guy. We can do this because there's only one good guy.

What we find in the gospel is deep and wide. What we find is a righteousness that's better than any kind of half-hearted obedience we would ever come up with. I mean, what do we read in Jonah? Even our best obedience is a lot of times like technical, delayed, unwilling, hard-hearted. Even our repentance needs repenting of. Even our obedience needs repenting of. That's what we find over and over in the book of Jonah. It's just a mirror for us.

But what we find in the gospel is that there is a righteousness provided. There's a righteousness that's outside of you that is given to you, that's credited to you, that you never had anything to do with. And so you can't ruin it either. It's not just that you're forgiven of your sins, but you are credited with a righteousness that's perfect because it's Jesus's, and it's given completely to you.

The gospel tells us there's a two-way exchange in the gospel. It's not just forgiveness of sins. That's good news. But it's also crediting us with righteousness. It's treating us as if we are Jesus in the eyes of the Lord.

The Gospel Picture in Philemon

Let me give you an example of how this works from another obscure book of the Bible. Anybody been reading Philemon recently? I didn't think so. Not everybody's favorite, right? Philemon is a story about Paul writing a letter to this guy, Philemon. There's a guy who owes him a whole lot of money. And Paul says this crazy thing in verse seventeen and eighteen:

If you consider me a partner in ministry, welcome this guy, Onesimus, the guy who owes you all this money. Welcome him as you would welcome me. And if he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me. — Philemon 17-18

He's saying two things with that: "I'm going to pay his debt. And I want you to receive him in the very same way you'd receive the apostle Paul." In other words, this is what he's showing for us. It's just a picture of the gospel for us.

Jesus is the one who pays our debt, and then in the eyes of the Lord, we receive His righteousness and we are received in the presence of God permanently and unchangeably as if we are Jesus Himself. That's what's given to us in the gospel.

Now why do you need to know that? I tell you why you need to know that. Here's why you really, really, really need to know that. J. I. Packer wrote this in his book, Knowing God:

There is a tremendous relief in knowing that God's love to me is utterly realistic. It's based at every point on prior knowledge about the worst things about me so that no discovery about me can disillusion him in the way that I'm so often disillusioned about myself.

Let me break that down for you. Packer is saying God doesn't blink. God knows everything. God knows all that there is. And because you've been credited with Christ's righteousness and forgiven of your sin, there's no new information that God is gonna come out with someday like, "Oh, no. I can't believe it." Right? No discovery. God's love is utterly realistic.

I think it's a common phrase for Christians to say something like this: "God loves me the way I am." And that sounds really good, doesn't it? God loves me the way I am. But the truth is better than that. God loves you the way that Jesus is. Amen. God loves you the way that Christ is. Nothing can change that. Nothing can diminish that. Nothing can take that away. Nothing can tarnish that. God loves you the way that Christ is.

This is why we can repent. This is why we should repent. This is why Christians love to repent. This is why we always do confessions. I mean, you're like, "Why do we always do confessions? Such a downer in this church." We love to repent. There's nothing on the line for us. This is not a zero sum game. We're not gonna lose anything by admitting "This is really what's true of me today. Jesus, I need you to help me turn."

The encouragement to repent is this: the jury has already done its deliberation. They've already come to agreement. They've already come to agreement in your trial. The verdict is in. They found you acquitted, guiltless on all charges because Jesus was found guilty of all charges.

And therefore Jesus can say to you just like Paul said to Philemon:

Welcome him as you would welcome me. If he has done you any wrong or owes you anything, charge it to me.

That's why we sing in our church all the time:

Because the sinless Savior died, my sinful soul is counted free. For God the Just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me.

It's about the heart, stupid. Here's an invitation for you this morning. If it's the first time, or if it's the one billionth time—bring your heart to the Word, to Jesus, to repent. Let's go to the Word together.

Father, we thank you for what a friend you are to sinners. And Lord, forgive us for the ways we don't actually consider ourselves really a meaningful part of that group. But Lord, we thank you that your grace is deeper still, your mercy is greater than our sin. Lord, it covers over our half-hearted, unwilling, delayed obedience. It covers over our hard hearts. Lord, give us grace this morning by the power of your Spirit to turn toward you in our hearts. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.