Good morning, Village.
My name's Ben.
I serve on the worship team and worship ministry.
I've been attending Village since the beginning.
Like many of you, I've been here for many, many years
prior to it being Village.
I'm honored to be here, honored to read this morning.
Today's scripture reading is from Jonah three.
Starting in verse one.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.
Get up.
Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach the message
that I tell you.
So Jonah got up and went to Nineveh
according to the Lord's command.
Now Nineveh was an extremely great city, a three day walk.
Jonah set out on the first day of his walk in the city
and proclaimed, in 40 days Nineveh will be demolished.
Then the people of Nineveh believed God.
They proclaimed a fast and dressed in sackcloth
from the greatest of them to the least.
When word reached the king of Nineveh,
he got up from his throne, took off his royal robe,
covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes.
Then he issued a decree in Nineveh.
By order of the king and his nobles,
no person or animal, herd or flock
is to taste anything at all.
They must not eat or drink water.
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, God may turn and relent.
He may turn from his burning anger
so that we will not perish.
God saw their actions that they had turned
from their evil ways.
So God relented from the disaster
he had threatened them with and he did not do it.
This is God's word.
If you have a Bible, go ahead and open it up to Jonah three.
We'll be hanging out there and working
through the verses this morning.
We've come a long way and we have a little bit to go.
We marketed this sermon series as a four week series
and unfortunately we probably weren't truthful.
It's gonna be five weeks.
It's gonna be five weeks because we got some ground
to cover and today we'll cover Jonah three
and then we'll move to Jonah four next week
before we get to September 10th, our launch.
And I didn't mention this in the announcements
but at our launch we are launching into a new sermon series
as well.
We're heading back to the book of Matthew
for a sermon series called Kingdom Life
and we're gonna be looking at the Beatitudes
and this upside down kingdom that Jesus brings.
But today we're in Jonah chapter three
and in chapter one, we'll do a quick review.
In chapter one the word of the Lord came to Jonah
to go and preach a message of judgment
for the great city of Nineveh,
the capital of that brutal, violent and wicked nation,
Assyria.
Pause.
Kids, did you, I just wanted to make sure you guys knew
that there were bags at the back.
I just saw them there and hopefully everyone got
an activity bag for our kids, perfect.
All right, unpause.
How did Jonah respond to this call to go?
Well, he ran the opposite direction.
He fled from the presence of God.
He was fleeing from it and he could,
but could he run far enough to get away from God?
No.
No, in fact, God's in a great wind that caused a great wave
and Jonah on a ship bound for Tarshish,
as far away as he could get,
was awakened from his sleep of sorrow
to find that the pagan sailors on the ship
were in great fear and distress.
Now, Jonah knows that the storm has to do with him
and his disobedience and so he finally convinces the sailors
to throw him overboard.
The storm is calmed and the sailors, it says,
have great fear of Yahweh, the God of Israel,
and they worship him and they sacrifice to him.
But God has different plans for Jonah.
In his love, God shows Jonah severe mercy
and judgment through, or salvation through judgment,
the Bible says that God appoints a great fish
to swallow Jonah and that Jonah would spend three days
and three nights in the belly of that fish.
And there we find that Jonah finally prays out to his God,
this God that he says he worships and fears.
He finally talks to God and he talks to him
in the form of a psalm or a poem.
And in it we found lots of beautiful truths
that he drew from other psalms and other places in the Bible
where he brought them together.
Being a good Hebrew student, he knew his Bible
and he brought those truths together
but we also noted a few things that were interestingly
absent from his psalm.
Absent from his psalm was that he was possible
that he was also despising the sailors in his psalm
as he got down to the end, not knowing that they had become
God-fearers after he had been thrown overboard.
But we left chapter two wondering if God was actually,
or wondering if Jonah was actually a changed man,
whether he was actually ready to serve God
by declaring his message of judgment
and whether he had gained a new humility
through this experience that he'd had.
Will Jonah accept that God desires to show mercy
to the repentant heart?
Will Jonah agree with the heart of God?
That's the question we left chapter two with.
And so we begin into chapter three with these words.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.
Get up, go to the great city of Nineveh
and preach the message that I tell you.
Jonah got up and went to Nineveh
according to the Lord's command.
So we begin with deja vu.
If you remember back in chapter one,
these are the same first five Hebrew words of chapter one.
We're back at the beginning.
But it's a do-over.
Jonah gets another shot.
Jonah gets a second chance.
How many stories in the Bible have you read or heard
are of people who have gotten second chances?
Quite a few, right?
Maybe all.
All humans at least.
Praise God for second chances.
We have no idea how long has passed
since Jonah was vomited out of that fish.
He's vomited out of the fish onto dry land.
We don't know how long has passed
between the end of chapter two
and the beginning of chapter three.
It might be immediate.
As soon as he gets out and he gets all that fish slime
off of him and he gets the, you know,
whatever's wrapped around his face, the seaweed,
he gets time to move on.
Or it could have been days, it could have been months,
it could have been years.
We don't know.
God could easily have moved on from Jonah.
He could easily have given his message
to be carried by another prophet.
He did not need Jonah.
But I think one of the important lessons of the Bible
is that God uses our failures, our sufferings,
and even at times our disobedience
to humble us in order that we become useful in his service.
To humble us in order that we become useful in his service.
Whereas there is something in us
that sin has so corrupted that it takes a sovereign God
to work situations and circumstances such
that our self-centeredness,
our inherent biases towards others
that are not like us or that we don't like,
or our treasuring of anything other than God himself
is slowly stripped away by suffering.
It's humiliated in our failures
and it's softened by the wreck of a life
we find through our disobedience.
And God uses all of those to prepare us to serve.
And that gives hope to all of us, yes.
If we respond to God, yes Lord, I will go, I trust in you.
We don't presume upon God's grace to give us second chances.
You ought not.
God may be a God of second chances
so we can read stories upon stories,
but we ought not presume upon that grace.
But we praise God when he does.
When he does give us.
And so what do we get here?
Get up, it's time to go Jonah, get up.
But there is a difference between this calling
and that first one.
This one says, go to the great city of Nineveh
and preach the message that I tell you.
Preach the message that I tell you.
Literally it's saying something like,
go proclaim the proclamation that I proclaim to you.
Go proclaim the proclamation that I proclaim to you.
And this triple emphasis that is embedded in the text
is meant to enforce that Jonah is only to say
what God tells him to say.
And this might be a setup, we'll see.
Only say what God tells him to say.
And so Jonah got up and went to Nineveh
according to the Lord's command.
Man, Jonah sure does look like a reformed man, doesn't he?
After the wreck of chapter one
and the suspicion of chapter two, maybe he got it.
It says he got up.
In the first chapter it said he got up
and ran, now he gets up and he goes to Nineveh
according to Yahweh's commands.
Maybe his time of distress, maybe his coming
to the absolute end of himself did the trick this time.
We'll see.
Let's keep going.
The second part of verse three in chapter three
reads that now Nineveh was an extremely great city,
a three day walk.
This is an interesting word here, an interesting change.
We've heard already that it was a great city,
but now a word is added to that in this particular telling.
We already knew it was a great city,
but now it's an extremely great city.
And what's interesting about the word extremely
or depending upon what version you have,
it's either extremely or exceedingly or an important city,
something along those lines, is the word extremely.
It's an important city, it's an important city.
And what's interesting about that,
and I'm gonna read those lines,
is the word that actually represents that
in the Hebrew is Elohim.
Does anyone know what Elohim means?
Elohim means God.
So it literally says it's a God city.
It's a God city.
Verse three tells us Nineveh is a great city to God
or a great city of importance to God
because it's the capital city of those people over there.
Nineveh, the capital city of those wicked,
evil idolaters, is a city that belongs to God.
It's a city that's important to God.
How quickly we forget the reach of our God, amen.
How quickly we forget the mercy that God wants to show
even in the darkest places.
Picture your neighborhood for just a moment.
Picture your neighborhood.
The houses next to you, the names of the people,
your neighbors, those who lived around you, they are God.
They're in his realm, his reign.
God loves the city.
God loves to call people to himself,
and he loves to show mercy and grace
to those who respond to that calling.
God loves Sacramento.
God wants to show mercy to her.
He wants to challenge her to stop living
according to her own wisdom and instead turn to him
and live according to his.
He loves her.
And yes, cities as we know,
especially maybe even here in California,
cities are often on display in great places
of evil, oppression, and sin.
But that's probably because they're called
but that's probably because they're concentrations
of sinful human beings all together
really close to each other.
But cities are also uniquely positioned
to radically display God's goodness
and to rapidly advance the gospel person to person.
God loves the city.
And we ought to see the city the way God sees the city.
And we ought to remember that God is the God of this city
and live in such a way.
He goes to this extremely great city,
this Elohim city, this city of great importance to God.
And so great was this city of Nineveh
that we're told at Jonah that it's a three days walk
or a three days walk across it.
And there is some disagreement over what this means.
This could mean three days walk
to walk straight down the middle of it,
from one end to the other.
It could mean a three days walk
as was common in the old times.
You would walk the wall.
And so if you walked to the outside of the walls,
that might be three days.
Or there's another option.
And it could be that it's drawing on that motif,
that imagery of three days that we already talked about
in that first chapter or the second chapter
where Jonah went into the great fish
for three days and three nights.
And how for him, that was a passageway
or what an ancient thought was three days
to get to the underworld.
That was a passageway to death.
But how God had taken that idea
and he turned it upside down for his kingdom.
And what it was was a passageway through death to life, right?
Salvation through judgment.
And so could it be that the three days walk here
is to remind us something's coming to Nineveh,
something's about to happen in this city.
And it'll take three days before we see it.
Three days walk.
And so now we get this message.
Jonah set out on that first day of his walk in the city
and he begins to proclaim his message.
And what's the message?
In 40 days, Nineveh will be demolished.
Jonah gets one day into the city
and he preaches his message and it's a five word message
in the Hebrew.
Maybe seven in CSB, eight in another version.
Five word sermon, a very quick sermon.
You guys want a five word sermon this morning?
Probably.
No.
Don't answer that.
I've already spent my five words.
Five word sermon he gets in and he says,
in 40 days, Nineveh will be demolished.
And there's a couple possibilities here, right?
It's possible, as in other places in the Bible,
that this is a summary.
Jonah said a whole lot more
and we're just getting the gist of it.
That's one possibility.
But there are a few cues in this sermon
that are interesting.
First, Jonah's message doesn't give any preface,
none whatsoever.
It doesn't say who this message is from.
If you're reading other prophecies,
you would expect to say something like,
this is the word of the Lord,
or thus saith the Lord,
or hear the word of God,
hear the word of the Lord,
Yahweh, the God of Israel,
the maker of heaven and earth,
and then the judgment,
none of that is present in his message.
It's absent who it's from.
The Lord is strangely missing.
And secondly in this message,
is he deliberately emphasizing the bad news only?
An intentionally void of any call to repentance
or any call to change or turn?
Has he left that part out?
And you might say, well,
he was told to speak against the city,
so maybe there was no call to repentance.
But I would remind you that this is supposed to cue
on a diligent Bible reader's mind,
who is God?
What is he like?
How does he treat mankind?
And we're supposed to go, is that like God?
There's no gospel here.
Is Jonah's message, it's missing,
not just who it's from,
but what kind of God he is.
40 is a number that will speak of judgment and death
throughout the Bible, the flood,
the time that Moses prays to God
to spare idolatrous Israel.
It's the number of years that Israel had to wait
to enter the promised land
because they had to wait one year for every day
that the spies were in the land scouting out
because they were unfaithful
and they refused to believe God
when they went into the land.
So 40 is this number that relates to judgment and death.
40 days, it's over for you, Nineveh, you're gone.
And in the CSB, the version that I'm reading from,
it says that Nineveh will be demolished.
Does anyone have a different word for demolished
in your version there?
Destroyed.
Overthrown, yep.
Overthrown, destroyed, demolished.
The literal of the word there in the Hebrew,
it means to overturn.
It's like if you overturned a rock
or if you overturned a wall or if you overturned something.
And overturned itself actually has double meaning,
and this is interesting as well.
It has a double meaning.
It can mean destruction or demolishing
as we've seen in the translations,
but it also can mean in places in the Bible
a turning away from sorrow or death
toward rejoicing in life.
In the book of Esther, it was said that their sorrow
will be turned over to rejoicing
and that their mourning will be turned over
to a holiday celebration.
So you see, it's not just a negative.
It's not just a turning over to destruction,
but this same word can be used
to mean a turning over to life or death.
A turning over to life or to, you know,
away from sorrow and to rejoicing,
away from death and to celebration and holiday.
And so when Jonah uses this,
when he says 40 days and you will
be overturned or demolished,
is it possible that we're to read
a double meaning in there?
This is very common in Hebrew
and the way that they would write
is they want you to hear both meanings.
They want you to interpret both and go
one is it gonna be?
Is it gonna demolished?
Or is it gonna be overturned in a positive way?
And one thing we know for sure,
one way or another, Nineveh will be overturned.
Demolished, destroyed or turned upside down
by this message that God has brought
to the people of Nineveh.
And so that leads us to verse five.
This leads us to verse five
which is probably the most profound verse here.
Then the people of Nineveh believed God.
It's so short.
It's so direct.
A five word sermon that lacks all this context.
And what?
The people of Nineveh believed God.
It's crazy because this is the same phrase
that's used of Abraham, the patriarch.
The same phrase that's used of him,
not only in the Old Testament,
but also in the New Testament by Paul.
Abraham believed God, and it was credited him
as righteousness.
Nineveh believed God.
And what a contrast.
Man, what a contrast between Nineveh and Jonah.
What a contrast.
Go and be my servant, take this message.
No thanks, I'm out, peace, yo.
See you later, out of your presence,
I don't want anything to do, I don't want my job anymore,
I quit.
Nineveh, you're gonna be overthrown in 40 days.
We believe you, God.
We believe you.
Extraordinary.
And so they proclaimed a fast and dressed in sackcloth
from the greatest of them to the least.
And when word reached the king of Nineveh,
he got up from his throne, took off his royal robe,
covered himself with sackcloth, sat down in ashes,
and then he issued a decree in Nineveh.
By order of the king and his nobles,
no person or animal, hurt or flocked,
is to taste anything at all.
They must not drink or eat, eat or drink water.
Furthermore, both people and animal must be covered
with sackcloth, and everyone must be covered
with sackcloth, and everyone must call out earnestly to God.
Each must turn from his evil ways and from his wrongdoing.
Who knows?
God may turn and relent.
He may turn from his burning anger
so that we will not perish.
I believe that many of us, so many people in general,
confuse intellectual assent with faith.
Intellectual assent with faith.
All of our intellectual capacities,
but it does not stop there.
Intellectual assent accepts something
that's reasonably true.
Intellectual assent is something like,
I agree with that, right?
I agree with that, or I admire that,
or I see the beauty in that, or that seems true,
or maybe just, yes, yes, yes, I agree.
That's intellectual assent,
and we give it all the time, right?
Intellectually assent, or we give descent.
No, I don't, no, that's not true.
No, I don't believe it, but one or the other,
we're always giving that.
That's not faith.
That in and of itself is not faith,
and sometimes we confuse that.
Yes, that's true, I believe that.
That's not faith.
That's not the totality of faith.
Faith goes further.
Faith goes further than intellectual assent.
Faith is about committing oneself to what you
intellectually believe to be true.
Committing yourself to what you intellectually believe
to be true, so let's try this one on for size.
Is physical exercise important to a healthy lifestyle?
Raise your hand if you say yes.
How many of you regularly exercise?
Somewhat.
Okay, there's some, good.
Some of us intellectually assent and follow through.
We commit our life to that knowledge.
We commit ourselves to that reality.
We believe it's true, and therefore we do it.
Others of us raise our hand for one and not the other.
And it wasn't the second one.
Right?
How many of you know, know, know,
know that the word of God says we are to gather regularly
and not forsake the gathering of the saints?
We mentally assent to it, do we have faith?
Do we believe it?
Do we commit our life to following through with it?
How many of you say we are called by Matthew 28
to go into all the world and preach the good news
to everyone, baptizing them in the name of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit, right?
Right?
We're to go make disciples.
We'll just sum it up like that.
Go make disciples.
Yes, yes!
Spot on, preacher man.
How many of us have faith?
We commit our lives to what we intellectually know
to be true.
There's a big disconnect in a lot of our lives
that we have to look at and we have to go,
I say it's true, I don't act as if it's true.
Yes, I can see the truthfulness of it,
but I will not reorient my life around that truth.
I will not commit myself to that truth.
James 2 is talking to you, the book of James,
when it says, what good is it?
What good is it?
My brothers and sisters, what good is it
if someone claims to have faith but does not have works?
Can such faith save him?
If a brother or sister is without clothes
and lacks daily food and one of you says to them,
go in peace, stay warm, be well fed,
but you don't give them what the body needs,
what good is it?
In the same way, faith, if it does not have works,
is dead by itself.
But someone will say, you have faith and I have works.
Ha ha.
That's not in there, but ha ha.
Show me your faith without works
and I will show you faith by what I do.
You believe that God is one.
Who believes that God is one?
We're Trinitarian here, we believe God is one, right?
Good!
Even the demons believe and they shudder.
Good for you.
Ooh, that's brutal next.
Senseless people, exclamation point.
Exclamation point.
Senseless people, are you willing to learn
that faith without works is useless?
Wasn't Abraham our father justified by works
in offering Isaac his son on the altar?
You see that faith was active together with his works
and by works, faith was made complete
and the scripture was fulfilled that said,
Abraham believed God and it was credited to him
as righteousness and he was called God's friend.
How do we know that the people of Nineveh believed?
How do we know that the people of Nineveh
had true faith?
By what they did.
It didn't just say, and the people of Nineveh believed,
but then we got that next part.
By what they did, they committed themselves
to what they intellectually ascended to, the truth,
and they held onto it and said, our lives change now.
We believe it now.
We're going to live it.
And that is when their faith became genuine.
Is when their faith combined with work,
it's proved out.
Sad cloth.
Sad cloth is not stylish.
Sad cloth is like burlap, it's itchy.
It's terrible and at their time it was worn
only by the poorest of poor who couldn't afford a garment.
And ashes was a representation of utter humiliation
into the dust of the ground.
Back to the elements I go.
From the greatest to the least.
And word gets to the king, it says.
So Jonah didn't even make it to the king.
Sometimes you'll see that in a kid's book too.
Let Jonah preach him before the king.
The text doesn't say that.
The text says that word gets to the king.
The word gets to the king.
Jonah doesn't even have to go there
and confront the king of Nineveh
and say 40 days in judgment.
Word gets to him and the king rises from his throne,
takes off his robe and gets in dirt and ashes
and begins to repent.
He repents.
And then he says, you know what?
All y'all, you're fasting and you're doing it too.
You're in my domain.
And all your animals, they're doing it.
I mean this is wild.
All your animals are doing it too.
They can't eat or drink and they have to wear sackcloth too.
They don't even wear clothes.
But they have to wear sackcloth.
They have to wear sackcloth.
Everything in his domain,
everything that was at his command,
he said everything needs to call out to God.
Everything needs to call out to God.
And not just call out.
He took it one step further and he says,
everyone must turn from their evil ways.
Not just call out, not just prayers.
Turn, believe.
And that word turn in the Hebrew is shuv.
Everyone say shuv.
Shuv with a V, shuv.
Shuv means to turn away from, to stop doing.
If one of you were heading in the wrong,
if you're like, hey, I'm heading out to McDonald's
and you start to walk in the wrong direction,
I would say shuv.
You're going the wrong way.
McDonald's is not that way.
You say you wanna go to McDonald's?
Well, McDonald's is over this direction.
Shuv, turn, turn away.
And in fact, the three times that this word shuv is used,
it's our word for repent.
The three times that shuv is used
in the book of Jonah are all right here.
All right here in the King's decree.
Every one of them.
And guess what?
These are the missing words.
If you were here last week,
these are the missing words from Jonah's Psalm.
Where were they?
Where was shuv in Jonah's Psalm?
It was a Psalm of thanksgiving for God's deliverance.
It was an awesome Psalm of lament
because of the troubles that he's seen.
But it was not a Psalm of repentance, was it?
It was not a Psalm of shuv.
But here they are on the lips of a pagan king
in his decree, everyone should shuv their evil ways.
And then he goes on to say, who knows?
Maybe God will shuv.
He may shuv from his anger and we won't die.
Let's repent and then maybe God will relent
or turn from his anger and we won't die.
The King seems to believe and commit himself
to something about God that Jonah doesn't know or believe.
What a statement of hope and faith
when the King says, who knows?
Who knows?
God may turn.
It's as if this King knows more about Yahweh
than Jonah knows, knows more about his character.
He's guessing and he's right.
Jonah knows and he's wrong.
The King's guessing, who knows?
Maybe, maybe he's that kind of God.
But it's in God's hand according to God's prerogative.
Who knows?
Maybe if we repent of evil, God will relent of judgment.
And what is God's response?
We're coming to the end here.
What is God's response?
God saw their actions that they had turned
from their evil ways so God relented from the disaster
he had threatened them and he did not do it.
God does not change, the Bible tells us
God does not change his mind.
So something's going on here.
God does not change his mind.
No, they changed their way.
And God treats each one of us according to our ways.
Our way.
They changed their way.
God did not change his mind.
Why?
Because throughout his word, his good Bible students
would know that he blesses, he has blessings for obedience
and curses for disobedience.
That's what his word says.
He has blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.
So if you're walking in disobedience, contrary to his law,
you can expect calamity and disaster and judgment.
But if you're walking according to his law,
he will not forsake you.
He will not turn his back on you.
He will not judge.
God sent them a prophet which was such great mercy
that God showed to them, to this pagan nation, Assyria,
that this prophet might go and tell them
what God's perspective is.
And listen to what God's perspective is
out of Jeremiah, chapter 18.
This is God speaking.
This is what God says.
At one moment, I might announce,
concerning a nation or a kingdom,
that I will uproot, tear down, and destroy it.
Okay, that's in God's prerogative, right?
He can do that.
However, if that nation about which I have made
the announcement turns from its evil,
I will relent concerning the disaster
I had planned to do to it.
If they relent, if they repent, if they shoov,
I will relent.
At another time, I might announce,
concerning a nation or a kingdom,
that I will build and plant it.
However, if it does what is evil in my sight
and will not listen to me, I will relent
concerning the good I had said that I would do to it.
God's prerogative, God's promise,
something we can bank on.
God was so gracious that he sent a mediator to Nineveh.
God was so gracious he sent Jonah to warn them.
He was a prophet who was to tell God's perspective
on the situation.
And this is so much, we'll wrap up with this.
This is so much like the gospel of Jesus.
This story of a mediator going to a wicked nation
and calling them to repent.
In Christ, God sent humanity, a mediator.
He came and called all of people, all humanity, to God,
and he said to shoov, to turn back to God, repent.
But Christ was very different, obviously.
Not only did he announce God's way, he was God with us.
He was God become a man,
and through his perfect obedience to the Father,
Jesus went to the cross and paid the penalty of sin,
which was death.
And he took on himself what only God could do for us,
the eternal wrath and judgment that we deserved.
And when the Pharisees asked Jesus for a sign
if he was that Messiah, what did Jesus say?
He likened himself to Jonah, as Jonah was three days
in the belly of the well, or belly of the fish.
So the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth
three days and three nights.
And then it said this about the people of Nineveh,
about those who relented, about those who shooved
on that day, Jesus said, the men of Nineveh
will stand up at the judgment with this generation
and condemn it.
The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation
and condemn it.
Those pagan Assyrians will stand up in the midst
of God's chosen people and condemn them
for their rejection of their Messiah.
Why?
Because they repented at Jonah's preaching.
And look, something greater than Jonah is here.
Jesus is greater than Jonah.
And we ought to heed the caution
that when Jesus says repent, He means it.
And we ought to respond to it.
If it was so important that Nineveh would turn
from their wickedness at the preaching of Jonah,
how much more for you and I at the preaching
of Christ Jesus, our Messiah?
And so I say repent.
Repent, all of you, and accept God's mercy and grace.
Repent.
Stop playing in sin.
Stop acting like, acting the part of a believer,
but living a lie on the side.
Stop with the intellectual assent that's void
of any commitment to Christ or seeing Christ's kingdom come
and going to be a lie.
Stop playing the part of a believer that's void
of any commitment to Christ or seeing Christ's kingdom come
and Christ will be done here on earth.
Stop.
Shoo, you're going the wrong way.
Brothers, you say you wanna go toward Christ.
You're walking the wrong way.
Sisters, turn.
Turn.
If you have never before received God's mercy,
because only destruction awaits the path
that you are on now, only destruction.
Turn and receive God's mercy.
Shoo.
Will you pray with me?
Father, thank you for your word
and thank you for this word from Jonah.
Thank you for this word from Jonah.
And thank you, Lord, for Christ and his mediating
on our behalf that he stood with us or before us
and took on himself the punishment for us all.
And while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
And so Lord, we receive that today.
We turn, we shoo, and turn back to you
and accept your mercy and your grace
that you have promised to all who would repent in faith.
Follow you.
We receive that whether we have been in Christ,
we receive it anew, and whether we are new
to receiving your mercy, I pray
that you would make us true, that our faith and our works,
our faith and our action would be shown sincere and true
as we go from this place.
We love you, Lord, and we thank you in Jesus' name, amen.