I appreciate you being here today. We're glad
to have you back again. You've made it through
most all of lectureship.
I hope you've been picking up good things. You
are in a class with Brady Bryce on Disciples,
Mission, Outside the Walls.
And I mentioned yesterday Disciples, Mission,
Outside the Walls. What I mean by these words are
Disciples of Jesus who are intimately connected
with Jesus, who are passionately following Him,
who are moving in the mission of God, the
expansion of the kingdom of God, involving
themselves in His reign,
but doing in places that we don't often go,
outside of our fortress, outside of our
churches, and in the lives of people.
And yesterday I talked a little bit about
chickens and told you some about my son Nathan.
And I'm really glad
this week I've been able to spend with my
family. I've got my beautiful wife Donna with
me who is playing
the man in the family. As you can tell, I've
got a broken wrist here and a separate AC joint.
So even today she's loading up the car. And
it's hard to imagine a beautiful woman playing
the man in the family
doing all the jobs I normally do. Bicycle
crashes will mess you up, and she's keeping me straight.
My parents, Dean and Janine Bryce, are in
Stillwater, Oklahoma, just starting a ministry there.
And a lot of friends, a lot of people. I'm
really glad to be with you again today.
Last night, for some reason, when I tucked
Nathan into bed, he was still going on the wild
of the chicken
across the road. He was coming up with more.
And he said, ask me, Dad. I said, okay, well,
why did the chicken
cross the road? He said, well, to go to the
class where you learn jokes. So I guess in his
mind, I'm here,
I'm teaching you jokes. I'll tell you only one
more chicken story. There was a guy driving
down a small country
road, and there was a chicken running alongside
with his car. He was going like 50 miles an hour,
and this chicken is running right with him. So
he speeds up to 60. And the chicken speeds up.
So he's really interested at this point, cranks
it up to 70, and the chicken just passes in.
Well, he starts following this chicken, and it
goes into a farm. And he goes in, and he's
looking around
this chicken farm. There are chickens
everywhere, and they all have three legs.
Can't figure this out. He goes, he finds the
farmer, and he says, what is this? And he said,
well, everybody
loves chicken legs, and so I have bred a
chicken with three legs. I'm going to be a millionaire.
And he said, well, how do they taste? I don't
know. I haven't caught one yet.
Yesterday, we talked about God's unlikely
mission. Today, it's a little on the lines of
God's unlikely
response, the unlikely response of people. And
sometimes we start something that's like
breeding a
three-legged chicken, and we can't even catch
the thing. It goes far beyond what we expect
and far
beyond what our anticipation is. And so today,
what I want to do, I told you yesterday, I'd be telling
you stories of things that I've done to get
outside the church walls, things our church has
done to get
outside of the church walls, and also spending
some time with Jonah, this prophet who wasn't
all that
interested in the mission that God had in store
for him, a guy who God said, go to, and Jonah said,
no way, I'm not going. And God said, oh, yes,
you are. And after being swallowed up by a
fish, after
being thrown overboard by sailors, Jonah gets a
second chance, but it comes after kind of a
disgusting prayer of Jonah that's enough to
make a fish throw up and spit Jonah on the
sidelines of a
bank, and he does go the other direction. What
I want to do is begin taking a look back at Jonah.
Well, first let's begin in prayer. Let's begin.
Before we dive too deeply into Jonah, let's go
to God
in prayer. Come on. Father, we thank you for
the gift of life today. We thank you that we
can be
together as a group of people seeking you today.
Father, I pray that we have any encouragement for
being in Christ. If we are at all consoled by
sharing in the Spirit of God, that we begin to make
your joy complete by being together, having the
same mind, being one in spirit and purpose. Father,
help us as a people to begin to lay aside our
selfish ambition, the things that fill us up with
conceit, and begin to take on the clothing of
humility, considering other people, especially those
outside of our churches, better than we are.
Father, help us in this life not to look at our
interests only, but also to the interests of
those that are outside knowledge of who you are. We
thank you for your Son Jesus, who gives us the
kind of attitude that we should have, who puts and
instills in us a mind that though He was God,
He didn't hang on to that. He didn't cling on
to the
position. He emptied Himself, taking the form
of a human being, taking the punishment of a common
criminal, and you exalted Him by your great
power and gave Him the name above all other
names, a
name that every one of us in this room and
outside of this room will confess, a name at
which we will
all bow, to Him be all honor and glory. Amen.
Open up your Bibles to Jonah 2. We left Jonah
still in the fish, actually. He'd been
swallowed up. He had that extremely pathetic
prayer of just
thanking God so much for His deliverance, and
it was enough to make this fish spit Him out, and
here we find Jonah with a second chance to go
on God's mission, and this time,
Jonah goes. In the midst of that prayer, he had
made some promises to God. Evidently, he said,
Okay, I get the picture. I'm going to go, and
he does go. I want us to look
closely at the response of these people,
because as he sets out to Nineveh, this great
city of Mosul,
Iraq, a place that yesterday, not many of you
were very interested in going when I tried to
drum up
kind of a missionary team to go to Mosul, Iraq
in the very near future, but Jonah goes, and he
preaches this extended sermon that I quoted to
you in its entirety yesterday, and I'm going to
do so
again today. I hope it's one that you can put
in your memory banks as well, from Jonah 3:4.
Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown.
That's the sermon. Now that would get you out of
church in a hurry. People usually would
probably be pretty thankful for that. Forty
days more,
Nineveh will be overthrown. Well, the response
that he gets is staggering, and I want us to
look real
closely at the response of the people, because
the fourth seed that I want to put in your
mind, I put
yesterday's up here for you. The fourth one is
that God's, excuse me, the response of the
people is
always surprising and always unlikely. If you
track through what happens, the people
themselves begin to
fast. They begin to deny themselves food, and
it's kind of this grassroots effort of fasting and
mourning to try to show God that they are a
repentant people, that they're sorry for what they've
done, that they're ready to turn things around,
that they're prepared to change their lives, stop
what they've been doing and be a different
people. This is all the people of Nineveh,
this skin peeling off group of folks are ready
to turn it around. Well then, oddly enough,
word gets
out to the king, and the king finds out about
it and says, you know, if this is going to be
our fate,
I'm going to make a declaration. I'm going to
declare that everyone is to fast, all people, all
animals, everyone, and put on sackcloth and
ashes. I sit back and I take a look at this,
and I think
with my modern, current, contemporary mind, and
I think it's kind of funny that the king's the last
one to find out, but he does respond quite
marvelously. He does kind of the equivalent of
what a mayor would do in declaring it's Dallas
Cowboy Day. Everyone put on your silver and white,
everyone look the part of a Dallas Cowboy fan.
He says, everybody put on your sackcloth and ashes.
So I imagine Elijah Akeem going down to Super
Walmart and trying to fit his family with sackcloth
and ashes, trying to pick up, make sure
everybody's got sackcloth and ashes, but the
problem comes
whenever he has to get sackcloth for his
animals. I told you Jonah's a little different,
but the king
declares that all the animals are to wear
sackcloth and ashes. Is that a little odd? This
is a
story that has so many funny elements, from
fishes swallowing Jonah, to Jonah being the least
religious person in the whole story, to sailors
having more religion than the religious person.
The responses are unlikely, and Jonah is
probably one of the most unlikely of all,
because he sees
what God responds by saying, okay, I'm going to
forgive them. I'm going to relent from the punishment
that I had planned for them. I'm going to let
it go by, because he saw the response that they gave,
and he forgives them. Jonah's an overnight
success. I mean, he's a guy who is ready to be
on Oprah.
One man turns a town of 120,000 to God
overnight, instantly. I mean, it's not even overnight,
it's in a minute. But Jonah's response is one
of anger, seething, blood boiling anger at what has
happened. Every response in this story just
kind of baffles me and throws me for a loop.
That was the
way it was for me, beginning with Rosemont. I
kind of introduced some stories, told you a few
experiences that I had by going over to this
low income tax credit housing across the street. I
thought I might go further back in the story
and tell you a little bit about how that came
to be.
A couple of years ago, our elders and ministers
went on a retreat, and an elder and I planned that
retreat. The opening day of the retreat was
spent by getting all of our elders and
ministers in one
place, which is pretty tough to do, and loading
them up in a van, which none of them is excited about
doing. They think of their school days as over,
but we get in a hot van, and we traveled all around
Denton County. We went to several different
churches, and we just prayed there. I guess all the
churches we went in this retreat were churches
of Christ. These are churches that maybe don't like
us, maybe won't talk to us. We just walked
around their parking lots, and we began to pray
for them,
that God would bless their efforts, that God
would be revealed through what they had to do,
and we
just prayed for them. Not very long, got back
in the van and would drive to another location. Another
stop on our journey that afternoon was to stop
in various neighborhoods in our county, brand new
neighborhoods, and to begin to pray for what
God might be doing in those neighborhoods, and
how He
might use us as His people in these new
neighborhoods. Some of them didn't have
anything but
streets and lampposts. One area in particular
is a brand new, it's a couple of brand new
cities that
basically they've come in, annexed,
incorporated, and built thousands of houses,
the Providence,
Savannah area. We began to pray for that area
because we knew our intentions were to plant a
church, to find a church planter, to be
located, to live in a house there, to meet in
homes, and begin
a new church that was focused not on finding
all the Christians in the area, not on finding
a big
mass of Church of Christ people to come and
start a church, but to find people who don't
know Jesus
at all. So we prayed. We walked through the
model homes and prayed and spent time there. That
experience begins to change you and shape you
because one of the other places that we went
was right
across the street. It was the last place we
went. We went into the community room and began
to pray
for what was already happening at that
apartment complex. Apartment complex that we
saw go up from
dirt to buildings in a matter of maybe six
months and began to do ministry there. Prayer
is the
beginning point of looking outward because a
lot of times we have a lot of good ideas, we
have a lot
of good things that we'd like to do, but you
have to begin on your knees because you might
go to the
wrong place. You might really feel like God is
calling you to do mission work in Tarshish because
you don't really like Nineveh, but God's
calling you to Nineveh, not a cruise to
Tarshish. And so
you have to be prayerful. You have to know and
be ready for God to redirect you, to use violent
storms, to use fish that you would never think
of in terms of mercy swallowing you in the
middle of
the sea, and let God be the one who directs you.
One of the things that people ask is just a little
more detail of what other things that we did.
We developed a relationship with the staff over at
this Rosemont apartment complex. Our youth
minister, our children's minister began to work closely
with them, find out what they need, find out
what kind of programs might help them. And
after school
programs were quite important for this
apartment complex. Again, thinking in terms of
business, an
apartment complex wants to fill up all their
units and keep their people as long as they can
so they
don't have to come back in and evict someone,
paint, and carpet. So having a community that
develops is quite valuable to them. And if
their clients know they're not just getting
room and
board and free cable, but they're also getting
a place where their children can have a place
to be
in the afternoon, they value that. So if your
church, if your group of people can come in and
provide something like that, they're going to
be very excited about what you can do. They'll see
that from a business standpoint. Kind of an
irony, an unexpected thing in this fourth point
here of
unexpected responses was food. My intentions, I
didn't know how to prepare going over there for the
first few times. I didn't know what to bring to
study. And I knew that I better be bringing food
because people weren't going to just look at me
like Bert did yesterday and say he's cute and say,
I'm going to stay and spend an hour with this
guy that I don't know. I figured that food
might be a
good way to go, especially in a low income tax
credit housing place. So I thought, you know, ask
and you will receive, seek and you will find. I
thought, you know, maybe I'll just call some restaurants
and just ask if they'd like to donate some food
to feed some people in a low income tax credit
housing. I was astounded. Almost every
restaurant I called, in fact for months, I
would call one
restaurant, that's all it would take. And
they'd say, sure, yeah, how many you got? And I
remember one
of the first times this group, it was a sub
shop in Denton, really good sub place, New
York's sub hub.
They gave me like a huge six foot sub that was
very wide so you could get several sandwiches
out of it.
And I'm carrying this thing and I'm thinking,
I'm stealing from these people. I'm like,
there's not
enough people coming to Rosemont for me to
bring this food. Every bit of it was gone. It's
a modern
day instance of the fish and loaves. God
provides. Gave me this food free and I'm giving
it away.
There are other times I'd go and a guy at Pizza
Hut gave me two pizzas and I thought, he just doesn't
understand. You know, I've got a lot of people
coming. That two pizzas is not going to be enough.
And I go in there with two pizzas and we have a
small group. Two pizzas is just enough. It's amazing
what God does and the response that takes place.
And it always surprises you. Sometimes you expect
big and it's small. Sometimes you expect small
and it's big. And I just encourage you to be
ready for
God to surprise you. I'm also surprised by what
people will say to me at Rosemont. I had one guy
kind of pull me aside and he said, do you do
marriages? Do you do weddings? I've done quite
a few
weddings. I can do weddings. He said, well, I'm
kind of wanting to surprise my girlfriend and
marry her. I'm trying to fix this in my mind.
I'm really an insider. I am Christian to the core.
Sixth generation Church of Christ. Surprise
your girlfriend and get married. I had to just
kind of
keep a straight face and say, oh yeah, how
would that work? We began to talk through what
that might
look like. What we're finding at Rosemont is
that most everybody lives together. It's a different
kind of ministry. They live together. They're
committed to one another. They have children with
each other. But they begin to see the value of
bringing God into a relationship. And that's a
door through which I can step and say, I'm glad
you asked. Let me tell you what you're doing in
marriage. Let me tell you what God brings to a
marriage when He becomes the focus of your
relationship. And so I've had numerous
conversations. In fact, Bob Bentley was at one
of the
weddings I performed. And Bob has performed
weddings for other people, not from Rosemont, but
people who are just coming to our church who
are in the same situation, trying to find their way
through life. It's astounding, the responses
that you will find when you lay yourself open
to God.
Let's go back to Nineveh. Well, no, let me do
something else. Let me tell you a little bit more.
I'm guessing that some of you want to know what
actually takes place at one of these meetings. Is
that a fair thought? In fact, I might even stop
right now, see where we're at, and see if there are
any other questions before I just go answering
a question that you asked yesterday. Maybe there's
another one that you want me to address as well
today. Any questions pop into your mind right now?
Good, I've sufficiently put you to sleep. For
those of you on the tape, please stop driving your
car. No questions? Alright, well you be
thinking. I'm going to give you some more
chances. What I
decided to do was to show up over there under a
program called Life and Faith. And by that I left
it open-ended. I didn't use language that would
point to Jesus. I didn't use language that would
chase people away. I used language about making
friends, building community, getting to know your
neighbors. That was the only hook that I had.
Coming to that first night, I just asked people why
they came. Just let them tell me. Why did you
come? What brought you here tonight? And so
they'd begin
to tell their story, and a lot of times what
would happen is in their own stories you'd find out
what's going on. You'd find out that they just
lost their job. There are tragedies everywhere, and
the people at Rosemont are ready to tell you. A
lot of us when we go to church, we're not ready to
tell people. It may take a few weeks. We're
going to be real slow to let somebody know
we've lost
our job. But for them, losing your job means no
bills paid. It means those credit cards are going
to come, and there's nothing to pay them. It
means the electricity may go off. And so
they're ready
to talk about it. Some other questions that
I've asked is what's your story of how you came to
Denton? How did you come to be at this
apartment complex? How did you come to be a
part of this group
of people? What's the most meaningful thing
that someone has done for you? On any given
night, we
might just have one question that everybody
talks about. What's the best thing that you
have ever
done for someone? What television shows are you
watching that you're really enjoying? Give
culture a
chance to speak, and we step back and listen
for how God is at work in what they're watching on
television. Within maybe a week or two, I was
able to ask this question. Who's God to you?
Now notice
that I say God. I didn't use Jesus. I didn't
talk about necessarily Christianity. I let it
be God
because I had a number of Muslims, people from
Sudan, people from India, people from a Hispanic
background, and African Americans. I had to use
it open-endedly so that the Muslims could also
express who God is. And it's very informative.
Whenever you sit and you listen, you're able to
learn something about God, even from someone
from another faith. A couple more. Who showed
you the
meaning of love? What is the dream of your life?
How did you come to faith? After a time, you begin
to see people begin to talk a Christian
language. You can ask them how they came to
faith. But the
one, two more, describe your experience and
impressions of church. Once people figure out that
I'm the minister or the pastor across the
street, I'll ask them, what's your impressions
of church?
Not our church, because most of them hadn't
been there. Some had. But what's your
impressions of
church? And then I'm able to learn a few things
about what they believe about church. The one
single question that I've used more than any
other, it's the one that I use every week now,
is what is
God doing in your life this week? I give them
the chance to think about what God is doing in their
world. And in a way, it kind of spins it,
because it makes them talk through that lens.
But the
questions, I tend to use appreciative inquiry
of trying to bring out positive things that are going
in their life. I don't usually say what
terrible things have gone on in your life.
Those are going
to come out even when you talk about what God
is doing in your life. But when you use appreciative
inquiry, by that I mean bringing out the
positive side, they're able to reflect on their
life from a
more positive side, rather than the way that
they often do, dragging along, thinking about
all the
negatives. And it's a way of centralizing God
back into the equation. Any questions there?
We actually do, every week. That was a
non-threatening way to bring God in, even in those
early weeks. And the way that I would do it is,
is there anything in your life that I could
pray for?
And a lot of times these stories that they've
been telling of what had happened to them in
the week,
or as they would come out, they'd be more than
happy for us to pray for how they'd lost their job.
They'd be more than happy for us to pray for
how they do not know where their partner was,
or how
they'd lost custody of their child. They'd be
more than happy. And prayer, again, becomes a
spiritual window into people's souls. Good
question. Yes?
Did you start that off in the first week, when
you were like, why did you come and why aren't
you here
to do story and stuff like that? Or did you
wait until you let them know that you're the minister?
Well, I started off, like on the signs and
whatnot, telling that one of our neighbors, Brady
Bryce, is going to be leading this. So they
know that there is a leader. They know there's some
direction. Did I wait until, the question was,
did I wait until after I told them that I was a
minister to ask them about God? Yeah, or like,
if it becomes like praying or something like that.
Well, it comes out so quickly. It comes out so
quickly, my identity. So I don't have to be afraid,
I don't have to be hesitant. And we prayed from
the very first meeting on, and we've prayed every
meeting since then. And I use a lot of
different forms of prayer. A lot of times I'll
let them pray
as well. Or we'll do just like, different
people will bring up prayer requests. And what
I'll do is
say, who would be willing to pray for that
prayer request? And then we would just keep
going. And so
multiple people would be praying for different
prayer requests. And I would lead us in a short prayer,
give people a time either to pray silently for
all those prayer requests, or a time to pray
out loud
for all those prayer requests, and then I would
close us out. Rather than just using standard forms
of prayer. Another type of prayer that I would
use is kind of a bidding prayer where I would tell
people, we're going to pray for certain things.
So if, say, you've lost your job, you could, at a
certain moment as I'm praying along, I'm going
to say, Lord, we have these requests to offer
to you.
And the way that they would bid those prayers
out is to say, for me as I look for a job. And then
someone else would say, for Sally, for John,
for Jason, for Priscilla, that type of thing.
So the
names are called out. But different styles of
prayer I think help. Rather than being a traditional
bow your heads, one person pray. I try to keep
that different and unique. Let's take a look at
Jonah some more. I've talked a lot about my son.
My son's favorite story is Jonah. And I felt
like I
had to come clean with Nathan about Jonah. I
just kind of felt like I needed to let him know that
Jonah doesn't end the way our children's
stories end Jonah. It's pretty incomplete. And
I don't know
if you know the rest of Jonah, but we're going
to take a look at the rest of Jonah because I
think it
really illuminates what we're talking about of
going outside the walls. In Jonah 3, we
get another one of Jonah's great prayers. These
great prayers that I know you'll want to
include in
your worship time. Jonah gets upset with God if
you look down in chapter 3. Verse 10, chapter 3,
God sees what they did, how they turned from
their evil ways. He changes his mind about the calamity
that he would bring upon them, and he did not
do it. Chapter 4:1, this was very displeasing to
Jonah and he became angry. I don't know if I
can stack up enough of the words for anger that are
loaded up in here. Very displeasing and angry.
And here's his prayer. Now I want you to think about
this in your devotional time. Think about this
prayer. Oh Lord is this not what I said when I was
still in my own country? That is why I fled to
Tarshish at the beginning. For I knew that you are
a gracious God and a merciful God and slow to
anger and abounding in steadfast love and ready to
relent from punishing. And now oh Lord, please
take my life from me for it's better for me to die
than to live. Amen. That's a beautiful prayer.
It's touching and honest. And Jonah just
relates his
heart to God. Is that not a shocking prayer?
He's ticked off at God. He's ready to die. He's ready
for God to kill him. And he lets him know in
this prayer and essentially he stomps off. If
you look
at what happens he just storms away. They kind
of have this dialogue. God says is it right for you
to be angry? Jonah doesn't even answer him. How
about that? Is it right for you to be angry Jonah?
I mean this is a pretty intense prayer. Jonah
doesn't answer. He turns his back and he walks away.
And he goes and he sits in his little place
outside the walls of the city to watch it
explode. He
wants to see the bombs hit Nineveh. He's ready
to see what should happen to this godless
people who
are bloodthirsty. He wants to see them die. The
fifth thing, the fifth of these seven seeds
that I'm
wanting to plant in your mind is that there is
a strong difference between obedience and alliance.
This one's number five. There is a difference
between obedience to God and alliance with God.
It's pretty easy to look at Jonah and begin to
say well he's such a hypocrite. His prayers are
terrible. He's not really a good follower of
God. I'm not going to be that way. But if you
look at
Jonah, he is one who followed God's word. Sure
he was a little slow. But his outward obedience didn't
really reflect any kind of an inward change in
his life. He was still the same person. There was
nothing in his life that showed that he was
allied with God. I guess I see even more why
this fish
couldn't stomach him. I wonder how if a fish
can't stomach Jonah how God is able to keep
putting up
with this guy, chasing him out in the desert.
But then I think about my own heart and I think about
how hesitant I am to go sometimes outside of my
walls. And I think about how sometimes we as a
church don't care for those who are hurting.
Don't care for those who need healing. And I
think maybe
we're not all that different from Jonah. Where
sometimes we're more focused on our morality of
obeying the things that God has called us to do.
Okay, I'm going to go. I've made vows to God. I
said that prayer in the middle of the fish.
I've got to go. I've got to obey. But inside we don't
want to do it at all. We're not allies with God.
We're not partnered in what he's doing in the
world. We're separated from it. We've got our
own mission. We've got our own purpose. And
maybe it's
to look God and make ourselves pretty lovable.
God loves me. God saves me. Never mind the rest
of the
world. What I'd like us to hear though is our
obedience, our seeking after God in prayer, our
practice of worship does not make us more
lovable to God. God loves us all the same. What our
obedience and our worship and our practice of
religion does is make us more like God. Where we
recognize the deity of God and we want to be
like him. It's not that we're trying to win him over
to make him think that we're somehow more
lovable than we were. God loves Jonah and God
loves Nineveh
and the sailors all on the same flat world. It
is a world that he sees the same and he breaks into
this world to show his love. Let me go now to
the sixth seed that I want to stick in your
mind. I
don't know if I could push that fifth one as
hard as I would like to about obedience and alliance,
but a lot of these are very similar. And the
sixth one is that God invites us as believers into
repentance every day. God invites us on the
inside to a spirit and an attitude of
repentance daily
and repeatedly. You want to know something that
made my jaw drop about this story of Jonah? Is he
never repents? He never admits he's done
anything wrong. Those of you that were here
yesterday will
remember some of the things that I said about
that first prayer of all the blame that he
shifts and
places upon God. He never tells God, I'm sorry,
I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have
run away.
I should have gone. His is all illegalistic.
Okay, you've got my attention. I'll make a vow
to you
now and I'll keep it. I'll go based upon my vow.
I'm going to keep it. No repentance. I guess I find
that stunning because we really lift up Jonah
as the hero a lot of times in this story and
he's not.
That's why I had to have a little
heart-to-heart with Nathan. Not because I want
to destroy children's
books or anything like that and I'm not trying
to pull people out of great children's books. There's
nothing wrong with that. Children can't handle
all the stories. But I wanted him to know a
little bit
more about this story. I find it amazing that
Jonah is so much like us because he is someone baptized
in the waters, baptized to his death, but
unchanged. Does that sink in at all with you?
Are there people
in your congregations? Are you sitting in
church? Baptized, obedient, but not transformed.
You can't
picture yourself having a heart where God's
heart is. I think that's where a lot of us are.
In some
ways we just assume die, then love the people
that God loves. I'm calling us here in this
sixth point
to repent of that. To really turn around and
tell God we're sorry because we've not shared
your heart.
We have not trusted you with deliverance. We
have not believed that you really and truly
want to
transform us. I think some of that happens as
we and our churches, as we leaders and people
who are
involved in churches, begin to celebrate
salvation. To see God's eye intending to save
the world and
to celebrate it. To rejoice with people when
they find deliverance from evil in small and
minor ways.
Like the guy who comes and says, I want to
surprise my girlfriend with a wedding. That's something
that can be celebrated. You capitalize upon the
good that God is doing in someone's life and
not be
overwhelmed by the evil that may be there. And
you celebrate it with them. Celebrate with them
in the
presence of God. I think Jesus gives us great
instruction here in his great sermon where he
challenges us and reminds us to love our
enemies. To love our enemies and to fill our
prayer list up
with the people who persecute us and hate us.
Does that not get us outside of our hearts and
how we
tend to look at the world? If we can just get
everybody in. If we can just come inside the walls.
If we can just begin to believe everything the
same. If we can just practice and worship the same.
All of these arguments and contentions would go
away. Well, that's not really the way God has worked.
God has done the reverse. If we could just go
outside of ourselves. Repent of our self-centered
focus and go outside of the walls. Then the
world begins to find a God who wants to save them.
Then the world begins to notice fish and storms
in a whole different light. And begins to see even
bloodthirsty people with the eye of grace. I'm
going to spend a little time on the last point that
I'll share with you. And by this point it's
going to be so anticlimactic. And if it is,
that's my
intention. Because it's the aim of this entire
time together, yesterday and today. That our
aim is to
share the heart of God. The seventh thing that
I want to place in your mind to annoy you and maybe
drive you crazy over the next weeks and months
is that our aim is to share God's heart. And God's
heart comes in this bitter, poison-filled
prayer from Jonah here in the fourth chapter.
As he
describes what God's heart is like. I think
that's what the whole thing has been moving us toward.
In fact, the very first one that I gave you was
for us to see that God's heart is for all people.
That God's mission is to the world. And here at
the end, here in Jonah 4, we see what that is.
And I
want you to look at this and see if you get the
same response that Jonah has. Verse 2. The reason
why Jonah ran away, the reason why Jonah wanted
nothing to do with this mission is because God is
gracious and merciful and slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love and ready to relent from
punishing. The whole reason he ran away is
because he knew God's heart and he wanted
nothing to do
with it. I can't imagine that heart God being
given to those Ninevites. What are you thinking,
God? How can you send countries like Assyria
and Babylon to come and punish us? How dare
you, God?
Look at our great suffering. God, I know your
heart and I don't like it because you're gracious,
merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast
love and ready to relent from punishing. And I don't
know about you, but that's the kind of God that
I want to know. I don't know if it's the kind
of God
that I'm ready to show by my actions to
everyone. I don't know if I can act in the same
ways that God
acts toward the world, but that's the God that
I want to know. It doesn't make me angry that God
saves this people, but if we're honest, we
still have to keep thinking of ourselves as
Jonah because
we want to see justice served, right? I mean,
if something is unjust, we want to see it set right.
And sometimes God's mercy ends up looking like
injustice. The good news is that we can let God
walk that line. We don't have to. We need to
celebrate who he is. Let those words just kind
of wash
over you, these words of God's heart, the
secret reason why Jonah ran away, this heart of
God of
being sheer in grace, full of grace towards
ignorance, towards people that have contempt toward
God. He's gracious. He is full of mercy towards
rebellion, even a group like Nineveh that's
outside of his covenant promise. At least
that's what Jonah would say. God says no, he's inside.
Nineveh is inside my covenant promise. In fact,
Jonah, you're supposed to be my missionary.
You're supposed to be the one going on my
behalf to share my heart with the world. And
while God is
slow to anger, he's tolerant and patient,
Jonah's quick to get angry, quick to have a
short fuse,
quick to be upset at God's mercy. This love is
beyond the norm of what's expected, and God's ready
to forgive at the drop of a hat. Even a town
that will say, oh yeah, we're sorry, a town
that says,
yes, we repent, we'll put on sackcloth, we'll
stop eating from the king to the cows in the land,
we'll all show God that we're repentant. Evil
will get the best of them later on. But God is the
hero of this story, the one to whom deliverance
belongs, the one to whom our worship and praise
belongs. Let's look at how this book closes.
Jonah goes out, outside the city of Nineveh,
sitting in a little stadium in my mind, ready
to watch everything come undone. He's mad at God.
He's ready to see destruction. In Jonah, in
this action, I sometimes see the church. I see
a church
that's ready to talk about God in terms of
judgment, in terms of eliminating
the wickedness that's in the world, ready to
talk about what's right and what's wrong. But
we come
and we tell the city, not a message of any kind
of hope, but you've got 40 days and you're going
down. And then we withdraw to the hill and wait
for judgment. Is that your experience sometimes in
your churches and sometimes with people? That
that's who we are. The church is the group that comes
in and judges, withdraws and waits for all hell
to break loose on the people who aren't living as
they should. I think sometimes that's the way
we are. That's not the heart of God. Judgment
in God's
mind is not for its own sake. It's not simply
to right wrongs. Judgment comes to pass so that people
will find salvation. Judgment has a purpose.
Its purpose is not just judgment in and of
itself. Its
purpose is to draw all people to God. Judgment
has a purpose. But sometimes I think we see it as,
well, that's what needs to happen. It's an evil
group of people. They're wrong. They need to be
judged. They need to be taken care of. And this
world is so terrible, so bad. All we can do is sit
on a hillside and lament it. Well, God comes to
Jonah and all through this story he's been sending
things. I don't know if you track the words. He
comes to Jonah, gives him a word to send him. Jonah
runs away. So Jonah, so God sends a wind to
blow against that boat. God's the one behind that
negative storm. Jonah's thrown overboard. God
sends a fish. Here in this final section, God
sends a
little bush to come and grow up over Jonah to
provide him a little shade while he sits there to
watch the destruction that he hopes will happen
in Nineveh. God sends this bush. Jonah's really
happy about the bush, really pleased about the
bush and thankful for it. But then God sends a
worm to come and eat at the bush and kill it
and make it wither and make it die. And then
God in
his humor sends what I'm sure has to be a West
Texas heat, wind, to blow over Jonah. And he knows
what it's like to have grace, a perfect image
of grace, a bush, a place of shade in the
desert. What
better image of God's grace than that?
Undeserved, unplanned for, nothing he did to
get ready for,
grow up over him. God sends that, but God also
takes it away and sends the wind. Jonah's most mad
when that's removed from him, when he's angry
that he loses his little bush. He's angry. He's
incensed. See all the things that Jonah's angry
about? People being saved that he doesn't like,
people that we'd rather not have in our church.
They don't look like us. We don't know how to
address their problems when they come to us
about surprise marriages. We don't know what to
do with
them. We don't need them. What do you mean
busing them in? What do you mean bringing them from
across the street? We get upset and angry. And
then we also get angry when our little bushes are
eaten and chewed away and our little bit of
comfort is taken away from us. We get angry
about all the
wrong things. And I don't know why God doesn't
just kill him. Why doesn't he just give up on him?
He's had every chance. He could have thrown him
in the river, the ocean. Jonah asked for it. All
he had to do was kill me. Everything will be
fine. There's your chance, God. He wants to die. God's
patient even with Jonah. Even with us and all
of our pride and all of our hesitancy, all the things
that we get angry about that we shouldn't be
angry about, God's patient even with us. And he begins
this dialogue with Jonah that basically I could
sum up by saying is it right for you to be angry?
Is it right for you to be angry? Is it right
for you to be angry? And here's how it ends.
Verse 10.
You are concerned about this bush which you did
not labor for, which you did not grow. It came to
being in the night and it perished in the night.
Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great
city in which there are more than 120,000
persons who do not know their left hand from
their right
and also many animals? And that's how one of
the most unusual prophets in the whole of the Old
Testament ends. It ends with the question, is
it right for me, Jonah, not to care about the people
and the animals who do not know me, who morally
don't know their left hand from their right, while
you sit and are angry about your bush and are
angry that justice is not being served? Pretty good
message, don't you think? Pretty good message
for those of us on the inside, leaving us with a
divine question. It makes a lot of stories come
to mind. I don't know what stories come to your
mind. I think of the prodigal son. I think of
the angry brother sitting on the sidelines. How can
you let this guy back into our house? He's come
home. Let's celebrate the salvation
that's taking place in this house. Yes? You may
have touched on this yesterday, I wasn't here, but
I guess my question would be, in your apartment
industry, going back to that, beyond being kind of
a point where you go in and spend some time and
then leave, I'm wondering how the discipling process
goes on, in terms of moving people from where
they are to becoming formed more in the image of
Christ. The role of the church community, your
community of faith, in being a part of that
encouraging, whether the people go there or
not, it seems like to form a community where continuing
to grow is an essential part for all of us. How
are they received into your fellowship? That's a
good question. In terms of, you know, change
for us is uncomfortable. We all want
conversions, but
boy, that means change for us, and we get like
Jonah. Exactly. I'm just wondering how all these,
these are the, to me, the moving beyond what
we've always done in terms of going in as a preaching
point, as a teaching point, going back and then
there left until the next week. How is that different?
Good question. Good question. The question is,
how is discipleship taking place? How are
people taken to
the next level? Is it just a teaching thing
where you come inside and you teach a little
thing and
then you're gone? For right now, it's happening
informally, and I think you're asking what kind of
structure would be there, what kind of things
would be in place. For us, one of the first
steps was
just to take the risk, to begin to do things
outside of our church building, to begin to
even have
things that are for other people that are even
far removed a little bit from Bible study. What begins
to happen even in these conversations is what
you're doing is rather than nurturing your structure
or your idea of what discipleship could look
like, you're nurturing God's activity in their life.
What I've been able to see is just beginning to
see transformed people, people that are now wanting
to come to church, whether it's with Singing
Oaks or other churches. Most of the people will
go to
other churches, but we've had a number that
will come to Singing Oaks. We're working on in
the next,
probably in October, we will begin a worship
service over there on a Sunday morning. We've discovered
from other people who've done this before that
coming during church time is a good thing to do,
and we're hoping that that will maybe be a
little more intentional Bible study, more time
for them
to share their stories of faith, and also time
for teaching. Beginning in a week from tonight,
I'll start a Bible study with them. Bible study
is maybe too strong of a word. It gets towards what
I'm writing for my final dissertation for my
Doctoral ministry program, and it will be a
study of
ten weeks of going straight through the Bible,
but it's a narrative approach. What I've
developed is
a postmodern catechesis. I know catechesis is
not a word that we use in Church of Christ, but
catechesis means instruction. It's training in
faith. You might think of people going to catechism
class where a lot of what they do is there is a
list of questions that they're to memorize and a
list of answers that they memorize. So you're
given the question, and then you give the answer.
It literally means to echo. So a lot of times
what we think of in terms of even Bible study is
what are we going to teach them so they can
echo it back to us? My approach at Rosemont and my
approach in this study that we'll be getting in
two weeks is a little different, because as you've
already been able to tell, I've put myself at
their feet as a learner, where I'm viewing them
as a
teacher. Now, that's really kind of radical and
hard for people to grasp, but I would actually
believe that I could learn something from them.
Here's what I'm doing. As a learner, I'm
sitting in
there listening to their stories, waiting for
opportunities to echo what God is doing in their
life, waiting to bring Bible into the equation.
And so in every one of our Bible studies, in every
one of our Wednesday night studies, when people
share their stories of faith, I'll bring Scripture
in. And I'll say something like, you know, a
lot of what you guys have been talking about
has made me
think of this Scripture. And so they take that,
and a lot of them are writing it down, even
though we
read it and talk about it and study it a little
bit, and it becomes something that they're
looking at
through the week, even as couples. The program
that we'll begin in two weeks is one where I'll go
very quickly through a narrative look at the
Bible. It's five weeks on the old and five
weeks on the
new. And it will be pretty interactive, because
we will still be doing some of their sharing of
stories, but it will also be intentional in
teaching them stories of faith. Because my personal
belief in this postmodern catechesis is that my
job is not to get them to echo me, but to
listen for
the echoes of God and help them become aware
that God is already right there in the middle
of their
story. And I'm able to then lay down Scripture
alongside of it and let them know that there's a
bigger story that's been going on much longer
than they've ever been around, and begin to
draw them
into that story. Now how that will play out in
terms of discipleship, we'll see. We're just glad
we're taking the risk there. Who else has
questions here as we're coming to our time? No questions?
Well, what I will do is I'll be hanging around
if you have some specific things that you'd
like to
ask me. I'd be more than happy to do that. I'd
like to lead us in a closing prayer. I don't
know if
you've noticed, but our prayers the last two
days, I've just been stealing the words of Paul. I'm
just not very original. I just steal his words
from Philippians 2, and it is a great
missional passage. It is a great missionary
passage. And if you need an example for a missionary,
I just invite you to take a look at Jesus, who
being in the form of God didn't hold on to that,
but left the walls of heaven and came into the
world. It's a beautiful prayer. Let's pray
together. Father, we pray that today we've been
encouraged that we have lifted up the name of God,
of your Son Jesus Christ, who is our Lord, that
we have shared in your Holy Spirit. And we pray
that our joy will be your joy, that we can be
more and more united, even as we're going
outside of
our walls, that we're acting in full accord and
in one mind, not focused on selfish things, not
focused on things that will build up our own
ambition or fill us with conceit. But Father, fill
us with humility, to where we can regard other
people, other faiths, other journeys as better
than ourselves, so that we can begin to see
others' interests in a new light. Father, we pray
that the mind of your Son Jesus Christ can be
not only our mind, but our heart, that we can share
the very heart of God. You weren't content,
Father, to remain distant from us, but you came
in the
form of your Son Jesus to live amongst us, to
die a death at our hands, the death of a criminal.
We thank you for that humility. We thank you
for exalting Him to the right hand of God. And today,
as a group, we confess that Jesus Christ is
Lord. We confess, as we one day will with all
who have
ever lived, that Jesus is Christ. We bow with
all those who will ever live. Jesus Christ is Lord.
Through Him we pray. Amen.