Would you please turn your Bibles to Jonah
chapter 1.
Jonah chapter 1 beginning with verse 11, and
we will read through chapter 3 and verse
5.
Jonah 1, 11 through 3, 5.
And having just been seated, would you please
stand out of reverence for the reading of
the words of our God.
The word of our God says, Then they
said to him, What shall we do to
you that the sea may quiet down for
us?
For the sea grew more and more tempestuous.
He said to them, Pick me up and
hurl me into the sea, and then the
sea will quiet down for you.
For I know it is because of me
that this great tempest has come upon you.
Therefore the men rode hard to get back
to dry land, but they could not, for
the sea grew more and more tempestuous against
them.
Therefore they called out to the Lord, O
Lord, let us not perish for this man's
life, and lay not on us innocent blood.
For you, O Lord, have done as it
pleased you.
So they picked up Jonah and hurled him
into the sea, and the sea ceased from
its raging.
Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and
they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and
made vows.
And the Lord appointed a great fish to
swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the
belly of the fish three days and three
nights.
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God
from the belly of the fish, saying, I
called out to the Lord out of my
distress, and he answered me.
Out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
For you cast me into the deep, into
the heart of the seas, and the floods
surrounded me.
All your waves and your billows passed over
me.
Then I said, I am driven away from
your sight, yet I shall again look upon
your holy temple.
The water closed in over me to take
my life.
The deep surrounded me.
Weeds were wrapped about my head at the
roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land whose bars
closed upon me forever.
Yet you brought up my life from the
pit, O Lord my God.
When my life was fainting away, I remembered
the Lord, and my prayer came to you
into your holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake
their hope of steadfast love.
But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will
sacrifice to you what I have vowed I
will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord.
And the Lord spoke to the fish, and
it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
Then the word of the Lord came to
Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to
Nineveh, that great city, and call out against
it the message that I tell you.
So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according
to the word of the Lord.
Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three
days' journey in breadth.
Jonah began to go into the city, going
a day's journey, and he called out, Yet
forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
And the people of Nineveh believed God.
Let's pray.
Holy Father, no condemnation do we dread.
Jesus is ours.
And Father, we come to you hearing this
word that you have breathed out by your
Holy Spirit.
And Father, we pray that it would come
to us from you with power and authority
tonight.
And Father, we pray that you would give
great glory and majesty in this place tonight
to our Lord Jesus, in whose name we
pray.
Amen.
You may be seated.
As the flashing blue lights reflected on the
wall behind him, I think all Don wanted
to do was to fumble around for a
cigarette.
He was a new believer.
He had been converted while sitting in his
house with a gun to his head, when
a door-to-door team of believers had
come to his door sharing the gospel.
And he believed.
He had been baptized.
He had joined a local congregation.
And Don had done evangelism training.
He had just learned evangelism explosion.
And he was on his way to go
door-to-door witnessing himself.
Problem was, the first door that he went
to, behind it was a lady who had
a restraining order against her ex-husband, who
had told her that he was going to
send somebody to kill her.
So when she opened the door, and Don
said in his very first witnessing opportunity, if
you were to die tonight, he found himself
causing a commotion.
20 years later, he still was able to
reflect on that, and to say, it is
a wonder I ever witnessed to the gospel
of Jesus Christ again, because I was terrified.
And the first time I heard Don tell
me about this, I sat back and thought,
you know, how rare it is that the
sharing of the gospel actually causes an Acts
17 type commotion, in which you actually have
that kind of foment.
Even among unbelievers, either among unbelievers or within
the church.
When we think about evangelism, and we think
about missions, especially when we think about missions,
what we often think of is the dissemination
of programs.
What we think about is a bureaucracy that
we want to extend to the ends of
the earth.
And it's something that is so routine, that
we have many times in our churches, children
and teenagers who reflexively yawn when a missionary
comes behind the pulpit, because they often know
that what's going to happen is that the
missionary will stand up and show pottery shards,
and will show quilts of his peoples, and
will speak in the tongue of the language
of his peoples, welcoming and greeting the congregation.
What we often don't sense is the fact
that world missions, global missions, this has everything
to do with warfare.
This has everything to do with a kingdom
that is invading this present age.
We've just read the account of Jonah, the
prophet.
The reason I want us to look at
this tonight is because this in the mind
of Jesus has everything to do with the
war he is coming to start.
I want you to turn to another passage
of scripture, if you will, in the Gospel
of Matthew.
Look in the Gospel of Matthew in chapter
12.
Notice what happens in verse 38.
You have Jesus, and he is standing and
he is speaking to those who are questioning
him, to those who are confronting him.
Notice in verse 38, then some of the
scribes and Pharisees answered him, saying, teacher, we
wish to see a sign from you.
Now, keep in mind what they are saying.
They're expecting Jesus to be the first century
version of the power team.
He's going to come in and give a
visible demonstration of the power of God.
They want to see a sign from him.
When in reality, they had already seen signs
they would not believe.
Look just a little bit earlier from this
in verse 28.
What does Jesus say when he's being confronted
with the idea that he is possessed by
demons?
But if it is by the spirit of
God that I cast out demons, then the
kingdom of God has come upon you.
They come to Jesus and they say, what
we want to do is we want to
see a sign.
And what the sign is to demonstrate is
that God is with Jesus.
They want Jesus, if you're the anointed one,
if you're this king that we are to
expect, if you're the one that God's going
to put all of your enemies under your
feet, we want you to show this with
some visible demonstration that God is on your
side.
Then what does Jesus do?
Jesus turns around and answers them.
Notice in verse 39.
But Jesus answered them, an evil and adulterous
generation seeks for a sign, but no sign
will be given to it except the sign
of the prophet Jonah.
For just as Jonah was three days and
three nights in the belly of the great
fish, so will the son of man be
three days and three nights in the heart
of the earth.
The men of Nineveh will rise up at
the judgment with this generation and condemn it
for they repented at the preaching of Jonah
and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
If we're going to understand the kind of
world that we're living in, if we're going
to understand what it means to advance the
kingdom, an idea that we have so robbed
of any of its impact and any of
its force, by turning the kingdom simply into
another slogan.
If we're going to understand what Jesus means
by invading this present order and displacing the
illegitimate rulers of this age, the principalities and
powers with the kingdom and the authority of
Christ.
If we're going to understand what Jesus means
when he says, I want you through the
power of the spirit to take this gospel
of the kingdom to all nations, to all
peoples, to the uttermost ends of the earth,
then we need to understand what Jesus means
when he points us specifically to the sign
of Jonah.
He says, I'm going to give you a
sign and this is what it is.
And this sign, if you'll notice, has two
aspects to it.
Notice that Jesus says, first of all, as
Jonah is three days in the belly of
the great fish, so will the son of
man be three days and three nights in
the heart of the earth.
Jesus says, this is a sign.
Now, notice back in Jonah what we see.
We have Jonah who is anointed as a
prophet of God.
He is set apart.
He is called out and what he is
called out to do is to represent Israel
as the light to the nations.
He is to call the nations to repentance.
He is specifically called to go to Nineveh,
a great and imposing and terrifying city, the
text tells us.
He is to go in to proclaim this.
And what does Jonah do?
He rebels against the call.
He does not follow the directive that God
has given to him.
And instead, he flees.
Now, notice what happens, though, to Jonah.
As Jonah is fleeing from God, you have
this sea.
You have the waters of the sea.
Waters, as we have seen previously, that often
show us the judgment of God.
The flood, after all, coming upon the world,
coming upon the creation with great condemnation.
You have the sea.
Think about the way in which, for instance,
Isaiah, in Isaiah 27, speaks against the sea
warring against the purposes of God.
The way that John in the Revelation will
say, in the new heavens and the new
earth, and the sea was no more, a
place of danger.
The sea is out in the sea, and
the sea is growing tempestuous.
The sea is growing here stormy.
There are waves crashing about.
The creation here itself, it seems, is rebelling
against Jonah at the direction of God.
He is going away from the direction that
God is calling him.
And even in this vessel, he is imperiled.
And the people who are on the ship
with him are also imperiled.
Now, contrast this.
Jonah on the boat with waves and winds
threatening the seafarers on the boat.
Compare this with another prophet of God, who
will find himself in exactly the same situation
later on.
He's on a boat with winds and waves.
The occupants of the boat, just as they
do with Jonah, come down and say, why
are you sleeping?
The seafarers say to Jonah, why don't you
call out to your God so that he
will save us?
Jonah cries out to God, and what is
the end result?
The end result is a sea that is
still tempestuous, a sea that is still stormy,
a sea that still threatens the occupants of
the boat.
Jonah does not have all things under his
feet.
The other prophet stands calmly before the storm
and speaks.
And Mark tells us that instantly there's stillness.
So much so that the seafarers with the
prophet Jesus are able to stand and say,
who is this man who has such authority
that even the wind and the waves obey
him?
That's not the question the seafarers are asking
of Jonah.
The question they're asking of Jonah is, who
is this man that the winds and the
waves are rebelling against him more and more?
What has he done to violate his God?
What has he done to cause these things
to come upon him?
And notice the result.
The seafarers, those who are on this ship,
in verse 15, they pick up Jonah.
This is after with much trembling, it appears.
They call out and they say to the
God of Jonah, we don't want to be
held guilty of the blood of this man.
You are doing this, God.
We are not doing this, God.
A very different kind of cry from the
one that we're going to hear later on
of the greater than Jonah prophet Jesus, where
the people stand up and say, we are
responsible for this.
We will do this.
Let his blood be upon us.
The seafarers say, no, no, this is not
us.
We are not giving up innocent blood.
And they throw him into the sea.
Jesus says, there is something here about Jonah
in this sign that is going to be
seen and fulfilled in Jesus.
And he specifically directs them to what happens
to Jonah as he is thrown into the
sea.
He says, as Jonah is in the belly
of the fish.
Text tells us that there is a sea
creature who comes and swallows Jonah.
Says in verse 17, the Lord appointed a
great fish to swallow up Jonah.
And he was in the belly of the
creature for three days and for three nights.
Now, we often read this text through the
grid of Walt Disney's Pinocchio.
We assume that Jonah is sitting on some
kind of a raft in the water in
this huge cavernous whale's stomach, sitting there with
a little lamp, reading his Bible and waiting
for deliverance.
That is not the experience that we are
shown here.
Instead, you have Jonah who is in the
belly of this creature.
He is entombed in the belly of this
creature.
Notice the way that he speaks as he
is praying to God from the belly of
the fish.
He says in verse 3, you cast me
into the deep, into the heart of the
seas.
The flood surrounded me.
Use this language of a flood coming upon
him.
The waves and the billows, they passed over
me.
And then he speaks about being enchained.
He speaks about this imprisonment in the very
belly of death.
He is driven away, he says, from the
presence of God.
I am driven from your temple.
I cannot see your temple.
Notice what he says in verse 6.
Your bars closed in upon me forever.
What Jonah is experiencing is a foretaste of
death.
He is experiencing here Sheol.
He is experiencing here what would seem to
be a burial, an entombment.
What he is experiencing here is judgment.
He is experiencing God delivering him over to
the chaotic waves, delivering him over to a
nature that is in revolt against human rulership.
And notice what happens to him.
He is consumed by a fish.
Now, think about how strikingly unnatural this is,
given God's creation order.
When God designs and creates the cosmos in
Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2, and
he creates all of the living creatures, he
speaks and you have the fish that swarm
in the seas.
All of the living creatures, including the great
sea creatures that exist within the sea, Moses
tells us specifically.
You have Adam, the man created with all
things put under his feet, including everything that
swims in the sea.
Everything that swarms in the sea, you are
to have dominion over it.
And yet Jonah, what happens to Jonah?
Jonah, this one who ought to be a
human ruler, who ought to have dominion, is
swallowed.
He is engulfed by a fish, by a
creature that the Lord God has made.
He is experiencing here judgment, the judgment of
God turning him over.
Jesus says, as he is three days and
three nights in the belly of the fish,
so will the son of man be three
days and three nights in the heart of
the earth.
He turns around, he speaks to them of
judgment, which is exactly what Jesus has been
talking about all along in Matthew chapter 12.
He turns around, notice if you will, in
Matthew 12, right before he speaks of this
issue.
In verse 33, he talks about the tree
that yields good fruit, or the bad tree
that yields bad fruit.
Notice what he says in verse 36.
I tell you, on the day of judgment,
people will give account for every careless word
they speak, for by your words you will
be justified, and by your words you will
be condemned.
Jesus is speaking of judgment, and then Jesus
turns this image of judgment upon himself.
As Jonah was three days in the belly
of the fish, the son of man will
be three days in the belly of the
earth.
We have no understanding often, even within our
churches, of judgment, of the holiness of God,
of the justice of God, which shows up
so often in the way that we preach,
in which we can have people who will
respond to Christ, but they do not agree
that they are rightly judged.
They can come to Christ, as it were,
while all the while justifying themselves in their
rebellion against God.
I saw recently, turning on television as I
was getting ready, a child-rearing expert was
going to be on one of the morning
television programs.
He said, I'm going to come on in
a few minutes and talk to you about
toddlers and fits.
And I said, well, this will be interesting
to see.
So I waited around until he came back
on, and the interviewer said, now tell us
about fits.
And he said, well, toddlers often will throw
fits because they want things.
And I said, that's true.
He says, you'll be in a store sometimes,
or you'll be at home, and they'll start
throwing a fit.
He says, and often what we want to
do is to discipline them.
I said, but you shouldn't discipline them, because
when they're throwing fits, they're not doing anything
wrong.
He said, what the toddler is trying to
do is to communicate with you.
He wants you to understand what he's saying.
He said, so what you need to do
is when a toddler begins to throw a
fit, he said, what you need to do
is to get down on your hands and
knees, and you need to look the toddler
in the eye, and whatever he is yelling,
you say it back to him.
And you say it back louder and louder
and louder until he finally understands that you
understand what he's saying.
So if he is yelling, I want a
cookie.
Then you just repeat back, you want a
cookie.
And you yell that louder and louder and
louder, and then finally he'll understand, they know
what I'm talking about.
They hear me.
And then at that point, you can explain
to the toddler why now is not the
appropriate time to have the cookie.
And the interviewer said, now, what if you're
in the middle of a grocery store?
And he said, you do it right there
in the middle of the grocery store.
Just get down on your knees, and you
do it right there.
I turned off the television.
I turned to my wife, and I said,
that's a man that one day is going
to have an 18-year-old son to
whom he is yelling, you just robbed a
liquor store.
You just robbed a liquor store.
And yet, you think about the logic behind
what he is saying.
It is perfectly and completely logical for a
utopian world in which there is no sin.
It makes absolutely no sense in a world
in which what you're trying to communicate is
that there are consequences for disobedience, and that
if disobedience is allowed to be given the
freedom it seeks, it ends in death.
Jesus turns, and he speaks, and he says,
the natural and right direction in which you
are going, even those of you who are
scribes and Pharisees, is an end that ends
in judgment.
But then Jesus turns immediately around and says,
but I have a sign.
This is the sign that you say you
want.
You're not going to get any sign except
for the sign of Jonah, who was enclosed
in the belly of the whale for three
days and three nights.
This is a man who, judged by God,
thrown into the seas, enclosed in the stomach
of a creature, crying out, I am in
the bonds of death.
Notice what happens to Jonah.
Jonah here is crying.
Notice in chapter 2, in verse 4, he
is crying out, I am driven away from
your sight, yet I shall again look to
your holy temple.
This is someone who is driven, he says,
away from the very presence of God, who
is exiled into the place of death, the
very bonds of Sheol.
Jonah's prayer, Jonah's cry here is, my God,
my God, why have you forsaken me?
He says, I am crying out.
I am away from your temple.
And the prayer that he is offering to
God is, rescue me from death.
Rescue me from judgment.
He says, I have no attention to pay
to idols, because I know that idols cannot
rescue me.
He says, I am appealing only to the
steadfast love, verse 8, the steadfast love of
God.
And God tells us in this text, very
matter-of-factly in verse 10, and the
Lord spoke to the fish, who is he
that even the fish of the sea obey
him?
The Lord spoke to the fish, and it
vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
Fish vomit.
That's your sign.
Jesus says, this is the sign that you
have, and it's the only sign that I
am going to give you.
And notice what happens to Jesus.
This is someone who, unlike Jonah, is not
in rebellion against God.
This is someone who constantly, the text is
showing us, the apostles are showing us that
he does everything that his father delights in.
He is growing in wisdom and knowledge and
in favor with God and with man.
He delights in what delights the father.
But someone who comes under a curse, not
for his own sin, but for the sins
of humanity, he comes under a curse.
He comes under a death sentence.
He is specifically handed over to the pagans.
Just as Jonah here has pagan seafarers who
take him and cast him into judgment, a
judgment that they don't really even want to
have anything to do with, so does Jesus
come before Roman centurions and prelates and governors,
who all the while are saying, isn't this
really something you all ought to be dealing
with?
And nonetheless, we wash our hands of this.
Don't let us be accused of innocent blood.
He's handed over to the nations.
He's handed over to the powers.
And when he is crucified, he is brought
under the sentence of death.
He is driven away from the presence of
God.
And yet all the while he is praying
to the father.
I know that you always hear me.
And he is offering up loud cries and
tears to the one who can save him
from death.
And he was hurt.
As Jonah was three days and three nights
in the belly of the fish, so will
the son of man be three days and
three nights in the belly of the earth.
He will come under condemnation of death.
He will be abandoned to the grave.
It will seem as though he is completely
exiled from the presence of God so that
the people can stand around and say, where
is this God who trust he trusted in?
He said that he was the anointed one
of God.
Why has God not saved him?
He is a dead corpse lying in a
hole in the ground.
And yet three days, three nights, that's it.
Jesus says that is your sign.
And that is what we are called upon
to proclaim in world missions.
When we are going out into the mission
field, whether that mission field is North America
or Indonesia or the Sudan or Chile, when
we are proclaiming Christ, we are proclaiming judgment,
curse, freedom.
That the judgment has already fallen, that the
one who was condemned is someone else who
bore that condemnation, who was vindicated by the
power of God.
When he prayed and he looked to his
God who could remember him, he was hurt.
He was not, as Peter says, abandoned to
the grave.
It means that the task of missions, we're
understanding it as warfare, we're understanding that it
has everything to do with the gospel of
the one who is both just and the
justifier of the one who has faith in
Jesus.
That's the sign.
There are some who will tell us in
contemporary missiology that there are some cultures of
the world that cannot understand justification.
They will say there are some cultures that
don't have categories of guilt and condemnation.
They will say to us, these are Western
categories.
And so there are some people groups that
you need to address in other ways.
And so you address animist cultures, for instance,
by saying, you are fearful of the great
spirits, and yet Jesus is the one who
is able to triumph over the spirits.
And indeed, that is true.
But if that's all you say, that is
not the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Every human being, Paul tells us in Romans
chapter 2, has an in-built knowledge of
guilt, looking forward toward judgment.
It is present within the human heart.
And the message of global missions, if we
are going to free people from the power
of the evil one, has to address the
issue of guilt and condemnation and judgment.
There are some right now, especially within contemporary
evangelicalism, who become enamored of what is called
the emerging church.
And there are many of them who are
saying, we are able to be missional.
And the way we are able to be
missional is to not stand in such sharp
contrast against the ambient culture of the day.
We're able to instead engage at multiple levels.
And you will read so much of the
literature that's being produced by the emerging church.
And you will find that ultimately, it often
comes to the issue of the cross, the
issue of judgment, the issue of condemnation.
And you have some who are willing to
preach the kingdom of God without preaching the
crucifixion of Christ.
This is nothing but Schleiermacher with a soul
patch.
This is the same thing that the church
always confronts over and over and over and
over again.
When you have Jesus speaking of the coming
of the kingdom of God, he speaks of
it specifically coming through this sign of judgment,
condemnation, vindication.
So that if we are going to be
relevant to a contemporary North American culture, or
if we are going to be relevant to
a contemporary Sudanese culture, we must address them
head on with the problem they all know
they have.
Problem of guilt.
You do not need to come in and
to somehow convince unbelievers that there is judgment.
Unbelievers are already scared to death of the
sentence of death.
That's the reason you can make billions of
dollars with Botox and Viagra and just for
men hair color.
They're scared of the sentence of death.
The sign that Jesus is giving us is
a sign that is coming, that is speaking
of this kind of freedom that comes specifically
through a man who is abandoned to the
grave.
Fish vomit is the sign, Jesus says.
An empty tomb, that's the sign.
An unbeliever buried with Christ in baptism is
the sign.
Because what we are saying is we are
placing you into the waters, the very judgment
of God, where as we place you into
the water, you have no ability to breathe.
You are submerged beneath the waters.
You are trusting in someone to pull you
out.
And as you're doing so, you're identifying yourself
with one who was placed under the very
wrath of God, crying out all along, I
entrust myself to the one who is faithful
to deliver me.
And he was pulled out of the wrath
of God.
He was vindicated on the third day by
the power of God.
This is the reason why Jesus identifies himself
at the Jordan River with the message of
John the Baptist.
He comes to the Jordan River of all
rivers.
Just as the people of Israel went through
the waters of the Jordan to where?
Into the land of promise.
Jesus identifies himself with what John says is
a judgment coming upon the people of Israel.
And John says, I don't want to baptize
you.
Repentance, you have no need for repentance.
Jesus identifies himself with sinful people so that
he can lead them into the inheritance.
He says, this is the sign that you
are given.
You and I have people in our churches
right now who are sitting in our churches,
some of them faithful believers in Christ, but
who are wavering wicks of flame.
There's some reports that say that women among
women of a certain age, one out of
every three or one out of every four
will have had an abortion.
Women are in our churches.
And so often the message that they receive
from us in our preaching is a message
that says God will forgive you through Christ.
But what they understand is that there is
a God standing over them saying to them
how I would condemn you to hell.
But you jump through that hoop.
Instead of communicating to the woman who has
had an abortion, yeah, what you did is
worthy of judgment.
What you did is worthy of condemnation.
What you did in the shedding of innocent
blood is worthy of eternal and everlasting damnation.
It is not that God is saying to
you that's okay.
And it is not that God is saying
to you I'm just holding back my judgment.
It is that God has already judged that
sin.
It is that has already been cursed and
damned and crucified and buried.
And you in Christ are a new creation.
There is therefore now no condemnation.
That's the message that she needs to understand.
She needs to understand that message in a
way that she is able to walk in
the freedom of Christ not as someone who
is continuing to self-justify murder in the
same way that the repentant idolatrous man in
your congregation is someone who is not justifying
his addiction to mammon but he is someone
who sees it as crucified and judged and
over.
Jesus says that's the sign.
In the belly of the earth three days
three nights that's it.
But Jesus says there's a second aspect to
this.
Notice what he says.
He speaks specifically to the preaching of Jonah.
He says I will be the son of
man will be three days and three nights
in the heart of the earth.
And then he speaks again to judgment.
The men of Nineveh will rise up at
the judgment with this generation and condemn it.
Why?
For they repented at the preaching of Jonah
and behold something greater than Jonah is here.
Now think about in the book of Jonah
in the passage that we read at the
very end how momentous this verse is and
the people of Nineveh believed God.
This is not in the history of the
nation of Israel.
There is no Israelite mission board.
There is no woman's mission society among the
people of Israel.
People of Israel are to serve as a
light to the nations.
You have Jonah coming to this one specific
nation.
He is speaking here that God is going
to judge.
God is going to wipe it out.
And you have the people of this mighty
and evil city believing the word of God
coming through the voice of the prophet Jonah.
This is a miraculous and unbelievable thing.
Jesus turns around and says, You want to
see another sign?
You'll see one who will be in the
belly of the earth for three days and
three nights and then you will see a
preaching ministry that if the people of Nineveh
were here to see what you see they
would condemn you because they believed and you
did not.
He points him to the power of the
authority of Christ.
Notice the condemnation here in Jonah.
Jonah doesn't believe the word of God.
And the pagan uncircumcised nation does.
People of Israel called consistently to be a
light to the nations and they're not.
They fail.
And this pagan uncircumcised nation does.
Jesus says this message of repentance is going
out.
You will see the authority present through the
preaching itself.
You and I are living in a new
covenant era in which God is doing something
in these last days through the preaching of
the gospel that is absolutely astounding and momentous.
He is demonstrating through the great commission task
that what he has promised to his anointed
one the very ends of the earth he
is delivering.
And he is demonstrating that when he speaks
of Israel he is not speaking simply of
some strain of DNA.
He is speaking specifically of one Jewish remnant
man that he has raised from the dead
and he is honoring him by every man
and woman and child who believes in him
whether that man or woman or child is
Sudanese or Chilean or Ethiopian or Finnish.
They're hidden in Christ.
They're the offspring of Abraham.
They're the chosen one of God.
That preaching of repentance it goes out all
over the world and wherever you have accusation
wherever you have condemnation you now have freedom.
That's why Jesus says to the churches I
am with you wherever you go even to
the ends of the earth and you have
the gospel going forward with the power of
the Holy Spirit all over the place all
over the world.
Jesus says the sign is the preaching itself.
The sign is the message itself.
The sign is able to deliver through the
power and the authority and the spirit of
God.
We do not preach this way often in
the way Jesus does.
I had a student come to see me
one time.
He said I need to see you Dr.
Moore.
I need to see you right now because
I think I'm lost.
And I've seen unregenerate students ministry students come
to faith in Christ before.
I was willing to talk to him.
We came in and sat down talked to
him about his hope in Christ.
This was someone it seemed who was trusting
and hoping in Christ alone.
And I said now tell me John why
do you think you're lost?
He said Dr. Moore you don't understand.
He said I am this far away from
apostasy and immorality all the time.
I said well good me too.
So tell me about it.
He said no you don't understand.
I'm literally I'm this far away from just
complete immorality and apostasy.
I said what do you mean?
He said I'm just I'm struggling and I'm
fighting with my sinful inclinations all the time.
He said it let me tell you something.
He said if you were to prove to
me that the bones of Jesus were in
a grave in the Middle East if you
could prove that to me beyond any shadow
of a doubt.
So Dr. Moore I'd be out right now
taking every kind of drug drunk on every
kind of liquor and having sex with every
woman that I could find.
I said John if you could prove to
me that the bones of Jesus were in
the grave in the Middle East I'd be
drunker than you are and I'd be wilder
than you are.
I said the fact is though do you
believe that the bones of Jesus are in
a hole in the Middle East?
And he said not a chance.
I said John the Apostle Paul tells us
if the bones of Jesus are in a
hole in the Middle East you ought to
be drunk and intoxicated with drugs and having
sex with any woman that you can find.
I said but the simple fact of the
matter is you and I know that Jesus
has been risen from the dead and what
that means is yes you know that you're
this far away from apostasy and immorality all
the time.
And yes you are apart from Christ when
you need to be worried and when you
need to be in despair is when you
no longer know that you're this far away
from apostasy and immorality as in what you're
living.
It sounds to me is the normal Christian
life of someone who understands the more that
he's a Christian just how sinful left to
himself he actually is as if you're not
able to sit and trace on some type
of a chart that you are holier this
year than you were last year.
I said you can't come in here and
tell me I am twice as humble this
year as I was last year.
Not anymore.
I said the hope that you have is
something outside of you in Jesus Christ.
You are looking to that.
You're trusting in that.
That's the gospel.
Jesus says when you see this sign that
you're warning the sign that you're warning is
a dead man who's alive and a gospel
that's preached.
He says I know that's not what you're
looking for.
That's what it is.
And if you do not receive it you
will be swept away.
That's the message.
That's the message of world mission.
We spoke about baptism a little bit earlier.
One of the things that I am burdened
about in our churches is the way that
we trivialize baptism.
This may not be the case in your
churches but it is in so many where
we come out into the baptismal waters and
we are so afraid that we're going to
communicate something sacramental that we spend the entire
time explaining what this is not.
This person comes knowing that this water doesn't
wash away sin.
This water does absolutely nothing.
I don't even know why we're here except
Jesus tells us to and so upon profession
of faith slosh slosh and we're out.
I don't think that's what's happening in the
book of Acts.
Instead what do we have?
We have a church announcing together that this
sinner is confessing that he is united by
faith with a Christ who has already been
submerged beneath the wrath of God who has
already been raised from the dead who has
already been seated in the heavenly places that
God has already said this is my beloved
son in whom I am well pleased.
This person is hidden in that Christ and
this person is trusting God to do to
him exactly what he does with Christ.
Jesus says the message that is going forward.
This is the gospel and the warfare that
takes place has to do with principalities and
powers that would have us to stand against
the wrath of God on our own.
Jesus says fish that's the sign when Jonah
is regurgitated up onto the seashore.
He stands up having escaped death gasping shriveled
a repentant rebel when Jesus walks out of
the tomb in Jerusalem.
He goes to Galilee and eats fish as
a triumphant warrior.
The confidence that we have in the gospel
and in world missions is not to say
we believe we've got a message that can
convince you as though we're we're selling a
product so we could do demographic research and
say people in Burma aren't as likely to
believe in Jesus as people in Birmingham and
therefore we'll concentrate on Birmingham and leave Burma
alone.
We're going to Birmingham and we're going to
Burma knowing that through the authority of the
message preached as the spirit of God goes
forward.
We are going to see the nations turning
to Christ and we are going to see
the nations enraged by Christ.
Jesus says this is the sign but the
sign is not simply joyous the sign causes
the enemies of God to become all the
more enraged so much so that they seek
to have him crucified and in the same
way as the sign is going forward those
who war against the people of God will
war all the more furiously.
If you're preaching a gospel of resurrection a
gospel of substitution a gospel of Jesus you
will find hostility you will find commotion.
Very early on in my ministry I served
in a place in which I found it
very difficult because I was I was preaching
and ministering to a group of teenagers who
had been in church all of their lives
and they were in many ways inoculated to
the gospel.
We've heard it all before.
The thing that I found very interesting was
we had a group of unchurched teenagers who
started coming and they were people who had
never been in the church before.
These teenagers had no dads they're mostly boys
they're showing up with pagers on because many
of them were drug dealers they're in a
cloud of marijuana smoke so much so I
think I was high some of the time
I was talking to them they would come
in and ask for things like prayer requests
giving thanks for pornography not knowing that this
would be something shocking and offensive and I
stood there thinking there is no way that
these guys are ever going to get a
hearing from me and all the curriculum that
would come in from all the evangelical youth
ministry publishers would tell you how to connect
with young people so that you can be
relevant and hip and I knew there was
no way I could be relevant or hip
and so I simply did what I always
did and the thing that I found very
interesting was that what engaged these teenagers was
how shocking what I was saying really is
that no reasonable and rational person would believe
this kind of thing and so they would
come up to me after and one of
them named Justin I'll never forget walked up
and said hey brother can I ask you
something do you really think that dead guy
came back to life I said yeah Justin
I do for real for real some of
them were converted many of them weren't but
the message that is delivered is not a
message that adjusts from age to age it's
a message that by its own authority and
power is relevant because it addresses exactly what
they are all scared of what they're all
in fear of what they're all in denial
about and some of them will surrender to
it through the power of the spirit and
some of them will walk away either way
Jesus says the gospel that is being preached
is pointing you to the kingdom of Christ
when that happens you're going to have a
commotion you're going to have upheaval you're going
to have those who are going to seek
to destroy you and you're going to have
those who will cry out for mercy but
at the end of the day Jesus says
you don't have shock and awe what you
have is a nation of people hearing you
speak about a man who went under the
judgment of God and who came out on
the other side as a sinless victor and
the question they will ask you is for
real for real let's pray it's holy righteous
father you've called us to be a missions
people father you've called us to be a
missions people in the midst of a war
father you've caused called us to go into
places that are held now by the ruler
of this age by the so-called prince
of the power of the air by a
being who fancies himself the emperor of this
present world father we pray that we would
not be afraid of him father we know
that left to our left to ourselves he
can destroy us left to ourselves he can
indict us and left to ourselves he's right
and yet father he has nothing on Jesus
and father we pray that we would be
bold and confident knowing that when you look
at us what you see is not someone
that you wish you could damn when you
look at us in Christ your response is
this is my beloved son in whom I
am well pleased father we pray that this
would give us boldness to take on the
powers of this age with the sword of
the spirit which is the word of God
father we pray that even this night you
would give us hearts that are broken for
the nations for those who are yet without
Christ and father we pray that we would
proclaim it and that we would call the
nations not to us not to some program
not to some bureaucracy but to the son
of man and it's in his name that
we pray amen take your song