Our scripture lesson tonight is from Jonah, as
we continue in the Old Testament.
Book of Jonah, the prophet.
Jonah chapter three tonight, reading at verse five.
Jonah chapter three, reading verses five to 10.
Let's hear then from Jonah chapter three at
verse five.
The Ninevites believed God.
They declared a fast, and all of them,
from the greatest to the least, put on
sackcloth.
When the news reached to the king of
Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off
his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth, and
sat down in the dust.
Then he issued a proclamation in Nineveh.
By the decree of the king and his
nobles, do not let any man or beast,
herd or flock, taste anything.
Do not let them eat or drink, but
let man and beast be covered with sackcloth.
Let everyone call urgently on God.
Let them give up their evil ways and
their violence.
Who knows, God may yet relent, and with
compassion, turn from his fierce anger, so that
we will not perish.
When God saw what they did, and how
they turned from their evil ways, he had
compassion, and did not bring upon them the
destruction he had threatened.
Amen, and may God bless to us this
reading from his word tonight.
Let's pray together, shall we, as we look
to the Lord's word together.
Heavenly Father, we bow in your presence this
evening, and we pray that your word would
be our rule, that your Holy Spirit would
be our teacher, and that your greater glory
would be our supreme concern.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, we pray, amen.
As most of you know, the theme of
our missions conference here in Knox Church for
this year, for 1996, the missions conference just
passed, was For God So Loved the City.
And our speakers talked about God's concern for
the city.
They challenged us to take the good news
of the gospel to the cities of our
world.
They reminded us about the urban development, about
the changes taking place in cities.
And we also thought about the mission of
Knox Church here in the city of Toronto.
One of the questions we might well ask
coming out of that conference is, what would
a city look like if it were really
touched in a profound way by the gospel
of Jesus Christ?
What would Toronto look like today, this secular,
urbanized context in which we exist as a
congregation?
What would Toronto look like today if the
winds of revival swept through the streets of
this city?
What would an urban revival, an urban renewal
look like, where the gospel is preached, where
people receive it?
What kind of a difference would it make
in the fabric, in the culture of the
city?
What difference would it make to life in
the city?
Well, in Jonah 3, I want to suggest
to you tonight, in the passage that we've
just read, verses five to 10, we are
given just such a description.
A description of an urban revival.
A description of a city taken over by
the gospel.
The last part of Jonah 3 paints a
picture of a city on fire.
Not on fire with judgment, not on fire
with destruction, but on fire with faith and
on fire with repentance.
And as we saw last week, Jonah was
given a second chance to go to the
city of Nineveh, to go and bring God's
message to the city there, and this time,
Jonah obeyed the call of God, and he
proclaims the message of judgment given to him
by the Lord.
He goes to the city, he goes to
Nineveh, and he proclaims the message.
Now, it's hard to imagine, as we think
about working into this passage this evening, as
we recall what we saw last week in
the first part of chapter three, it's hard
to imagine going in that Jonah could be
effective in his mission.
I mean, after all, the challenges are immense.
Think about the challenges that he's facing.
Nineveh, as we saw last week, was a
large city.
It had satellite suburbs.
It was a walled city within which the
business existed, the king and the nobles lived,
the kind of upper crust of society, and
then out beyond lived the workers in these
kind of satellite suburbs, an immense city, tens
of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of
people, and Jonah, of course, is there by
himself.
He doesn't go in with a team.
He goes in by himself, a stranger in
a foreign country walking the streets of the
city absolutely alone.
Furthermore, he has a very unpopular message to
deliver, a message of judgment, a message that
in 40 days, God's going to destroy the
city, and given the situation, the size of
the city, the foreign language, the decadent culture,
we read that it had degenerated into a
kind of culture of violence and crime.
We consider Jonah's initial reluctance to go, he
wasn't the most eager of prophets, and the
unpopular message that he had to declare, it
doesn't seem, really, to be a strategy designed
for success.
In fact, I suggest to you that Jonah's
mission to Nineveh and the strategy as it
unfolds here probably would not make the top
10 list of the most effective ways to
reach a city, the way to reach unreached
urbanized peoples.
He doesn't have a demographic study of the
city.
He doesn't have an advanced team to go
in ahead of him.
He doesn't have all of the contacts that
he needs with the media, with the power
brokers of the city.
He just goes in on his own and
proclaims the message.
One is reminded of Billy Graham's famous comment
after his New York crusade, where after many,
many weeks of preaching, they certainly had an
impact, but when he talked about the difficulty
in reaching a great city for the gospel
of Christ, he said, the impact is like
a mosquito biting an elephant.
You really don't make much of an impact.
But Jonah goes and he enters the city
and he preaches and what happens?
Well, against all odds, the people believe.
The city repents and the people pray for
mercy and the result, the city is saved
and God relents from the impending disaster that
loomed on the horizon.
And Jonah 3, verses five to 10 teaches
us, it seems to me, what can happen
when people respond to God's word in faith
and in repentance and in obedience and in
prayer.
A city can be turned upside down.
And so this evening, as we think together
into this passage, I want us to think
about what that might mean for us as
God's people in this congregation, as those who,
having just considered the importance of reaching the
cities of our world for Jesus Christ, the
importance of reaching our own city, our own
community, here at the corner of Harvard and
Spadina, what does all of this mean for
us as God's people seeking to be faithful
in the commission that God has given to
us?
Well, the first thing I want us to
notice as we look together at this passage
is that the response of the people is
very simple and very straightforward.
The people of Nineveh believed God.
Now, Jonah's message was really pretty blunt.
He didn't really go in with good news.
He told the people of Nineveh that God
was so fed up with them that they
had 40 more days until they would be
destroyed.
And there's no evidence at all that he
tried to sugarcoat the message or tried to
make it more palatable or tried to make
it more acceptable to the people that he
preached.
Now, the people of Nineveh, presumably, could have
responded in any number of ways, and one
can imagine the kinds of responses that might
have come.
Most obviously, of course, they might have simply
ignored him.
They might have responded with apathy.
I mean, what did this great city of
Nineveh this cultured city, this city of commerce,
this city of business, this city of wealth,
this city of sophistication, what did the great
city of Nineveh have to fear from a
pesky little prophet named Jonah from Israel?
Or on the other hand, they might have
ridiculed him.
I mean, one can imagine as he's traveling
through the streets of the city of Nineveh
proclaiming this message, telling perhaps about his experience
about how God rescued him from the ocean.
They might simply have ridiculed him.
Hey, Jonah, tell us that story about how
you were swallowed by a great fish again.
Yeah, that one.
Three days you were inside that fish?
Uh-huh, do you want to tell us
a bit more about that?
You see, they might have ridiculed him.
They might have made a mockery of his
prophetic message, or they might have arrested him
as a public nuisance, put him into prison,
and condemned him to death.
But notice that that's not what happens.
Verse five says that the people of Nineveh,
the Ninevites, believed God.
Now, the phrase here is very interesting because
it doesn't say that they believed Jonah, although
presumably that's implicit in the comment.
They received Jonah's message, but they received Jonah's
message as from God.
They listened to him as a true prophet.
They believed the message God had given Jonah.
It's as though they've been primed by some
divine hand to respond to Jonah's preaching.
The sovereign spirit of God has been at
work in the very hearts and the lives
and the very fabric of the peoples of
this city, the city of Nineveh, prior to
Jonah's arrival to prepare the way for the
preaching of the message.
And so they respond by putting their faith
in God.
God would do what he said.
They believed.
They believed God.
They believed the message that had come, and
God is the object of their faith.
They believed the word of God, and they
trusted in what God said he would do.
And the first lesson that I want us
to see here and what I want to
suggest to you this evening is that true
saving faith is that kind of faith.
It is faith in God.
It is faith which has its object as
God himself.
And it is faith born out of the
preaching of the word of God.
Faith offered in response to the message of
God.
And often, in fact, always, it is faith
prepared in our lives by the sovereign working
of the Holy Spirit.
The Westminster Confession of Faith says it this
way, that the grace of faith whereby we
are enabled to believe to the salvation of
our souls is the work of the Spirit
of Christ in our hearts and is ordinarily
wrought by the ministry of the word.
It goes on and says, by this faith
we are enabled to believe to be true
whatsoever is revealed in the word for the
authority of God himself speaking therein.
Now somehow, when they heard Jonah speak, when
they heard Jonah bring this message, they knew
that they simply didn't have to do with
a man, that they didn't have to do
with a prophet, simply someone who was sort
of there to deliver a message that he
himself had thought up, but they realized that
they had to do with the very word
of God itself.
And I wanna suggest to you that one
of the things that happens in true saving
faith is that the Spirit of God works
in the lives and hearts of people in
such a way so that they read Scripture
and they hear the word of Scripture as
it really is the word of God, the
Holy Spirit speaking to them through the Scriptures.
Now there's no way to explain this rationally.
There's no way to argue this out logically.
You can't prove to someone that the Bible
is the word of God, but nevertheless, when
the Spirit is at work in a person's
life, they hear that word as it truly
is, the Spirit speaking through the Scriptures.
And one of the marks of true revival
is this kind of faith.
The great revivals in the history of the
church have been characterized by real faith in
response to the preaching of the word of
God where people were taken up with the
fact that this really was God speaking.
And it happens, it seems, spontaneously as the
Spirit of God attends the preaching and the
reading of the word of God in the
lives of people.
And people who once did not believe and
people who made a mockery of all that
God is suddenly now, without explanation, believe God.
We need to be praying for that kind
of work of the Spirit of God in
our day because that's how renewal and that's
how revival will come.
But notice that they also repented of their
sin.
The text says they declared a fast and
they put on sackcloth.
Now fasting and sackcloth are signs of repentance,
signs of mourning.
In the Bible, people who do this do
it out of remorse.
In the ancient world, this was the way
that you showed that you were going through
a period of grieving, a period of mourning,
a period of remorse, a period of sorrow.
And so they do this out of sorrow
and there is a genuine experience of being
sorry for something.
And that's what repentance is.
It's a turning away from sin.
It is a godly sorrow for one's sin
together with a resolution to turn from it.
It's more than simply being sorry for getting
caught.
It's more than simply kind of being sorry
in an emotional sort of sense, but it's
a deep godly sense that things have to
change.
And it's a change of mind with respect
to God.
And saving faith always includes this kind of
repentance.
The Westminster Confession of Faith says that repentance
is wrought in the heart of a sinner
by the Spirit and the Word of God,
whereby out of the sight and sense, not
only of the danger, but also of the
filthiness and odiousness of our sins, and upon
apprehension of God's mercy in Christ to such
as are penitent, we so grieve for and
hate our sins that we turn from them
and we turn to God.
Now, what we have here in this experience
of the people of Nineveh is a very
good example of what the Bible calls saving
faith.
A saving faith is a believing faith, trusting
in God, but saving faith is also a
repentant faith.
Repentance and faith belong together.
A turning from self-repentance and a turning
to Christ.
And that's simply, my friends, what the Bible
means by conversion.
It is a change of mind with respect
to ourselves and our actions and a change
of mind with respect to God and who
God is.
We don't hear a lot about this in
today's church, even in today's evangelical church, sadly.
We hear a lot about meeting people's needs,
but we hear very little about the need
for saving faith, for repentance.
And unfortunately, sometimes we cheapen the gospel of
God's grace by not remembering, by not realizing
that there is this dimension of saving faith,
a repentant faith, which in fact needs to
shape our lives.
That's why this morning, as we thought about
forgiveness, we thought about the reality of the
freedom of forgiveness that all of us require,
that all of us need to live whole
and healthy and full and free lives.
Conversion is this kind of repentance and faith
a decisive turn from and a decisive turn
to Jesus Christ.
And then notice that all of them believed
and repented.
The text says, verse five, from the greatest
to the least of them.
The revival touched everyone in the city.
I've described it in the outline as a
kind of popular, populist revival in character.
And the great revivals in the history of
the church have been like that.
They sweep up young and old, rich and
poor, uneducated and educated.
All of them are swept up in the
furnace of renewal.
And everyone, presumably in the city of Nineveh,
was talking about what happened.
And one can imagine the kind of day
-to-day chat that went on in city
streets and in public places.
It was on all the news shows, on
talk radio had it been a part of
our experience today.
Everyone was touched by what was happening.
Everyone believed and everyone repented.
We hear a lot about revival and renewal
today in various parts of the world and
even here in our own nation.
And I wanna suggest to you that one
of the marks of true revival is not
only saving faith, faith and repentance, but also
this populist character.
That it touches everyone from the greatest to
the least.
Everyone is touched in some way.
Certainly that's the pattern throughout the history of
the church and it's for that that we
need and ought to pray in our own
day.
But let's move on because not only did
the people of Nineveh believe, but also the
king of Nineveh responded personally to the news
in verse six.
The king received the news.
Now again, one might well ask, what would
his response be?
Well, one can imagine in our own minds
the kind of responses that are possible.
One can think, for example, that he might
have seen the revival as a threat to
public order and sent out the National Guard
to squelch it.
I mean, political leaders have been known to
do that.
I mean, after all, you can't have religious
fanatics running around upsetting the social, economic, political
order of the day.
And so, in fact, he might have seen
it that way and tried to squelch it,
but he didn't.
He might have seen the people's religious faith
as a means of maintaining public order and
co-opted the revival without really believing in
it.
In our own day, political leaders have been
known to do that in other places in
our world.
In Latin America, in Africa, in some countries,
in Asia, political leaders have been known to
use religion for their own purposes.
They see a revival, they see a religious
revival taking place, and they try to use
it and manipulate it for their own political
ends and for their own political gain.
And how sad it is when that happens
and when religious revivals can be co-opted
for political purposes.
Well, the King of Nineveh may have tried
to do that, but he didn't.
He might have seen it, of course, as
a quaint experience which could do no real
harm, a kind of harmless distraction for the
people of Nineveh as they were living in
this city of crime and all of the
turmoil that was there, crime and violence.
He therefore may simply have indulged it.
He didn't see it, however, as a threat.
He didn't try to co-opt it for
political purposes, and he didn't simply patronize it.
He didn't respond in any of those ways.
What he did is he got up from
his throne, he took off his royal robes,
he covered himself with sackcloth, and he sat
down in the dust.
And all of those actions are put in
the text in such a way so as
to describe very clearly that the king himself
was touched by this revival.
He acts with humility.
He joins his people in repentance of their
sins, all of their sins, from the least
to the greatest.
And again, one of the marks of a
true revival is that it influences the power
brokers of a city, the political leaders of
a culture, of a nation.
People in positions of power and influence begin
to act differently.
They begin to think differently.
They have a change of mind with respect
to those things that are important, and ultimately
with respect to God.
And they too are touched by the spirit
of God.
They too are converted.
They too begin to look at life differently.
And I suggest to you that that's one
of the reasons why the Apostle Paul in
the New Testament enjoins Christians to pray for
political powers and civil authorities.
In 1 Timothy 2, for example, Paul urges
us to offer prayers and intercessions and thanksgivings
for everyone, for kings and all those in
authority that we may live peaceful and quiet
lives in all godliness and holiness.
Now the most that you want to pray
for and the most that you hope for
is that the political leaders and that those
in powers of authority, places of authority, those
who have positions of power that make a
difference in justice and peace in our world
will indeed be touched so profoundly by the
spirit of God that they will begin to
act differently.
And think differently.
And treat the agendas of life differently.
That's the most for which we ought to
hope and pray and for which we ought
to long.
But at least we ought to pray for
the fact that we are given, that we
ought to be given political leaders who rule
wisely and justly so as Paul says that
we may live quiet and peaceable lives, godly
and respectful in every way.
So the apostle Paul enjoins us, not particularly
for political purposes, but nevertheless he enjoins believers
to pray for our leaders.
The King of Nineveh was touched in a
very powerful and in a very real way
by this revival and it's one of the
marks of revival.
And then thirdly, notice that the kings and
nobles issued a public decree in verses seven
to nine.
Now the King of Nineveh could simply have
rested in his own personal experience.
I mean here he had been touched by
this revival, by this renewal.
He came to believe it would seem, he
repented at least, he mourned, he identified with
his people.
And what he does is he calls the
nobles together, the other power brokers in the
city and together they issue a decree.
Now under normal circumstances, this would not have
been an easy thing to do.
I mean can you see the king trying
to get his advisors, his councils, the nobles
who held power, perhaps even the balance of
power, who perhaps even threatened the king's own
power, can you see trying to get all
of them together and the kind of dynamics
that would unfold as they together try to
agree on a public statement that's going to
order a radical change in the daily life
of the city?
I mean our experience is that most city
councils can't even agree on the price of
parking meters, let alone come to some agreement
on this kind of a profound statement that's
radically gonna alter the very fabric and daily
life of the city.
But again we see evidence that the spirit
of God is at work in a powerful
way and they issue a decree which in
fact states that the entire city is to
be shut down, that everyone is to fast,
that everyone is to call urgently upon God
in prayer.
Presumably there are concerts of prayer and gatherings
of people all over the city.
People are to give up their evil ways
and their violence.
There's a call for public righteousness and there
is a hope expressed that they might yet
be saved.
And so they enter together as a city
corporately into this spirit of true repentance.
It's not filled simply with gloom and pessimism
but it is filled with hope, hope that
things can be different from the way that
they are.
And I wanna suggest to you that what
happened here in Nineveh has happened numerous times
throughout the history of the church, that when
the spirit of God comes, when there is
true faith and when there is true repentance,
when there is true revival, one of the
things that marks true revival is public righteousness.
A change in the moral fabric of the
culture.
Think for example about the Puritan or the
Methodist revivals in England.
The change, the very moral fabric of the
culture.
I mean, Methodism impacted England in a way
that is hard to imagine.
A nation in the 18th and 19th centuries
taken up with prostitution, taken up with child
labor, taken up with the oppression of the
Industrial Revolution and all of the fallout of
that and into that came the spirit of
God and it transformed the very social fabric,
the very nature of what the culture and
what the society was about.
And the revivals of the 18th and 19th
centuries spawned not just religious fervor, but leaders
who took it upon themselves to give leadership
to change the way that life was lived.
So much so that in the 19th century,
one of the great evangelical leaders led the
movement for the abolition of slavery.
It was out of that spirit, out of
that need.
And one of the tragedies of course in
our world today is that we often see
revivals and we see renewal sweep across the
church.
But the question we need to ask ourselves,
is there this dimension of the revival and
the renewal taking place?
Does it really change people in such a
way that they are called and committed to
changing the way that they live and the
world in which they live?
Are we praying for this kind of a
revival that would change the very fabric of
our culture, the very spiritual fiber of our
city?
It's not by might nor by power, but
by my spirit says the Lord.
And what I wanna suggest to you is
this, that if we are going to see
the outpouring of renewal and revival fire in
our day, it's going to come not by
carefully planned programs to influence power brokers, but
it's going to come as an outcome of
the outpouring of the spirit of God.
But an outpouring that doesn't simply stop with
the transformation of people's lives individually as important
and as powerful and as necessary as that
is, but one that overflows and changes life
itself.
That brings the reality of Jesus into every
sphere of life so that as Rob reminded
us earlier, his lordship will be seen and
his lordship will be recognized in every sphere
of life as the kingdom of God breaks
into our world.
And then finally, what happened?
Verse 10, God responded with mercy.
The city of Nineveh did not get what
it deserved.
In wrath, God remembered mercy.
God saw what they did and how they
turned from their evil ways, the text says,
and had compassion and did not bring upon
them the destruction that he had threatened.
Now, just stand back, particularly those of you
who've been with us throughout this whole series,
just stand back from Jonah for a minute
and see what's happened.
In Jonah chapter one, God has mercy upon
the heathen sailors and they are converted.
In Jonah chapter two, God has mercy upon
Jonah and Jonah is converted.
And now in chapter three, God has mercy.
God has mercy upon Nineveh and the people
of Nineveh are converted.
The Lord had compassion on them, it says,
and did not bring upon them the destruction
he had threatened.
Now, why did God change his mind?
Well, God saw their faith.
God saw their repentant spirit.
The people of Nineveh really believed God.
They were truly sorry for their sin.
They truly repented and God saw their obedience
and God then had compassion on them.
Now, does this mean that God changes his
mind at the drop of a hat?
Is it possible that the sovereign God of
the universe can be persuaded against his better
judgment to give the people of Nineveh another
chance?
Well, the answer to that question is both
yes and no.
On the one hand, the God of the
Bible is sometimes portrayed as someone who seems
to change his mind.
I mean, think of Abraham bargaining with God
for Sodom and Gomorrah.
Although in the end, of course, he loses
the argument that as Abraham does and Sodom
and Gomorrah are destroyed.
But the point is that the mystery of
divine providence and the sovereignty of God in
the midst of life is not easily explained
and for whatever purposes in the plan of
God, God encourages us, God invites us, God
commands us to pray and to respond to
his promises in such a way that it
seems to make a difference.
Prayer does make a difference in the purposes
of God.
And at the same time, of course, we
must remember that God always accomplishes his purposes
in the end because the promises of God
are invitations for us to respond and the
threats of divine judgment as in the case
of Nineveh are invitations for repentance and response.
And so God doesn't follow through on the
original judgment that Jonah pronounced, not because God
is capricious, not because God is indecisive, not
because God can't make up his mind, not
because God is easily swayed by popular opinion
or by the polls, but rather because God
desires that all women and men should be
saved and come to a knowledge of the
truth.
And that, my friends, is what happened in
Nineveh.
And so we need to understand that the
God who sent Jonah to preach judgment to
Nineveh is the same God who says in
2 Chronicles 7.14, if my people who
are called by my name shall humble themselves
and pray and seek my face and turn
from their evil ways, then will I hear
from heaven and will forgive their sin.
And what's the last part of that text?
And will heal their land.
The God who saved Nineveh is the same
God who says to us through the prophet
Isaiah, seek the Lord while he may be
found, call upon him while he is near,
let the evil forsake his way and the
unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return
to the Lord and he will have mercy
upon him and to our God for he
will abundantly pardon.
And as we consider what happened in Nineveh,
let us pray that we too in our
own personal lives, individually, in our life as
God's people here in Knox Church at the
corner of Harvard and Spadina and in the
great city of Toronto, let us also pray
and consider as we think about our own
city and its vastness and the nation in
which we live, may we pray that the
experience of the people of Nineveh would be
our experience, that we might believe God, that
we might trust in the word of God
and that we might see the marks of
revival and renewal manifest themselves in our day.
That's what we ought to be praying for,
the kind of renewal and revival that's described
here in Jonah chapter three, verses five to
10.
And if God in his sovereign grace should
answer our prayers in our day, we would
have the privilege of seeing a revival and
a renewal that would change, that would turn
us upside down, that would turn this church
upside down and that would turn the city
in which we live and even beyond, all
of it upside down for the kingdom of
God.
May that be our prayer this evening.
Let us pray.
Father, we do bow before you this evening
and pray that you would increase our vision,
that you would increase our faith and that
you would increase within us a spirit of
repentance, that you would increase within us a
concern for prayer, that through it all, by
your sovereign grace, you would work in our
day.
For the sake of Jesus, we pray, amen.