Jonah

Marc Jolicoeur · Tidal Church Moncton · July 23, 2023 · Give Me a Break series

Marc Jolicoeur walks through the book of Jonah to show why Jonah refused to preach to cruel Nineveh: he did not want them forgiven. Since all of us have needed God's mercy, we are called to pass grace on to others.

More from Marc Jolicoeur · The Give Me a Break series

Topics: Grace, Forgiveness, Mission & Outreach

Transcript

[0:00] Well, hi, church. Can we do something a little bit unusual today? Is it okay if we take a bit of a twist and a bit of a turn? this is something that I've never done and it's not something that we normally do. We're gonna read, like, most of the book of Jonah, like most of the whole book of the Bible today, people. Now Jonah is a, it's a teeny-weenie book. It's not a very large one, and actually part of it, I kind of cheated the system a little bit and I had Charlene lead you in part of it earlier. So we'll be able to excise that from a reading together. but there's a reason why I'd like to be able to do this one, as I mentioned, super short, two, extremely interesting, and three, you need the full scope of this story for the, kind of the one key truth that I'm hoping will kind of rise to the top for it to make sense. And rather than me try to summarize it, I figured maybe we'll just read it together.

[0:54] So I was not really looking for your approval. It's what we're going to do. But if you're on board, maybe you can clap. Is that good? We're okay? Good. Okay, good. All right. Okay. So it'll be on screen here, for the most part behind me, or if you're watching online, it'll be kind of right in front of you. However, if you'd like to read along, I'm reading from the New English Translation, the NET. And if you're like me, though I always encourage you to go to the Word, you might, it might even be better for you to just kind of close your eyes and listen, you know, everyone's got their own kind of learning style, but I promise you, you can check my work afterwards if you want. So starting with Jonah, chapter 1, verse 1, The Lord's message came to Jonah, son of Amittai: "Go immediately to Nineveh, that large capital city, and announce judgment against its people because their wickedness has come to My attention." Instead, Jonah immediately headed off to Tarshish to escape from the commission of the Lord.

[1:53] He traveled to Joppa and found a merchant ship that was heading to Tarshish. So he paid the fare, he went aboard to go with them, to Tarshish, far away from the Lord, as though that were possible. But the Lord hurled a powerful wind on the sea. Such a violent tempest arose on the sea that the ship threatened to break up. The sailors were so afraid that each cried out to his own god, and they flung the ship's cargo overboard to make the ship lighter. Jonah meanwhile had gone down into the hold below deck, had laid down and was sound asleep. The ship's captain approached him and said, "What are you doing asleep? Get up. Cry out to your god. Perhaps your god might take notice of us so that we, I don't know, might not die." The sailors said to one another, "Come on, let's cast lots to find out whose fault it is that this disaster has overtaken us." So they cast lots. And Jonah, surprise, surprise, was singled out.

[2:52] They said to him, "Tell us whose fault is it that this disaster has overtaken us? What's your occupation? Where do you come from? What's your country? Who are your people?" And Jonah said to them, "I am a Hebrew, and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." I just wanna pause briefly here at verse 9. If you, this might be like super redundant for some of you, but I think it's particularly important in this story and in the context that we're reading here. When you see LORD in all caps, so sometimes it doesn't show up here in the way that it's on screen, but if you're looking in your Bible, possibly you'll see Lord, L-O-R-D. But they're all caps. It's not just 'cuz they're yelling the word like, "Lord!" It's not 'cuz they're doing that. It's a way of translating the Hebrew word that's kind of like Yahweh, Y-H-W-H. It's not those letters, but that's the gist. The point is, is that they would use Lord or Adonai in various contexts.

[3:49] Like they talk to the king in that way. They talk to important people that way. But when they're translating the word Yahweh, which is like the proper name, so like my name is Marc, theoretically, in practice, the God that Jonah serves, His name is Yahweh. But what you're gonna see is LORD, when you look at the text, it's important to remember that as you go along, this is not just some god, this is, this God. Picking up in verse 10, hearing this, the sailors, the men, they became even more afraid and said to him, "What have you done?" The men said this because they knew that he was trying to escape from the Lord because he had previously told them. So, because the storm was growing worse and worse, they said to him, "What should we do to you so that the sea will calm down for us?"

[4:36] And he said to them, "You gotta pick me up and throw me into the sea so that the sea will calm down for you because I know it's my fault that you're in this severe storm." Instead, they tried to row back to land, but they were not able to do so because the storm kept getting worse and worse. And these are pagan sailors who were trying to avoid throwing him into the sea. Verse 14. So they cried out to the Lord, "Oh, please, Lord, don't let us die on account of this man. Don't hold us guilty of shedding innocent blood. After all, You, Lord, have done just as You pleased." So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea. And then the sea stopped raging. The men feared the Lord greatly.

[5:22] The men feared the Lord greatly and earnestly vowed to offer lavish sacrifices to the Lord. And then, depending upon the version of the Bible, you're looking at, this is either the last verse of chapter 1 or the first verse of chapter 2. And this is the part that you all know the story for. If you know the story of Jonah, it's for this. This is why I loved it growing up. The Lord sent a huge fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the stomach of the fish for three days and for three nights, which is some wild and wacky stuff. And that's where we picked up earlier when Charlene was reading the, what essentially is like a psalm, right? It's like a prayer that Jonah gives to God from the belly of the beast. But it's not as though he's talking about the fish very much.

[6:08] He's usually kind of describing what sounds like death, right? He spends three days in the grave, as it were, in Sheol. As it says there a few times. If you wanna check that out, you can. So we pick up again at the beginning of Jonah chapter 3. It doesn't have this on screen, but spoiler alert, the fish vomits Jonah out onto dry land. So picking up at verse 1 of Jonah, chapter 3, The Lord's message came to Jonah a second time, "Go immediately to Nineveh, that large city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you." So Jonah, this time, went immediately to Nineveh in keeping with the Lord's message. Now, Nineveh was an enormous city. It required how many days?

[6:55] It required three days to walk through it. Interesting. Three days to walk through it. Verse 4, Jonah began to enter the city by going one day's walk, announcing at the end of 40 days, "Nineveh will be overthrown." And then this incredibly surprising verse, chapter 3, verse 5, The people of Nineveh believed in God. They declared a fast and they put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. And when the news reached the king of Nineveh, it started at the bottom. It worked its way to the top. When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he got up from his throne, he took off his royal robe, he put on sackcloth and he sat on ashes.

[7:43] He issued a proclamation and said, "In Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, no human or animal, cattle or sheep, is to taste anything. They must not eat. They must not drink water. Every person and animal must put on sackcloth and must cry earnestly to God. And everyone must turn from their evil way of living and from the violence that they do. Who knows, perhaps God might be willing to change His mind and relent and turn from His fierce anger so that we might not die." And when God saw their actions, not just the good inside their hearts, but their actions that they turned from their evil way of living, God relented concerning the judgment He had threatened them with, and He did not destroy them. Now in a little bit, we're gonna read Jonah chapter 4, but we're gonna take a little bit of time here just to kind of build the case for what's going on. Now, who were the Ninevites?

[8:52] Who were the Ninevites? So Nineveh was the capital city. It says capital a few times in the text of the Assyrian Empire. And if you don't know who the Assyrians were, these are not the kind of people that you want to invite over for dinner. Okay? They were nasty. These are some brutal people. Uh, so Assyria was the empire that was kind of up and to the right, to the northeast of where, uh, Israel and Judah were at this time, part of what they call the the Fertile Crescent. And they were pretty well known as being not super friendly people. Uh, they were sort of like the Proto Empire. So when you think of empires later on in the Bible, we think of the Roman Empire. Well, these guys were maybe, maybe the originators of some of the violence and some of the stuff that they did. So actually a few years ago, uh, in 2018, there was a, um, a retrospective, if you will.

[9:43] There was like an art exhibit that happened in the London Museum and the British Museum in London, I should say. And, what they did is they found a bunch of different Assyrian artworks and they brought them there and they put them on display. And this is not like propaganda against Assyria. This is not the kind of stuff that people were using to say, these guys are terrible. This was their own self-published work, as it were, curated. It's like the Instagram reel of what Assyria would've been like at this point in time. They wanted you to know. And so this is actually in The Guardian, which is a British newspaper, which is not a terribly like right wing, it's actually kind of a left wing newspaper, frankly. Somebody by the name of Jonathan Jones in the November 6th, 2018 edition of The Guardian, he wrote this about his time walking around and taking in the sights.

[10:34] He said, "You have to hand it to these ancient Assyrians. They were honest. Their artistic propaganda relishes every detail of torture of massacre, battlefield executions and human displacement that made Assyria the dominant power of the Middle East. From about 900 BC to 612 BC, Assyrian art contains some of the most appalling images ever created in one scene. Tongues are being ripped out from the mouths of prisoners that will mute their screams when in the next stage of their torture they're flayed alive. In another relief, a surrendering general is about to be beheaded, and in a third, prisoners have to grind their fathers' bones before being executed in the streets of Nineveh." And if there's any sensitive listeners in the room, I probably already should have given you that warning, but we're actually gonna show you a few of the artworks right now.

[11:26] Don't worry, it's pretty low resolution, so it's not as though you can see it. This is stuff that's carved on sandstone, but we'll take a look at some of these images. The first one here is, yeah, so this is the one where they're cutting out the tongues of their enemies. Fun. The next one here is when we have them being impaled. And then we've got one where they're doing the flaying alive that was described. And then last but not least, this is supposed to be the one where they're grinding the bones of their fathers, before they themselves are set to be executed. So, like I said, not people that you would describe as being overly friendly. The Ninevites, which I think leads pretty naturally to this question, which I would like us to consider this morning.

[12:14] Why did Jonah not want to preach to the Ninevites? Oh, you think you know, that's cute. That's gonna be good. Okay, so I mean, so here's the first one. Was he afraid of the Ninevites? Now I've seen in my fair share of kids' stories that have used this as the angle. Understandably, nobody here wants to have this removed and then this removed and all the things removed systematically. That's no fun. Was he afraid of the Ninevites? I mean, quite possibly he was, but I would submit that that's not necessarily the only answer for why he didn't want to go. Option two, was he rebellious?

[13:01] Was he like, I don't know, myself as a teenager or myself as a 42-year-old, where I'm going to do something and then somebody tells me that I should do it and immediately I go, "I don't wanna do that." You know, I was gonna clean my room until you told me to clean my room. That kind of thing. Is this the explanation for why Jonah? He was just like, "No, I don't want to do it because you said so." I mean, he does seem to be a little bit rebellious. Option number three worth considering, is he just ignorant? I wrote down the word ignorant. I kind of, what I mean is, I guess, does he maybe just not know the will of God very well? As a prophet, like one of your calling cards, one of the things that makes you a prophet is that you can hear and discern the voice of God kind of clearly and directly.

[13:50] Is it possible that Jonah was just, I don't know, a bad prophet? Was he afraid? Was he rebellious? Was he maybe ignorant? Well, here's when we get the opportunity to kind of take a look at the last little section of the story starting at Jonah chapter 4, verses 1 to 4. And it says, "This displeased Jonah terribly." What's this, this is the fact that God said, "Okay, I'll let you off the hook." This displeased Jonah terribly. And he became very angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, "Oh Lord, this is just what I thought would happen when I was in my own country.

[14:39] This is what I tried to prevent by attempting to escape to Tarshish because I knew that You were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in mercy and one who relents concerning threatening judgments. So now, Lord, go ahead and kill me instead because I would rather die than live." And the Lord said, "Are you really so very angry?" So was he afraid? Quite possibly. Was he rebellious? Quite certainly. Was he ignorant? It seems as though Jonah knew quite well the heart of God and how this whole thing could go. He knew that if he preached the message that God told him to preach, that this was a very possible, if not likely, outcome. But here's the question: What was the message that Jonah was told to preach, to walk through the streets and say, "God loves you.

[15:39] He has a wonderful plan for your life. He wants what's best for you"? Is this what he preached? We have a couple different very short sections of the book of Jonah that tell us, give us a window into what likely was preached. And I think it's fun cuz it's Jonah chapter 1, verse 2 and Jonah chapter 3, verse 4. So it's like 1, 2, 3, 4 kind of combo hits. So here's what we have. We have, starting at Jonah 1:2, it says, "Go immediately to Nineveh, that large capital city, and announce judgment against its people because their wickedness has come to My attention." And then Jonah 3:4 says, "Jonah began to enter the city by going one day's walk and announcing at the end of 40 days, Nineveh will be blessed, will be, you know, given lollipops. Overthrown, Nineveh will be overthrown."

[16:46] So this is the message that Jonah likely preached, one of judgment, one of condemnation, one of God's displeasure. Isn't that interesting? I think that's interesting. And so I'm gonna take a bit of a sidetrack here. This won't be long, but I think it's important. I think it's a valuable thing for us as a church, us as Christians, to get an opportunity to see, and shout out to my folks who are walking through the Bible with some of us on this kind of one-year plan. We have been seeing all kinds of Old Testament passages. Hang in there. We're about a month or so away from the New Testament, I promise. But we're moving through and there's so many different prophets that are preaching so much bad news and condemnation and it's not a whole lot of carrot at the end of the stick.

[17:31] It's just a whole lot of stick for most of these people. But all along the way we end up facing what is really a mismatch with how this has often been taught to us as Christians. We have often been taught this, and maybe you've come across this on like blog posts, maybe in conversations, maybe in university classrooms, that the God of the Old Testament is this like super angry, super violent, super legalistic, not compassionate, not gracious guy. And then there's Jesus, who's all like, "Ha, it's all good." So Old Testament, bad, New Testament good. But this is not how even the Jewish people conceived of or understood the God that was described in their ancient texts.

[18:20] And so in Exodus 34, we come across what's often maybe described as like the paradigmatic approach of describing who God is. Really, really briefly, Pat spoke, it was either one week or two weeks ago about Moses. We know about Moses. Moses was a wild guy. Moses saw God face to face. Moses goes up the mountain, he gets the Ten Commandments, he comes down the mountain, he sees people having an orgy, he gets mad, he breaks the tablets, he goes back up the mountain, he negotiates with God and says, "Don't destroy them all." And God says, "Okay, but I'm not gonna go with you anymore." And then Moses says, "We won't go if You don't go with us." And then God says, "Okay." And then he gets another set of the tablets. And Moses, who's already been having this back and forth, this deep conversation with God, says, "Could You show me Your glory?

[19:11] Could You let me see You like as You really are? Could You help me understand You a little bit better?" And God says, "I can't show you My glory or you'll die, but I can hide you in this rock and I can kind of pass by you so that you can get a glimpse." And then we have this really weird passage, as if that wasn't weird enough. Exodus 34, verses 5 to 7, it says, "The Lord descended in the cloud. Remember, this is the Lord, this is Yahweh. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with Moses there and proclaimed the Lord by name.

[19:58] The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, keeping loyal love for thousands of generations, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But He by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children's children to the third and even the fourth generation. And if you're anything like me, you grew up hearing that last part. And frankly, with my Western worldview and my individualist framing, I thought, well, that's not very fair. Why should, I mean, why should the, you know, not even the children but the, grandchildren or maybe even the great-grandchildren, why should they have to suffer for the sins of the parents?

[20:51] And I think that's worth wrestling with. But if you're ever looking for a bit of a deeper dive in this than I'm able to give today, a scholar by the name of Matt Lynch, who released a work called Flood and Fury. And in this he points out and he does the math and he says, third or fourth generation of those who sinned, but thousands of generations to those who followed after Him. The math stacks up pretty heavily on this side. If you had a balancing scale and try to say, where will you fall? Will you fall on the balance of mercy or on the balance of judgment? It seems as though God, who is always just and always true and always righteous, it seems as though this God is willing, seems as though He may even be wired to balance on the side of mercy and grace.

[21:48] That's why as Jonah walked through the streets and said, I'm just gonna say what God said: in 40 days, y'all are gonna burn. He knew somehow that God would take these people back if they would just repent, that it was always a possibility. Now we gave a little bit of context for Jonah. Excuse me. We gave a little bit of context for the Ninevites, but we haven't really talked too much about where this Jonah guy comes from. And the truth is there's not a whole lot of context for where Jonah comes from. He does show up in the New Testament, which we'll get to, but he shows up in the Old Testament pretty sparsely. He's mentioned in 2 Kings, chapter, 14, verse 25. He shows up during the reign of Jeroboam, the second, in the nation of Israel.

[22:39] So Jeroboam reigned somewhere between 780 to 750 BCE, give or take. And, but there's no way to know A, how old Jonah was during that reign, and B, exactly when he's referenced in that reign. So who knows, he could have been a 19-year-old in 750, he could have been a 60-year-old in 780. It's hard to say, but he shows up in there somewhere in that context. What we do know is that somewhere between 727, 722 BCE, Israel falls, it is decimated by an invading empire. Anyone care to guess who that empire might be? It's the Assyrians. That's correct, yes. These lovely people from Nineveh, the flayers, the tongue pluckers, they come down and they do just absolutely terrifying and atrocious things to the people of Israel.

[23:31] So as I see it, we have, again, the number three shows up a lot today. We have three options, either Jonah just knew who these horrendous people were. Again, they weren't very shy about letting people know the kinds of things that they did to their enemies. They were very public about it. So either Jonah simply had heard of the Assyrians and knew the terrible, no good, very bad things that they would do to people, or, this is possible. Remember, Jonah's a prophet. So even if he lived before this time, it's conceivable that by the direct revelation of the Holy Spirit or just by his ability to kind of read the cultural moment in which he was placed, he could say, those are the people that are gonna do in my own kingdom and my own people, or as I mentioned, because we don't really know how old he was and we don't really know where he lived. There's not enough details.

[24:28] It's at least possible that Jonah was one of the people who survived the sack of Samaria, the sack of Israel, and that he survived even though he knows dozens of himself personally, possibly hundreds if not thousands of other people who did not survive, who ended up having the same kind of things happen to them as we saw depicted on those terrible, terrible reliefs. So it's one of those three things. So with all that being said, I want to ask one more time, why did Jonah not want to preach to the people of Nineveh? Because Jonah did not want the people of Nineveh to receive grace. Jonah did not want the people of Nineveh to be forgiven.

[25:19] Jonah received the word from God and he said, those people, you want me to go and preach to those people? You want me to be an instrument of grace to those people, the ones who did that, the ones who were going to keep doing that, you want me, you gotta give me a break. Not a chance. I would rather die. I would rather die than be Your mouthpiece to people like that. And this, even though it took us a little while to get there, this is where I want us to kind of land as we consider going forward.

[26:06] Do you find yourself in need of a break today? Do you find yourself in need of mercy and of grace? Do you need a break? If you need a break today, maybe you need to be the one to give a break. If you need a break, maybe you need to be the one to give a break. As I mentioned, this is not exactly an Old Testament concept. It's not karma either. It's littered all over the New Testament. These Scriptures are not on screen, but I just wanna blow through a number of them really quickly. So Luke chapter 6, verse 31, Jesus says, treat others the same way that you would want them to treat you.

[26:51] We know that as the Golden Rule. Paul in Galatians chapter 6, verse 7 says, do not be deceived. God will not be made a fool, for a person will reap what he sows. In other words, if you reap judgment, if you sow judgment, you'll reap judgment. If you sow lack of mercy, that's also what you're gonna reap. Matthew 7, 2, Jesus says, by the standard you judge, you will be judged and the measure that you use will be the measure that you receive. Again, in Matthew chapter 6, verses 14-15, if you forgive others their sins, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, your Father will not forgive you your sins. Or what about this from the Lord's Prayer, the way that Jesus taught us to pray. Luke 11:4, forgive us our sins, Father, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us. And I won't even take the time to read through Matthew 18's parable of the Unmerciful Servant.

[27:49] But just the story of this man who's received an absolutely astronomical gift and he is unwilling to parse out even a little bit to other people. Do you need to get a break? Maybe it's because you need to give a break. I think of it like water. I think that grace, like water, is meant to move. Grace is meant to move. My family knows that if I'm anywhere near a body of water and I have anything that even approximates swim shorts, I'm going to get into that body of water. Whether it's freezing cold, whether it's boiling hot, if it's the ocean, if it's a river, I want in. The one exception would be like a still kind of a stagnant, small kind of pond. Those are pretty nasty, nasty things to get into, ponds, right?

[28:47] Because water, like grace, is meant to move. You know, whether it's the rolling tides of the ocean that churn up huge volumes of water, whether it's a river or stream that has a clear beginning and you can see it flowing through, or even, you know, beautiful lakes, beautiful ponds. It might look like they're still, but they have tributaries, they have things that are feeding into it and they have places that it goes out. But if it stops, the water turns and it becomes a nasty place to be. I'm gonna read the last little bit of Jonah now, Jonah chapter 4, verses 5-11. Starting at verse 5, Jonah left the city, he sat down east of it. He made a shelter for himself there and sat down under it in the shade to see what would happen to the city.

[29:39] He wanted to see what was gonna happen to the Lord. God appointed a little plant and caused it to grow up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to rescue him from his misery. Now Jonah was very delighted about the little plant. So God sent a worm at dawn the next day and it attacked the little plant so that it dried up. And when the sun began to shine, God sent a hot east wind. So the sun beat down on Jonah's head and he grew faint. So he despaired of life. And in his ever so dramatic way, he said, oh, I would rather die than live. And God said to Jonah, are you really so very angry about the little plant? And he said, I'm as angry as I could possibly be. And the Lord said, you were upset about this little plant, something for which you did not work, nor did you do anything to make it grow.

[30:33] It grew up overnight and died the next day. Should I not be more concerned about Nineveh, this enormous city? There are more than 120,000 people in it who do not know right from wrong. Or sometimes in translations that will say, they're right hand from their left. They don't know which way is up as well as many animals. God leaves us hanging at the end of that. That's the period at the end of that book. He leaves us hanging with a question: should I not be concerned about the people of Nineveh? Should we not be concerned about the people of Nineveh? As I mentioned earlier, Jonah gets mentioned a number of times in the New Testament.

[31:27] Jesus Himself refers to him, I don't believe that He says this directly, but I can't help but think that when we get to the story of the prodigal son, we see a parable that really helpfully illustrates this particular truth from the book of Jonah. In fact, when Uche was preaching on, the prodigal son just last month, this sprang to mind, right? You've got the older brother who's upset when the younger brother comes home and says, you know, why should this guy receive grace? Why should this guy receive mercy? And if you're anything like me, I know that there's different, we've got different people in the room. We have people who, you know, have been dealing with and struggling with the Bible for decades. We've got people who are really brand new at it. We have some people who haven't cracked the cover, but we're glad that you're here and that you're willing to at least continue on in conversation and fellowship with us. But if you are anything like me, you'll often end up identifying with the older brother in that story.

[32:26] And if you're anything like me, you might be identifying with Jonah in this story. You might be thinking, you want me to extend grace to those people, to the people who hurt me, to the people who hurt the ones that I love. You want me to overlook all of that and to be an agent of mercy and grace, a vehicle of Your love to that. But here's the part that I'm hoping if we've tracked along the whole time, here's the part that I'm hoping will kind of come home to roost because it hit me where I live. As I was reading through this, some of us are Jonah in this story, but all of us are Nineveh in this story.

[33:25] Some of us know the heart of God and have to wrestle through it and how we're gonna choose to live. But all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. All of us have sinned, all of us have made mistakes. And each and every one of us needs mercy and grace. We need it from God and we need it from others. So here's the question that I want you to ask. As we land this morning, who are you in the story? As I've been reading and as you've been thinking and closing your eyes and picturing all the things with the boats and the throwing of the cargo and the flying, which one are you? We can occupy different places at different times. But tonight, this morning, right now in this place, who are you in this story?

[34:24] Do you need a break today? I'm gonna ask you to stand if you're able right where you are. And if you're joining us online, I would even ask you to consider changing positions right now. Who are you in the story today? In just a few moments, we're gonna enter into a time of prayer and singing and we're gonna kind of move through the pattern. Cuz remember, grace is meant to move. So for some people this morning, you have never really unlocked the dam at the end of your pond as it were.

[35:22] And we believe in this church that all of us have received grace in our Christian tradition that sometimes use a fancy word of, like, what is it? Prevenient grace, or the grace that goes before, or common grace. Every single person, whether or not they've ever even heard of the name of Jesus or called on the name of Jesus, has received some grace. But for so many of us, we received it into a, essentially a closed system. It wasn't able to flow through us because the first move, the first way of chipping away at that dam is to admit that we need a break. That won't break until we admit that we need a break. So in a moment, whether this happens to be the first time that you've come to that knowledge, or whether it's a time that you've been reawakened to your need for it, we'll go ahead and we'll pray for that together.

[36:21] But then after that's happened, we have to acknowledge that we are grateful for the fact that we've received mercy and grace, that amazing grace that God's given us. But it won't stop there. Remember, grace is made to move and so we acknowledge our need for grace. But then the next thing is we have to realize that people who have hurt us, people who have hurt those that we love, people who are just different than us, anybody that we feel like we need, that we're holding something against, if we're holding onto it, that is a blockade in this process of grace movement. And the bigger the channel, the more the grace can flow, the bigger the channel, the more the grace can flow. Now, for some people, I wanna at least say this, there are some people here who have received the kind of hurt in their life that is different.

[37:15] There's some people for whom they have been literally, as it were, wounded. You know, there's real world repercussions for some of the things that you've experienced. And when I'm saying we need to forgive people, that doesn't mean no accountability. That doesn't mean that we should turn a blind eye and allow people to continue to victimize and hurt other people. I heard somebody say very wisely the other day that forgiveness and reconciliation are different things. If we forgive somebody, it means that we are letting them out of our life. We are no longer allowing them to have mental real estate in here. It doesn't mean that we are acknowledging that what they have done was not wrong. In fact, it actually means all the more. If we acknowledge that what they've done was wrong, then forgiveness is all the more needed.

[38:05] You can forgive anyone, I promise, today, wherever you are, whatever it is, you can forgive them. We start by receiving our forgiveness from God, by acknowledging that we need it and that we continue to live in grace. We continue to live into the character of the God that Jonah knew all too well. We continue to live into His character and bear His name by forgiving others and being agents, conduits of that mercy and of that grace. So I'm gonna put these words on the screen. You might not know this. Whether you wanna pray along under your breath or whether you wanna pray along out loud, I would encourage you in this song, God, confess sins, what we have done, what we have left, we have not our whole heart.

[39:20] We have not loved our neighbor as ourselves. Most Gracious God, most gracious God, we have lost our way like wandering sheep, we have. We're truly now for the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy.

[40:13] Have mercy on us. Have mercy. Have mercy on us. Mercy have mercy, have mercy. Amazing grace. How sweet the sound that saved me once was lost, but I found.

[41:14] Was blind. But now I see. Was blind, was blind. But now I see. Holy Spirit, You have opened our eyes to see who You truly are. A God who is just, who is right, who is willing to punish, who is willing to bring judgment on those for whom it is needed, and yet is all the more willing to show us the mercy and the grace that we need. All of us are and have been Nineveh.

[42:01] We haven't all done those same things, but we have all hurt people. We have all taken part in systems that have hurt people. We have all personally, consciously, willingly said things and done things that are not honoring to You. We all need a break. Holy Spirit, continue to form us into the kind of people who are quick to forgive, slow to anger, and abounding in the kind of love that we deeply need. In Jesus' name we pray. Let's continue to sing together about this. God, ask Him to fill us with love.