Jonah 3:5-10 / I am Jonah - The City
Introduction: Melting the Calluses
Father, we do declare that You are wonderful, worthy of praise and adoration, a God whose name is lifted high here this evening. We look to You now. Would You shape us in Your Word? Would You form us? There are calluses on our hearts of truths we need to hear. Would You melt them away? Would You burn them down? With a fresh touch of Your love, help us understand a bit of who You are and who You call us to be. Would You stir within us a love that goes far beyond where our dreams and imagination can take us? That’s what we’re looking for in our time together. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.
My name is Jared, and I’m the Clovis campus pastor for The Well Community Church. I’m glad to be with you today. We are in a series called I Am Jonah, and it has been messing with people. As staff and as campus pastors, we hope in the next few weeks to share some of the things we’re beginning to hear—the “cities” people are feeling stirred to go toward. The cities of their marriages, the cities of their neighborhoods, and the communities where they live, work, and play.
This series comes to a bit of a climax here in Jonah chapter three. It’s a simple message that Jonah gives the city of Nineveh. In our English Bible, it’s eight words; in Hebrew, it’s five. The message was to turn, because judgment is coming. We know this was Jonah’s second chance to go to this city, and he delivered the message. But what happens when that message goes forward? We’ll look at the response in the people’s hearts, but the clear point I want you to understand is that this story is about God and who He is. It’s about a character trait of God that we need to see very clearly.
A Simple Message with Profound Impact
Simple messages can have really profound impacts. A number of years ago, I worked in student ministry. Every winter, we’d take five or six buses of students to a small town in Oklahoma for a camp called “Winter Chill.” It was a terrible name, but a fun event. We would cram these high school kids in for a long three-day weekend of messages, worship, and crazy games where we’d force them to eat things they’d never eat at home.
We got to the final night, which is usually the most impactful night for students. Our planning was a bit simplified that year. We had spliced together dramatic pieces of the movie The Passion of the Christ with music. The speaker gave a short two or three-minute message, repeating one phrase: “If this action is you, you deserve death.” He just kept saying it: “If you do this, you deserve death. If you do this, you deserve death.”
Then we played the video. It wasn’t meant to pull on emotional strings, but to stir in those students’ hearts that judgment is inevitable. As we heard last week, it is appointed once for man to die, and then comes judgment. We have to wrestle with that.
I remember not being super excited about some of the students who came on that retreat. There were guys from a school where I knew their reputation. I knew how they acted with girls, with teachers, and with their coaches. I was hardened toward them. I had a negative expectation. Shamefully, as a youth pastor, I was always just waiting for them to do something wrong, to act out, or to raid a girl’s cabin.
I held that perception until that last night. That simple message was so profound that it resonated in those guys’ hearts. I saw them go forward to respond, and then they found me with tears in their eyes. They talked about what God had done in their lives, confessing sin they didn’t want to entertain anymore. In that moment, it was as if God took the cold heart of a youth pastor and just melted the ice away. He melted all the hardness I had toward them. He gave me a glimpse of the love He had for them. I got to see through God’s eyes how He cared about them. Their reputation mattered to God, but He loved them more than their reputation.
That was a learning experience I’ll never forget. It was a time when I learned to love like God loves and see people like God sees people. And let’s be honest—that’s not always easy. When we first come to Christ, we can’t help but tell people what God has done. We love everyone because we know what wretches we were and what grace God showed us. But over time, especially in religious communities, it’s easy to become comfortable. We associate with people who look like us, dress like us, and share the same jokes. We get into a bubble. And then we see “those people.”
For Jonah, “those people” were the Ninevites—horrific people who did unimaginable things. We might even say it was okay for Jonah to have a hardened heart toward them; they deserved whatever was coming. But we’re going to see a fascinating picture of how God sees them.
The God Who Relents
I’m going to frustrate the achievers in the room because we’re going to teach this text backwards. It’s important to see where God ends up so that everything else makes sense. Let’s look at verse ten.
Jonah 3:10 (NASB)
When God saw their deeds, that they turned from their wicked way, then God relented concerning the calamity which He had declared He would bring upon them. And He did not do [it].
When God saw the response of the people to the simple message Jonah gave, He relented. A natural question is: Did God change His mind? Did He not know what was going to happen? No. God’s character never changes. We understand from Malachi that He is the Lord and He does not change. He doesn’t change in His essence or attributes. But often in Scripture, you see God changing His reaction based on people’s actions and attitudes.
The encouraging thing for you and me is that God holds off judgment as long as possible. It’s as if He waits until the very last moment before His holiness demands judgment. He gives us the greatest gift: time. Time to respond to the Gospel. He relents in the sense that He holds off to allow grace to intervene, for lives to change, and for hearts to melt.
God relented because of His love for the city and His love for His creation. The Ninevites were terrible in their actions, but like you and me, they were created in the image of God. They bore a resemblance to the Almighty, and He loved them with a love we can’t strive for or attain, but only submit to.
I couldn’t love those students at Winter Chill on my own. God had to intervene in my heart and give me fresh eyes. He told me, “You have to love these students like I love them, because I can see into their heart and you cannot. I know the plans I have for them and you don’t.”
Do you feel loved today? We’ve romanticized that word. Pop singers talk about “unconditional love,” but that’s rarely what they mean. Love in sitcoms, movies, and social media is confusing. But love takes on a new meaning when you see the Ninevites for who they were and realize God relented because He loved them.
Do we have that kind of love? Or are we okay with our little bubbles in Fresno? Are there parts of this town you have a certain mentality about? Is there an neighbor whose actions are so grievous that you’ve just decided, “God will deal with them,” and you feel okay not loving them? We need to be careful. When we do that, we are slipping away from the freshness of the grace we experienced when we first came to the Lord.
The Anatomy of Repentance
What does it look like when people who don’t deserve grace repent?
Jonah 3:5 (NASB)
Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them.
The people of Nineveh believed God. This polytheistic nation set aside their other gods and saw the one true God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth. Sackcloth was like burlap—coarse, rough, and humble. It was a sign of mourning. It was like putting on a potato sack to say, “I’m not comfortable. I’m grieving.”
This was revival. Revival happens individually, but this was a city-wide movement from the greatest to the least. Even the king of Nineveh was affected.
Jonah 3:6 (NASB)
When the word reached the king of Nineveh, he arose from his throne, laid aside his robe from him, covered [himself] with sackcloth and sat on the ashes.
The king stepped off his throne, removed his robe of authority, and sat in ashes. He issued a proclamation that neither man nor beast should eat or drink, but everyone should call out mightily to God. He said, “Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands.”
That is a powerful point. If your hands are causing you to be violent—and not just through physical murder, but through any wicked action—let it cease. The idea of repentance is that the Holy Spirit convicts you, and you turn and go the other way. It’s not just words. I remember as a young man saying, “God, I’m sorry,” but never actually turning. True repentance is fleeing temptation like David did, even if it costs you your clothes.
The king wondered if God might relent. I’m convinced these people were motivated by fear to some degree, but I love the king’s worldview. It’s not man-centered. He doesn’t say, “If I do A, then God must do B.” He leaves the divine up to the Divine. He hopes God will be gracious.
It’s easy to have a stereotype of God sitting on a cloud with a lightning bolt, just waiting to zap us. But that’s not the God of the Bible. He is patient and long-suffering. He endures a stubborn, self-willed creation. How many times do you read about the Israelites and think, “Why can’t they just get it? They watched the Red Sea part!” Then you look in the mirror, recap your own day, and realize, “Okay, I get it.”
God is patient. His lovingkindness is there for us to enjoy. He loved us so much that when we couldn’t meet the requirements of His holiness, He provided a way. From Genesis 3, the plan was that a Man would come to crush the serpent and defeat sin and death. That Man is Christ.
Loving Your Nineveh
God doesn’t need us, but He chooses to use us. He didn’t need Jonah, but He used Jonah’s disobedience to help some sailors see Him, and He used Jonah’s partial obedience to save an entire city. That’s the kind of grace He offers.
Do we love our city like that? Fresno, Clovis, Kingsburg—do we look at them with compassion? Do we pray for the humility to see the city as God sees it? When you pray those prayers, your neighborhood looks different. Our mission as a church is to help people connect to God and to each other in every neighborhood—the places where you live, work, and play.
If you don’t pray for that kind of love, you’ll be okay with judgment coming to them. But if you pray, God might put you on your way to Nineveh. You’ll have to trust in someone bigger than yourself because you don’t have enough power, faith, or charisma to change a city on your own.
Romans 5:8 is about you and me.
Romans 5:8 (NASB)
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
Even in our disobedience, God sacrificed what He loved most. I never fully understood this until I had kids. I was chatting with staff today, and I told them that on a good day, if a car was coming to hit my assistant, I might jump in front of it. For my wife, even more so. But for my son? You couldn’t offer me enough money or power to not jump in front of that car. Yet God did the opposite. He was willing to sacrifice His Son for the love of the people.
That realization will transform the way you enter your neighborhood. God wants us to love people.
1 John 4:7 (NASB)
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
We can’t just say we love the city with our words. We can’t just live vicariously through missionaries or the neighbor who buys groceries for someone in need. I feel like God is in our ear saying, “I want to use you to reach your city.”
How much did the “big boys” of the Bible love people? Look at Paul. He met Jesus face-to-face, and his life was transformed. He said this about his neighbors and kinsmen:
Romans 9:3 (NASB)
For I could wish that I myself were accursed, [separated] from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh,
He was willing to wish himself accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of the lost. I’m not there yet, and it’s embarrassing to admit. But I want to be.
My prayer for The Well Community Church is that we would have love like God has love. That we would have the faith to step out beyond ourselves and let God use us in the darkest, poorest, and richest places. May He chip away at us until we are willing to forsake our own comfort for the sake of a lost brother or sister. Those are “big boy” and “big girl” prayers that separate the Christ-like from the pretenders. Let’s let God shape our hearts to that end.
Closing Prayer
Father, these words are not easy to hear or swallow, but they are true and Christ-honoring. We can’t attain this kind of love by ourselves, but with You, our impact could go beyond our dreams. The worst of the worst can be restored, and we can find joy in that. You gave the biggest sacrifice for us all in Your Son. He was killed for us, but He rose from the dead. May that same power live in us and give us a love for the places where we live, work, and play. Use us to reach our Ninevahs, for we are Jonah. We ask these things in the name of Christ. Amen.