Jonah May 21/2023











 Your Creator invites you to take Him as your partner.  Do you not have a partner?  Maybe you have a partner and don't trust  your partner.  Or, it may be you have a friend who has turned his back on you.  God wants to be your partner: your partner in business; your partner in school; or your partner in the home.  Is your marriage in trouble?  God wants to enter your home and bring you back together.  Most marriages can be saved.  Oh yes, God is interested in those things.  You can go to a psychiatrist, or a psychologist (and I do not underestimate their help), but what will give you personhood is when you realise that your Creator would come to you and bring you in and deal intimately with you and be your partner in your frustration with your financial problem, with your sickness, with your disease, with your trouble.  That is the kind of God who calls.  And so, the word of the Lord goes forth familiarly.  'The word of the Lord came to Jonah.'

We are told that the word of the Lord in this case (to Jonah was to go to Nineveh.  We learn from this something of God's ways with nations.  Now the first question to be asked is, 'Why Nineveh?  Nineveh was a pagan city.  Nineveh would not be on Jonah's schedule.  It wasn't on his chart;  converting Nineveh wasn't anything he had planned to do.  Why Nineveh?  Nineveh was a city with a population we are told of 120,000 souls.  Why would God ask Jonah to go to Nineveh?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall May 31/2023.

Image
  I once knew some Dutch people very well.  And they told me that for a long time they sincerely believed that God spoke Dutch.  Since I have been in this country I have found out that some think God speaks English, with an English accent!  Jonah thought that God spoke Hebrew and Nineveh was hardly on Jonah's prayer list.  But God's prerogative to do what He wills with whom He wills the way He wills is something that we need to learn.  And after all, God can do it differently from the way He has done it in the past.  Peter was told by Jesus on one occasion how he was going to die.  You know what Peter's question was immediately:  What about John here? (John 21:21).  And it could be that God will want to do something in the world with a nation that you had not thought of, or with an individual you would not suspect.  And God may actually want to do something through you, and you ask:  Why me?  Why not this other person?  Why not that one?  You see God may deal with you in a
Read more

Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall June 16/2023

Image
 Are you here this morning and you have been running from God?  Could I be talking to somebody like that?  Well, maybe not in the explicit way like Jonah.  Perhaps you are not aware of what you are doing.  Are there sins you have been nurturing that nobody knows about but you?  The word of the Lord has come to you and has said one thing and you have been doing another.  You are running; you are in retreat and you think nobody knows about it.  Let me remind you that if you are running from God you are doing something that cannot be done.  Very well, then, Jonah's retreat brought him more noticeably into this realm of common grace.  But God manifested special love and mercy by sending the wind.  This wind we may call the chastening of the Lord.  God's chastening maybe defined as His simultaneous wrath and mercy.  Now, Habakkuk the p0rophet prayed: 'O Lord, revive they work in the midst of the years, in wrath remember mercy.'  How can this be?  You may be angry with them a
Read more

Jonah by Dr. R.T. Kendall June 6/2023

Image
J   Jesus said that we must be like children (Matt.  18 :3).  Children take things at face value, and we as mature Christians must accept the simple promises of God's Word;  such things as "Preach the Gospel to every creature' (Mark 16:15) and "holiness without which no man shall see the Lord" (Heb. 12 :14).  It doesn't surprise me one bit that God is using Pentecostals today and passing up most of us.  It doesn't surprise me.  God honours those who believe in the simplicity of His word.  Perhaps the reason God is withholding some of the deep things of His word from the church is because of what it has done to some.  So, I suggest to you, Jonah was a victim of the folly of over-familiarity with holy things. Jonah was also a victim of the folly of ingratitude.  Jonah should have been thankful that God gave the commandment to go to Nineveh.  He should have been thankful that God saw the sins of Nineveh and was going to discover them, and there were a hundre
Read more