Pray with me before we turn to Jonah 3.

Father in heaven, Whom shall we fear? You are our light and our salvation. You are the stronghold of our lives. Armies and wars may be upon us, but we will be confident because we dwell in your house. We will wait for you, taking courage because you fill us with your powerful spirit. Send your Holy Spirit to us. Yes, send your spirit to fill our lungs with the life giving breath from heaven. From the smallest child here, to the oldest. Let your Spirit rekindling our passions for you as we eagerly anticipate the joyous celebration of your resurrection. Father, that same spirit we pray for, the same courage and confidence we ask for, send it to your people in the Ukraine. The first responders, the refugees, the people left behind waiting for their enemies. Let them sing and make melodies to you. Let their cries be heard and send them salvation.

As we study your word today, help us examine our own lives through your eternal perspective, and then convict us and move us toward repentance. Lord, as we repent, do not turn your face from your humble children. Love us unconditionally despite all of our sinfulness. Help us be obedient to you, as your children and disciples. Forgive us of our disobedience, our luke-warmness, our inaction, our procrastination. Help us love people the way you loved us. Thank you for your mercy and grace on our lives. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.

We’re going to examine the climax of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh. Let’s read. Jonah 3.

¹Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, ² “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” ³ 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. ⁴ Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” ⁵ And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.

⁶ The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. ⁷ And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, ⁸ but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. ⁹ Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”

¹⁰ When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. (Jonah 3:1-10 ESV)

The big idea we need to walk away with today:

Big Idea: God responds to repentance

That’s in verse 10. We see the conclusion very clearly. “¹⁰ When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.”

God’s response to repentance is merciful, loving, and full of grace. God’s response to repentance is an act of supernatural forgiveness. A miracle that needs to be cherished because we’re not entitled to it. We see that in verse 9, when the king of Nineveh says, “Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.”

But why did the people of Nineveh repent? The reason is simple: because Jonah repented and the people of Nineveh followed suit in repentance. Through Jonah they recognized their status before the holiness of God.

Many of us fail to repent because we fail to see who God truly is in our sinfulness. It’s not because we’re arrogant or dumb, it’s actually because there are three culturally accepted views of God that we sublimely accept to varying degrees of truth which overrides our recognition of God described in the Bible.

1. The Clock Maker God. He may have created all things and loves all people, but he sits back and allows things to happen. So people conclude that God is sitting back just watching events unfold and will not act regardless of how we act, or believe. So we don’t repent because it doesn’t matter one way or another, at the end, God will fix us, he is the clock maker.
2. The Vindictive God. Vindictive, cold, and vengeance filled. This is the exact opposite of the first view, and in fact, everything bad we experience in life is a punishment from God directed to make us pay. He is not loving, nor caring. He is a dictator who holds our eternity hostage, so we don’t repent because there is no point, he’ll make us pay for something else we did later.
3. Free Spirit God. Then we have the God of whatever makes you feel good. Everything is God. God is everyone. He is so loving and caring that he just wants everybody to be happy so God is okay with you as long as your conscience isn’t bothered.

But none of those things are actually who God is. The God of the Bible, the God we see right here in Jonah is a God who is eternal and righteous. He’s the God of love. He’s the God of transcendence; that is, he’s above space and time and history. Yet he is the immanent God; that is, he is so much with us that we cannot possibly escape from him. He is everywhere. He is unchangeable. He is truthful. He is reliable. He’s personal.

When that God, the God of the Bible is our God, we are compelled to repent because of who God is. So we look at our wretched selves and repent. Jonah and the people of Nineveh arrive at that conclusion. “Salvation [our salvation] belongs to the LORD!” (Jonah 2:9).

If we believe that the God of salvation, the God of the Bible is our God, then we must repent! And we must know that God responds to repentance.

That lead us to three observations about the process of repentance.

• Repentance begins with hearing the Word
• Repentance involves believing the Word
• Repentance requires responding to the Word

I’m highlighting the process because when the people chosen by God repent, there tends to be a spiritual phenomenon that follows. That phenomenon is called revival, and when revival happens we find breakthrough, healing, reconciliation, and a spiritual fervor reimagining God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. Simply put, your repentance can lead to changes that extend way beyond your individual person and impact the world.

So What is Revival?

Revival is the restoration of life to the people of the church. At this point in our society, we are not only living in a period marked by a cultural moral decline, we are living in a time where the whole world has lost it’s mind. This is the time we need God to restore the church and the people of his church to the life he planned and created for us. That is what repentance does.

So let’s review the Jonah’s story up until this point. Jonah first appears in the Bible in 2 Kings 14:23-28. You can look this up later, but long story short: Jonah is living in a time when his profession as a prophet of God, wasn’t necessarily favorable. Sort of like being a Christ follower in the 21^st century, it’s not necessarily advantageous. Israel was in a dark period in it’s history. The country is war torn, economically turmoiled, times were lean, people were committing all sorts of evil to make a living. Jonah’s legacy, before this book in the Bible was that he was willing to speak up in a time when it wasn’t necessarily beneficial for him to speak up on behalf of God. When Jonah spoke and the people listened, we find God restore the border of Israel. Essentially trade was opened up again, an the sovereignty of Israel was restored politically and economically.

In his obedience to God, Jonah enjoyed a certain privilege of influence. He is only mentioned here in 2 Kings because despite the brokenness of the nation at the time, people listened to Jonah and that caused God to rescue the nation. God didn’t call Jonah out of nowhere and tell him about this impossible mission to Nineveh. Absolutely not. He was groomed, and trained. If you flip a few chapters backward in 2 Kings, you get a sense of how Jonah grew up and the people he was associated with – Elijah, Elisha, the sons of the prophets. He was one of them. He saw miracles, he experienced God’s power. He knows God. He is familiar with how God works. How God loves, how God provides. Yet, despite knowing all that, having experienced all that, he ran away.

Does that sound familiar to some? Sounds a lot like many of your stories, those of you who grew up in Christian households, giving your life to Jesus at a young age.

So Jonah runs away and finds himself thrown overboard by a bunch of pagans who feared God more than the servant of God. Then, if being thrown overboard by pagans wasn’t bad enough, he is eaten alive by a big fish. Chapter 3 picks up on the heels of the fish vomiting Jonah upon dry land; giving Jonah a new life. That’s how God responds to repentance.

Isn’t it amazing that God uses Jonah’s disobedience to equip him for service through of his repentance? If you’re asking yourself, how does this relate to me then, ask yourself these two questions:

1. Are you living with only the memories of obedience to God in your life?
2. Are you substituting your past spiritual record in lieu of present submission to the will of God?

If you answered yes to either of those questions, you need to repent because memories of obedience to God and past spiritual record doesn’t replace obedience now in the present. Our disobedience, and the punishment we receive for our disobedience can be used to equip us for where God wants to take us next if we are willing to repent.

You see the connection between repentance and revival? To experience new life or revival, you have to die to your old self in repentance. When Jonah was in that fish, he died to himself, to his will, and experiences new life because he submitted to the will of God.

If the beginning of revival is repentance, then the beginning of repentance is exalting God above our own will and desires and turning away from the sin that offends God through disobedience. You will never have the spiritual life and relationship with God you desire if you’re unwilling to repent. So posture yourself toward repentance. The result of our repentance is always God’s response to restore us for the purposes of his calling.

The Process of Repentance

Let’s go to verse 1. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time [you see how once you come back to God in repentance, he comes back to you in response?], saying, ²“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” 

If you read verse 2 carefully, it’s eerily similar to chapter 1, where God says to Jonah, “call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” Here’s what the difference is: the first time around, the “what” Jonah needed to do is clear. He is a prophet. His job as a prophet is to speak the things of God, to do the work of God. Jonah disobeyed because he didn’t understand “why” God wanted Jonah to go to Nineveh.

Why We Sin

The reason many of us rebel is because we don’t understand why we need to be obedient? It’s only after we’ve rebelled and faced the consequences that we actually see why we needed to obey in the first place. The second time God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh, what is clear is that he understood why he was called to go.

I’m not quite sure how much of it he understood, but he understood enough to be obedient to go because we see him going in verse 3. 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. 

Nineveh was a great big city. It was three days walking in diameter. God wanted to rescue a huge city. We know from chapter 4, verse 11 how God felt about the great city of Nineveh: God tells Jonah, “And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” Our God is compassionate. That is who he is. That is why he responds to repentance. God wanted to save Nineveh because he had pity for the people.

Jonah was the vehicle tasked to proclaim repentance to people who needed to be rescued by God. It took a while for Jonah to understand that, but when he did, he believed and responded by going to proclaim the Word of God to Nineveh. You see the process of repentance at work here?

Hearing the word, believing the word, and responding to the word is being totally obedient to God. Repentance only works if we are totally obedient to the will of God. This is the hard part about genuine repentance.

Partial obedience is not repentance. There are times and moments where I hear the word of God, and I believe it to be true, and then I only go halfway through with what God is asking me to do. Partial obedience just masks our stubbornness, hypocrisy, and a lack of understanding of who God is. Go all in with God!

Verse 4. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s journey. And he called out, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”  This little bit of information is important. He didn’t wait to get to the city center, where the power of the city would have been. He was obedient right away. Let me allegorize this for us as a practical application: he was obedient from the most insignificant areas first. The outskirts of the city is not necessarily where change occurs or where they make a massive difference. But to God, obedience with even the insignificant is significant.

Go to verse 5. And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them. When even in the seemingly insignificant areas of life are repented for, that impact snowballs across other areas. If you want to see massive life changes and bring yourself to complete obedience to God, you have to repent with the things in your life that are on the outskirts.

I want us to recognize two things in verses 4 and 5. First, in verse 4 says, the Bible says that Jonah simply proclaimed, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Was that all that he said or was that just a summary of what he said?

Honestly, whoever wrote Jonah probably didn’t think Jonah’s words were that memorable and summarized the message. But the point is that God doesn’t require great skill, knowledge or ability as much as he requires complete obedience. Secondly, when we are completely obedient to God, people don’t believe in us, they believe in God. Verse 5 says, the people believed in God. They understood who he was, which caused them to repent.

When we repent just like Jonah, the most amazing part of our obedience is not that people would listen to us, but that they would believe God is working in us and through us. Our posture of repentance causes others to repent because through our repentant posture, they recognize who God. When enough of us decide to obey God like Jonah did the second time around, people will believe in God. Not just know of God, but to obey God. This is how God changes a nation.

When the people of Nineveh believed in God, they placed their trust in God and they acted accordingly. Look at what happens as a result. Verse 6.

⁶ The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. ⁷ And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, ⁸ but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. ⁹ Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish.” ¹⁰ When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. (Jonah 3:6-10 ESV)

Not only did the people on the streets hearing the word of God from Jonah repent, the king of Nineveh, the nobles, they all repented because they believed in God. Slowly and steadily from the smallest, most insignificant outskirts to the greatest and most important areas, repentance swept the city. That is how repentance works in our lives. Remember that idea of revival I mentioned earlier? This is revival—new life to an entire nation.

The people of Nineveh responded to the Word of God by turning from evil and calling on the name of God to save. You can see that they were appalled by their sin, they felt the depth of their sinfulness and was ready to accept the consequences as they changed their behavior. They didn’t expect or demand forgiveness. They submitted themselves in total obedience before God.

These people were not God’s people. They weren’t Israelites. But they were chosen by God to receive his grace and mercy as a result of their repentance. That’s an amazing miracle. God responded to their repentance by reviving them. Likewise, we too must die to ourselves and repent and receive the grace offered by the cross of Jesus Christ.

The evil of our sinfulness came up to God and God, in his loving mercy and grace wanted to rescue us. So he sent his son, Jesus. He was totally obedient to God, the Father, to the point of death. Jesus died on the cross for our sins and paid the price. We don’t deserve it. We didn’t earn it. We are forgiven from our sins as a gift from God and it leaves us awestruck because it is a miracle that the creator of the universe could love such an insignificant pieces of dirt like us.

Jesus died, he was buried, and then he was resurrected on the third day to give us eternal life. We believe in God who is alive because death could not hold him. That is God’s grace and mercy to us. We become children of God through Jesus’ death and when he was spit out of hell on the third day, our eternity became secured. So we believe in God. We believe in Jesus to be our Lord and Savior. We believe God will respond to us with mercy, grace, and love when we repent.

Many of you know how I came to receive Jesus as my savior. My dad was a pastor, I saw the miracles. I encountered the power of God. I knew who he was. But yet, I didn’t give my life in obedience to him. It wasn’t until a friend of mine, being rescued by God after he repented of his rebellion, became obedient to God and shared the good news with me. He didn’t win me over with a grand argument. What he said was simple, straightforward, I heard the Word, I believed the Word, and I responded to the Word in repentance as a result and received Jesus as my savior.  

Some of you have heard the word for so long but never believed it or responded to it. Today, just don’t hear the Word. Believe the Word and respond with repentance because God responds to repentance with revival. He will give you new life!

Admit that you are sinful and that leaves you grieved because of who God is. You believe God has adopted you through the life, death, and resurrection Jesus, God’s son. You respond to that miracle by being totally obedient to God.

Perhaps you have repented and God has responded with salvation, with new life in Jesus Christ. Are you living on the fumes of that memory or will you hear the word of God and submit to his will in total obedience with what he is calling you to now?

Total obedience may mean for you to go get baptized and make a public declaration of faith. Maybe it means to serve in a ministry on the weekends, to sacrifice your time to love others. Maybe it means joining a Life Group instead of making excuses for your non accountability.

Maybe it’s to go to the people God is sending you to share the life giving Word of the gospel. You’ve been avoiding a spiritual conversation with those people for way too long, and they have been waiting for you to share that message with them. No glitz, glam or persuasive sales, just straight, simple. Maybe it’s time to invite that friend or family member back to church.

Whatever that next step is. Submit to God in total obedience today so that God would not only save your life, but so that he can save the lives of the people around you.

If you have questions you can ask somebody at our connect desk, come talk to me after service, talk to anybody serving this weekend. Just take a next step and be a part of the revival of God’s people.

Let’s pray.

Father, salvation does belong to you. Thank you for sending your son Jesus, to rescue us. We didn’t deserve to be loved. We didn’t deserve to be rescued, but you did. You respond to us when we confess our need for you. You respond so graciously. So lovingly. We want to be totally obedient to you. We know that is our sweet spot in life. Or at least that’s what we want. But we know we can’t do that on our own. We need your spirit to empower us.

Those of us here who are feeling like Jonah at the beginning of this chapter; just realizing that you are going to use the repercussions of our sinfulness for your purposes. God thank you for the grace and second chance. Help us navigate that just as you did for Jonah. Give us a word to encourage us forward.

Those of us who are waiting for culture and society to change before repenting. Give us the boldness to openly and publicly repent and return to you with humility. That is what you desire—that we become devoted to you, not to the sacrifices we make in your name. Lord, we know revival starts within our own hearts, and we so desire it for our communities, our nation, our world. So we repent and submit ourselves in total obedience. Let us be like the Ninevites and humbly repent knowing that you would respond by healing our land when we call your name. Yes, walk with us, do not forsake us.

We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.