Hindrances to serving God effectively are explored through the story of Jonah, who disobeyed God's call to preach to Nineveh. The sermon suggests three potential hindrances in Jonah's life: a love for prosperity, a desire for popularity, and prejudice. Prosperity can lead to complacency and a focus on worldly comforts, hindering evangelistic efforts. The desire for popularity can make individuals hesitant to share the gospel with unpopular or despised groups, as Jonah was with the Assyrians. Prejudice, whether racial or cultural, can create barriers to reaching diverse populations with the message of salvation. The sermon concludes by urging listeners to examine their own lives for similar hindrances and to prioritize God's will over personal comfort, popularity, or ingrained biases, emphasizing that God's plan is to reach all people.
Restored with Diffio
Audio restored with Diffio. Diffio processed the original archive recording to reduce noise and produce a cleaner listening version; the original stays available.
Speech quality score (model-estimated, SCOREQ): before 2.38 → restored 4.31
book of Jonah. Jonah chapter one. Hindrances to serve. My brother-in-law asked me, am I going to ask everyone who feels that a hindrance to evangelism to stand? Well, I won't be doing that since I'm already standing anyway. I'm not my intention to be critical. I trust some way we'll be graciously able to consider together things which could be a hindrance in our lives to getting the gospel out.
If you've got the Jonah open, just keep your finger in that place and turn back, please, to Second Kings chapter fourteen. Jona is mentioned twice in the Bible, the Book of Jonah. Well, of course, he's mentioned in the New Testament. But in the Old Testament, he's mentioned in the Book of Jonah and also in Second Kings chapter fourteen. And we'll first read a few verses from there. Chapter fourteen and verse twenty-three. In the fifteenth year of Amaziah, the son of Joash, king of Judah, Jeroboam, the son of Joash king of Israel, began to reign in Samaria and reigned forty and one years.
And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. He departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin. And yet in spite of that, verse twenty-five, he restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamas unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord God of Israel. which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah, the son of Amitai, the prophet, which was of Gathepha. For the Lord saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very bitter, for there was not any shut up, nor any less, nor any helper for Israel. The Lord said not that he would blot out the name of Israel from under heaven, but he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam, the son of Joesh, a man who did wicked.
Now over to Jonah. Chapter one. Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before them. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa. and he found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare thereof, went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
God had a job for Jonah to do. There was a wide open door, a whole city waiting to be reached. What an opportunity! What a thrilling opportunity. God calls Jonah. He's called of God. The opportunity is there. Jonah packs his bag and goes the wrong way. Why? What went wrong? What was it in this man's life that hindered him from fitting into God's plan for his life.
And I would suggest three things. And perhaps those three things could be a help to us this morning. And since these messages are being recorded, perhaps they could be a help to some others who might listen to them. The three things I would suggest are these. Perhaps it was that he loved prosperity. Secondly, he loved popularity. And thirdly, he was prejudiced. I suggest, first of all, it could have been because he loved prosperity.
That's why we read the passage in Second Kings. You see, and under the reign of this man, Jeroboam II, there'd been an economic boom. He had reconquered all the land which had been traditionally Israel and more, and that had forty-one years of peace, prosperity. They were living lives of great comfort, affluent. In fact, they'd never had it so good. if you go through the book of Second Kings. You know, this kind of a light can get a grip on a person and make it very difficult to get up and go and do what God wants us to do.
And I believe that that's one of the problems in the world today, at least the Western world, at least prosperity, And it could be that this is one of the things which instead of forwarding the kingdom of God, in many ways is a tremendous hindrance to the work of God. It doesn't have to be, of course. But I wonder if it is. So the word of the Lord comes to Jonah. God says, Jonah, arise and go. I wonder what Jonah thought. We don't really read what he thinks. We don't really know what were the hindrances. We just suggest him.
Did he look at himself living in his comfortable house there in Israel and think, well, I mean, why should I go? Other prophets have stayed right here and denounced the heathen nations. Why should I leave the comfort of this home? He gets a grip on a person. can make a person this God's plan for his life. Someone has said, prosperity is the curse of modern prisoners. It gets such a grip on our souls. You remember what the Lord said when he spoke about the parable of the soar.
There were four types of soil, the pathway, the stony ground, the thorny ground. And when explaining to the disciples about the seed that fell amongst thorns, this is what he said. He said, that which fell among thorns are they which when they have heard go forth and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of this life and bring no fruit to perfection. Cares, riches, pleasure. It seems that the more prosperity we have, the more cares we have, the more things we've got to be taking care of and so on, the less time to go out with the gospel and bring forth some kind of fruit.
The cares, the riches, and the pleasures. When a man is not prosperous, he doesn't have much time for pleasure. Not that I'm saying he shouldn't have pleasure. The Lord said to his disciples, Come ye aside and rest a while. There is a place for that, of course. But I'm wondering if perhaps we've become so prosperous in the Western world that we're just so busy taking care of our prosperous way of living and so on that we are missing God's plan for our lives. You know, Bill Grunbaum, a veteran missionary to Europe, Eastern Europe, I read a little note he wrote, I think it was in that British magazine called Echoes, if I'm not mistaken, just a year or two ago when Eastern Europe was suddenly opening up.
They'd been under the pressure of communism for years. With the result, the church grew. And Bill wrote something like this. He said we'd better start praying more than ever for the believers in Eastern Europe, because once the system changes, and they start having a taste of the Western world's prosperity and goods and possessions. He said, I have great fear that they won't be doing the evangelism that they have been doing. When I first got saved, I thank God that a brother in the meeting, one of the elders, he took me after I'd been saved about a month, I guess.
He said, David, I go out of town to a rundown part of the city to teach a Sunday school, and I want you to come. Get a lesson ready. We went out there. He said, that's your class. A bunch of boys, rioters, and noisy. The best training ground in the world, I tell people today. I didn't think so then. I was dead scared. Didn't know what to say. Had no idea how to control kids, none at all. I had a learned by bitter experience, not from a textbook. Then that brother one day, as we were driving back, we'd go there week after week. He said to me, he said, you know, we're just playing at Sunday school.
I was a bit shattered. He said, we should be out here two or three times a week, getting to know these kids, playing soccer with them, going to their home, getting to know their background. And I thought to myself, you know, for the next month or two, well, why is it we just playing at Sunday School? Why don't we get out? Is it because we're just too busy making our way in this world? This man was the director of a company. I had just started as an accountant. And I had to start asking myself some serious questions. If we get out and do the job properly, it'll interfere with my career, my pleasure time or leisure time.
And I had to ask myself, what is going to come first in my life? Will it be my job or will it be my job? Was it going to be money? Or was it going to be service for the Lord? Was it going to be a life of security? I'd just taken out a life insurance. When I reached fifty-five, I was going to be given five hundred pounds. It's not worth much today. That was my eyes in those days with a vast fortune. Because I gave it up when I had left my job still.
I had to ask myself, is that what I'm here for? You see, when I left school, my eye was set on my career, an accountant, get to the top. God stepped in and saved me just a week before I started my job. And I had to start asking myself, did God have a different plan for my life than I thought, than I had? Why are we paying it on this? I used to walk around during the lunch hour. street with Soresbury, another young fellow, actually the son of his dear brother, about a couple of years younger than me, he just started work. We'd meet together and we'd walk up and down the street, window shopping.
He said to me one day, he said, David, for the time I'm thirty, I want to be a millionaire. He'd got himself into some company there and he could see the opportunities for making money. Well, by the grace of God, and I call it the grace of God, he took me out of my job, sent me up to the bush with a little secondhand scout tent, six foot square, an ancient motorbike that broke in half three months later, and all my possessions in a thin trunk this side. This friend of mine, I want to be a millionaire by the time I'm He died a couple of years ago in what is called the most materialistic city of the world, Johannesburg.
He died in a vaccinated state. And I wonder, prosperity, if that was hindering the church, if the assembly, perhaps me, from getting on with the work that God wants me to do, I'm not indicating here that we need to give up our jobs. We've just heard a message on that. Not at all. God wants us to serve him within our jobs. What I would suggest is this, that we examine the motives we have for being in the job. What is my ambition in that job?
Is it to live for God and for eternity? Or is it to get to the top of the tree? One of the things that I used to get very scared about as a young believer, as I worked for six years and as an accountant, was this, the pressure of the world. Romans twelve, verses one and two. Don't be conformed to this world. Don't let the world pressurize you to fit into their pattern. Their pattern is what? The top of the tree. Have we been brainwashed by the world? It starts with our kids. We want our kids to be at the top of the tree. I ask a dear couple, how are the kids getting on?
How's John doing? Oh, wonderful. He's got a job as a chief accountant in this terrific company. I said, how's he getting on as a believer? Well, I think he is going to a group there. He has found a place he can go to church. You see, we've been praying more. It starts with our attitudes of the kids. But it's in our own lives often, isn't it? We feel we've got to get to the top. That's not what the Lord says. Matthew six thirty-three. When those young people we told you about last night, we've had the privilege of reaching them in those schools for years. When they graduate from grade twelve, we try to get a new testament for each of them.
And on the front cover we print Matthew six thirty-three. Seek ye first. The kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these. the things Floyd already mentioned, the food, the drink, the clothing. Yeah, we need them. Certainly we need them. They'll be added, aren't they? There's nothing wrong with having a job. There's nothing wrong with having money. There's nothing wrong with being a rich person. But it's my attitude that counts. And if my attitude is, I want to glorify God with my job, God may see fit to entrust me with millions.
And there are believers like that. Must you go to them and say, you're wrong? Not at all. If God has given them the millions, a good example of this is a man by the name of R.G. Le Turner. She'd never read his book, the book about his life that's well worth reading. There was a young engineer who started out, and his ambition was to live for God as an engineer. He didn't want to make money. That was the furthest thing from his mind. So God says, I can trust this man with money. And he did, and he made him a millionaire. But all that came in, he poured it out in various ways in the service of God.
So it's not money that's wrong. Never is. It's not possessions that are wrong. It's my attitude to those things. I'd like to read to you from the book of Revelation. Chapter three, the Church of Laodicea, you might like to turn to it, Chapter three, verse seventeen. The Church of Laodicea, these churches, as we know, one way of interpreting them is, first of all, they were letters to individual churches, obviously. But another thought is that they give a picture of the church of the various ages. Laodicea being the last, the church of the last days.
We're expecting the Lord. Is this a picture of the church today? Listen to what it says. The church looks at itself, verse seventeen, and says what? I am rich. I'm increased with goods. I have need of nothing. We've never had it so good. We heard yesterday, we live on a standard, or the day before from Brother George, a standard which our parents knew nothing about. And we say perhaps I'm rich, I'm increased with goods, I've got need of nothing. We are just going along fine. Everything ready for retirement. Just wonderful. But the searching eye of the Lord Jesus Christ looks down, deep down.
And what does he say? Great sorrow and sadness, he says. And thou knowest not that thou art wretched, miserable, poor, blind, naked, naked. You've got nothing. not one treasure laid up in heaven. Then I look at myself, I've got it made, have I? If I haven't laid up treasure in heaven, I've got nothing. All I've got is going to be left behind. Not only that, but maybe what I've got is being a tremendous hindrance to God's work in my life.
I believe that's one of the things in the life of Jonah, which was a tremendous hindrance in his life. May the Lord help every one of us. And I spoke to myself as a missionary, going back in the will of God, hoping to get a four-wheel drive vehicle because of the goodness of God's people. And I think when I went out with a broken-down motorbike, rich, got it made. I've got a four-wheel drive vehicle. And I... just like all of us need to examine our attitude to our wealth, our leisure, our comfort in the light of Calvary. In the light perhaps of Second Corinthians chapter eight, verse nine, the Lord Jesus Christ, who though he was rich, yet for your sake became poor, how poor, just how poor.
The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests. The son of man has nowhere to lay his head. You know, that verse means so much in Africa. The fox. The fox in Africa, we call it a jackal. The most despised creature of the jungle is that fox. And the Lord says, the most despised creature of the bush is more fortunate than me. The Lord of the Lord. The Lord said, became poor. And you see, in the light of that, I've got to examine not how much God has given me, but my attitude to those things. My attitude to those things.
That dear brother who got me started into Sunday school, and I thank God for him. When that country of southern Rhodesia was getting its independence, many of the white people were getting up and leaving. And I was invited down there to speak at a conference and I met this dear brother, and I was gray hair, between sixty-five and seventy years old. And he said to me, David, he said, I'm getting out, I'm landing a top job in California. And a wave of sadness went in over my heart. And all I could do was just say, go back to where I was staying.
Praise him. Here he was, a man going on for his seventies, who had been used of God in my life, and landing a top job in California, getting out of this. How sad. Praise God. He never did land that top job in California. He never landed any job, and he ended up in a little assembly way down near... in South Africa somewhere. And he's serving God in his senior years. But at the same conference I was at, another brother came to me. He said, you know, I want to get out of my job.
I want to take early retirement, an elder in one of the meetings. He said, I've just got to give more time to my work as an elder to get out and feed the sheep. and visit the sick and reach out to the unfaved and get into the Sunday school kids' homes. And I was thrilled. You see, it's our attitude that matters. Whether God blesses me with a job which doesn't bring in much or a job which brings in millions. That doesn't matter. My attitude that matters. My attitude. I think of a dear brother. Oh, how thrilling he is to my heart. Just after we came on furlough, he's a high school teacher.
He's head of the mathematics department. And the government came to him one day. He's a believer and he's serving the Lord. And they said to him, we want you to become the inspector of school. Tremendous promotion. A much bigger house. Double your salary. Young brother said, well, I'll have to pray about it. Oh, he said, there's no time to pray. They need an answer right now. You've got to get on the phone and give them an answer. He said, in that case, you better tell them no.
I don't have time to pray. How do I know this God? He never took that promotion. He stayed where he is. Because he wants the God first in his life. But I think of another brother. And after we spent a weekend at a certain assembly, young people, thirsty for help, coming to us until midnight on Saturday night, questions and so on. That dear brother said, come to the office on Monday. We went over. Did you know this has been a tremendous weekend? I wish I had time to do what you've been doing over the weekend. He said, I just love to get in with those young people.
And he is a great preacher and one who works with young people. But he says, there's a problem. I've just been promoted. I just don't have time. Did the promotion come from the Lord? not for me to decide. Only he and the Lord know that. But you see, it's my attitude, my attitude to my job, to this prosperity which is flooding the Western world. Although we took about a recession, I know, and some people are suffering. But generally speaking, most of us don't.
I wonder if that's what caused Jonah to go the wrong way. But look at the next thing. Could it be his popularity? He had been asked to do a job before this. This isn't the first time, not at all. He'd been asked to do a job by God way back there earlier on, rather, in the days of Jeroboam II. He'd been told, go and preach. God is going to restore your kingdom. My, that's wonderful. And he went out and preached. No problem. That's a message everybody wanted to hear. A popular message. He went at it and preached and everybody heard and God came in with blessings.
Now God says, Jonah, Arise, go to Nineveh. Oh, that's a little different. That's a lot different. You see, the Assyrians were the enemies of Israel. Go to the Assyrians. Cruel, sadistic people. When they took a prisoner, they'd cut off his hands, cut off his feet. They'd cut off his ears, they'd tear off his lips. They'd sometimes skin the man alive. Wicked, brutal, inhuman. Go to those people?
What'll my friend say? Just ask them. Don't do it, Jonah. They don't deserve to hear. They don't deserve the gospel. inhuman degraded creatures. Go to some of the cities of Israel. There's many of them that need to hear the word of God. They're not all living for God. It's a popular thing, isn't it? You go to the cities of Israel, but you go to the people that are just so opposite and different, a completely different social strata?
That's not popular work. And I ask myself, is that why he never went? What about us? You know, maybe it's not true, but I feel that it is true that if we looked at our assemblies in general, And not only our assemblies, but the general outreach of evangelical work in the Western world. We are reaching the upper middle class. And that's about all. Praise God, that's not only the case. There are other out-teaches. But generally speaking, and this is generalizing, is my assembly just reaching the upper middle class?
We've got a kind of a social group going. People that fit into that social group, great. Let's get them in. What about those, like the Assyrians, degraded, living in sin and deportured, uncontrolled passion? What about them? This came home to my heart, way out in Zambezi once. You do a lot of high school work. And one day a high school teacher made a schoolgirl pregnant. That was repugnant to the whole society.
Oh, get involved with somebody else, but not a schoolgirl. And I felt the same. Well, that guy, what a filthy, despicable thing to do. Ruining her education, her life. And he's a high school teacher, he should know better. He doesn't deserve to hear the gospel. But when we had our little meeting in the house, one Sunday night, a few weeks later, this guy comes in. And of course, maybe I did not preach the gospel too clearly in case he wants to get saved.
Well... He did want to get saved. He came on the Monday following and he said, the words of God have convicted my heart and I want to get saved. What could I say? You don't deserve forgiveness. When I looked at myself, all I could say, amazing grace, to save the wretch like me. The Apostle Paul, all he could say was, I'm the chief of sinners. Oh, my dear brothers and sisters, may God give us a heart and a spiritual realization of the fact that He came to seek and to save the lust.
And basically millions of the lust are down in the gutters. They're not in our social, our show social strata. They're in a different social strata. How are we going to get them in? Not easy. You've got to go against the tide of popularity. Acts chapter nine, Ananias. God speaks to Ananias in a vision. Brilliant. Ananias, get up. Certainly. Go to the street called straight. Great. Go to the house of a man called Judas. There you'll find a fellow called Saul of Tartan. Oh, great.
Saul of Tartan? And Ananias says to the Lord, but Lord, that fellow is a murderer. He's destroyed the Christians. He doesn't deserve to be forgiven. And not only that, he's come here to catch the Christians and destroy them. God says, so. He's a chosen vessel. And he's going to take my gospel to the Gentile nation. And Ananias went. against the tide of popular opinion. And he led that man to the Lord, who became the greatest missionary that ever went to the Gentile nation, down the streets of our cities, down by our gospel halls and chapels.
Could there be some down there that God wants to lift up and send out to reach people that they know how to reach better than we do, with the gospel? But when we can get one or two of them into the assembly building, they don't feel too comfortable, do they? You know, we have this kind of, we brought out our culture into the assembly. And they, from a different type of a culture, I wonder, is that one of the reasons that Jonah never went and did the job he was supposed to do? And thirdly, could it be that he was prejudiced many Jews were.
They said, we are the people of God, the chosen. And those Gentiles, dogs, that's the word they use. They animal, subhuman. We are so far superior. Prejudice, racial prejudice. That's a terrible thing, you know. When my mother got saved at about fifty-eight years old before I did, All our friends were unfaithed with a great mission field. She's not a preacher, but praise God. She knows how to use her life for the Lord. She got hold of one of her old friends and said, Jesse, she said, I want you to know that you can come to know Christ.
He died on that cross for the sins of the whole world. Red and yellow, black and white. You can be saved. That woman, when she heard the colors mentioned, she said, Black? You mean there'll be some black people in heaven? Mom said, yeah. And she said, I don't want to go. Prejudice. And I don't want to go there. And my mother, being saved about a month, she said, well, I'm afraid you'll find a lot in the other place too. But prejudice. Well, we don't usually find that amongst believers. Praise God for that. But you know, we can be prejudiced.
We can have our little cultural groups within our assembly so that when somebody from another culture does come in, they just don't feel comfortable. We run our young people's meetings in a way which suits our culture. But when a fellow or a girl from another culture comes in, they just don't feel comfortable. Well, we don't worry about that. After all they have to come, if they don't stay, well, that's their point. The Lord said, I came to seek and to save a lot. And if it meant going right down to the depths of Calvary, he was willing to sacrifice everything.
Maybe the Lord needs you and I to take a look at our own assemblies and our own homes and decide, are we willing to sacrifice what we call our culture, our social strata? in order to reach those from these other races? Could it have been this racial prejudice which kept Jonah from doing what he should have done? Read Acts chapter two. Fifteen different countries represented. People from fifteen different nations, possibly fifteen different languages, groups. Fifteen different cultures made up the first shift.
That church was born with fifteen different cultural things, and God had to mold them to Jeff. As we got away from that and we've molded our assemblies and our individual homes into putting into Jeff the way we want things, it's not easy. Not at all. I was a young fellow. I was in Cape Town for a couple of years studying. That was thirty-five, thirty-seven years ago. And there was a separation of the races. Praise God, that's gone. Rapidly going, what's left of it. But in those days, a white fellow couldn't sit on the same seat as a black guy.
One day at the little post office, there was a young white man sitting on the steps next to a young black man about ten minutes. People walking down the street outraged. absolute look at this what's going on here where's this world coming to where's it all going to end where did it end that young black fella got saved she was got to be willing to go against those inbuilt prejudices which we don't always realize are there We've got to be willing to take a fresh look at the way we are running our assemblies and our homes and so on.
Will these people sit into this system we have? Do we need a change? Zambia got her independence in the nineteen sixty-four. There was a little English-speaking assembly in Lusaka, struggling along, all white. When we got independent, they tried to reach out to the Zambian community. A few came in, but they just didn't fit the cultural sort of set up in that attempt. And God had to move out many of those people who had been there one by one. Until finally there was only just a few families left who were not prejudiced.
And a tremendous work of God has been built up as a result. But he moved out, the ones who had that prejudice attitude. They couldn't use it. They were in the way. And I asked myself, do we stand at the threshold of unprecedented blessing? We looked at our assemblies. That assembly in the soccer was a struggling little group. Once they were able to overcome the prejudice. doors were open for floods of blessings. It's a thrilling assembly. There's young men in that assembly, bank managers and so on, who will be what they, when they get up to preach, would be accepted on any conference floor in the Western world.
They know the Word of God. They're out on Saturdays, the whole assembly in the streets, seeking people for Christ. Tremendous blessings. Perhaps you look at your assembly and you get a little discouraged and you say, well, you know, where our chapel is, the area is getting really run down. You don't have the people, they're not going to come in from the suburbs, twenty miles and drive into this place. We're in a run down part of the town. Run down? You mean surrounded by people of another culture? Has God given you a mission field right where you are?
He's brought them in and sent the others away so that you can go out and reach them for Christ. What are we going to do? Are we going to do what Jonah did? He paid the fare and went off. Are we going to do that? Are we going to go out to the suburbs and spend a lot of money and buy a house and eventually perhaps abandon even that place of meeting? And it's surrounded by a mission for you. We'll send our missionaries to the people of the other nations, for when they come and surround our chapel, and I'm not saying this critically, I'm saying it in love just to help us think through these things.
Unprecedented blessing. People say your assembly is dying out. Five or six people. Maybe not. I studied in England for a while. We went back there this time on our way here for a couple of weeks. Tiny little groups, struggling little assembly. I guess there's only about six to ten people in it. Dying out? No. You've been praying for the Kurds, haven't you? Most believers have been praying for the Kurdish people. That little attempt, which you've got as priorities right, God is now using to reach the church.
One of the kids in the Sunday school, only six kids in the Sunday school, contacted a Kurdish kid in his school. He could hardly speak English. He said, come to the Sunday school and he brought him. Different color, different culture, different language. But he understood a little English. And this little kid so enjoyed the Sunday school, he went and got ten of his friends. And the next week there were eleven Kurdish kids there. So what does this assembly do? We can't run this. Let's go to the suburbs and let someone else do it. Not at all. We said, well, ten of these kids don't speak English, so we better change our entire program.
We've got to be willing to change. We're going to fit into God's plan. We changed their program. They had some of the opening exercises together. Then they'd have the ten Kurdish kids on their own with the eleventh one and knew a bit of English and speak to them through interpretation. And they didn't play at Sunday school. They then went out to visit the home. And they found a whole Kurdish population around that dying assembly. Not dying at all. We had a letter from that dear young brother, one of the six. Just the other day he said, a swim. He said, two of the parents have trusted Christ. We're having a baptism next week.
There's a mission field on our door. Here was a mission field for Jonah. Unprecedented blessing, waiting. Could it be that his prejudice kept him from going out, getting to that mission field? Could it be that he wanted to be popular with his friends and not rock the boat? Could it be that his love of a... Spirit, life, and a comfortable home, kept him where he was, but instead of going where he should have gone, He should have gone five hundred miles northeast to Nineveh.
He packed his bags and he went fifty miles southwest to Joppa. And he got on a pleasure cruise. Oh, of course, if you'd ask him why, why? I've had such a job preaching over there in Israel, telling them about this coming blessing from God, restoring the kingdom and so on. I need a bit of a rest. Well, that's a reason. Of course, it could also be an excuse. And she is heart-worn right. And so I go back and forget everything we've been talking about, if you like, to what we said yesterday.
God loves you from straining me. These hindrance will fall away. And I'll go the right way and say this to her. Fortunately for Jonah, he was given a second jump. God came to him there in the belly of a fish of him. But before that ever happened, have you ever thought the result of Jonah's backsliding? The result among the people, verse five, the mariners were afraid. They cried every man to his God, his false God. They cast forth the wheres in the ship. They tried to lighten it and row.
Three things. They were fearful. Secondly, his backsliding caused them more than ever to be devoted to their false gods. Thirdly, they struggled on and thought somehow we're going to get to the end of the journey. And Jonah had the answer. And where was Jonah down in the bottom asleep, fast asleep, sailing up to heaven and flowery beds with ease? as he sang the other night. They wake him up.
He tells them the real reason. Then he says this. All right. Verse twelve. He says, take me up and cast me into the sea. I draw the drown. Die. Then go to those people in the middle. Would you rather die out than go to the people around you? Because Jonah was saved. And they took him up and threw him in the sea. But God. I love the but of Scripture. But God. God sent a fish. He wasn't going to let Jonah get out of his responsibilities.
That he did. A little bit of discipline first. And that fish. water. Shuck down that airless, slimy, long, dark passage, the peristaltus, to use a medical word, all the movement of those massive muddles and the fishes buried. Remember what it says in Isaiah, there is no peace, says my God to the wicked, primarily the unsafe. But I wonder, my dear brother and sister, and I ask myself, as you've had this conflict, Is there peace in my heart about the way I'm reaching out? Or has God disturbed me with the peristalsis of his word?
If so, then from the belly of the fish, let me do what Jonah did and cried unto God. From the belly of the fish, God brought him back and set him right back where he started. He said, okay, Jonah, arise, go to me. Unprecedented blessing. One hundred and twenty thousand people turn to God. Is that what God is saying to you and me? He's got the courage. God stirred up our heart to remind us of the love of God which will motivate us to come to Him at the end of this conference and say, Lord, take me.
A broken pot. I've lived my life, my ambition set on the wrong thing. Take me up, put me back on that part of the wheel, and make me over it. I'll show you there. Father, your Holy Spirit has challenged our hearts this week in a way we never expected. Help us in the quietness of our own heart in the light of Calvary, to re-evaluate our priorities, to re-evaluate everything about our lives, our outreach, our assembly, and help us, Father, to sit in the thine plan of reaching this world.
We remember the words of thy Son, I will build my church. Thank you, Father, for giving us the privilege of being workers together with thee. Yet we realize, even if we don't get involved, the work will go on. Father, we offer ourselves up as individuals, as assemblies, and ask that you will help us to fit into your plan, to reach the people for whom your son dies. And we ask it in His precious name. Amen.