Jonah, the Reluctant Prophet - BSF PPKD Lesson 12
Passage Reading: Jonah 1-4
Does obeying God really matter? Does it matter if I submit to God's will or rebuff and run away from it? How can my little life make any difference in the larger scheme of things. And why should I be happy about God's grace and mercy with the deplorable peoples of the world. Shouldn't they get their just desserts?
Today, we have the un-prophet, the prophet who was a prophet in name but didn’t behave as a prophet should. He ran away from his mission and had to be dragged back to carry forth a message which has become the resounding cry of God in Christ to the nations in this Age of Grace.
Jonah was in a sense the antithesis of what a prophet should be like. Now before we start wagging our fingers against Jonah, we must take a step back and realize that Jonah’s story is a story of all of us in the church. There are many of us who are un-Christian as an "uncola" while freely going about thinking we are very Christian. We believe one thing but act in a totally different way, in many cases in opposition to the very things we know to be true about the heart of God. There are those who run away from God in body and those who run away from God in the spirit, but we won't get far because God is at the center of our most vital life purpose. Yes, Jonah’s attitude is nothing for us to snicker at as if we were looking at something peculiar and foreign to us: Jonah is US!
Let's look at what this means for us, and how we ought to live in repentance in the broader view of God's work. Let's look at God's eager desire to forgive those who seek repentance.
