God's Gift of Repentance
Sermon Manuscript
Jonah chapter three. We have seen Jonah receive the call to preach to the Ninevites which he does not want to do because he knows that this means God will show the Ninevites compassion which Jonah hates. Nineveh was a part of the Assyrian Empire which was the most evil and brutal empire ever to exist up to this point in recorded history. So, Jonah tried to flee from the presence of God by sailing in the opposite direction of Nineveh. God caused a storm to come upon the ship, the pagan sailors realized all this was Jonah’s fault, and they threw him overboard. That’s when the storm stopped and as Jonah sank into the ocean, a fish swallowed him. Jonah spent three days in the fish and the fish vomited him onto the shore close to Nineveh.
Last week we saw the breakthrough that Jonah had in the belly of the fish and now in chapter three we get to see one of the sweetest and encouraging passages in all of Scripture. We get to see the nature of repentance. I know many people hear the word repentance and don’t think of it as sweet or encouraging. Some people reduce repentance to an emotion instead of transformation. They think repentance just means to feel bad about what they did. Guilt without change. Others confuse repentance with self-improvement. A call to try harder, be better, or fix yourself. Others still hear repent as an angry, judgmental word. Repentance isn’t weakness, repentance isn’t just being a better sibling, a better child, a better spouse, a better friend, or a better person, and repentance certainly is not a sign of weakness. It’s an invitation to turn from death to life.
Martin Luther once said that “we stare at the doctrine of repentance like a cow at a new gate.” A cow, when it sees a new closed gate, just stands and confusingly stares at it instead of understanding what it is and why it’s there. People hear about repentance, but we don’t naturally understand or act on it. So, I want to use Luther’s language and see in this passage 1) How the gate opens, 2) How we walk through it, and 3) What lies on the other side of the gate.
- How the gate opens
When I say ‘repentance’ I mean ‘A gracious, Holy Spirit empowered turning of the whole person, mind, body, and heart, from sin and to God.’ If that is the gate, how is it opened? Through God’s persistent pursuit of His children. The chapter opens up with pretty much the same command God gave Jonah in chapter one. Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time, saying, 2 “Arise,go to lNineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” - Jonah 3:1,2 The same command God gave that command to Jonah in chapter one and Jonah said, “No.” But God didn’t write him off. He didn’t strike him down. He didn’t let the storm or the ocean kill Jonah. God was persistent and is again giving Jonah the same instructions.
If anything is clear from the story of Jonah it is that God is relentlessly persistent with His children… with Jonah and with us. He pursues Jonah’s attention through the storm, He pursues Jonah’s repentance through the fish, and He now pursues Jonah’s obedience by giving him the same command a second time. God’s persistence is the soil in which repentance grows.
God’s persistence is really just another facet of His grace. Instead of writing us off, He pursues us until we can ignore and disobey Him no longer. But, we need to ask the question: why does God need to pursue us so vigorously? Because we don’t naturally repent. We stare at that gate like a cow.
There is an interesting shift happening in our American culture that I think helps us to see the gate a bit more clearly. America has traditionally been known as a guilt-innocence culture. This means that there are rules and consequences if you break them. But, many sociologists are pointing out that we are shifting into an honor-shame culture. In an honor-shame culture, a person’s identity and morality are defined by their communities more than conscience or law. And in these communities, you are welcomed in very fast, but once you mess up, you dishonor the community and you are cast out. No second chances. No grace. This kind of culture used to be limited to the Middle East, North Africa, South and East Asia, and parts of Spain, Italy, and Greece. But now there are noticeable shifts in the way the younger generations increasingly think in terms of belonging and exclusion more than right and wrong. You can see the ways social media creates smaller niche communities and how it has introduced a new honor-shame dynamic through public cancellations, call-out culture, and conflict entrepreneurship.
So, a guilt-innocence culture says, “I broke the rules and I need forgiveness” but an honor-shame culture says, “I lost face and I need to be accepted again.” The reason it’s hard to repent of our offenses against God in guilt-innocence language is because we think we make the rules and struggle to see that we have broken them. In honor-shame language, we think we choose the community standards, we don’t see that we have lost face, and we struggle to see that we need acceptance. So God persistently pursues us to show us that He makes the rules and we have broken them…that He defines community standards and that we have betrayed them…that we have lost face and need acceptance…and behind the gate is more forgiveness and acceptance than we could ever possibly imagine and the strongest, most encouraging community we could ever ask for. The gate isn’t self-improvement, it isn’t trying harder, it isn’t judgmental, and it isn’t weakness. It’s an invitation to life. And God is going to pursue us in any way He needs to to help us to see that that gate is not arbitrary, it is not punitive, and it isn’t controlling. It’s a gate that leads from death to life. Tim Keller said, “There is no activity that takes more human greatness, nor any activity that produces more human greatness than repentance.”
So, how do we walk through it?
- How we walk through the gate
We walk through by hearing, believing, and turning. We looked at Jonah’s repentance in the last chapter and now we get to see the repentance of the Ninevites. Jonah obeys God’s command and goes to Nineveh. The text says that the city was exceedingly great and that it took three days to journey across it. Basically everyone agrees that the city was great, but that it didn’t take three days to walk across. What that most likely means is that it took one day to go through the process of getting in, another day to go through all the formalities as a formal delegate from Israel, and then on the third day, Jonah could get down to business.
And what did Jonah say when he got down to business? “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Some have called this the worst presentation of God’s offer of grace ever. Others have said that Jonah was still irritated that God’s grace could go to Nineveh so he just got to the worst part fast. Others have said that his message was longer, but the heart of it was recorded here. Honestly, we don’t know, but what we do know is that the Ninevites heard.
And I actually think this is pretty encouraging. Sharing God’s message of grace in Jesus with others can be intimidating. But, if God is the one sending us and God is the one persistently pursuing the lost, then we can trust that God will use the best we got. Some of you have heard this, but I have a friend named Isaac who led a college student at Ole Miss to the Lord about eight years ago using the wrong name the entire time! Both DL Moody, one of the great American evangelists of the 20th century and Charles Spurgeon, one of the greatest preachers of the 19th century, both said that they came to faith through (and I quote) ‘The worst evangelistic talk ever.’
The first step through the gate is hearing. Hearing that Jesus died for you. You broke the divine rules and deserve eternal consequences. Jesus, though, kept the rules, but took on the consequences for our rule breaking and gave us the privileges of his rule keeping. You are guilty, but the innocent One bore your guilt so you could be seen as innocent. You lost face and deserve the shame of being cast out and cancelled. Jesus showed God only honor, but willingly took on our shame on the cross. He was cancelled from God’s love so that we could be eternally accepted.
There are many ways to explain the gospel to many cultures and struggles. But, at the end of the day, we share because they must hear. And we trust God to work from there. And that is what he did in Nineveh. The whole city from top to bottom, both peasant and king, heard and believed. They wore sack cloths which were cloths made out of goat hair that were very itchy to show remorse. They fasted. They even made their animals fast and wear sackcloths. To my knowledge, that is the first recorded instance of people dressing up their pets.
But, it’s hard to ignore the fact that this was likely the largest mass conversion the world has ever seen. The unwilling prophet became the most successful prophet of all time. The Ninevites heard and they believed. Then, thirdly, they turned. tLet everyone turn from his evil way and from uthe violence that is in his hands.- Jonah 3:8b They weren’t just saying yes with their mouths, they were saying yes with their hearts and actions as well. Remember my definition of repentance? A gracious, Holy Spirit empowered turning of the whole person, mind, body, and heart, from sin and to God. This is what is happening.
Maybe you are here today and you have seen the gate, but you have not walked through it. You have heard, but you have not believed and turned. Well, today you can walk through that gate. You can respond like the Ninevites by turning from your sin and turning to Jesus.
And for all of us who walk through that gate, what will we find?
- What lies on the other side of that gate
Three things. God’s mercy, God’s calling, and God’s commissioning. First, God’s mercy. Verse ten. 10 When God saw what they did, xhow they turned from their evil way, xGod relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. - Jonah 3:10 In the old King James, it doesn’t say God relented, but that God repented which raises an important question. If repenting is turning from our sin, does that make God sinful? No. When the King James was written it used the language people spoke in the 17th century. Back then, ‘repent’ was a common way of saying someone changed their minds. But, that raises another question: Does God change his mind? If God is all knowing, why would He ever change His mind? God not only doesn’t change His mind, God does not change.
The thing that changed was the Ninevites. This wasn’t a mood swing on God’s part. God consistently responds to unrepentance one way and repentance another. Think about God as sunlight. Sunlight is good for plants and bad for worms. It accomplishes different things based on what it is shining on. But it isn’t changing.
So, when the Ninevites repented, God responded as He always does: with mercy. When anyone repents and turns to God, He delights in showing them mercy and grace. Mercy to walk through all the highs and lows of this life with Him and grace to be with Him for all eternity. God is always loving and always just. He does not change. We do. Either we will bear the judgment of our shame and guilt and forever be exiled or Jesus bears the judgment of our shame and guilt and we will be forever accepted. But, for those who repent and follow Jesus, we are welcomed into fellowship with God as honorable and innocent children forever accepted by the Father. That is a mercy that we will never fully deserve or appreciate.
Secondly, on the other side of that gate is God’s calling. When I say calling, I mean the call as saved ones to turn from evil and walk in obedience and holiness. The Ninevites turned from their evil. Grace is opposed to earning, but not opposed to effort. We are saved by God’s grace and then the fruit of that grace is our walking in obedience to God.
Christians have always struggled with this. In the early 2000’s there was this large shift in Christian theology responding to the moralism of 20th century fundamentalism, but the pendulum swung way too far the other way calling any kind of focus on obedience legalism. What was missed was the fact that it is in the realm of our obedience as saved Christians that we more fully experience the mercy God has already shown us.
So, if you are Christian and struggling with some very specific sin. God will pursue you to repentance. Not for your salvation, but for your joy. Not to just keep you in line, but to keep you in love. And one of the greatest gifts he has given us in this call is community. We are saved into the body of Christ. So, this repentance happens best in community. We repent to God and we confess to other believers. I have had many times in my Christian life where I was struggling with sin and it never ceased to amaze me that the moment I confessed this sin to another Christian, the desire to sin somehow lost its grip on me. It was much harder to say the sin than to stop the sin.
If you are a new Christian, one part of this obedience means getting baptized. Being baptized is a calling to publicly show that, like the Ninevites, you have received God’s mercy. To publicly declare that, like Jonah you have been given a second chance. Just as Jonah had been delivered from the depth of the ocean, you have been delivered from the depth of your sin. Just as Jonah had risen from the sea through the fish, so you will rise from your death through resurrection. And this is possible because just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of that fish, Jesus spent three days in the belly of the earth only to resurrect, proving that He is God and our sins are forgiven. If baptism is the next step for you, we are having baptisms on November 30th and after the sermon, I’ll show you how you can take that next step.
Then, the third thing that lies on the other side of that gate is God’s commissioning. I said this last week, but we are saved to be sent. Jonah is saved and the first thing God says is ‘go.’ We can think about obedience mostly in terms of stop. Stop doing something. And, yes, there are things we need to stop, but that really only happens in the context of ‘go.’ God commissions us to ‘go’ love Him with all our heart, mind, and strength. To ‘go’ love our neighbors as ourselves. To ‘go’ bring the gospel to the nations. The ‘stop’ without the ‘go’ is bootstrap religion that won’t bring anyone joy. But, when we realize that we are commissioned by God into His mission of redemption of humanity…when we realize that we are both products and vehicles of that redemption…the ‘stop’ begins to come much more naturally.
There is a big difference between telling a child to stop being selfish and to go and make friends. When the going is the focus, stopping the selfishness behavior becomes a way to get something better. In the same way, there is a big difference between telling a spouse to stop nagging and to go love your spouse. In the same way, when we see our call to go love God and love our neighbor, believers and unbelievers alike, the joy of going becomes stronger than the challenge of stopping.
And it doesn’t mean that we will feel ready, because we won’t. When Jonah was a big fish loogie standing on the beach, God didn’t say, “Boy, you must be tired. Why don’t you take a break and rest?” God’s commission isn’t for the well-rested, it isn’t for the elite, it isn’t for people with extra time or extra money, it isn’t for the extraverts, it isn’t for the well-spoken, and it isn’t for the theologically trained. It’s for anyone who repents and turns to Jesus. God doesn’t want your gifts, he wants your will. He gave us gifts to use, but He works more through our weaknesses than our strengths.
Have you ever noticed that the people who are the biggest advocates for helping in areas like addiction, drunk driving, sex trafficking, abortion, or cancer awareness usually have something in common? They have come through it. They are often the ones who have struggled with addiction, have lost someone to a drunk driver, have been sex trafficked, have had an abortion, or had cancer. They have a profound sense of their weakness and loss and that drives them to help others in the same situation. Well, what are we commissioned into? Going to those who need to repent and experience God’s mercy. And what have we all experienced acutely? Our own sin and God’s rich mercy. That’s our main qualification.
So, I want to finish by asking you to think of one person in your life who needs to hear this. One very specific person. The thought of talking to them might scare you as much as Jonah going to the Ninevites. Maybe it’s as simple as inviting them to come to church and having lunch after. And at that lunch, what is one way you can connect your need for God’s mercy to theirs? What is one question that might open the door to you sharing your story of repentance?
If God has saved you, He wants to use you. Don’t center your commissioning around you and your fears, center them around God’s love and power. If He has brought you through the gate, you now have the honor and privilege of showing others the way.
