Honest condition of the heart

--- Today, we get to study the final chapter of our women's Bible study called the Call of Compassion on the book of Jonah. And we love good endings in movies. We love good endings in novels. We even love a good joke with a good punchline. And at the end of chapter three, we had such a good ending to the book of Jonah. Jonah got a second chance. Jonah was successful in the mission God had given him to do. Nineveh got an opportunity to hear God's call of compassion. Nineveh got an opportunity to repent. They found the humility to repent. They were spared from judgment. Everything was perfect, all's well that ends well. And then we have to start Jonah chapter four, verse one, which begins with that three-letter word that always signals a change, but, but it displeased Jonah exceedingly. And he was angry. What displeased him? Well, back up to Jonah three, verse 10, when God saw what they did, what Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented from the disaster that he said he would do to them. And he did not do it. That is what displeased Jonah. And so we go into verse two, and he prayed to the Lord and he said, O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country, when I was home and comfortable? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me for it is better for me to die than to live. And we want to ask Jonah, would you tell us how you really feel about this? He's just a little bit dramatic. And in this book, we have seen a lot of emotional response from Jonah, wide range of emotions. Right now he's mad. He is exceedingly angry. He's the kind of angry that you need to call somebody and just bent to them. And so since cell service is so terrible in Nineveh, he called to God and he says to him, he goes, this is why I didn't want to come in the first place. I know you. I know what you're like. I know you have this long fuse before judgment. And I suspected this very thing would happen. I suspected that Nineveh would be spared. Do you know how bad that looks for me? Do you know how bad this looks on a resume for a prophet to say one thing and then another thing happens? And so he, he just vents to the Lord and we learn that in our life, living out our purpose that God has given us does not always make us look smart. It does not always make us look good and it does not always make us feel good to be obedient to the Lord. And if we get quiet for long enough, God may come and speak to us just like he did to Jonah about the condition of our heart in the moment. And that's why I titled this lesson, The Honest Condition of the Heart. What is the honest condition of the heart? When we look honestly at our hearts, Jonah was being honest and that is a good thing. And there's a lot of times that we need to look and say, where are these emotions coming from? Why do I feel this way? So God begins to speak to Jonah. He actually begins to confront him. And the Lord uses a interesting teaching method that we now call the Socratic method, where a teacher asks a series of questions to the student to get them to process and think about the response, to connect the dots, if you will. And so God begins asking questions. In verse 4, the Lord said, do you do well to be angry? And Jonah didn't even want to listen to the question or begin to respond. He just wanted to go off in a huff. And so in verse 5, Jonah went out of the city and he sat on the east of the city and he made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city. Now, occupationally, Jonah's job was done. It was finished. He completed the mission that God asked him to do. Emotionally, he is still very much entangled in that situation. He in fact is on emotional overload. He's been riding this emotional roller coaster for weeks, perhaps months, and it's about to get the best of him with his level of anger. One interesting little note here, it says that his choice of location, he says he went out to the east of the city, which means he's facing west. Now it's July right now as we're finishing this Bible study. And so in Ontario, if you cross the Snake River and you actually go up on the bluff to face the city and watch over it in July, from about four o'clock until seven o'clock, it is brutal. It is just like you're going to be completely miserable. And it says that God, or it says that Jonah made himself a booth, like some kind of a canopy to shade him. But I feel like this is just like when God came upon Adam and Eve and saw they had used big leaves to cover them, and he says, oh, people, I can do better than that. I feel like God's compassion is at play here. Like I can do better. Now the Lord God appointed a plant and he made it come up over Jonah that it might shade over his head to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. So God is quietly carrying on, quietly at work, providing for the comfort of Jonah. It was probably, maybe, a plant that we call the castor oil plant, which is native to that area. And it's in the spurge family of shrubs. It actually does grow very tall and it grows very swiftly, but it doesn't grow overnight. So again, this was a miraculous appointment on the Lord's part. And so now under the shade of this plant, Jonah's emotions changed to exceedingly glad. Why? His personal circumstances changed. That is the difference. And for a Christian, this should be a warning sign for us. When our emotions can change from angry or mad to glad, just because what affected us, our personal circumstances change, it should tell us that we have keyed in to the life below. We have keyed in to the horizontal life, which is natural for us because we have a sinful nature. But I love how Paul told the Colossians in

When we set our minds on our circumstances and our comfort level, we will ride this emotional rollercoaster. The condition of our heart is tied to what we see. Jonah, how ironic that he was exceedingly angry that people were destroyed, but he was exceedingly glad about a plant that provided for his comfort. Interesting. We get the sense here that God is waiting for Jonah to begin to see how self-serving his emotions are, how much they affect the condition of his heart. And so God is going to employ more aspects of his creation to drive that point home. And he calls in the W's. I call them the W's. The worm in the wind. Look at verse 7. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die and said, it is better for me to die than to live. So again, God begins to ask the questions. In verse 9, God said to Jonah, do you do well to be angry for the plant? And Jonah says, yes, I do well to be angry. Angry enough to die. And once again, we see that when somebody, when their emotional response is keyed into their comfort and their circumstances, over an extended period of time, we become unreasonable. That was an unreasonable statement to say, I am mad enough to die because of this plant. But we become unreasonable. And Jonah just felt like he just wanted to hold on to this anger that was brewing and finding more things to be angry about. And we look at this and we just say, Jonah, go home. Let it go. Go home. Your part is over. Let God do his part. Oh, we're not good at that, are we? We are not good at letting God do. part. We want control over the whole thing. And if we feel like we have lost control of some aspects surrounding our life, we hold tight. We hold on tight to it, just like we see Jonah doing. And God was hoping that Jonah would realize that more people needed to repent than just the Ninevites. Sometimes, sometimes God's people, even God's prophets, are the ones that need to repent. And remember we said repent just means to turn the other way, to turn around. Jonah needed to turn from the condition of his heart, which was his emotions were bundled up in his circumstances, and he needed to turn the other way and let it go. And just say, God, this is your program. This is your plan. I am just going to let it go. Verse 10, the Lord finishes up talking to Jonah saying, You pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. You pitied it because it served your own purposes. It gave you comfort. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle? I always kind of thought that hundred and twenty thousand persons was that's how big Nineveh was. But I do think, and most Bible scholars point out, that what God is saying here is, should I not pity that great city? Remember we said it was probably about a million people. And if you can't do that, can you at least pity the children? The hundred and twenty thousand that haven't even yet been taught, you know, the difference between right and left hand. And if you can't pity them, can you go for the animals? The cattle? I don't know what to think about the cattle. Like, you know, animal lovers have their opinion and ranchers have their opinion, and that is a very, very odd way to end a book. But the story closes with an open wound. We never hear the resolution between God and Jonah. We never hear. But this opens for us a dialogue in our Christian lives about what makes us happy and what makes us angry. Jonah was glad about things that positively affected his experience, and he was angry about things that he didn't think were just or right. So where are we today? What are the things today, July 3rd, 2020, what today makes you exceedingly glad and what makes you angry? What are the questions that God would come up with and say to me? What would he say to me? What's swirling around in my world that's just like masks? Would God say to me, do you do well to be angry or glad about this? Like, it's just a thing. It's so horizontal. It's so just about our circumstances. And the Lord would encourage us, set your mind on things above. Look at the big picture. Look at what I'm doing. Let these things go. Once again, the story of Jonah runs shockingly parallel to the parable that Jesus told about the prodigal son. You know, a couple weeks ago when we used that story, we were pointing out that Jonah and the younger son were both prodigals. They had both left. They had both disobediently left and suffered for it. Both of them came to their senses. Both of them said even the words, I will arise. I will go back. And so we saw that Jonah was actually just a parallel to the younger son. Now today we're going to read the story and see that Jonah has switched places. And now he sounds just like the older brother in the story. So Luke 15, it starts at verse 25 and I'll just read it to you. It goes like this. Jesus is telling this.

The father is taking the older son aside and saying, can you be glad about what I'm glad about? Can you lift your eyes above the circumstances which tell you an injustice has been served because he got a party with a fattened calf and I never got that. This isn't right. This isn't fair. But that's your circumstances. They build your emotions. Can you be glad about what I am glad about? That he was lost and now he has been found. I think that is one of the biggest blessings that we have in our Christian life with possessing the Holy Spirit. He will whisper these questions to us. Can you be glad about what I'm glad about? But it's one of the biggest challenges for us because we are so ingrained in the things that are below. So it is a challenge but it is a blessing for us. God wants us to know that he is on a rescue mission. He is on a call of compassion and he wants us to be glad about the things that he is doing. What is happening in your world right now that's causing you discomfort but it could potentially be playing into God's mission of mercy. Maybe the book of Jonah will open up our eyes to God's greater compassion toward the world and I hope that it will. Father we pray that. We just pause and pray that you would lift our eyes, take our little chin, lift our faces up, lift our eyes Lord to what you are doing. That we can build our even our emotional life based on what you are doing, what your plan is, your mission of mercy in the world. And that Lord we will fight against building the condition of our heart based on what affects us and instead gear in our emotions and gear in the condition of our heart to what pleases you. Lord thank you for this whole book, this whole study and we just look forward to being in the word again whenever that happens. In Jesus' name, Amen. ---