Arise, Go and make disciples...
Jonah • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 1 viewWhy do we need to plant churches? Because God loves people. God loves the city.
Notes
Transcript
Jonah 1:1-3
Jonah 1:1-3
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
Introduction
Introduction
We are a missional church. A church plant. According to my brother Ben Connelly,
“Church planting at its best is the starting of new local churches for the sake of seeing the gospel go forward in new places in a new way.”
The process of church planting involves evangelism, the discipleship of new believers, the training of church leaders, and the organization of the church according to the New Testament model. Church planting is a specific focus within the larger work of “missions.” The ultimate goal of church planting is to glorify the Lord and meet him on his mission to seek and save the lost.
As a church plant, we heed the call of Christ in Matthew 28:18-20
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Church plants are missional churches. We are under that same Spirit led, gospel centered, kingdom minded, disciple making mission of God.
God is a God on mission. And God has sent the church on mission. “As the Father has sent me,” Jesus said, “even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). The church itself is not the kingdom, but is a sign that the kingdom of God has begun on earth, and is a foretaste of the consummated reign to come. Therefore, missional churches are dedicated to co-laboring with Christ on his mission to be fruitful and multiply communities of life and light in enemy occupied territories.
Brothers and sisters that’s what we are doing here. Building each other up and instructing one another through the Word of God to understand this call on our life. The Lord speaks this plainly in the story of Jonah. The book begins:
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying,
The word of the Lord came, is a phrase that is mentioned seven different times in the book of Jonah, a number that is ripe with biblical meaning as the number of perfection, or completion. We do not really know anything about Jonah or his father Amittai outside of this book. But the Old Testament speaks of Jonah as a real man who lived Gath-hepher, in between the towns of Nazareth where Jesus grew up and Cana where he turned water into wine. We have the tendency to write off Jonah as somewhat of a fairy tale of a man eaten by a fish, but that is not how the entire counsel of God views him, so that is not how we should view him.
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.”
Great city does not mean awesome city, it just means big. But here the Lord calls Jonah to stand up and go to make disciples in Nineveh. Call out against them for their evil or disaster has come up before me, essentially what Jesus instructed us in the great commission go and make disciples by teaching them all I have commanded you. And it harkens back even further to the creation of mankind in
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
God said be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with more image bearers that know their creator and represent his image over every living thing that moves on earth. Or more pointedly, create more communities of people that share my image where I have placed you.
Go to Nineveh, that mighty city, and teach them all I have commanded you.
God loves the city.
God loves people.
He loves the city, because there are a lot of people in the city.
Whether we admit it or not, we tend to think of the city as evil, and full of wicked people. And we might not be wrong, for God says that the evil that was happening in Nineveh had come up to him. But when we think of the city and all of its wickedness, what is the first thing we do?
Yeah, usually run to somewhere far away. We currently see this. People are moving from big cities for a little slice of the country. For somewhere a little less noisy. For somewhere a little less crowded. Which is also not a bad thing, John Mark Comer says that “to be more like Jesus will require that we slow down, that we become present to the moment, that we breathe.”
The country can help us accomplish all of these things. But what we see in Jonah and in the illustration of people leaving the city is that they are actually running towards self, towards comfort, not towards God.
And the problem is, we think we are running away from our problems, when in fact we are just bringing our problems with us. C.S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce, describes hell in a similar way:
As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he's been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbour . Before the week is over he's quarrelled so badly that he decides to move. Very likely, he finds the next street empty because all the people there have quarrelled with their neighbours -and moved. So he settles in. If by any chance the street is full, he goes further. But even if he stays, it makes no odds. He's sure to have another quarrel pretty soon and then he'll move on again. Finally he'll move right out to the edge of the town and build a new house.
Lewis goes on to share that hell is full of empty houses on empty streets. That everyone lives light years away from each other and they are still unhappy. That is an image of the people we see moving away from the city. They think they are coming to get rid of things in their life, and they might be, but they also bring all of that trouble in some sense with them. We think of the evil and wickedness that is in the city and we run somewhere far away. In fact, the Word tells us that Jonah ran away to Tarshish, a town that is spoken of several times in Scripture, but most of the time implies somewhere a great distance away. So when God called Jonah to go to the mighty city to teach them, Jonah did what so many of us do, ran somewhere far away. Somewhere more peaceful, somewhere that makes us more comfortable.
But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
Here we see that Jonah didn’t just run away from the city, but he ran away from the presence of the Lord. And everytime the Bible capitalizes LORD, it is his his name, Yahweh. We are told in Scripture that there is nowhere we can go from the presence of the Lord
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light about me be night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is bright as the day,
for darkness is as light with you.
My brother Caleb who pastors a church plant in Fort Worth, said to me that this image reminds him of a child in their bedroom that has pulled the covers over their head. They think for certain they cannot be seen because everything around them is dark, but God sees, God knows. Jonah is like a child that has covered up his head and ran away from the only being he cannot flee. He’s working so hard to avoid God’s call and remain in his comfort. We will see where that will get him, soon enough.
As a church plant we are going to have moments where we want to flee, moments where we would like to run off to the wilderness for some peace and quiet and think that are problems are going to stay where we left them. But as Jonah will teach us, God loves the city, God loves people, and God has called his children to do the same. So, we need to begin listening to and learning from our father. We need to surrender to his call that he might shape us to his will. God wants us to go on mission and make disciples of all who do not know him. God does not want us to run away from this call. But lean into him.
Look at Matthew 4
Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written,
“ ‘Man shall not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”
Jesus demonstrates that whether in the city, or in the country, the Devil is there. He is tempting us with the lie that peace is found in the wilderness. Peace is found in God, and God has called us to the city. May we remember the call of our Lord, that man does not live on the things that comfort us alone, but man lives on the Word of God.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Jesus is the Word. He went to the cross so that we would not have to rely on our comforts. He went to the cross so that we could find peace apart from our self and our circumstance. He went to the cross that we might face the evil and wickedness in the mighty city with the power of the gospel that Jesus Christ saves sinners, of whom I am the foremost. We are a church plant. We are the light of the world in Christ. Let us demonstrate that light with our lives. Let us demonstrate that light with our love. God loves the city because God loves people, let us take up the call to go into the city and teach all that he has commanded us with our lives, and our service. May God bless and build his church and his kingdom beginning with our desire to answer that call.