Sermon Transcript
This sermon— Bridges has had a very important part in my life. As you’ve heard, I’m a pastor. I’m both a missionary, co-founded an organization with one of your former missionaries, King Anderson, dear friend of mine who passed away a few years ago. And I’ll be sharing a little bit more about that at the luncheon as well, some of the work that we’ve been doing with refugees and the poor and the homeless in the South Bay area. Well, about 20— not, not about, exactly 23 years, 1 month, 20 days ago and 5 hours or so, I stood on the stage not to give a sermon and not to lead a worship song, which would have been horrible, although I did sing a song.
I stood on this stage— it looks, looks slightly different, it was about 2 or 3 carpets ago— to say I do to my current wife, Denise Bell. You’ll see her up here. You might recognize, some of you guys who’ve been here a long time, that is actually your sanctuary. You may not remember it because that was probably 2 or 3 carpets ago, and a few remodels. It looks a lot nicer now.
Thank you very much. Good job, guys. But I did— I married Denise Bell. Now she’s Denise Turani. We have 3 amazing kids who you saw in the picture earlier.
So this church has had a significant impact in my life, both meeting my wife as well as being married in this sanctuary. Also, another wonderful thing I want to share, a sweet connection that I have with all of you, is due to the vision and the the dreams and the work of your pastors and elders years ago. You see, there was a church in San Jose that was not doing so well. It was under 50 people. The pastor did not want to continue much longer and did not know what to do.
And if it wasn’t for this church praying and deciding that it was time to replant this church, and not only replant it but financially support it, not only to financially support support it, but to send 150 members of your church to go and populate this now small church. And not only that, to send 2 pastors full-time supporting them to replant what was then Saratoga Avenue Baptist Church, which is now called Westgate Community Bible Church, or Westgate Church, which is where I pastor. And I’ve been pastoring for now almost 14 years. So your church had this vision not only with Westgate, but you’ve also done this with Highway, you’ve done this with numerous other churches, you’ve this through your missions program, I can assuredly tell you that hundreds of thousands of lives have been impacted for the gospel, for water, for love, for healing, for medicine because of those decisions that you guys made to not just be selfish and keep everything here on your campus, but to develop other campuses and bless other ministries and to send your pastors and congregations. So kudos to all of you congregants who’ve supported that to the pastors and elders who had this incredible vision to do so.
I have been a beneficiary of that now, having served on this staff for 14 years as well. Let me pray as we begin our service together. God, may the words of our mouths and the meditation of our hearts always be pleasing to you. God, speak to us today through your scripture. Speak to us today through your love.
Speak to us today through your Holy Spirit. Spirit and guide us into the truth. In Jesus’ name, amen. I want to begin with my journey that began in the country of Iran. I was born there in 1975.
My family was fairly wealthy. They had a company. We had a large house in the center of Tehran. Everything was going well. Again, my family had taken care of us, and if there was anything that we wanted, we could have purchased at that time.
However, in 1979, there was a revolution in my country. A more radical Islamic government took over, which was shocking for my family because they weren’t extreme religious people. And then a year later, Saddam Hussein tried to invade my country in 1980 and started the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted for 8 years and killed over a million people. As a result of this, my family and I decided— I was very young, I was only 6 at that time— to escape Iran. And we did.
We went to the first country that would accept us, to give us a visa, was Spain. And so we went to Spain, and I— in Spain I grew up, I went to first grade there, I actually learned English at the American School of Barcelona. My favorite department store, my favorite store of all time there was called El Corte Inglés. You’ll see this building right before this slide, and this is a giant multi-story shopping center, if you want to call it that. Every floor is something different.
One floor is fruit, the other one is clothing, then furniture, then electronics, electronics, then toys, anything you could want is in this one thing called El Corte Inglés. And this is in Barcelona, there’s multiple of them in Spain. And so my family, as we would do often on a weekend, we would go after school, we would go shopping and get our supplies for that week. And we would always say, they would always say to me, ’cause they knew I was the one who would run away sometimes, was, Keyvon, stay close by, we don’t want you to get lost. And I’d say, okay, I will.
And one day, as we were in the toy section, you know, they reminded me, okay, Vaughn, make sure you stay close to us. Okay, I will. What do you do when you’re in a toy section? You wander off and you start looking for more toys, right? And I did that, and I look around 5 minutes later, my parents are gone.
And I start frantically running around the toy section, I cannot find them. I run downstairs to the next floor, I run upstairs to the next floor. I mean, I was going up and down. 30 minutes later, I was still lost. And I finally sat down, I started crying in the toy section, because I thought, how am I going to live?
I have to provide for my life now. I have, as a 5-year-old, 6-year-old now, I have to make— I have to get a job. I can’t survive without having a job. So a 6-year-old, what does a 6-year-old do to make a living, right? I’m contemplating never seeing my parents again, right?
I’m going through all these scenarios that a 6-year-old goes through. In his— in their wild imaginations, right? And as I’m crying and, and talking to myself about my life and how it’s going to be without my parents, my parents walk up. They’re crying. We hug, we cry, and they say, where were you?
I said, I was looking for you. They said, we told you to stay near us. And I said, I know, but the toys are so much fun.
So my parents were right. I didn’t listen to them. And that was one of the first times I got really truly lost because I didn’t pay attention to them. A second story I want to share with you was after a year of living in Spain, God brought us to the United States to— actually, I landed in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County, Corte Madera. And we had to give up a lot of things in Iran and eventually in Spain to be able to make it to the US, but we pursued freedom and God opened up the doors to come here and get the education that my parents wanted.
Both my parents were highly educated intellectuals and they wanted us to have the same opportunities in education. They knew it wouldn’t happen in Iran. And it would be a little bit more difficult in Spain. So we came to San Francisco Bay Area in 1982. And when I was a junior in— no, I’m sorry, when I was in 7th grade in junior high school, I got my first official job interview.
I was asked to go and be an instructor in the Aikido class for the summer school. I’d done that several years as an elementary age student. I was pretty proficient in this martial arts. And so I had to go get interviewed to become a summer summer school aid. And so my mom, for some reason, was not able to drive me that day.
I think at that time we only had one car that my parents shared, and my dad was at work. So the only way to get me there was by bus, and I think my sister was not feeling well that day, so she’s like, you gotta take the bus on your own. And so she said, okay, I’m gonna take you to the bus station, I’m gonna give you the instructions of how to get there, and I’ll give you just the amount of right money to be able to go on the bus. I said, okay, you’ll get a round-trip ticket. Okay, so I get on— so she stood me on top on the street and she says, you need to stand right here at this bus stop.
Do you see this bus stop? I said, yes. You need to stand right here. Bus 22 will come and it will take you and you will go this direction and you will go to your school. It will drop you off right in front of your school.
There’s a bus stop. Do you understand those directions? Yes, Mom, I understand those directions. What are you gonna do? I’m gonna stand right here.
The bus is coming. It will take me and drop me off at my junior high Yes, repeat it again. So I repeated it again. I will stand right here and the bus will come. We’ll make it to the junior high school.
Okay, so very simple instructions, right? Well, I waited 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, and the bus wasn’t there.
But all of a sudden I saw the bus, but my mom was wrong. It wasn’t on this side of the street, it was on the other side of the street. Yeah, those of you guys who’ve taken buses know what I’m talking about. So I quickly ran in front of the bus, right, to get on the other side of the street to get on the bus. I said, is this bus 22?
Yes, get on. Well, I was supposed to go to my junior high school. I ended up 20 miles away in another city. I kept thinking, wow, that’s odd that it’s going this direction. Why is it getting on the highway?
Why is it going to another city? I thought, oh, for sure it’s gonna turn It didn’t. It dropped me off in Mill Valley, a town south of us. I’d never been to Mill Valley on my own, and we get to the last station and the bus driver comes up to me and says, Kevon— he didn’t know my name— says, sir, you need to get off this bus. Why?
It’s the last stop. You’ve only paid to get to the last stop. Okay. I did. I was too embarrassed to tell him where I was supposed to go.
So this is it. This is the end of the line. So I get off the bus. Now I am lost. I have no money.
Don’t know what to do. And again, should have listened to my mom. And I didn’t realize that if you get on the bus on the wrong side of the street, it will take you to a completely different direction in a different city. So I had to ask people in the streets for money, right? I’m asking for quarters, please, quarters.
Back then there was these things called payphones. Those of you who are younger do not understand this, but we did not have cell phones to guide us. So I had to beg, borrow, and get some money from people. And I called my mom And I call her and say, Mom, you need to pick me up. Where are you?
I don’t know, ask some people around you. And so I did. Long story short, I gave directions enough that my mom and dad finally had to come pick me up, and they were fuming mad, right? I missed my interview, first of all. Secondly, I was in a lost city, and they thought I was crazy for getting on the wrong bus.
And then my mom said, didn’t I tell you to stand right here and take bus 22? I said, yeah. Bus, but bus 22 came on the other side of the street and I didn’t know what to do. And I said— and I, and I just— I, I was too nervous to miss that bus. So long story short, I had a lot of adventures as a child of not listening to my parents and taking their directions.
And this leads us to the scriptures that we’ll discuss together today. It’s the book of Jonah, another man who doesn’t pay attention or take instructions very well when God gives him very clear instructions of what to do. So let’s read the word together in Jonah chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. It says, the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish.
He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. So you’ll see in this next image where Joppa is. This is where he went down to the port, and God has given him clear instructions to go and preach against the city of Nineveh that they may repent because they’ve done some awful things. Now Nineveh is 550 miles inland from Joppa, or almost anywhere from that coast.
What does he do? He gets on a boat and goes 2,500 miles away to Tarshish, which is in southern Spain. They believe that’s where the city that he was headed for. So clearly Jonah does not take instructions very well, like I didn’t in taking that bus that one day. This was around 785 BC.
And you wonder, why did he get on a boat when God gave him such clear instructions of what to do? Why would he get on the boat and go that far away? This was the Assyrian Empire time. The Assyrian Empire, which lasted for about 700 years, from about 1365 BC to 609 BC, was a large and very destructive empire, very evil empire. They were brutal in how they treated some of their subjects.
If you want to see how brutal they were, you can look up Ashurbanipal and see his story and read about his life. He was one of the kings of Assyria. Ashurbanipal. So why did he hate the Assyrian Empire so much that he would run away 2,500 miles away from the direction that he should have been going, which is only 550 miles away? We’re not given that answer, but what we do understand is that Jonah almost missed his bus from the rest of the story that we’ll see.
A lot of it had to do with fear, some of it had to do with selfishness, but mostly it had to do because of Jonah’s hatred despise for the Assyrian people and the Assyrian Empire. You would want to equate this to modern-day ISIS or Al-Qaeda or Nazis and how they treated people. Even Hamas not too long ago that we were seeing in the news every day. Jonah had a very hard time receiving God’s mercy for himself, but also receiving God’s mercy for the Ninevites. You see, I believe that most people, when they read the book of Jonah, because of Pinocchio, we focus on the fish.
It’s the big fish story, right? And so much energy and focus is given on the fish and maybe the miracle of how he was able to survive, or lots of great imagery there about Jesus and the 3 days in the belly of the whale and things like that, that we miss the actual incredible story of God’s mercy that he wants to share with people. The story is really about God. It’s not that much about Jonah. Jonah is actually the disobedient prophet.
He’s the prophet who rejects Jesus, our God’s call in his life. He is a prophet that runs away from God. And this story is about, unlike other prophets who spoke the words of God, this was more about his disobedience, but God’s mercy despite his disobedience.
We see in Matthew, Jesus refers to the story in Matthew 12:40, just as Jonah was in the whale’s belly for 3 nights, so the Son of Man shall be 3 nights in the heart of the earth. It’s a resurrection story, isn’t it? The story of Jonah is giving us an image of what’s to come. Jesus is going to die and rise again. Be buried for 3 days, and then what happens?
There was a resurrection. What happens to Jonah? He’s swallowed, dies, and in 3 days he is resurrected on the beaches to begin his journey to Nineveh. It’s an incredible imagery that we see. Jesus refers to it.
So if Jesus refers to an Old Testament story, there’s something powerful in that story. And there’s some— if you want to get into deep theology, for those of you guys who don’t go to seminary, I won’t get into the, the words and etymology of that story, but it even says that he cried out from Sheol. He cried out from the depths of hell to God to have mercy on him. And God does. God does have mercy on him.
But we, again, we focus so much on the fish, we miss God’s mercy. The point of this story was God’s love for the people of the world.
Again, Jonah had a very difficult time receiving that mercy and also giving that mercy. But eventually, God wakes him up, obviously resurrects him, gives him a second chance, and says, now, will you go to Nineveh and preach the truth? He goes but he’s not very happy, is he? If you read the story, he is consistently angry at God, consistently rejecting God. This is a prophet.
We see him act like a little child sometimes. When God says do this, he wants to do that. My parents said stay here, I ran and did the other thing. Very similar. So God goes, he goes to Nineveh and gives arguably the best or the worst sermon in history.
It’s arguable which it was. He gives in Hebrew a 5-word sermon. Imagine me giving a 5-word sermon. Some of you guys might be like, that’d be great, very memorable, and we get to go home early and have lunch.
Imagine if I stood here and gave a 5-word sermon, dropped the mic, and I walked off the stage, right? That’s what he did. This is the words that he shared in Hebrew: In 40 days, destruction is coming. There’s a little contraction there. In 40 days, destruction’s coming.
Drops the mic, walks off. Doesn’t give an explanation of who God is. Doesn’t give a sermon on the history of the Jews. Doesn’t give a sermon on their disobedience and how God wants to show mercy. 5-word sermon in Hebrew.
Why?
My personal thought, he didn’t want them to repent.
He didn’t want to listen to God. He could have given a long sermon. He could have explained all kinds of mysteries to them. He was a prophet. He knew the Scriptures very well.
He did not want them to repent. Why? Because he wanted God to destroy them. So he gave the world’s shortest sermon, hoping that they would reject him or kill him or something, and they would be destroyed.
But what happens if you read the story? The opposite happens. It says the people began to repent, and the word began to spread throughout the kingdom of Assyria, even getting to the ear of the king.
The king has a transformation. He calls for a prayer and a fast. He says, not only do I want every human being, but I want every animal, every sheep, every donkey, every duck, every chicken to repent, and all of them are going to fast. They made the animals not eat for a few days. That’s how crazy it was.
It was full repentance of an entire nation 5-word sermon. It’s your call. Was it the best sermon ever given or the worst sermon ever given?
In fact, when Jonah was thrown off the ship, it says that they prayed and they repented when they threw him into the waters. The Ninevites repented, including the king. They had a greater spiritual transformation in this story than Jonah did. Think about that. An evil empire king has a greater encounter with God, and the shipmates of his have a greater encounter with God than Jonah.
It’s pretty powerful, isn’t it?
Right now, on a global scale, we’re seeing the destructive effects of hatred and unforgiveness, aren’t we? Every day in the news, you hope that there’s going to be something more hopeful, but it seems to get worse.
Hatred and unforgiveness are destroying our world.
We don’t know what Jonah’s hatred was. I can guess. As I mentioned to Asher Baneh-Pal, the Syrian Empire was pretty evil. They destroyed the Jews. They decimated them.
They began spiking people, burning them alive.
It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to believe that he has this deep hatred because family members of him were killed. We don’t know. God doesn’t reveal to us why he has held on to such levels of hatred, but it was so deep that he didn’t want them to repent. He wanted them to be destroyed. So we know it’s something very deeply personal that affected him that would make this prophet want to see Nineveh destroyed and the Assyrian Empire destroyed.
You’ll see this image of Hamas, you’ll see this image of Ukraine.
This is our reality, a world of hate where countries invade other countries, people kill people and women and babies without any care or recourse. It’s a world of hatred and unforgiveness that we live in, very similar to that time with the Syrian Empire and Jonah. How do we respond to such hate? It was shared a little bit earlier with the Great Commandments. I believe there’s the 3 biblical loves that we could all learn from.
How we respond to such hate is through loving God, loving our neighbors, and loving one another. These are biblical values. You just heard the scriptures in Matthew 11:36. This is the first and greatest commandment. And this is to love, love, love the Lord your God.
And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. So we see that, right? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. And hang on to these 2 commandments. In Galatians 6:10, it says, therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, all the whole world, especially those who belong to the family of God.
The believers. So it says love one another, but also love the world, and don’t forget to love God. I believe this: loving God can be fairly easy. Loving other believers comes pretty naturally for us. But loving our neighbors, especially our enemies, is a much harder task, isn’t it?
That’s what Jonah’s called to do. Jonah. Go love your enemies. No, God. Jonah, go love your enemies.
No, God. Jonah, go love your enemies.
No. His response was no over and over again. It’s much harder to love our enemies than it is to love our friends and fellow believers, isn’t it? I spoke about a decade ago at a church not too far from here. I shared my story.
During a Sunday morning sermon. And after the sermon, many people wanted to come say hi and greet me and say hello. And this woman waited patiently in the back and she waited until everyone else had said hello and she came up and she had tears in her eyes, streaming down her eyes. Now what I shared was not incredibly profound that day; it was just my story and some Scripture.
And she gave me a hug.
And I said, how are you doing? She said, today, God met me here. I said, that’s awesome, that’s amazing. Tell me about it. She says, until today, I had a deep hatred for all the people of the Middle East, especially Iranians.
I was kind of shocked. Wow. I thought she was going to say something nice, but But you’ll understand in a second why she had that hate.
Until today, I didn’t think that any single good thing could come out of the Middle East, until you spoke and you shared your story about God redeeming you and that you’ve preached the gospel in dozens of countries around the world. I could not believe that. I said, why do you carry so much pain? Why do you cry so much? She said, you see, my husband was on Flight 93 on September 11th, coming home from a business trip.
The love of my life was taken that day. And since that day, I have only prayed prayers of hate towards the Middle East. Oh man, when she shared that, I began to bawl.
Immediately, I understood the depths of her pain. Viscerally, I felt it.
How could you not hate what happened that day? The love of her life, her life companion of over 35 years, was taken by terrorists on 9/11. Do you feel that pain even as I share that? Do you feel that? That’s the depths of the pain that Jonah had against Assyria and the Assyrian kings, that God was saying, let it go, Jonah.
Let it go, Jonah. I love these people, Jonah. I love them.
Wow. We cried. I understood. We prayed together. It was healing.
She said, today God healed me. And I said, praise God. Nothing of me, just showing up, just having an Iranian background and being a preacher was all it took to break, at that point, almost 13 years of deep, deep pain for this sweet woman. Tim Keller says this, God is both too holy and too loving to either destroy Jonah or allow Jonah to remain as he is, and God is also too holy and too loving to allow us to remain as we are. He doesn’t give up on us either when we say no to showing grace and mercy towards others.
He is patient with us. He knows the depths of our pain and suffering, and He wants to live with us and remain with us, ’cause He’s too holy and too loving to let us go. He was too holy and too loving to let Jonah die and not be resurrected from the belly of that fish. I believe this, we are not the church because we attend church or come to church on Sunday mornings. We become the church when we practice the 3 loves.
Faithfully, loving God, loving one another, and loving our neighbors, even those who hate us.
2001, I saw the same images as you guys on TV. In August, we saw Afghanistan people loaded up in planes like this. We saw the US military trying to save as many people as possible, babies being lifted over walls, people willing to give their babies up so the babies would have a chance a new life. They didn’t even care if they couldn’t get out of Afghanistan. When I watched the news, my heart broke, as it’s broken many times since then when I saw what happened in Ukraine and I see what happens in Israel.
But my heart broke for the people of Afghanistan.
And I went up to my wife and I was weeping and I said, I need to work. God is telling me I need to work with Afghans. And her question to me was, where are they? I said, I don’t know. How are you going to work with them?
I don’t know. What are you going to do? I have no idea. But God is telling me I need to work with Afghans through my nonprofit. I said this to her in September, and October I prayed, and November I prayed.
We put on a conference together. I think one of you guys was there, a couple of you guys were there. I put on a conference before I’d even met a single Afghan from that tragedy. I thought maybe 10 to 25 people would show up. That was our goal, to have 25 pastors come.
We had 160 people from 60 different churches come together to get trained on how to work and love Afghans when they come. This is a prayer of ours, because God said do it. I said, okay, God. It was one of those moments where, unlike Jonah, I didn’t reject it. I said, God, I need to do it.
I have to do it. And my heart broke for Afghans. Now what’s remarkable is before August of 2021, I knew less than 5 Afghans my entire life. I had worked at an Iranian Christian church for a decade. I had thousands of Iranian friends, thousands, both here and around the world.
But somehow God had only led me to about 4 or 5 Afghans total. And now God has asked me to work with this people group. How, God? Well, he opened up the doors in January when I got invited to go give some food to a family that was starving because their caseworker had COVID. And they were starving.
They had no food for 2 days. And they said, is there any way you can get them food? A friend of mine called me and I said, yeah, where are they? I went to this hotel they were at and I met them and I brought $200 or $300 worth of food and much more food after that. And as I was there walking around the hotel, I realized this was the refugee hotel that all the Afghans were in.
There was 40 Afghan families, over 250 Afghans in this hotel alone. Guess what? God opened up my heart, God opened up the doors, and we began to work with those Afghans. And right now, you’ll see some of the images in the next image, over 100 of the Afghan men, I have their phone numbers of. Many of them I talk to on WhatsApp.
We have coffee together, tea together, we eat meals together, we talk about God sometimes. I take food every 2 weeks. Actually, this afternoon, 6:30 PM, I’ll be taking food to the hotel again. With some of my friends from different churches. We get together and we share God’s love.
Why? Because God said do it. God said go, love these people, and show them Christ’s love. Don’t ask for anything in return, just share God’s love with them. And that’s what we’ve done.
And I believe that’s what this book of Jonah is all about, is God sharing his mercy with people of the nations, of all backgrounds, regardless of what they’ve done, regardless of the countries they’ve come from. The book of Jonah is a foretelling of God’s incredible love and mercy that we’ll see in the New Testament, isn’t it? We see that, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
And it says, continues on in John 3:16-17, says, for God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to do what? Save the world through him.
Save the world through him. God doesn’t want to condemn the world; he wants to show love to the world. He wants to show love to Afghans. He wants to show love to Ukrainians.
He wants to show love to Russians.
He’s asking us to pray for Hamas and Al Qaeda and all the evil of this world. No, we don’t want them to continue their evil. Yes, they must be stopped, but do we pray or do we hate? Because if we hate, we become just like Jonah, and we don’t believe that God can redeem this land. I can tell you assuredly, God is doing an incredible work in the Middle East.
In my country alone, since 1980, it went from 500 believers to well over 1.5 million believers in the nation of Iran. Do you believe that?
Can you even believe that? 500 believers in 1980 and over 1.5 million today. God is redeeming the Middle East. Me and the pastors at the Iranian Christian Church that I served at for 10 years, all of us were reached at a church similar to this. Me at Marine Covenant in there, my senior pastor was at USC at a college ministry, post-college ministry, and the other 2 pastors were reached at Venture Church in Los Gatos.
How crazy is that? God brought us to America to hear the gospel of Jesus and receive. Amen. Why couldn’t God do that again now with Afghans and Iranians and Ukrainians and Russians and Palestinians? God has given us incredible opportunities because he didn’t send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
There’s 4 lessons, beautiful lessons, that we can learn from the book of Jonah. First is this: God whispers to us, pray and learn to love everyone, including your enemies. Such a hard prayer.
Pray and learn to love everyone, including your enemies or the enemies of your friends.
Second, loving our enemies is painful and can cost us a lot. Jonah lost his life. His heart was torn to even have to say a 5-word sermon to Assyria; shredded because of the pain and the suffering his people were under for over 600 years at the time that he said those words.
It cost him something. It was painful.
Third, God doesn’t just walk among us. We must remember that God walks among our enemies while praying for them too.
God was in Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
God is in Russia today.
Walking, praying for people.
God is definitely in Israel, but he’s also in Palestine, walking and praying for the suffering of the people.
4th lesson we can learn from Jonah’s life: God’s love and mercy is for all.
It’s for all. There’s no one exempt from it.
You cannot say and pick and choose who God loves, because this story reminds us even the worst of humanity, the Assyrian Empire at that time, God loved.
God loved them in a way that Jonah couldn’t love and didn’t love.
The book of Jonah, I believe, is a mirror of our own lives.
Like Jonah, we’re not merciful and graceful towards our enemies, but God is.
But it’s He who is graceful, He who is merciful, He who is all-forgiving, He who is all-loving. You see, we don’t see the big picture.
Jonah didn’t see the big picture. He didn’t realize that Jesus was going to come to love all humanity. And even when Jesus came, do you realize the disciples argued whether the gospel should go to the Gentiles? It’s in there. There was a legitimate argument among the disciples of Jesus whether the gospel should go to the Romans.
They believed it was only for the Jews. It’s in there. They met, they fought, they yelled at each other. Finally, James and Paul and eventually Peter said, you’re right, this gospel is not just for the Jews. It’s not good news for the Jews.
It’s good news for who? The world.
Even the disciples struggled with that because they hated the Romans. The Romans had subjugated them. Why would you pray for them? Why would you want the gospel for them? Why do you want the good news for the Romans?
We see this repeated again and again.
And now God is asking you, do you hate Hamas and pray for its evil destruction?
Have we ever stopped to pray for Hamas and the Palestinians and their salvation?
Do we pray for the Jews and the Buddhists and all people of all backgrounds, Muslims and like? That’s what God has called us to do. Yes, the evil must stop. Yes, we must get in the way of evil and stop it as much as we can. But boy, is it hard to pray Tim Keller says this, if you were 100 times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for his mercy.
Can I get an amen?
If you were 100 times worse than you are, your sins would be no match for his mercy. And that’s ultimately what the book of Jonah is about, isn’t it? God loves the world in a way that we don’t understand. God loves our enemies in a way that we could never fully fathom. God loves them and has died for them, not just for us.
As you see the news, I ask you guys, I actually put in my newsletter recently, turn off the news sometimes and pray, because the news can be so destructive for our souls, so destructive for our spiritual lives. Too much of it can be. Be. Take time, turn off the TV, don’t watch the news, watch Hallmark or something that will not destroy your soul.
But pray; pray the same way God prays for the world, amen? Let’s pray together. God, thank you so much for the visible example of us in Jonah. God, we too have a hard time praying for our enemies. We too have a hard time praying for the salvation of the hurting and the lost.
God, we have a hard time praying for those who are aiming to do evil to us and to our neighbors and our friends. God, it’s a high calling to pray for your enemies, but you tell us to love all people. Though we do not fully understand how we can do this, I know it’s only because of your power and your Holy Spirit that we can do this. You are merciful, you are good, you are just, you are loving, an all-forgiving God for those who repent. God, we pray for the repentance of Putin, of Hamas, of all the destructive groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, so many evil groups around the world aiming to do injustice towards people around them.
But you’re a good God. And You’re a healing God. Heal them. May their eyes be revealed. May pastors rise up.
May churches rise up in these nations as You’ve done so in Iran. May it expand like a flame to neighboring countries. In the name of Jesus we pray, amen. Thank you.
I feel like somebody today needs to hear that God’s grace is available. For you today. It’s available for all people. Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, period. Believe in your heart that Jesus is the Son of God, that He came to the earth, that He lived among us, He took our sins upon Himself, made Himself a pleasing sacrifice to God so that we could be reconciled to God.
God’s plan for everybody here in this room is that you know Him. That you be part of His family. God didn’t wait for us, you’ve heard me say before, for us to get our act together before Jesus died for us. Jesus died, Romans 5:8 says, while we were yet in sin, while we were God’s enemies. Jesus died to pay the penalty for our sins.
We can understand somebody dying for a righteous person, but dying for the unrighteous?
Never happened before. It’s what Jesus did for all of us, and I— my hope and desire is that we would receive that today and continue to ask questions. If you want to know what it means to, to be a Christian, if you want to know what the Bible has to say about some of the things that Kayvon talked about, but even more than that is just how to be in a relationship with God, we want everybody here to know that. And so, I or our staff would love to answer questions that you might have about some of those things, more than the testimonies of different service opportunities. We want you to be connected to God through His Son Jesus and to understand the invitation that is available to all.
Our sin reaches great, God’s grace reaches so much further.
