All Christians are Probably Jonah

Jonah, the prophet of God who didn't want to do God's work. Not because it was necessarily hard, but because he knew what God was like. Jonah knew what would happen if the people of Nineveh repented and that's he what was running from.

There is a good possibility in life where you might enter into a situation like Jonah's. God will examine your life and challenge the secret hate held in your heart. The thing of it is, is that  sometimes this hate can be directed at a problem that God thinks needs to be addressed where more than one person can be affected. Maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a work issue, or maybe it's a case like Jonah's where God has called you to minister to a large group of people you do not care for and place a lot of blame at their feet.

As the book of Jonah shows, however, God is a provocateur, He is insistent that the people who make themselves available to Him carry out His will.

After trying to run from God, being thrown overboard from a boat, and then being rescued by a giant fish, Jonah finally carried out the mission God called him to do. And guess what? The Ninehvites repented like there was no tomorrow and God spared them from judgment because He saw their hearts. The heart of Jonah was also exposed. He flipped out and yelled at God that he knew God would do this,

"O Lord! Is not this what I had said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing (Jnh 4:2, NRSV)."

This whole situation made Jonah so mad he requested to die. Dare I say Christians have the same attitude sometimes? Through serving, through obedience and worship, through prayer, Christians learn the character of God. Most of the time we are willing to carry out His will. Yet, there are things that we still try to keep hidden from God. He finds them, and then we flip out, even though someone has been helped because of you. Then we find something that is supposed to comfort us and make it a first priority.

For Jonah, that comfort came in a form of a plant that provided shade. God messed with that too and the plant withered. Again Jonah went all emo and wished to die. It is here where God revealed Jonah's priority and passion by revealing His own passion and priorities in the form of a question:

Then the Lord said, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about 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 many animals (Jnh 4:10-11)."

 The book ends there. We do not get to find out Jonah's response. But if ever you come to this spot in your life, let God lay bare your heart. Let His conviction rain on you and devastate you, let Him transform you. It is a emotionally and spiritually painful process, but the growth you'll experience will bring you closer to God so that others can get close to Him.