Please turn with me in your Bibles to Jonah chapter 3. You can find that on page 775 if you're using the few Bibles provided for you. When we last left Jonah last week, he had just been spit out onto dry land after spending three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish. And we'll resume our story in the book of Jonah, picking up in verse 1 of chapter 3, after Jonah has been spit back out upon the dry land. Again, you can find that on page 775 if you're using the Pew Bibles, and I invite you to follow along as I read from God's holy word. Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time saying, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey. And he called out, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he issued a proclamation and published through Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything Let them not feed or drink, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them. And he did not do it. This is God's holy word. Let us pray and give thanks to him for giving it to us. Our Father in heaven, thank you for your great grace to us and giving us this book. May we receive it this morning for what it really is, not the word of men, but the word of God. By the power of your Holy Spirit, we ask that it would be at work in our hearts, for we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, have you ever put off doing something until later? Perhaps you remember a science fair project from when you were younger, or perhaps for some of you younger people, the science fair project from last year. You were given the assignment at the start of the year. You had months to work on it. And so you kept putting it off, putting it off thinking that you would have plenty of time to do it until the day or the week before you opened it up and looked at what the assignment required and realized, that you didn't quite have enough time to get done what you thought you would do. You put off to tomorrow what you should have been doing today, thinking that there would always be more time, when in reality, that was not the case. As we look at Jonah 3 this morning, this text teaches us that God's judgment is near, so repent of your sins. God's judgment is near, so repent of your sins. We'll consider this under four main points This morning you can see them in your outline in the bulletins. And so first we see verses 1 to 3 teach us that when the Lord forgives you, you should respond with grateful obedience. When the Lord forgives you, you should respond with grateful obedience. Last week we looked at Jonah's plight and we considered how he ran away from God and I had observed that God that God pursues is disobedient and unwilling people. And so when God went after Jonah, this was an act of mercy. It didn't seem like that, as we saw last week. It didn't always seem like that, a violent storm at sea and spending three days and three nights in a belly of a fish. It doesn't seem like mercy at first, but when we considered the alternative, we saw how merciful God was in pursuing Jonah. in not allowing Jonah to exile himself away from God's presence where true life is to be found. And then God's love for Jonah in not allowing him to be drowned in the sea but instead to be swallowed and saved by that fish. Not only does God save Jonah, we see that God gives Jonah a second chance to perform the task that he had called him to do. Verse 1 of chapter 3 is actually almost identical to verse 1 of chapter 1. It's kind of like, for those of you who play golf, it's kind of like a mulligan here. Or what we might call on the playground, a do-over. God's giving him a do-over, a mulligan. It's as if the story is starting over at this point. In fact, chapter 3, verse 1, is actually how the book of Jonah should have begun had Jonah obeyed. We wouldn't have had to have these first two chapters. It begins with God speaking and Jonah obeying. That's indeed what happens in verses 2 and 3. In verse 2, we see the Lord commanding Jonah again to get up, to go to Nineveh, to call out the message that He gives to Jonah. Notice, call out the message, whatever it is, not whether Jonah likes it, not whether Jonah wants to do it, just call out the message that I give you. And then in verse 3, we see that Jonah obediently goes to Nineveh this time, and in verse 4, We see him calling out the message that God has given to him. At this point in the narrative, at least, it seems that Jonah is exhibiting fitting obedience, given his deliverance, given the deliverance that God has rescued him with. God saved him, and he also gave him again a second try at the task he was sending him for. And so therefore, in grateful obedience, the prophet obeys, just as he had expressed gratitude from the belly of the fish in chapter two. And there's much we can learn at this point from Jonah and Jonah's response because our Lord Jesus Christ came to save sinners. He died on the cross for our sins, for all those who will look to him in faith. And if you've trusted in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, Take stock of how much you have been forgiven. Consider all your many sins that the Lord has cast away from you as far as the east is from the west. He's pardoned you. He's forgiven you so much. Consider this. And then as you do, I think you'll agree that the only fitting response to such forgiveness is one of grateful obedience. Grateful obedience in every area of your life. For any of you who were on the youth retreat this past year, you'll perhaps remember that we worked on memorizing Romans chapter 6, verses 17 to 18. Romans 6, 17 and 18 says, but thanks be to God that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. You see, you were once slaves of sin, but Christ has set you free. And so the only fitting response is obedience, and obedience that comes straight from the heart. I think you'll readily see the difference between an obedience that comes from the heart and one that comes just grudgingly. It's the opposite of gratitude. Children, think of times when you've been asked to do something by your parents. Let's say they ask you to clean up their help clean up the room. How do you respond? What is a grateful response? A cheerful one, right? To do it gladly and happily. How do we sometimes respond instead? Or for you older people, maybe you remember when you were a child, how did you respond? But why? I didn't make the mess. Right? Is that a grateful attitude? Do we respond like that or do we respond willingly from the heart? Up to this point, Jonah seems at least to be responding gratefully with an obedience that comes from the heart. He expressed gratitude from the belly of the fish and then he goes as God commands him. However, as we continue in our story of Jonah in chapter four, we'll see that Jonah still has some remaining sin. He still isn't quite as cheerful as the text might seem to indicate at this point. We know this because we see he's not thrilled with the repentance of Israel's enemies, and he again begins to complain. about why God had sent him. And so from there we can learn that even when we respond with grateful obedience at first, we must be on guard against sin, against sin that can still so easily entangle us. As God once said to Cain, a sin is crouching at your door, its desire is for you, but you must rule over it. So we see that when the Lord forgives us, we should respond with grateful obedience. A second, verse 4, says that your time to repent is short. The full extent of Jonah's message is contained in the single verse here in verse 4 of chapter 3. Yet 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown. That's it. But that's the kind of message that requires an immediate response. Picture a king. Picture a king who's facing an invading army. The invading army has surrounded the city. It's cut off all its food supply, dammed up the water so that no more water can get into the city. And the choice is surrender or face destruction. There's no time for delay in that response, in that situation, is there? The time is short and you need to make a decision. You need to decide, am I going to surrender or am I going to fight or call for help? But you need to make that decision quickly before the battering rams start knocking down the walls, before you run out of food and starve. The situation isn't always like that. For other kings or presidents, sometimes they have more time to make decisions. Perhaps they recognize a rising superpower that seems to be building up their army and their military and is also becoming increasingly aggressive to surrounding nations. In such cases, presidents and kings may have time to beef up their own defense, to add to their defense, to pursue avenues of diplomacy and the such, to come up with a long-term strategy of containment. But that's not the kind of situation the Ninevites are facing. They're facing a situation like a king who has been surrounded and is facing imminent destruction. And that's Jonah's message to them. God's judgment is imminent. It's right around the corner. The lion is about to pounce. Choose what you will do. And based on their response, the Ninevites understand this. They get it. Well now at first glance it might not seem like you have much in common with the Ninevites and in many ways we don't. America has not been given the ultimatum that in 40 days we're going to be overthrown. So our country could be safe for even hundreds of years perhaps. You also individually haven't been told you have 40 days and I'm going to overthrow you as an individual. But that doesn't mean that this message this morning isn't urgent for you. It doesn't mean that there isn't any way in which you can relate to the Ninevites personally. You see, like them, you are a sinner. Like them, we are all sinners. 1 John 1.8 says that if we say we don't sin, we're simply deceiving ourselves. And likewise, Romans 3.23 tells us that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This is also clearly proven in our own lives, right? Who here would be willing to stand up and tell me that you've never sinned? We all see it in our own lives. We all see ourselves falling short of God's glory, falling short of even our own lower standards that we set for ourselves. But we're also like the Ninevites, not only in the need in general for us to repent of sins, but in the fact that our time, like theirs, is short It may be longer than the 40 days that God gave Nineveh. But then again, it may not be. As John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus, we saw a similar warning. He had this to say, according to Matthew 3, God's acts of judgment is already laid at the root of the trees. Now, regrettably, I think as a society, we like to ignore this reality. We like to pretend that it's not true. We like to pretend that the ax isn't laid at the root of the trees. We can talk about heaven, but not hell. We can talk about God's love, but not God's judgment or God's wrath. Michael Rogers, the senior pastor of the church I grew up in, illustrates this vividly in the life of a pastor friend he has. This pastor went to visit an elderly saint who was dying, and she was trusting in Jesus. She was looking forward to her hope of heaven. However, in the midst of that pastoral visit, the woman's unbelieving daughter came into the room. After the pastor left, the pastor was surprised to see this woman follow him out of the room, and she lit into him as soon as he got out. She said, how dare you? How dare you talk to my mother about dying? We're trying to do everything possible to surround herself with positive encouragement, and you come here telling her she is going to die. How dare you? Not long afterwards, this lady attended her mother's funeral. But the nearness of death and judgment isn't only for the elderly or for those who are facing serious illness. Walk through any cemetery and you'll see young as well as old, those who've lived many days and those who've lived but a few short days. Why do I say this? Why do I bring up this bitter reality? Because some of you who are listening to this message today are young. Some of you, particularly if you haven't even graduated high school yet, if you're that young, please take heed of this. If you're young, please pay attention and hear this. This message is for you today, too. This message of an urgent need to repent. Don't assume Don't assume that you have a long time left to live. Don't assume that you have many days left in which you can repent of your sins and turn back to God. You, even at your young age, you may not even have 40 days left. James chapter 4 verse 14 asks us, what is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then it vanishes. Do you take that seriously? Even if you're young, do you take that seriously? Or do you presume that you have a lot of time left and you can change later, that you can turn from sin later? Well, there's another reason that you need to repent, and another reason it's urgent. It's urgent because the time is short. It's also urgent because the time in which you are spiritually prepared to repent may be even shorter than the number of days you have left. You see, when you get in the habit of waiting for tomorrow, tomorrow never comes. When you get in the habit of putting something off later, you will always put it off later, or as Mark Twain has said, why do tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow? J.C. Ryle, perhaps a little more seriously, has warned us against waiting for tomorrow to consider this call to repent. Tomorrow, he wrote, is the devil's day, but today, today is God's day. Satan does not care how spiritual your intentions are or how holy your resolutions, if only they are resolved to be done tomorrow. If only they are resolved to be done tomorrow. The devil rejoices if you make the assumption that you can do it tomorrow. And by the way, to paraphrase Ryle again, if you buy his lie today that you can wait till tomorrow to repent, tomorrow he's going to be selling you the lie that it's too late for you to repent, that there's no bother doing it anymore, that it's too late for you. Why such gloom on a beautiful Sunday morning? I'm seeming kind of pessimistic here this morning, aren't I? Well, Ecclesiastes 7.2 tells us that it is better to go into the house of mourning than to go into the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. So this morning, for your own good, for your own eternal good, you have an opportunity to lay it to heart, to lay the end to heart, And you need to hear this message because you are a mist that appears for only a little while, and then it is gone. Because even now the ax is laid at the root of the trees, because our Lord has said, behold, I am coming soon. Because you don't know how long you have to live, but you do know that when you die, you will face the judgment seat of Christ. Take heed of this, lay it to heart, Lay it to heart because this is the end of all mankind. So your time to repent is short. And just as this call was urgent for Nineveh, it is urgent for you this morning. But if we need to repent, how exactly should we repent? What does true repentance look like? Verses 5 through 9 of Jonah 3 answer that very question for us. There are three things that the Ninevites do that we need to do as well when we truly repent. The Ninevites believe God, they humbly repent of their sins, and then they turn from their sinful behavior in keeping with repentance. So the first thing you need to do to repent is to believe in God. We see that in verse 5, where the Ninevites believed God. You see, they could have laughed Jonah out of town, right? They could have disbelieved his message. They could have said, that is not going to happen. Get this crazy guy out of here. But instead, they took heed of the prophetic word. And likewise, we all need to hear God's warnings. We need to believe that God is perfectly holy without any sin at all. That sin is abhorrent in His eyes. That He is a righteous judge and He will judge the world. And He will condemn sinners. And importantly, you need to believe that you are a sinner. Not just people are sinners. You are a sinner. Do you believe that about yourself? Do you believe that you do not deserve God's favor, but only deserve his wrath and judgment? But that's not all we need to know. We need to believe that in Jesus, if we were to have any hope of escaping God's guilty verdict, of escaping God's wrath, believe that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, that Jesus died on the cross for your sins, and then believe that God raised him to life on the third day. Jesus tells us in John 8 24 that unless you believe in him you will die in your sins. The Philippian jailer asked Paul and Silas what he needed to do to be saved and Paul and Silas replied, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved. Do you believe in him? Do you believe in him? Do you believe what God reveals in his word? So you need to believe God. You need to believe in the Lord Jesus to be saved. You also need to humbly repent. Humbly repenting means not excusing your own behavior. It means not focusing on someone else's behavior that led to your behavior. It means keeping the spotlight solely on your own sin. Look at how the Ninevites repented here in Jonah chapter 3 verses 5 to 8. What do they do? They call for a fast. They put on sackcloth. A sackcloth in those days was used to express deep mourning or repentance. The Ninevites are exhibiting true grief over their sin. They humble themselves before God. They cry out for mercy. They don't excuse their sin. There's no record of them pointing to other nations saying, hey, those people are worse than us, so we mustn't be that bad. Why are you judging us? Let me ask you a question. Is that how you repent? Is that how you repent of your sin? I think about confessions of sin you make. I'll take an example of a husband and a wife. Perhaps your husband's confessing sin to his wife, and he says, well, when you did this, it made me feel this way, and so I did this. What's wrong with that? You know, the spotlight isn't on you, the spotlight is on what someone else did to you and so you kind of couldn't control yourself and you had to respond this way. Or children, do you ever say something like this? A fight breaks out and your parents come into the room and you say, you see your parents catch you red-handed punching your brother or sister. What do you say? Why did you do that? She took my tower, or she took my car, she knocked down my tower. Well, can your sister or brother make you hit someone? Can your sister or brother make you sin? But we excuse our sin like that all the time, don't we? We excuse our sin as if other people can force us to sin. Sadly, we've seen this kind of repentance all too often in public apologies, even from Christian leaders who've been caught in sin, who seem to weakly confess the sin and then push the blame off on the surrounding circumstances. It's sad, but I hope it breaks your heart even more than seeing Christian leaders doing it, is when you see yourself doing that, when you see yourself repenting in a way that's half-hearted and not truly broken over your own sin. Notice, too, that this humble repentance applies to everyone, from the greatest to the least. In Nineveh, even the king humbled himself. He removed his royal robes, put on sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And their urgency is so great that they even make their animals join in with them in this. And from this, we can learn that no matter who you are, you aren't above being humbled by your sin. I think many of us would like to think of ourselves as great rather than small. But wherever you are in that continuum, you need to humbly repent of your sin. will pick on church leaders and say, you know, it doesn't matter where you stand in the church, you also need to repent. So let's say, for example, that Grace Church became convicted of some deep, pervasive sin as a body of believers. We were convicted of a way that we were sinning against God, and so the elders decided to call for a fast, and then to have a day of fasting and prayer, and we would meet together in the fellowship hall afterwards to pray at the end of the evening. And let's say you go, you sit down and you're waiting for everyone to arrive, you see Pastor Clifford and I walk in throwing away our milkshakes and you see some other elders walking in throwing away their Big Mac wrappers from the session powwow we had at McDonald's before this time of fasting. Leaders are not above humbly repenting. And so if you're a church leader, or if you find yourself having succeeded in other areas of life, you too need to humble yourself before God. Don't ever allow your station in life, the amount of money you make, how many people work for you, or your position in the church, cause you to become too humble to repent of your sins. So you need to believe God. You need to humbly repent of your sins. The third thing you need to do when you repent is to change your behavior in keeping with repentance. In verse 8, we read that the king of Nineveh called on the people not only to call out to God, but also to turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. As I mentioned last week in the book of Nahum chapter 3, it describes Nineveh as the bloody city all full of lies and plunder, no end to the prey. It appears that violence was a particular sin of the Ninevites and so the repentance needs to include turning away from this particular sin. So think about your own life. Think about your own life. What are particular areas that need to change? When you ask God to forgive you, what are the besetting sins that you struggle with repeatedly? Pride, anger, lust, gossip, stealing, or something else. When we repent, we must also resolve to turn away from our sin. And if I could give you a homework assignment tonight or this morning, I'd ask you to go home and consider this, to consider where you specifically need to change in your life in keeping with repentance. Think about where your behavior needs to match your confession of sin. Maybe some of you will even do this, even though I won't be grading the assignment. Well, in John 3, John the Baptist warned us to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. And likewise, Jesus tells us that a good tree will bear good fruit. Now, of course, sin still dwells in us. Even as believers, we're going to sin and we're going to struggle with sin all our lives. But do you have a lifestyle of repentant obedience? Or is sin really not that big a deal to you? Are you looking for a cheap repentance that doesn't require you to make any effort to change? So that's how we should repent, believe God, humbly repent, and change your behavior. But none of that does any good, does it? If repentance doesn't accomplish anything. If we can beg and plead for forgiveness and still not find any. But thankfully, verses 9 and 10 teach that if you repent, God will forgive you. If you repent, God will forgive you. And that's what happens when the Ninevites turn from their sin. The king calls for a fast. They put on sackcloth and ashes. They humbly call out to God. And in verse 9, the king gives his rationale. Who knows? God may turn and relent from his fierce anger that we may not perish. And in verse 10. We find out that's exactly what happens. God relents of this disaster. He observes how they change their evil ways and he decides not to bring upon them the destruction he promised. The King James Version actually translates this even more starkly. It says, God repented of the evil he planned for the city. A commenting on this, John Calvin has said of the word repentance, that surely its meaning is like that of all other modes of speaking that God describes for us in human terms. For because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state, the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity that we may understand it. So we ought not to understand anything else in this word repentance than a change of action. In fact, what God does here for Nineveh is actually what he promises to do to anyone who repents in Jeremiah 18, verses 7 to 10. In Jeremiah 18, God says, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. Well, I'm kind of down in the theological weeds here a little bit on God's providence. So let's look up here a bit so we don't miss the main point of verses 9 to 10. Again, the main point of verses 9 to 10 is that if you repent, God will forgive you. God will forgive you. I mentioned earlier 1 John 1.8 that says that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. But 1 John 1 9 gives us a great promise. We read it earlier in this service. It says, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. That's an absolutely rock-solid assertion, a rock-solid promise that if you have faith in Jesus Christ, you will be forgiven. If you will humble yourself, stop making excuses, and own up to your own sins, and look to Jesus for forgiveness, you will receive it. This isn't like a bad warranty that turns out not to really cover anything. God promises to forgive you if you trust in Jesus. There's no fine print here. There's no catch. It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? But there's no catch here. If you're looking for it, you won't find it. It doesn't matter how wicked of a sinner you are, or how wicked of a sinner you have been. For some of you, that's very important. You may think, there's no way God could forgive me. He can. And he will, and he promises he will. Look at the Ninevites. If you think you're bad, look at the Ninevites. You're not worse than that. God can forgive you if you turn to him. God has mercy to all who look to him in faith. He freely pardons their sins, casting them as far as the east is from the west, and he remembers them no more. He can do that for you. He will do that for you if you will look to Him in faith. He has mercy on you because Jesus Christ has borne your sins. Jesus Christ has suffered that disaster that was due to come to you. Jesus Christ has paid the penalty that your sins deserve, and therefore God is faithful and just to forgive you from your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness if you will look to Him. So as we close this morning, let me urge you not to leave here today without seriously thinking about these things. Not to leave here without really understanding that God's judgment is near. It may be even much closer than you expect or that you hope. It's coming soon. Therefore, don't leave here without turning to Jesus, without confessing Jesus as your savior and confessing your own particular sins to him. Turn to Jesus because he will abundantly pardon you and cleanse you from all your unrighteousness. Let us pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for the urgent warning you have given to us today and your word to repent. as well for your promise that if we confess our sins, you are faithful and just to forgive us. I ask that you would cause each of us to confess our sins, to believe in the Lord Jesus, and therefore to be saved. Please don't allow any of us to leave today delaying. Don't allow any of us to delay while the ax is laid at the root of the trees. Instead, may we repent now as you give us grace. For we ask this in Jesus' name, amen.