JUN 10 2018 | UberWhale: A Deep Dive Into The Life Of Jonah S1E4 | Jonah’s Anger at God’s Compassion

Sea Change Church · UberWhale: A Deep Dive Into The Life Of Jonah · "Jonah's Anger at God's Compassion" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · June 10, 2018
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Good morning. I'm Carmen. And if you want to chat about going overseas, I'll be next door. Love to talk with you about that. After the service tonight or this morning, I'm reading from Jonah 3, 10 through 4, 11. So the end. When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened. But to Jonah, this seemed very wrong. He became angry. He prayed to the Lord. Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? This is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love.

A God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live. But the Lord replied, Is it right for you to be angry? Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade, and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort. And Jonah was very happy about the plant.

But at dawn the next day, God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die and said, It would be better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, Is it right for you to be angry about the plant? It is, he said. And I'm so angry, I wish I were dead. But the Lord said, You've been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow.

It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals? The word of the Lord. Thanks, Carmen. We are having an acai Sunday today. We've mentioned that multiple times. It is free, so just go eat. But if you want to support Carmen, we put a little booth there.

Please support her. She's trying to raise some funding. And if you want to support her on a monthly basis, please do that as well. She's trying to get her funding. She is going to places that not many believers go. So we're excited about that. And that's part of our Four Corners strategy. So bless her, and also go have some great acai today. We're in the final week of Jonah. A deep dive into the life of Jonah. And Jonah is the classic example of where you end up when you live the self-focused life.

He is completely focused on his wants, his desires. When things are going well, Jonah's going well. When things are going bad, Jonah's not doing well. Matter of fact, he gets to the point where he's so self-focused, and that things don't go the way he wants. And his anger has moved to a depression. And they say oftentimes that depression is anger turned inside out. That a lot of depression comes from unresolved anger issues.

And he gets to the point where he says to God multiple times, I think about five times he wishes to be dead. He says to God, I know he was thrown over into the sea. He requested to be thrown into the deep ocean. He gets to the point where he's so angry. He's so in despair. He's so discouraged. Even though God is speaking to him directly. Like, we want that, right? Like, God is saying, hey, go do my deal. And if you do, I've got you, I'm speaking to you directly.

But Jonah is so self-focused, even with the presence of God audibly speaking to him. He says, it would be just better if I were dead. When I say he has moved into a place of utter despair. And I began thinking about people like Mother Teresa, others around the world that actually take the goggles of their soul, of their eyes, of their mind, and they turn them outward. And I thought, when it comes to people in the world, I find that the people who are happiest are the people who think about themselves less and think about others more.

I've talked about my own struggles with anxiety and different things during the day in the past that I have had. And I realized that so much of that was self-created. I wasn't born with a mental deficiency or some kind of thing in brain chemistry that led me towards anxiety. And some people are. I believe that there are chemicals and there are people that are born with different disorders. And so I'm not speaking about that.

I'm speaking about this meteoric rise we have right now in all these, in bipolar, in depression, in anxiety, in despair. What is that coming from? And let me just speak from my own platform. For me, my struggles with chronic anxiety that lasted for a long time to the point where I thought, I might need to check myself in somewhere. There was actually one day, it was only one day, thank God, because I haven't struggled with this multiple times.

But there was one day where I thought, I don't know if I can go on or want to go on like this. And all of a sudden, I had some deep compassion for people who were in their lives thinking I don't want to go on anymore. So I want you to know that there's been a couple, twice in my life where I have come to that door and thankfully, it's only been for a day or so. It hasn't been something that I've continued to have to deal with.

But what I have found is that for me personally, the anxiety that I had, I created. It was because I was setting a bar, it was because I was worried whether people thought. I had all these different things that I had set up and if I didn't live up to them, anger, despair, fear, all these things of caring about what the world cares about. And so for me, it had to do with a self-created anxiety. I wasn't born, I believe, with that mental thing.

And so my question to you, if you deal with those things strongly, because I think the world really just wants to put a label on it and just say, well, everyone, you were born that way or you have a chemical imbalance. Let me say that not all, from my perspective, not all anxiety, depression, fear, despair is a chemical imbalance. I believe that it can become a chemical imbalance if we allow ourselves to continue to walk down those paths.

And circling back to what I was saying is I have not met many people who have turned their focus outward that are living in despair. Many people who have turned their focus to help others, to care for the poor, or whatever it is, to give their lives away who are living in places of despair. Not that they don't have hard days, but you see that when we turn our eyes from the inside out and trust that God can sort out the things that we need, abandoning our lives to God, we end up in a place that is antithetical and opposite of where Jonah ends up.

Jonah says, I wish I were dead. And so one of the things I did and I want to continue to do here for you, because we live in a world that creates mental illness. Broken to the heart is supposed to work with the mind. And when your heart is broken through, as a child, through divorce or abuse or something has happened to you, your heart shuts down. And so when the heart shuts down, there becomes a roadblock between your heart and your mind.

And the Bible is very clear that your heart and your mind are supposed to work in conjunction. But when we shut our hearts down, when we build walls around our heart and we no longer let anybody in, the entire load of living goes where? To your mind. And I believe that broken hearts break minds. And that's what happened to me. I had a broken heart from all the abandonment and all the things that had happened in my life and looking back, and this is not a victim story, because I'm not a victim.

Jesus, like I said on the cross, was not a victim. He was taking victory, and I'm not a victim. But I know that my broken heart is what broke my mind. And when God fixed my heart, four or five years ago, when God fixed my heart, my mind got better. I want to say that one of the things we want to do here is help people fix their hearts, to know the love of God, to take a deep dive into the love of God, to have faith that He's got this, that He has got you, and to turn that outside in, and we can begin to heal some of the woes of this world.

Jonah was not living that life. Jonah was all about him. Jonah was about anger. He was about resentment. He had enemies. He was angry that God sent him on a mission of repentance to these people. He went and preached the worst sermon of all time, hoping that they wouldn't repent. And then he went up on a hill, and he sat there, and looked, and was hoping, and waiting for the destruction, because he was so excited about it.

But here's the thing with God. God loves mercy over judgment. Judgment has to exist, because you have no justice, unless you have something that can eradicate evil. And so God has judgment, but the good nature of God will always supersede that. And so the Bible says that mercy triumphs over justice, and over judgment. And so Jonah was not in that place. He had enemies. He was an ideologue. He looked at people who did different things than he did, and he said, I want them dead.

He was the Christian, and he wasn't a Christian because he didn't know Christ yet, but he was the God follower that you don't want to be. He was the God follower that was self-righteous, and you know where it led him? It led him into bitter despair. I say loving your enemies is the way of Jesus. Jesus talks about this. Read the Sermon on the Mount. It is everything opposite. He was living, of what Jonah was doing. He was living a self-focused life.

Moving into the first point of the notes. Jonah 3.10. I love this. This is such a beautiful sentence. And I'm a, when I read the Bible, I look for words. I look for words, and the thought I've always had, did you ever get that, in the 80s, we used to wear sweaters. You know, remember the big sweaters that we wore? Maybe they were coming back. But I remember I got this really cool rolled neck sweater. It was wool, and it was expensive, and I remember, it was like 140 bucks in the 80s.

You know what I mean? That's an expensive sweater. And I remember I got it, and I had saved up for it, and I wore it to school, and I was walking by home, and I was up by a nail, and I caught it on a nail. Have you ever done that? There ain't no fixing $140. There ain't no fixing a $12 sweater, okay, if you catch it on a nail. I mean, you can try to get it in there, but it ain't never gonna be the same. When I'm reading the Bible, I look for nails that catch the sweater of my soul.

I just, as I read through, I'm like, God, just illuminate a word. And you will find in my preaching, generally, I hit like two or three words. Like, there's just a word, and it's an idea, and it's a thought, and it usually takes me into this complex understanding of scripture. And I have to be very careful that I don't spend too much time preparing my sermons because they would just, I just go, like I said earlier, a rabbit warren.

But, as we read this, there's a few words. The first is this. When God saw, God thought, man, the eyes of the Lord. Do a Google search. Eyes of the Lord verse. Just Google search that. Anything you want to search, in the Bible, put what you want to search, and then put verse, and all the verses will come up by it. That's just a little trick. When God saw what they did, and how they turned from their evil way, he did what?

He relented, I love that word, and did not bring on them the destruction that he had threatened. That's our God. That's the message of the gospel. Hell has to exist because of the justice of God. Evil needs to be eradicated because of the justice of God. God does not delight in punishment. That is a message that people try to foist upon the Christian message, and a message that many Christians have used with the turn and burn, turn or burn theology.

But we serve a God that wants to be with you and love you into eternity. And I want, people are waiting to hear this message. I say, you don't know who will turn towards God until you ask. And I want to challenge you, if no one shows up on Tuesday nights, that's on you. Because I'm going to invite five people myself. This isn't a guilt thing. But we are setting the ball. We are setting the ball on the team. And I'm encouraging, I'm challenging you as a congregation because this is not a top-down Episcopal leadership.

Episcopal not meaning Episcopal church, but the word meaning from top-down. This is a congregational thing. And the question we're going to ask for the next few weeks is who are you going to invite? Do you really want people to know the love of God that you know? Who are you going to invite? And not be embarrassed and say, I know the love of God. Come, ask hard questions. If you have an atheist friend, please come, challenge.

Ask questions. We're prepared for it. God's not afraid of their questions. Who are you going to invite? And so, we see here that God is looking and He desires to have people turn to Him. And it says that He saw what they did. In 2 Chronicles 16, 9, it says, For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth. To what? To destroy those who are doing wrong? No, to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him.

We talked about that last week. I don't know if anybody took me up on the challenge to try to live one hour fully committed to God. I know, big assignment, right? Just one hour. Just one hour where you say, God, that stuff, the sin I like, the things I'm into, the anger I have, just one hour, I'm going to fully dedicate one hour to God. I've said it since I got here. You give God an inch, you'll take an eternity. Like, He's really greedy with stuff like that.

He wants to bless you. And He wants to bless obedience. And it says that the eyes of the Lord are roaming. They're just looking. I don't know if you remember, if you saw Lord of the Ring, okay, and they had the eye, right? And the eye is sitting here and it's looking and the eye would just go, and there would be like a spotlight looking. The eye of the Lord is looking for the same thing. The eye of the Lord is looking to see whose hearts are fully committed to Him.

Those that want to go after God. That doesn't mean you're perfect, by the way. Oh, I can't be fully committed. So He's not. No. But you're saying, God, I know that I mess up. I know I have issues. Will you please do whatever it takes to get these issues out of my life? God, I still want to keep doing them. I still might keep doing them. But God, I am at least willing to start with the 1% to say, God, break me for doing this.

Try that prayer. Say, God, break me. You know when my life got miserable? When my mom stopped chasing me around PB. When I was just a classic. I'm going to tell this story. Can't do anything about it. I'm telling it. I moved out three days after I was 18 to PB, Oakwood Apartments. Woo woo. If you were around, you know the Oakwood Apartments and we don't need to remember much beyond that. I'm 18, you know. And I remember, I moved out on a Tuesday and I sat there and it was 3 in the morning and I thought, I can do whatever I want.

It's 3 in the morning. I can do whatever I want. I was in my apartment and I thought, this is super lonely. Like, there's actually nothing to do at 3 in the morning. And I called the operator because we had operators then we would talk to. I called like a 411, like zero. And it was this girl and she was like in her 20s and we talked for like two hours on the phone. I talked to the operator. She was like in Missouri or something.

It's a true story. It's an absolute true story. All the freedom in the world and nowhere to go, you know. And I remember one night I looked out and I saw my mom. Her car was parked across the street. And I'm like, I'm out. Like, mom, mom, where are you across the street? I don't remember. I think I walked out. You had a cell phone early but I didn't have one to call you back. And I walked out and I said, mom, what are you doing here?

And she said, well, I just want to make sure you're okay. And I said, those days are over. And we weren't in a great space then, were we? We're in a great space now. We are, right? And it's true. And my mom went home, I think that week or the next week and she prayed and said, God, the Lord said to her in a Bible study, wherever Adam is, I'm there with him. You don't need to show up anymore and just pray. And she turned me over to the Lord and had a really profound spiritual experience.

And so she began to pray, God, do whatever it takes. I please hope he doesn't die, but do whatever it takes to bring him back to you. My life got miserable from that point. Like, absolutely miserable. Then she went, it wasn't good enough for her just to pray that. She had to go get all of her warrior prayer friends to start praying that my life would be a wreck. Seriously, every time I tried to do drugs after that, I would be in the hospital, I would OD, like it was a bummer, someone would try to kill me, break into my house.

Like, it was crazy. I thought, I can't live like this anymore. anymore. And one of those experiences where I thought to myself, I don't want to live anymore, I believe came because my mom and her friends were willing to pray, do whatever it takes to bring my kid home. And you can either go outside, the person who you care about's life, and try to fix them, and show up and chase them around, or you can turn them over to the hound of heaven and say, God, you know what, you're in charge of them.

They're not my kid anyways, they're yours. That is so hard. That is prodigal language, but it's really helped me in my own life. We're off topic a little bit. But here we are. It's good medicine. Well, I won't tell my daughter. Yeah, I'll tell that part. My daughter's almost 16. She came to me, she goes, Dad, I have this thing I want to do. Can I start doing that? And I'm like, you know what, at this point, you're 16.

If you want to do it, you can do it anyways. I don't know if you realize, but if a 16-year-old wants to do something, there's nothing I can do as a parent to stop them. Right? I don't know if you've been a parent long enough, but I know that was the case for me. And I said, if you don't know right from wrong at this point, I'm just here for coaching at this point, so you're free to go do that, and I trust you. That actually helps kids not to rebel, by the way.

It's a great strategy. My other friend was like, that wouldn't work with my kid. I said, okay, well, whatever. I just turned my kids over to God. Just trust them. Turn them over to God. The eyes of the Lord are ranging throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to Him. And I want to encourage you back to the point. To take me up on a one-hour offer to say, God, I'm fully committed to you, or do whatever it takes to break me.

Just, oh, Jesus says, you know, they've mistranslated the verse. It says, pray for whatever you want. It doesn't say that. It says, the word is thalo. Pray for whatever you're willing. Whatever you're willing is a lot more dangerous than whatever you want. See, the Americans have turned that into, like, pray for whatever you want. The Bible doesn't say that. The Bible says, what are you willing to pray? And Jesus wants you to pray really dangerous prayers.

So, say, God, the sin that I'm really into, would you use it to destroy my life until I get things right? Pray that. I dare you to pray that. Pray it. Or God, this is my favorite one. I can't really pray that one. So, I pray, God, make me bored of my sin. Please make it boring. Start praying that. You will become incredibly bored of your sin. It becomes incredible. Just pray stuff like that. The eyes of the Lord is looking.

He's looking and saying, come to me. Why do I want you to turn your heart over me? Why do I want you to give these things up? Because I want to strengthen you, the scripture says, and I want to love you. You will put yourself on the train tracks of God's love when you start living in obedience. And I've climbed the pulpit already and we're only 18 minutes in. It says, when God saw, he relented. And maybe the winds are blowing in your life because God loves you.

And God doesn't send everything, but on occasion, he's not afraid to send some winds into your life. Jonah 4.2, we're moving to 4.2. Jonah prayed to the Lord. Who prays this? Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? This is such a petulant prayer. That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God to slow to anger, abounding in love, who relents from sending calamity.

He's basically saying, I knew these people would turn and follow you. I knew it. And I hate them so much that I wanted them dead. You know, I watch a lot of things Christians post on social media. You know, out of the heart, the social media speaks. That's a new verse. That's a current verse for you. It's so tiring. And do you really want people to know God? Or do you just really, do you want to step in and be God and have judgment?

You know, you never need to judge. Jesus says, don't, you know, when he speaks about not judging, the reason you don't judge, and this is such a key fundamental thought for Christians, the reason you don't judge is because God is already judged. You just can agree with God's judgments. When there is a law that is created, I wasn't the judge who put the law in place. But if it's a law, I follow the law, but I wasn't the judge.

Does that make sense? We don't judge, but we understand God's judgments. And when we fall in accordance with God's judgment, it says that he brings his love and strengthens us. Jonah here in this, in this scripture is upset. And we're going to get to Jonah's anger and hashtag outrage in a second. Turn your paper over. It says, Jonah gets a teaching moment. And I think this is a great teaching moment for us that Paul completely flips on his head in the New Testament.

Paul's life, it's, I mean, it's great with the joy of the Lord, but you wouldn't want to be Paul. Let me read the bit about, I was thrown into the sea. I was beat with rods like three different times. I was stoned. We actually believe that he was stoned to death, that he was the guy that went to the third heaven that it speaks to. And then it was so classic. It's like he, they prayed for him and then he gets raised from the dead.

We're not sure, but we think it was Paul. But we know that he was stoned really bad. And we know that after they took the, because they would, when they stoned you, like they didn't just hit you with a couple rocks. They piled it high, like five, eight feet, you know, like that's how you stone somebody proper in the back in the day. And so his friends pray, they like must've come and like taken all the stones off of him, prayed over him.

And you know what he does? He gets up and walks back into the city. They just took him out in stone and goes and starts preaching again. You gotta be thinking, are you serious, bro? Like, really? Really? Like he just wanted people to know the love of God. You know, Paul, this is something I wouldn't pray, but Paul says, I would go to hell that the Jews might be saved. That is gnarly. I'm not praying that for anybody.

Like, I don't wanna go to hell. And I'm sure Paul had glimpses and visions of what hell was like. And if you could get, and some people have, if you could get a four second preach, just four seconds in hell, you'd invite a lot more people to know Christ. That's true. Myself included. I'm speaking to myself. And who I want to invite to know the love of God. We have to become an inviting church. Inviting people in the love of God.

Not just inviting your friend from a church where they're not happy. Which is easy to do. But inviting people who are desperate. People are desperate. Read the headlines. They're desperate. The world is dying. They are desperate for an answer. Now's the time. I believe that there is a window right now. That there is an open window right now. I believe that God told me, and I could be wrong, I won't even say how long it is, but I believe there's an open window.

And that if you begin to begin conversations with God about the love of God, and don't start with repentance, start with the love of God. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He started with his love before he told us about the sin. He gave us his word to tell us who he was. It's a love story. Let's not be like Jonah. Jonah gets a teaching moment, and too often our relationship with God is based on how things are going in the moment.

This is opposite of Paul. Jonah, if things were good, he's having a good day. If things are bad, he's having a bad day. And he cannot find abundant life in bad times. The whole point of abundant life is not that you have a great season emotionally going, and things are going great when things are good. Anybody can have abundant life when life is abundant. Abundant life makes its wage. When your life is in a miserable place, and you can experience the sky, the blue, love of another person, a flower, the smell, the life of God, where you can experience life even in between your chemo treatments.

When you can experience life even after someone you love has passed away or you've lost someone, that is abundant life. And that is the life that we need to preach about. Not just when things are going well. The world is always looking for a good time. And that things, when things get this good, then I can enjoy my life. The Bible is not about that. The Bible is about you know God. God is your Father. And there is such a love that He wants to generate in your heart that no matter how things are going, and not that things are easy, and I'm not saying life is easy, but in the midst of it, every so often, you can reach down and scoop out just enough of God's love that you would feel it and it'll transcend you beyond what you're going through in the moment.

That's the love we preach about. That is the love that Paul spoke about, and it's the love that Jonah wanted nothing a part of. He wanted his life, he wanted all the things of the, you know, I wouldn't say it's the American dream or these other dreams. He just wanted things the way he wanted. He wanted his political things in his nation to go the way that he wanted. He didn't want to see a nation, this is Mosul in Iraq, current Iraq, he did not want to see them come to Christ because it could change everything.

It could change his culture, it could change the political landscape. He did not want to see them know the love of God. Why? Because he was self-focused on what he wanted. So God gave him a little teaching moment in Jonah 4, 6. It says, Then God provided a leafy plant, made it grow up over Jonah to give him shades. He got so good. for his head to ease his discomfort. And Jonah was very happy about the plant. Well, good for you, Jonah.

So he's having a good time. Oh, God must be getting ready to destroy the city because he put this cool little leafy plant. Now, Jonah had already built himself a shelter, but this leafy plant was pretty cool. So maybe it had fruit, I don't know, but he's very happy. And so some of us need a leafy plant to be happy. I want to say, do you need, you know, do you need that shiny thing? Do you need the leafy plant to be happy?

Or can you, can you teach yourself? And by the way, this is a spiritual maturity thing. You, you, you have to grind this one out to be able to source joy when things are going bad. That is a spiritual maturity thing. And don't expect it to happen this afternoon. You might have, you might be able to get a whiff of it this afternoon, but you can actually get to the place where that becomes the chemistry of not only your soul, but affects your brain chemistry to where you are constantly looking for the joy in life, the good in life.

Right now, all everyone's looking for is the negative things in life. If, I, I can't, I really can't read the news anymore. If I read the word outrage one more time, I'm going to punch myself in the throat. I mean it. It's a hard analogy, but it's true. We don't even know what outrage is anymore and what are we outraged about? Continuing on. Because Jonah gets outraged. But at dawn the next day, God provided a worm. Interesting.

Which chewed the plant down so that it withered. Sometimes God is not afraid to provide a worm to chew things down. He provided it anyways just to get your focus right. And when the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind. He provided it. I love that. And then the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. So I'm thinking the shelter that he built, the wind must have knocked it down. I can just see it. Okay?

And then because it was hot, he wanted to die. And he said, it'd be better for me to die than to live. So Jonah had issues in his life. Read the next sentence there. Jonah had a geography problem, not a God problem. Jonah was never where he was supposed to be. Where do you think Jonah would have had some shelter and friends and been well received? Nineveh. Nineveh. You see, God told him to go to Nineveh. Not to go to Nineveh and then leave Nineveh and then go sit and wait for destruction to come.

You see, his problems were self-created. We have to own our own problems. I have to own the fact that the anxiety that I had in my life that was deeply troubling, deeply troubling, terrifying. My daughter said the other day, I don't really know what a panic attack is. Hey, Dad, what's that like? I said, you don't want to know. Terrifying. If you've never thought to yourself, I need to go to the hospital right now because I'm dying, you haven't had a panic attack.

And some of you, I'm not asking to raise your hand, but you got me. You know what I'm talking about. Panic attack is when, for me, when I want to be God and I'm trying to control anything and I realize I can't control the universe and everything overwhelms and your brain's like, can't do it no more, we've used all the dopamine up, we're done. So my daughter asked me, what's that about? I realize that that happened because of my own choices.

Of who I thought I needed to be, of what I thought they needed to attain, of people's opinions of me, trying to live according to their opinions. People are anorexic today because of that stuff. People are dying and choosing despair. People are living in depression. Not all. There are brain chemistry issues. I'm not saying all. But I don't think that within the last 30 years that this spike that we've seen is just because everyone's brain chemistry changed.

I believe that we have the ability to change our own brain chemistry by allowing ourselves to worry and have fear and be concerned and to not be in the place God wants us to be. And Jonah didn't have a God problem. Jonah didn't have a life problem. Jonah had a geography problem. And he wasn't where God wanted him to be. I'm going to say, if you go and say, God, I'm willing to go to the place you want me to be. To leave that relationship that you know is not right.

To cut off, you know, to make some changes. You know your thing. We all got a thing, right? Everybody's got a thing. Nobody in here doesn't have a thing. Okay? Only imperfect people can come here. So if you're perfect, we can send you somewhere else. I'll give you a list of places you can go. But just, maybe you have a geography problem. And if you change your geography, you know, quit going to the bar, quit going, I don't know, wherever your place is, quit going to your pharmacist, whatever.

You know, that's the acai team leaving, not everybody being upset. If you do want to go, now's the time to go, though. It looks, nine people leave at once, like, whoa, he is hitting some buttons right now. Hey, let's just sit in the back from now on. That's what makes it a little easier on me. Man, that guy preaches truth. Half the people left. I got like three minutes and I got to be done. If you got a geography problem, you know it.

Change the geography. Just change it. Just change it. Anger and outrage. Anger and outrage. Anger. Are you an angry person? But God said to Jonah, is it right for you to be angry about the plant? Anger's a really good thing. God gave us anger. Anger lets you know when your boundaries have been crossed. If you don't have anger, if you don't understand anger, you won't know that justice has been superseded by something evil.

Anger is a thing that says, okay, I'm angry. Thank you, God. That's a reminder. An alarm has gone off. No, you're not allowed to touch me like that. No, you're not allowed to. Whatever the thing is. It's a boundary thing that God showed us to show us what is right and what is wrong. Anger's a really good thing. Unrestrained anger causes us to move where we become the judge and we start doling out a sentence on people because we have become the judge.

And Jesus says, in your anger, do not sin. Or the Bible says, in your anger, do not sin. This does not mean that you go to your spouse and say, we've had a fight. We need to make up before we go to bed. No. Guys use that all the time or people use that all the time. That's not what the Bible says. It says, you, okay, don't sin in your anger. Do not let the sun set on your anger, it says. Good. Don't let the sun set on your anger.

That's your issue. Go to bed and let your spouse have some time to figure it out. Okay? Don't use that verse because that's not what it's for. That verse speaks to you and says, don't let the sun set on your anger, but we can give somebody some space to work it out maybe tomorrow in the morning. The question is, is with anger, what are you angry about? And we are living in a society that is trying to whoop up anger because anger is an emotion that releases endorphins and adrenaline and much of the entertainment industry, much of the news media, people, much of people you know understand this and it gets a reaction.

And a reaction makes money these days. My question I ask is I get angry just like everything I look at things and I have to ask myself, what am I angry about? And is the thing that I'm angry about something that God would be angry about? And if God's angry about it, what good does my anger do? I want to use anger to shepherd myself into right decisions, right action and knowing when someone's been taken advantage of or whatever and making a right action.

But I don't need to be angry about something that God's angry about because what can I add to the eternal anger of God? Nothing. So what's the point of being angry other than it is a boundary line for me where I say, okay, I'm experiencing anger, I'm going to go find out what the Bible says and make a right decision. But the world is selling anger right now. They're selling it. They're feasting upon anger. And a house divided against itself will what?

Will not stand. It is for destruction. Anger will never lead you, I believe, in its end if you keep following it to death. But anger is a great alarm bell. Ephesians 4.26. I knew Jesus didn't say that. In your anger, do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you were still angry. And what do we learn from Jonah as we close? I think we learned a lot more about the love of God than about how to be a God follower. Jonah taught me, he didn't really teach me anything else other than he taught me in the negative.

You ever met somebody and you thought, I learned a lot from that person of what not to do or that organization. the love of God. This book is all about the love of God. And that's something that we want it to beat so strong that it beats like a drum that they can feel in Seattle, in Tacoma, wherever, in Missouri, wherever we go, that the love of God in this place beats to tell people, get your geography right, know that God loves you and that the eyes of the Lord are searching.

And I want to say the eyes of the Lord are searching for people that you know and you might be the voice that goes to their Nineveh and says, I'm willing to be here and sit with you in Nineveh and tell you about the love of God. Amen? Amen. Let's stand and have the worship team and the prayer team come forward. Amen. Amen. Amen.