Vince Vitale [00:00:43] Hello, friends. Welcome to Ask Away. Thank you for all the questions you've been sending in. Please keep them coming as we love to feature them on future episodes. You give us a lot to think about every week and we're very grateful for the opportunity to learn as we go. One of the questions that we've heard most over the years is some version of what about people who have never heard the gospel? It's encouraging that this is a question that burdens your hearts because it reveals the deep concern many of you feel for those who have not yet encountered Jesus for themselves. Of course, one uncomfortable response to that question is this: What are we going to do about those who haven't heard? After all, if you're listening to this and you're already a Christian, then Jesus is very clear that you are called to be part of the solution, to share with others the hope that you have. So what keeps us from sharing about our faith with the same level of urgency and conviction and excitement and joy that the first followers of Jesus displayed when they confidently went out into the world to make disciples of all nations? 

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[00:01:52] This is the question that Jo explores in today's Ask Away episode, which is a recording of a talk she gave at a missions’ conference earlier this year. Jo approaches this topic through a case study of the life of the prophet Jonah, whom he describes as the world's most reluctant missionary. Despite living long ago and in a very different cultural context, we can learn a lot from Jonah and from Jo about what is going on in our own hearts when we say no to God's call to go. Here's Jo. 

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Jo Vitale [00:02:39] We started this morning looking at how does God see people? And then in the second session, we were looking at how can we see and proactively engage with others. And so in this last session, I wanted to complete the circle by asking whose vision are we going to live by, our own or God's? Because no doubt about it, hopefully this is being clear already, but if you're a follower of Jesus Christ then that is a missional call on your life. It was never a question of should I go, but rather where are you sending me? A missional living is not like AP class for the super keen Christians. It's just Christianity 101. It's how God intends for his followers to move through the world, not as those going on their own terms, but as those who are sent by Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit to proclaim to a dying world: despair no more, your rescue is at hand. 

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[00:03:33] And yet, while the disposition of God's heart is always go, oftentimes our own heart's response is no. Oftentimes it's no. And so in this last session, I just want to unpack with why is that so often the case? What is it that holds us back? And I want to do that by looking at a case study of the world's most reluctant missionary, the prophet Jonah. And I've always felt a particular affinity for Jonah ever since I was a tantrum prone toddler. My parents, bless their hearts, nicknamed me Jonah the Mourner. Little did they realize, I think, how prophetic that name would turn out to be. But when I reached age 18, I'd actually got away with my church youth group at a Christian summer festival, and around that time I was actually preparing to go away on my fifth international missions’ trip. Sure mentioned that I was off to Ambala Uganda for seven months to volunteer with the Christian Missions organization there. 

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[00:04:29] And honestly, I just couldn't wait to go. I was just so excited. Well, at least I was excited right up until night two of the conference when the guest preached that evening who was a British evangelist called Jadon. He began to tell the story of Jonah and how the Lord told Jonas to go to preach the people of Nineveh and so Jonah immediately responded by jumping on a ship and fleeing as fast as possible in the opposite direction. And when I say opposite direction, I do mean literally. Instead of heading north east of Israel into the heart of the Assyrian empire, which should be kind of modern day Iran, Jonah instead sets off to Tarshish, which is actually on the southern coast of Spain. In other words, he's planning to go 3000 miles in the wrong direction. And so as I sat there listening to the sermon that evening, my heart also actually just began to pound in my chest as I likewise strongly felt the Holy Spirit convicting me that I needed to go in a direction which I didn't want to go in. 

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[00:05:29] And specifically that he was asking me to give up a dating relationship that I was very invested in at that point in my life, but which I knew didn't align with the direction that the Lord was ultimately leading me. So what did I do? Well, inspired by the sermon, I took note of Jonah's example and I ran away. Literally, I ran away. In my distress I abandoned both my parent’s car, which I drove in seven hours to get to the festival, and my 14-year-old sister who I was technically responsible for, and I paid around $140 to jump on a train and head 200 miles from the presence of the Lord straight back home. And I was just so overwhelmed in that moment that I actually couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop crying. And so one of my well-meaning friends who kind of wanted to help me out but she just didn't know what to do in this situation, right before I got on the train, she kind of went out and she panic bought me an entire chocolate fudge cake. 

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[00:06:25] And so she just handed it to me along with a fork as I got on the train. You'll be pleased to hear that unlike Jonah, I didn't get swallowed by a giant fish. But I did, however, swallow the entire chocolate fudge cakes. And in fact, I just spent the next four hours on that train just being stared at by British strangers who were so uncomfortable and didn't know what to make of this girl who was weeping hysterically as she ate an entire chocolate cake. That is a true story. There's some debate amongst Christian scholars as to whether the book of Jonah is a true story. Is it a real life historical account or is it intended as fictional satire, kind of like a sort of cautionary tale for us? And I think the reason that some scholars believe the latter is because the account of Jonah's life is so extraordinary and so melodramatic that they think it must be intended purely as farce. But my response to that would be, do we have to choose it? Could it not be both? 

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[00:07:24] After all, we have historical records from 2 Kings chapter 14 of Jonah son of Amittai prophesying in Israel in 785 B.C. He was a historic figure. And the accuracy of the book itself is also striking when it comes to so many of the historic and archeological details. What weighs with me the most as I'm thinking about this question is based on my own life experience, I've never had trouble believing that a story could both be totally outlandish and yet at the same time, completely true. That has been so much of my own life experience as well. And I think particularly when you're dealing with a mission minded God, a God who can do incredible things even when he's having to work with really reluctant idiot sometimes. Also doesn't the most searing comedy always mirror real life? I think one obvious example of this is the way that in our everyday lives we constantly make choices that we already know make no earthly or heavenly sense. Jonah admits as much when he's cornered by the sailors who've decided that he is the cause. He is the one who start up the storm by angering some deity. 

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[00:08:30] And so he replies to them when they ask who are you and what have you done? He says, "I'm a Hebrew and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land." How ironic. Jonah is claiming to fear the Lord even as he's in the act of running away from him, and how illogical to recognize that his God rules everything from the waves pummeling the ship to the dry land that he's ultimately vomited back up on to. And yet he's still trying to kid himself that somehow he can get away from the presence of the Lord. Our response to fear is so rarely rational; is it? You're back on that train. I knew I was being ridiculous. I knew it. But the fear that was driving me was so strong that I literally felt like I couldn't stand for another second under the weighty presence of the Lord. Not when I had a heart that was so unwilling to yield to him. The tension was just unbearable in me. 

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[00:09:29] And I had this vision on a certain kind of future and I was far more committed to seeing my self-centered, shortsighted goals realized than I was aligning myself with the God of heaven's 30,000 foot view that not only spans the dimensions of the earth, but that encompasses the weaving together of all of human history by the only one who knows the end from the beginning. When we put it like that, when we lay side by side our vision and God's vision, the contrast is so stark between them that it seems ludicrous that we don't just get on board with God's way of seeing things. And yet just like when a solar eclipse is caused by the moon and it briefly blocks out our view of the sun, even though it's like 400 times smaller than it, so too sometimes from our earthbound viewpoint I think there were times in our lives when we lose sight of God because we've allowed some small obstacles to eclipse him in our line of sight. 

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[00:10:29] And in Jonah's case the first obstacle that had him running is this, that Jonah doesn't want to die. In all fairness to Jonah, it's not actually an irrational fear. Unlike the little northern kingdom of Israel, the Assyrian empire had been a powerhouse of the region for 18 centuries. And by the time Jonah came on to the scene, Nineveh was famed for being one of the greatest and the largest and the most powerful cities of the ancient world. Warfare was the backbone of the Assyrian culture. And they actually built that empire on brutal conquest and the torturous treatment of their enemies, and even prided themselves on this kind of bloodthirsty reputation as one king of Assyria boasted 70 years before Jonah came along. I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the pile of corpses over the walls. I dyed the mountains red with their blood, and I cut off the heads of their fighters and built a tower before that city. 

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[00:11:29] You learn a lot about people by how they choose to decorate their homes. I've seen some astonishing arrays of porcelain cats in my time, but nothing quite compares with the wall art that decorates the king's house. If you were ever actually to visit the palace at Nineveh, if you look at the next slide it's grim but you'll see dismembered bodies, decapitated heads of enemies and foes impaled upon infamous stakes of Assyria. This is the wall art at Nineveh. As the Old Testament prophet Nahum later described it, Nineveh truly was the city of blood. Suddenly Jonah's decision to flee makes a little bit more sense, doesn't it? I'm sorry God. You want me, one little prophet, from an insignificant backwater kingdom to travel to the heart of the most brutal empire in the world and call out the rulers and the people for their wicked ways? Tough choice. Let me think. A gruesome death in Nineveh or a little retreat to the Spanish Riviera. What's it going to be? 

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[00:12:35] Humanly speaking, it's totally natural to think in these terms; isn't it? A warning. Danger over there, safety over here. But as Christians that's no longer our framework. We're not called primarily to see naturally, but to see supernaturally. Even life and death are no longer conceived of first and foremost in physical terms anymore, but in spiritual realities. Which means that for us the real life and death issues are no longer determined by how closely you follow the US Department of State travel advisory warnings, but whether you choose to remain in the presence of the Lord or whether you're going to run from him. Just look at Jonah. He makes a bid for safety based on his manmade calculations, but all that leads to him being thrown into a stormy sea and swallowed by a giant fish. Biblical skeptics get kind of caught up on what kind of fish could this have been? 

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[00:13:29] These raging debates in Old Testament circles. Was it a plankton eating baleen whale? In which case Jonah would have had to squeeze through and suffocate only a few inches thick. Or was it a toothed whale? In which case Jonah would have been chewed up and corroded by enzymes. Either way, the point is the odds of surviving are not great, whichever fish it was. And yet, rather than try to defend the science of it all, I would just say isn't that exactly the point here? You take a quick look at Jonah's prayer from the belly of the fish because he references both sheol and the pit, two Hebrew images for the realm of the dead. And he talks about a land where the borders are closed forever. And he also describes the soul as fainting away, a Hebrew expression that was used to describe a person taking their very final breath. In other words, Jonah's is saturated with the imagery of death. 

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[00:14:18] People get very consumed with defending Jonah's survival, and I absolutely believe God could have miraculously preserved him. But given the emphasis of the actual language of his own prayer, I do wonder if maybe we're fixating on the wrong miracle. Is it that God kept Jonah from death or is it that God revived him from the dead? I don't know. Whichever the case, Jonah's brush with death and our own starting point, were actually not all that dissimilar. Okay, maybe we haven't been in the belly of a fish before, but weren't we once too dead in our sins and now are alive in Christ? I watched a movie a few years back, probably the weirdest movie I've ever seen. It was a romantic comedy called Warm Bodies. And the premise of the movie is about a zombie who falls in love with a human and gradually comes back to life. 

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[00:15:03] Anyone else seen this random film? [inaudible]. I didn't expect that. It's not exactly a classic. It's not Jane Austen. But the first line of the film, it did really strike me when the protagonist who is a zombie, by the way, he says, "I'm dead, but it's not so bad. I've learned to live with it." And it's kind of funny. But to be honest, as soon as I heard that, the grief hit me. I was just hit with this wave of grief because it suddenly just occurred to me what could be a more honest description of how most people move through the world. Yeah, we joke about what would we do if the zombie apocalypse came. But isn't that already the question? Every day we are surrounded by people going about their daily lives and one that is totally animated, but in the most significant sense of all, they are spiritually dead. In contrast that state of being with Jesus' description of those who follow him, he says, "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but had passed from death to life." 

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[00:16:08] In the Greek it really means literally like has already passed from death to life. Meaning that when you follow Jesus, it's no longer a matter of fearing death while kind of hoping that maybe I'll get out alive. No, as far as God is concerned, you've already entered in. You have already started eternal life. That switch has already been made. And nothing whether it's a giant fish or stormy sea or sickness or heartbreak or persecution or suffering a [inaudible] for the gospel, nothing is going to rob you of your future. When your life is hidden in Christ, death isn't just something we need to fear anymore. It's just so totally freeing. And so delivered from death, Jonah, good for him, he gets a second chance. God says to him when he comes out of the ocean, God says to him again a second time, "Go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it with the message that I give you.". 

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[00:17:02] And yet, even as he now is setting out in the right direction, Jonah's heart is still not right. If anything, he seems to be taking solace in the fact that even though he has to go to these murderous people, at least he gets to go prophesied their doom. He gets to go to the city and say, "In 40 days the great city of Nineveh will be overthrown." How satisfying must that have felt? To be the handpicked prophet who gets to go and declare death to the empire that depressed and slaughtered his people for generations. It's not just that Jonah didn't want to die. He didn't want the Assyrians to live. And from his personal perspective, those fears also were probably justified. Fifty years later, in 722 B.C., the Assyrians wiped Jonah's homeland, the entire northern kingdom of Israel, totally off the map. He wiped them out. 

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[00:17:51] And then again, in 701 B.C., they invaded the southern kingdom of Judah all the way to the city of Lachish. You can see more pictures of that very conquest, which were hung on the walls of the palace at Nineveh, now housed in the British Museum. And yet, despite Jonah's every intention against his enemies, this reluctant missionary actually proved to be one of the most successful revivalists in all history. Because then Jonah began preaching, the people have never believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them. Even the king himself leads the people in sincere repentance. So much so that when God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil way, God relented the disaster that he said he would do to them and he did not do it. What insights we are given into the heart of our God here. That even knowing that those Assyrians would later on return to their violent ways in future generations, God doesn't make a decision to act in the present based on what other people are going to do in the future. But he deals with each individual according to how they personally respond to his conviction of sin and the call to repentance. 

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[00:19:04] Because to him, they're not just statistics. Every single one of those lives mattered to God. Unfortunately, this is an outcome that Jonah can't get on board with. It displeased Jonah exceedingly and he was angry. Lord, is this not what I said when I was yet in my country? That's why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster. Therefore, now O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live. And the Lord said, "Do you do well to be angry?" It's ironic to me that often people protest against the God of the Old Testament being so does mental instead of being loving. And yet here Jonah has the exact opposite complaint, doesn't he? God, I didn't want to come because I knew that you were going to do this. I knew it. I knew this is just so like you. 

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[00:20:01] Why do you always have to forgive everyone? You yourself brought me here to speak against their evil. If anyone in the world deserves death, it is these people. And now what? Just because they've got to their knees and they've said sorry, you're going to have compassion on them. Are you kidding me? What is your problem? It's not that Jonah doesn't understand God's heart. He knows God is like this. It's just he's so blinded by hate. He cannot stand God's heart. He can't stand it. To him the Ninevans they're not people; they're the problem. They are savages who need slaughtering; they're not souls who need saving. So fiercely does he feel this that he would rather have died in a fish than brought a message of salvation that caused these people to live. Yet God won't allow Jonah to simmer in his hatred. Instead, he turns the question back on him. He says, "Do you do well to be angry?" In other words, if your anger is causing you to wish death upon them, how are you any different? 

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[00:21:04] Because Jesus warned us in his Sermon on the Mount, at the heart level, to God, anger looks just like murder, doesn't it? Having spent eight years in a Soviet labor camp in the 1940s and kind of seeing the very worst of human nature play out, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had a pretty good insight into people, and this is what he had to say about them. He wrote, "If only it were all so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil, it cuts through the hearts of every human person and who's willing to destroy a piece of his own hearts." The irony here is that for all their evil deeds, when the word of the Lord actually came to Nineveh, the immediate response of the Assyrians was to fall on their knees and repent. Whereas, when the word of the Lord came to the supposedly devout prophet Jonah, his first instinct was to run away. 

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[00:22:01] Putting them side by side, I'm just reminded of the line from my favorite British Amateur Sleuths, Miss Marple and Agatha Christie character. And she has this to say. She writes, "I was thinking that when my time comes, I should be sorry if the only plea that I had to offer was that of justice, because it might mean that only justice would be meted out to me." Jonah wants God's vision of justice to align with His. But what he fails to see is that if God were not all those terrible things that He accused him of, he would still be in the belly of that fish. What about us? Who do we want to live? In that time that I spent in Uganda was one of the most amazing times in my life. I loved it. I never wanted to leave. But as [inaudible] alluded to, he then made it all the more painful when after a long process of discernment and prayer, I actually sensed that while the Lord was commissioning me to go, in my case, he wasn't calling me to the conflict zones of Africa or the opium dens of Kowloon or the refugee camps in Greece or the underground church in Iran, but instead to engage with the intellectual skeptics of my own culture. 

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[00:23:06] And you know what? There was so many people I would have gladly gone to with the gospel. But when he sent me to Atlanta, Georgia, the Bible Belt, I said, "Lord, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me right now? You're going to send me to these people who think they already know everything and they have everything and they need nothing from God? These stubborn, proud people who just don't even want to know." I was just not enthused about sharing the gospel there. It's funny, as a Brit over here, I guess technically I am involved in overseas mission, but it's definitely not the missionary life that I'd envisioned in my mind since childhood. It turns out you can actually make idols even out of a mission because along the way God just had to break off some deeply ingrained stereotypes and prejudices in my own life, particularly the notion of who I thought qualified as needy and who I thought deserved the gospel. 

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[00:23:58] The correct answer being, of course, nobody deserves the gospel. Least of all, me. And yet, if God saw fit to rescue me anyway, who was one of those stubborn, proud people, then how dare I begrudge sharing that thing grace with anybody else? As Jesus puts it, the one who's been forgiven much, loves much. And there is not a single person in this room who hasn't been forgiven much. So what then should our love look like? In the words of Pastor David Plotz, "It should look like nothing less than this, that every saved person, this side of heaven, owes the gospel to every lost person this side of hell." It's ironic, really, that for someone whose perspective on missions was very different from David Plotz, Jonah still had the kind of missionary success that most of us only dream of. And yet, to Jonah, this success that he had was actually his very definition of failure, wasn't it? Look how hard he digs in. 

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[00:24:56] Jonah chapter four. "Jonah went out of the city and he sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there." He sat under it in the shade so he could see what would become of the city. In other words, rather than preaching and going home, Jonah settles into watch and waits. What is he sticking around for? Well, he's waiting for his prophecy to come true. He's waiting for some mystery army to come sweeping in and overrun the city of Nineveh within the 40 days that the Lord has predicted. Rather than celebrating revival, Jonah is holding out for that destruction. After all, what can make you more of a laughing stock in the prophetic community than to be the prophet whose predictions of doom don't come true. He went to Nineveh, told them they would all die and turns out they didn't. 

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[00:25:42] Up until this point, Jonah, he's had a good name in Israel. In 2 kings 14, he's the prophet who got to tell the Israelites everything they wanted to hear. That God was going to restore the borders of Israel against the foreign invaders. That's the kind of prophet we love. But look at him now. Rather than overseeing the doom of their enemies, his preaching has become the catalyst for their salvation. How do you go and tell that to your mom? So Jonah sits there waiting and hoping for all of the people of Nineveh to die so that he can go home with a success story for his people. It may not be the same thing, but how often does reputation eclipse the bigger picture when it comes to us too? Don't we also want to be known in a certain way? In what kind of standing in the community would we be giving up if we actually said yes to that niggling that we have just been sensing in our hearts from the Holy Spirit who is calling us to lay something down and go. 

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[00:26:38] And what if, after all of the sacrifices and the costs, we don't see the kind of response that Jonah sees? What if, in worldly terms, it looks like a failure? What if the visible outcomes do not match the steep investment and people think we were fools to have gone in the first place. Must have just misheard. Must have got it wrong for them. Even worse, what if the call to go requires us loving people that no one else wants to even live? What if God wants you to go to the people no one else wants to live? One of the hottest aspects of choosing to love your enemies is that more often than not, they're not just your enemies. Sometimes they're the enemies of your friends or your community, which means that sometimes the very act of reaching out comes with this real risk that it's going to cost you relationships that you hold dear. Friends who may find your actions so unfathomable from the perspective of their own hurt that they think you've totally lost the plot. 

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[00:27:38] And if we want to get anywhere in the Christian life, I think one thing we need to accept early on is that aligning your vision with God's will certainly means serious hit to your reputation if you're left with any at all. Let's be honest. How could it be otherwise, though, when the reputation of Jesus was actually the first thing to go for him? Isaiah 53: "He was despised and rejected by men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. As one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not." Have you ever noticed that Jesus never asked us to give up anything that he hasn't first already willingly given up himself? He always goes first. When we're called to come and die it's always a call to come after him. I'm so grateful that Jesus didn't prioritize his reputation over the missional call on his life. If he had, he certainly wouldn't have gone to the lengths that he went to rescue me. What a sad outcome it would be to get to the end of your life and realize that actually what kept your worldly reputation intact was the very thing that cost you the erosion of your integrity and a life of missed opportunity. 

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[00:28:49] How sad. A feeling of getting to heaven and standing in front of God and being like, God I wanted your name to be known, but I just wanted to make a name for myself more. I wanted to make a name for myself more. There's only one name that we can avow before one day. And the choice as to when we bow that knee, that is the day that we're never going to regret. We will never regret the decision to bow our knees before the name of Jesus Christ. I think one thing we could regret, the only thing perhaps we'll ever regret is that we didn't vote sooner. In the words of missionary William Carey, "I'm not afraid of failure. I'm afraid of succeeding at things that don't matter." There are so many things that we could put our hope in that have no lasting value at all. Let's look at Jonah winds up at the end of the story. He's taking shelter in the shade of a little plant while he waits with baited breath for the destruction of Nineveh, only for God to then cause the plant to die and the hot sun to beat down on Jonah's heads. 

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[00:29:56] And after everything else that has happened to Jonah, for him, this is the final straw. He totally loses that. I think sometimes it's the death of those small comforts that tripped me up the most as well. Actually, I sort of am prepared sometimes for the big sacrifices. [Inaudible] talked about those in often the Christian life, but sometimes it's the little things that really get you. I still remember my first Christmas in the States after we moved here. I was so resentful not to be home with my own family in England. I literally locked myself in the bathroom on Christmas Eve, sat on the floor and just cried. In that moment, I didn't care about God's call. I didn't care about the mission. I didn't care about all the unbelieving extended family members I get to see on Christmas Day, the next day, and what an opportunity to share the gospel on Christmas. But all of that was just eclipsed by my longing for home. And as I lay there throwing a 30 year old's tantrum, I felt the gentle prompting of the Holy Spirit saying, Jo, don't you think I know how it feels to be home sick, too? Don't you think I know? 

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[00:30:57] And suddenly it hit me what Christmas Eve meant for Jesus. The night of his birth, when he willingly gave up the riches of his home in heaven for a stable and grew up to become the son of man who had nowhere to lay his head. He had nowhere to lay his head. The king of heaven. Also, that one day he could have the opportunity to bring us home with him back to his father's house, where there are many rooms waiting for people this side of hell who needs to hear the gospel. Those rooms are prepared and they're waiting. For each one of us, the comforts that God is asking us to lay down, they're going to look different. And some will seem trivial and some will seem really big. Maybe it's the shade that you rest in. Maybe it's the cultural traditions that you love on Christmas. Maybe it's living close to your family. Maybe it's relinquishing a career goal that you spent your life working towards. Maybe it's the security that comes from engaging with the world in the same way that your friends do. Maybe it's the surrender of a relationship that means a great deal to you or the giving up of the lifestyle that you wanted for your family and your loved ones. Or the loss of financial and Social Security not just for you, but even for your kids. 

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[00:32:08] It's not inherently wrong to want any of these things, but the problem is when they get so big in our lives that they start eclipsing the view of what God wants to do in your life. And one of the reasons our pastor lives very simply is because, in his words, he never wants his response to Jesus’ call to go to be, "But I really like that couch. I really like my couch." And please hear me. It's not that God wants less for you. It's that he wants infinitely more. God desires so much more for your life than you could ever even dream of or imagine. As the psalmist puts it, in his presence there is fullness of joy. That is what he's committed to giving you. And he's fierce. He is fierce about removing any obstacle in your life that risks stealing that joy because he knows so much better than we do where that joy is actually going to be found and what real life looks like. CS Louis puts it well, "It would seem that our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with drink and sex and ambition, when infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea." 

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[00:33:26] We are far too easily pleased. Consider Jonah caught up in so many distractions. He's faithful they'll die. He doesn't want these Assyrians to live. He's worried about his reputation. He's furious about the loss of his comforts. He's so busy focusing on everything that could go wrong that he has lost sight of the only thing that ever needed to be right. He's lost alignment with the very heart of God. And yet, even with this dysfunctional profit to work with, God never loses sight of the goal. Does he? His heart is so missional, his love is so relentless, that you better believe that God is going on mission. Whether we go with Him willingly or not, God is going on a mission. Consider the pagan sailors whose conversion comes through the very act of Jonah's disobedience. They're so convicted by the power of God when he sweeps them into the sea that they cry out for mercy and they make sacrifices and vows to him. 

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[00:34:16] Well, think about the Assyrians for whom God's commitment to their life proved to be so much stronger than Jonah's wishes for their death. God was so committed to those Assyrians. And speaking of them, not only were their descendants some of the earliest recipients of the gospel in the first century, but today the descendants of the very same Assyrian empire, they make up two to four million group of an ethnic minority living in the regions of northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. And due to the predominant faith of that group today, not only are they incredibly persecuted in the region, but the official designation for them in the world today is simply Assyrian Christians. We never get to see, do we, the whole picture of what God is doing in our finite lifetime. But just look at his faithfulness. Look at the story he's writing throughout history, that he could take a group of people who begin there and that's where they are today. That is the grace of our God. 

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[00:35:21] Jonah had no idea the seeds that he was sowing, but God had a plan and a purpose not only for the people of Nineveh then, but the salvation of future generations as well. And he will do whatever it takes. Just as God worked around Jonah then, he can work around us now. If we get in the way, God can work around us. But you know what? It's so much rather do it with us than without us. It's so much rather that you be a part of it. It brings him so much more joy when his children are delighted by what's on his heart and he gets to do it with him than when we are dragged, kicking and screaming. Which is why the Book of Jonah ends at God leaving us with that very choice. He sets forth this challenge. The book ends with an unanswered question because that is the question posed to every one of us who read it. And the Lord said, "You pity the plants for which you did not labor. You did not make it grow, which came into being in the night and perished in the night. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left-- and also much cattle?"

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[00:36:28] Jonah sits and he is so angry over the death of this one single measly little plant that he wants to die, and yet he can't even muster up the emotion to want the 120,000 souls in Nineveh to live. It'll be funny if it weren't so convicting. Honestly, the number of times I sat on an airplane writing an evangelistic talk only to get frustrated at being interrupted by the person sitting next to me who sees what's on my screen and it stirs up a spiritual conversation. And now I am fuming because I want to get it written so that when I land I can get to bed on time. I mean, what is wrong with me? Am I well worried about my bedtime and my precious sleep than the salvation of the soul sitting next to me? You guys, we are kidding ourselves if we don't think that we are like Jonah. We are like him, but the good news is we don't have to stay there. We don't have to get stuck as Jonah the moaners. It doesn't have to be our destiny, no matter what our parents call us. Instead, we can choose differently. 

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[00:37:29] We can choose to become worshipers like David who wrote in Psalm 27, "My heart says, Seek his faith. Your faith, Lord, I will seek. Your faith, Lord, I will seek. With my heart I will seek your faith." Wouldn't it be amazing to have a heart that just cried out like that within you? Seek his face. In the words of the 18th century Bishop James Sean Wall [sp], "Until we give God our hearts, we give him nothing at all." But you know what? You may not feel like you have much to give, but to God, that is the most beautiful gift you could ever give him. There is nothing he wants more than your hearts. And if you know that your heart is so far from aligned with the heart of God for seeing people as God actually sees them, then I just want to end today with this challenge. Why not ask God to give you that heart today? 

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[00:38:25] One of the hardest things to confront after my quick exit at age 18 was how far I drifted because just five years earlier, God had done just a miraculous work in my life. And I knew that I needed to come back to that because when I was 13 years old, I was actually sitting with 10,000 teenagers at that very same summer camp when a missionary from Indonesia came and he was preaching about God's heart for the lost. And as he shared I just felt so convicted because I was sitting there I was thinking, God, I know I'm supposed to care about this. I've been saying since I was five I was going to be a missionary, but I'm listening to this guy and I feel nothing. I just feel nothing. Honestly all I feel is that my heart is like a rock in my chest, just solid and nothing is getting in. But then I prayed something. I just said one line through it. I just said, "God, please, would you break my heart?". 

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[00:39:21] And I think in my mind I just sort of thought, well, this would be a prayer that God answers gently and delicately over the next 10 years and gradually get me ready for mission. What I wasn't prepared for was that actually that might be a prayer that God would want to answer that very day, but it actually was. And I'm not sure quite how I got there, but the next thing I knew I just found myself hunched over in a ball, on my knees, bawling my eyes out, weeping so loudly in this silent 10,000 person tent that probably everyone in the room was looking at me. But I was just so overwhelmed by this wave of grief that just washed over me. I'm British, so we don't do PDAs. It was embarrassing, but I felt like that was part of it. God was saying "Jo, do you want my heart more than you care about what everyone thinks about you in this moment? How much do you want my heart? What would you give up? What would you surrender?" And the grief that was washing over me, it was not a human grief. I didn't have the capacity to feel. Two seconds before I felt nothing. But I felt like God was just giving me the smallest glimpse of how he feels when he looks out on the people who don't know him and how much it just devastates him. 

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[00:40:25] And so I was just weeping and weeping. And as I wept, suddenly all these different people's faces started streaming before my eyes. It's like young and old, male and female, all different nationalities and ethnicities and just every kind of person you could imagine. I just sensed like the Holy Spirit was saying in that moment, "Would you go for them? If I called you to go, would you grieve for them? If I sent you, what would your answer be?" And I just felt like I needed to say yes. The only thing I could say was, "Yes, Lord, I will go for them. I will go." And then he laid before me what about all the things that you love? What are the idols in your life? And he started listing the things that were my obstacles, that were blocking my vision and saying what if it was this and that? And what would you give up? And I kind of was working through it on the floor for a few minutes, but finally I just "Anything you ask, I will give you. I will go if you're calling me.". 

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[00:41:17] And it was when I said yes that I just felt-- it's hard to describe it-- just these waves of love washing over me from head to toe. And I just never experienced anything like it before. I sensed that it's the love of God just pouring over me. His love for me, but also his love for the lost. And it changed my life. That was the moment when I just wanted to go. And nothing was going to get in the way of that going. That was the transformation moment. And I say that not to be like look at me and look at how great my heart is-- because it wasn't. That's the point. It wasn't. Humanly, I had nothing. But I really believe that if we ask the living God to give us his heart for the lost, then not only can he do it but that is actually a gift that he loves to give. He's just waiting for you to ask. It's like it's on the tip of his tongue that, yes, I want to put that on you. Yes, I want to give you my heart. 

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[00:42:11] There's nothing you could ask of me that delights me more than that you want my heart and you want to go on a mission with me and that we could do this together. That is the greatest thrill imaginable. Yes, I want to answer that prayer for you. And so I'm ending here because I don't want us to leave today without you guys having that same opportunity. Maybe some of you've been sitting here saying, you're "Theologically, I'm checked in. Yes, intellectually this makes sense, but I just feel nothing. Like whatever's in here it is a rock. I wish I felt, but I just don't. And, God, I just need your help. I need you. I need you to change me. I need the God who is the God of heart transformation, who brings the dead back to life to bring my heart alive in love today. And so that's the invitation I want to leave us with. You can go out of here and pray that gentle prayer, but also what if you just wanted to pray it now? And say God, I want that today. I want to walk out of here different. I want you to give me your heart today. Please, I don't have it, but I need it and I'm asking you. 

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