Last week as we began our new sermon series about being spiritually fatigued, I couldn’t help but examine myself. To be perfectly honest, I am exhausted, I’m worn out, and I WANT to be lazy and do absolutely nothing. But as we began to examine why we become fatigued, I could see how some of those things were affecting me as a person. Over the course of the week God has made it abundantly clear that my diet is horrible, I don’t have active rest, and my mind isn’t set on the task at hand.
As I examined myself, I couldn’t help but think of Jonah. Most likely when you think of Jonah you think of his charge to go to Nineveh and preach, but instead of doing so he runs away from God and gets swallowed by a fish and then vomited up on the shore. End of story. But it’s really not the end at all, and I learned to love the second half of the story because of the way that we can see God handling Jonah’s sorry attitude.
Beginning in Jonah 3 we see Jonah go to Nineveh, and the people repent. This is a wonderful thing! God relents from the disaster that he was going to bring upon the Ninevites and the people are back in a right relationship with God and everyone is happy… except for Jonah. Jonah goes outside the city and makes a booth for himself to sit under and pout. God brings up a plant to shade him and keep him comfortable, but when dawn comes the plant was dead. God had sent a worm to destroy the plant.
This causes Jonah to cry out to God for a second time and say “it is better for me to die than to live” to which God responds “are you mad about the plant?” Jonah responds “Yes I’m mad. Mad enough to die.” To which the Lord responds “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I 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?”
Jonah had a sorry attitude about that for which he didn’t even work. How often do we have the same attitude? Instead of behaving like Jonah, we should be asking questions like “how can I be involved in this work?” or “how can I be the change I wish to see in the church?”
Let us not grow weary in doing good (Gal. 6:9). Let us be steadfast, always abounding in the work of the Lord knowing that our labor is not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58).
– Josh Fowler
Dalraida church of Christ is a congregation of Christians that meet in the mid-town area of Montgomery, Alabama. Our goal and purpose is to seek and follow God and His Word in everything that we do in life.