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Jonah was a most remarkable man. He was a man who had faithfully served the Lord. Yet at this point of his life, he was most reluctant to do so.

Then, from another point of view, he could be described as quite an innovatorin that he was the first person who ever took a "submarine" ride. Even though it was quite involuntary, and in quite an unusual “submarine at” that.

A lot has been said about Jonah, so much of it in jest. But the message of Jonah is a most serious message. It is a message which brings to us the strongest challenge today. There is so much that we need to learn from this servant of the Lord.

Make no mistake about it, this man was actually a servant of the Lord. Reluctantly so at this time, yes, but very much a servant of the Lord.

Perhaps Jonah was no more reluctant to serve the Lord than a great many Christians are today. We live in a day which offers many incredible opportunities for effective and fruitful Christian service. Yet all too often those opportunities are left to go begging. They remain unclaimed because God's people are not ready to buy up the opportunities in the Name and for the glory of the Lord.

It is all of these aspects which make this challenge so relevant and so significant for Christians today. We want to concentrate our thoughts of the first three verses of Jonah 1;

The Lord is always in the place of first priority. It was because Jonah forgot this fact, that he found himself in so much trouble. This is so often the case today.

Too many of God's people forget the sovereign preeminence of the priority of God in every aspect of His Work. This includes every area of the life and service of His people.

It was the Lord who initiated this relationship with Jonah, it was the Lord who chose him, who called him, and who appointed him.

It is the Lord who constantly initiates our involvement and relationship with Him. Remember that Jesus said in John 15: 16, “You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you.”

One of the problems we have in our own thinking and attitude is that we talk and act as though we are the important party in this relationship. We see ourselves as the ones who should make all the decisions. We are the ones who should take the initiative in all we are to do.

But that is not true. The Lordship: the Sovereign Lordship of the Lord Jesus, is always the key. We must constantly maintain this central priority in all areas of our thinking and attitude.

He called! He called us! This fact reminds us that it was not only the Lord's initiative, but also that when the Lord does call us, He does so as an act of infinite grace. We are called to serve, not because we are worthy, nor because we deserve any place whatsoever in His service.

God has not only saved us, but He has also called us with a calling which is described as: "Holy!" A calling which is to be treated with the greatest reverence and deepest devotion. This is a calling to which we must respond with thankfulness, love, and commitment.

Then Paul goes on to say this, "Not according to our works." Not by anything that we have done. Nor because we deserve, or have earned, this calling. But, "According to His own purpose and grace." His purpose and His gracethose are the essential elements.

This was true as far as the Lord's call to Jonah was concerned, and it is equally true as the Lord initiates His work in our lives and in His challenge to our service.

As we hear His call, if we are true to our Lord, we will respond as John the Baptist did when he said, "I am not worthy to fulfill the most menial service for the Lord Jesus." Yet, even as we make that totally honest confession, we humbly and sincerely accept the opportunity and thank Him for it.

We also have in the first verse the emphasis on "The Word" which the Lord spoke. The Lord spoke to Jonah. He spoke to specifically revealing His Will to Jonah. To make known His purpose to His servant.

How vital this fact is. It reminds us of the absolute importance of the Word of God for us in our relationship to God.

How can we know His will? How can we understand His leading? How can we get light on the path ahead? It is only as we hear His Word. Only as we respond to Him as He speaks to us to personally enlighten us through His Word.

We remember, of course, and Jonah should have remembered, that the Word of the Lord carries the full authority of God's sovereignty.

God was not making a suggestion to Jonah. God was not saying, "Now, perhaps you might like to consider this possibility. And after you have given it whatever you think is appropriate consideration, then you can make up your mind as to whether or not you want to do it."

All too often that seems to be the way we think God is speaking to us. We respond as though all God is doing is simply making suggestions which we can take or leave as we choose!

God does not speak to us on that basis. Rather He always speaks in absolute sovereign authority. It is never merely a suggestion to us. But it is God's deliberate call to service which requires our immediate and complete obedience.

There was the time when the Lord Jesus quoted the Old Testament statement, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. " That problem is still with us.

There are far too many Christians who give lip service to the authority - the sovereign authority- of the Word of God, but who fail to carry it through in practical expression in their lives.

The Word of God wields total authority over our lives It is our only authority for both: all we believe and preach, and for all we say and do. We need to hear it, apply it, and live by it.

Now for the third step in the chain of this relationship. First, the emphasis was on the person of the Lord. Then, the Lord speaks His Word in Sovereign authority.

Let us make no mistake about it, this is always the sequence when God is dealing with His redeemed people! Third in line of spiritual priority, after the Lord Himself, then: His Word, is the person to whom God speaks. this is as true for us as it was for Jonah of old.

Jonah was known as a man of God. In 2 kings 14 :25 we read this statement made about the reign of King Josiah, "He restored the coast of Israel according to the Word of the Lord God of Israel which He spoke by the hand of His servant Jonah the son of Amittai the prophet."

Jonah was the prophet of the Lord. He is identified by the Lord Himself as His servant.. Thus it becomes quite obvious that through much of his life he was available to faihfully serve the Lord, to odediently proclaim the Word of the Lord, and to minister the Word of God to the people of God.

What a challenge there is in this. That we be known as people of the Word, the servants of God who are genuinely committed to teach, preach, and proclaim the Word of God. The Church does not exist to entertain people. It exists to proclaim the Living Word of God to all people everywhere. To young and old. To take this Word to all those who are living in sin as we seek to point them to the Saviour.

To teach that same Word, to all believers so that they will go on in the faith, growing in Christian maturity and effectiveness. We need to be known as the people of the Word of God.

This is a very interesting picture of the situation: The Lord was able to speak His Word to and through His servant. They had that relationship, which had been a continuing relationship in which Jonah the servant of the Lord had been used effectively by God to proclaim the Word of God most effectively.

God said to Jonah. "Arise, and go." We are not aware of the location where Jonah had been ministering up until the time at which God called him. We do know that his ministry had been to the Israelites, and they certainly needed to hear the Word of God as much as anyone else.

We are reminded of another situation which is recorded in the book of Acts. Philip had gone to Samaria where he proclaimed the Word of God with the result that there was a great revival among the people of Samaria. As they listened to the Word of God they believed, they responded, they were born again, and a vital living fellowship was established in Samaria.

But, then, in the middle of that revival, God said to Philip, "I want you to leave Samaria and go down into the desert." Philip may well have been tempted to say, "Lord, You are doing such good things here through my ministry, Your blessing is on the work, so, why take me out of here and send me down into the desert?"

The Lord had every right to send His servant wherever He wanted to send him. Philip did not question the Lord, he obeyed. You will remember that is was down there in the desert that he met the Ethiopian Eunuch who also believed in the Lord and was saved, giving immediate witness to His faith in the Lord.

God came to His servant, Jonah, and in effect said to Him, "You have been concentrating your attention here long enough. But out there, out there beyond the borders of Israel, there are so many people who so desperately need to hear My Word!” The people who had been ignored and neglected far too long!

It is the time chosen by the Lord for Jonah to arise and go! There are times when, if we really do hear what the Lord is saying, we will hear something very similar.

It is vitally important that the Word of God be taught and proclaimed to all who share in all of the various activities of our Churches and Christian fellowship. Yet, at the same time, the Lord has every right to choose the time when He comes to us most decisively and says, "But what about those people out there? Now is My time for you to go to them with the Gospel!”

What about the people in the community? What about all those people throughout the country and around the world? When are we going to reach them with the Word?

Jesus said, "Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the world."(Acts 1: 8).

There are times when we hear Him saying most clearly to us, "It is time to reach out beyond the walls of your building, To reach out more effectively into your community. On to that mass of people who are without Christ and without hope. Go into that desperately needy world as My ambassadors with My Word."

You will notice that the Lord said, "Go to that great city, Nineveh, and cry against it." Go! Cry! Let your voice be heard loud and clear throughout the streets of Nineveh. Proclaim the Word of God to them so that they will hear it, so that they will understand it. So that they will know exactly what God is saying to them. Why was He saying this?

Yes, we are called to proclaim the awesome judgement of God on all sin. Some people today want to water down the emphasis of the Word of God on the wrath of God which is so decisively expressed against all sin and uncleanness of man. But we do not have that right. Indeed, we would be most foolish to attempt to do so.

We need to faithfully proclaim the fact that our God expresses Himself in holy wrath and judgement against all sin. Then, having proclaimed that truth: point the sinner to the Saviour who is able to save them to the uttermost. To the Saviour who is able to provide forgiveness for them because He died on the cross to redeem them.

"Go,” He said. “Go and talk! Go and teach! Go and preach! Go and proclaim this message!" It is still the same today as when Paul expressed the need in Romans 10, "How shall they hear without a preacher?” Without someone to tell them?

The Bible still contains the statement that if we fail to sound out the warning, then God will hold us accountable. Yes, it is still, “Arise and go! Go, and preach!”

And there is something else about this second verse that is so very significant "Arise, and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness is come up before me."

Jonah was commissioned to go to an extremely difficult area of service. This is brought out by the fact that God emphasized that the wickedness of the people of the city was so very great.

It was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and at that very time the Assyrians were rampaging relentlessly through country after country. Those very Assyrians were a most serious threat to everything that Jonah, as an Israelite, held dear.

And yet, in spite of all thator was it: because of all that?God was saying to him, "Go to that very difficult city! Go to those very dangerous people, and proclaim My Word of judgement to them! That is the responsibility that I am putting on you!"

Jonah's situation reminds us of Noah. It was at a time when the wickedness of man was so very great that God regretted that He had even made man. Every imagination of man's heart was only evil continually. This is what was said about the situation in Noah's day. Noah had a extremely difficult task to perform. He preached, and he preached. He persisted in faithfully proclaiming the Word of God to those people who would not listen.

It was a most difficult area of service. They were the most hardened people imaginable. When he got through preaching and proclaiming the Word of God, always being so very faithful to his task, the world would have written him off as a failure!

Why? Because the only ones who went with him into the ark were his wife, his sons, and their wives. Nobody else believed his message or responded to the Word which he proclaimed.

In the light of this example, we must remember that God offers no easy tasks to His people today either. It is true that there are a lot of Christians who think that they have it made because they are having quite an easy time of it. They are not really that busy. Their service for the Lord does not take them very much time or effort. So they are satisfied that there is no great cost or sacrifice involved in their place of service. Thus they just cannot identify with the statement, "God offers no easy tasks to His people today."

But if that is true, there is probably only one reason for it: their place of service is most probably selfchosen, not Godappointed!

God has no easy task to which to call His people. How we need to understand that this is an awesome reality, even as it is an inescapable fact even today. To serve the Lord Jesus Christ still demands a sincere willingness to humbly deny ourselves. Yes, it still does involve the daily commitment to take up our cross, and by that road, and that road alone, follow Jesus.

When the Lord called Isaiah (Isaiah 6), he responded, “Here am I, send me." And the Lord said to Isaiah, "Go and tell this people, Hear ye indeed and understand not, see ye indeed but perceive not, make the heart of this people fat and make their ears heavy and shut their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and convert and be healed."

God was saying to Isaiah, "I am going to send you to a very difficult place of service. You are going to preach My Word, but the people are not going to respond.”

As Isaiah listened, he could not help asking, "Lord, How long?" And the answer he received was, "Until the cities be wasted, without inhabitants, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate!"

"Our God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we ask or think!" Yet it is a tragic mistake on our part if we think that it is always going to be done without a high price being paid by usif we are to prove to be the genuine servants of the Lord.

We cannot, we dare not, attempt to limit our service to the nice, polite, respectable people which we would prefer to associate with if we had our own way. Out there in the world all around us are people who are desperately in need of Jesus as their Saviour. If they do not hear the Gospel they will be lost and lost eternally.

Our Lord holds us responsible to take the Gospel to them no matter how difficult the task may be. So, where are the people today who will ask, “Give me the more difficult people to work with. The hard, the unresponsive, the degraded, the repulsive?"

Or are we convinced that God does not love them? That Jesus did not die for them? So, therefore we can safely ignore them? Our Lord's commission to us is still to every creature. That includes those who are the most degraded, the most repulsive. Even to those who, as we go, we will have to pay a very high price in patience and love and sacrifice so as to win them to our Lord.

And, they are all around us. "Arise, go, preach to every creature, understanding that it is going to cost you: everything to do so as in love you obey the Lord!”

Then there is this third verse. What a tragic verse this is! Tragic, and yet so very typical. a verse in which the theme is:

Jonah ran away! He deliberately fled from the task to which the Lord had called him. His attitude so loudly proclaims: “It is all very well for God to attempt to send me, but I do not have to obey! If that is what You expect me to do, Lord, then I decline to serve you any longer!"

He ran away from the task the Lord gave him, and in running away from that task, it was inevitable that he was running away from the Lord. You see, to run away from God's command is to run away from the God who issues the command. “He fled from THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD!”

What a tragedy it is that today there are still so many people who are doing this very thing. The first responsibility of every Christian is to do everything possible to reach a lost world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet so many Christians are doing everything they can to avoid involvement in the very ministry to which their Lord appoints them.

It has been suggested that ninety five percent of all Christians have not won one other person to Jesus Christ. Yet those very Christians all claim to love and serve Jesus. And yet, this is the very work we are called by our Lord to do.

This is the challenge that constantly comes to us, and we run away from it. We are busy in all kinds of other places, doing all kinds of other things! Even busy in so-called “Church work!”

Yes, it is a lot easier to entertain and organize social functions, and all those other “nice” things. It might be a lot easier, but the price we pay for such an attitude is tragic beyond words.

He wanted to get away from that place where God had spoken so clearly and so definitely to him. So he left to travel to a foreign country. Nineveh was in a north easterly direction. He bought a ticket on a ship travelling west.

He wanted to shut off and shut out that insistent voice which commanded him in such a disturbing way to take the Word of God to those people who so desperately needed to hear it. He was looking for a place to hide, a place where he could be concealed from the Word of God. To find that place: HE WENT DOWN!

People today have become quite proficient in their attempts to hide from God. Some people even attempt to hide in the Church. They get into the fellowship, and get so busy doing incidental things that are of no real value, and nobody notices them.

They are quite happy, and everyone else seems to be happy with the situation. Yet all the time they are hiding from the insistent call of God, they are seeking concealment from the commission of their Lord. They have taken the path which LEADS THEM DOWN! That road is always: “DOWN!”

"Where can I go to hide from Your Spirit, Lord? or, where can I flee to escape Your presence?" The Psalmist asked that question, knowing that there was no answer to it. We, as God's people, must realize that there is no place in which we can ever hide from God.

You will notice something else about this third verse, Jonah had to pay! It is said there, that, "He paid the fare."

Now, while it is true that it would have cost Jonah a lot to serve the Lord in the place to which God had appointed him, in fact it cost him much more to run away. And that cost involved not only the fare he paid to travel on that ship.

It cost him his personal fellowship with God. It cost him losing the blessing of God in his life and service. It cost him the very sense of the presence of God in his life. It cost him everything that mattered.

This is just as true for us today. When we, as God's people, try to evade God's command, when we try to hide from His call, trying to escape from our responsibility in making known the Word of God to those who so desperately need to hear it, then, it is going to cost us far more than we could ever imagine!

It will cost us financially, make no mistake about that. It will cost us at the point of our fellowship with the Lord. It will prove to be most costly within our homes and families. In the area of our influence in the lives of our loved ones, as well as our witness before our neighbors.

Everything that we should count dear will inevitably suffer. We will have to pay. There is no escaping that reality.

This is one of the reasons the lives of so many Christians today are dry, empty, and sour. There is no joy, no vitality, no life. It is because they are running away from their Godgiven responsibilities that they are inevitably paying this very high price.

Jonah had only one aim now, and that was to go to Tarsus from the presence of the Lord. To accomplish that, he deliberately broke fellowship with the Lord.

This man of God, who had served the Lord faithfully for years! One who had been used to proclaim the Word of God so effectively, so powerfully, and so fruitfully! Who elsewhere was spoken of in strong words of commendation.

Is it possible to come to that point where the one desire, the one motivation of his life, was to get away from God? Yes, that is what the Word of God says: "To get away from God!" To evade God. To get out of His presence. To silence that voice which brought the Word of command.

But, to silence the Voice of God, he also had to renounce every blessing and every expression of grace which the Lord so greatly wanted him to experience.

He wanted to get away from God so that he could do what he wanted to do. He would serve, but only in a place and situation which he thought would be more acceptable to him.

He was running away from God. God, and all He represented, was sacrificed to his determination to have his own way. The inevitable result was that he ran headlong into misery and tragedy.

It was, and still is, a totally futile flight! There is no escape from God. That is what Jonah discovered, and sooner or later we today will be brought to the point where we realize how true it still is.

The One with Whom we have to deal is the Sovereign God. The Almighty God! The Ever-present God! He continues to come to us to remind us that His commission to us is still the same as it always as been, "Arise, go and tell the world the Gospel of the redeeming love of God in Jesus Christ," "Go and preach the Gospel to every creature."

Our Lord challenges us afresh to reach our generation, to reach our world, our community, with the Gospel. We can respond to that challenge in a variety of ways. Jonah responded to God's Word by getting up and running away. Yet, do not forget what it cost him.

We can, and should respond as Isaiah did, and say, :”Here am I, send me." "I'm available, Lord, use me."

When we respond in that way, the Lord will take us and use us to reach our community, our world, and our generation with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.