Don't Be A Jonah!

Have you ever been given bad advice? Worse yet, have you not realized that the advice which you were given was bad until after you had acted upon it? Well let me tell you about the worst advice that I was ever given, albeit indirectly, and from a preacher, to boot!

Back around the turn of the century (there’s a phrase which has caught me by surprise a good number of times in the last few years), I was a band director at a rather small school. My son was just a toddler, and my wife and I attended church regularly with the local Baptist congregation. We had an interim pastor for several months, and I thought he was a very good preacher and a great guy all around. Fast forward to a sermon he gave from the book of Jonah.

Now before we talk about that sermon, let me rewind to fill in a bit of background. I was a relatively young Christian at the time. I had been saved at the age of 26, and we had been attending church in this place for probably a couple of years. This was when I began to feel the call for the first time. By “the call,” I mean that I felt a calling into the ministry. I didn’t really know what to do about it, if I’m honest, partly because I was cripplingly introverted. Besides that, I felt horribly unqualified to stand in front of people and preach about the Bible, because I never really spent any time reading it. I didn’t have the first clue about how to preach or be a pastor, so I pretty much just kept this information, somewhat uncomfortably, to myself. I may have “talked to God” about it a time or two. In those days, I was still under the impression that praying was some kind of overtly formal thing that I really didn’t “do.”

Anyway, one Sunday, I sort of felt like God had responded to my “talking.” Remember the interim pastor I mentioned previously? Well, he preached a sermon from the book of Jonah, from a very unexpected perspective. The basic premise of the sermon was that if you felt called to be in the ministry (why yes, yes that did in fact catch my attention), then you should really take some time to consider if the call is truly from God or from your own vanity. All well and good so far. To this day, I believe that part to be very good advice. But the rest…

The pastor then advised anyone who might be considering accepting a call into ministry to resist that call. His reasoning? Look to the book of Jonah, wherein the prophet goes out of his way (quite literally) to avoid doing what God had very plainly told him that he must do. The pastor’s logic justified this stance by saying that if the call is actually from God, it will be repeated, and God will apply a significant amount of pressure to get you headed back in the right direction. This preacher also referenced Samuel’s call as well, which as you may remember, happened three times before Samuel realized it was not his mentor, but God Himself who was calling his name.

I, being a very immature Christian at the time, thought this was brilliant advice, especially given that the topic had been on my mind for a while. This seemed like the logical thing to do.

Spoilers: this is probably the worst advice you could ever give to anyone, but most especially to an extremely willful introvert who was very immature in the faith. Following this advice did not pan out very well for me at all. To be fair, that interim pastor was right about one thing: God did, indeed, put the pressure on me. However, had Bro. Resistance Man known the extent to which I was willing to go in order to resist being behind the pulpit, he might well have reconsidered his broadly-cast advice.

Suffice to say, the next decade of my life was colored by a series of questionable decisions which ultimately led me directly into the belly of the whale. And it was there, in the whale, where God ultimately got His way. I did surrender to ministry: as a worship leader, a discipleship teacher, and a writer; though I still don’t currently believe I shall ever become a pastor of a church. But… I have learned to never say never where God is concerned.

I recently completed a series of essays concerning sin, and I believe that this epistle is strongly related to that series. After all, “…whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” (James 4:17) Jonah, an actual prophet of the Lord, refused to follow a direct command from God. If that doesn’t qualify as sin, I don’t know what would. Look what it got him. I mentioned in the previous series that a Christian who continues to have sin in their life will have a rough time because of it. Jonah’s story is a prime example of that.

Even after the whale, Jonah continued to have a bitter, judgmental attitude towards the people of Nineveh, to whom he had been sent to deliver the message which ultimately spared the city from destruction. It is revealed in chapter four that Jonah had been refusing to go to Nineveh because he believed that they should not be spared. The text implies that Jonah likely argued with God for some time even before attempting to flee to Tarshish.

Consider all the hardship which Jonah endured because of his disobedience. Consider also his generally bitter outlook on life. All of this and more awaits the Christian who continues in disobedience to the Lord. I can personally attest to the reality of these consequences through my own lived experience. While most of the sermons I hear from the book of Jonah are focused on the prophet’s miraculous survival of his encounter with the whale, and how this episode is a foreshadowing of Christ’s death and resurrection, I believe there are also other, perhaps more mundane and practical lessons to be learned from Jonah’s tale.

In short: obey God, or you will be sorry. Take it from a guy who swam a mile in Jonah’s sandals: don’t be like Jonah.