Reforming Truth Church Sermons

After the Word comes to Jonah a second time, he walks into Nineveh and preaches, and a city of over 100,000 of the ancient world’s worst enemies of God’s people believes and repents in a single day. This sermon looks at what that scene says about the gospel: repentance and faith are gifts God gives rather than works we produce, and God has always shown mercy through the preaching of his Word. We see ourselves in Jonah, who obeys with a divided heart and still gets used by the Lord, and we find comfort in knowing that when Christians sin, they fall into grace and not from it. The message also takes up how God can “relent” without changing, how he justifies the ungodly, and why Christ is the Second Adam we need, far more than a second chance.

Jonah ran from God, went down into the sea, and ended up in the belly of a great fish, and only there did he finally cry out to the Lord. This sermon follows Jonah’s prayer from the depths and shows how God uses trouble to draw His people near. Jonah points us to a better Jonah, Jesus, who went down into death in perfect obedience and out of love for His enemies. And because salvation belongs to the Lord from start to finish, we are secure in Christ, and our good works flow from remembering His mercy rather than from fear. When trouble comes, fly to Jesus.

We walk through Jonah’s flight from God’s call to preach to Nineveh, noting how he keeps going “down” (to Joppa, into the ship, into its lowest part) as sin always leads downward. He highlights the irony of Jonah’s orthodox confession of God as Creator of sea and land while living in open contradiction to it, and argues from chapter 4 that Jonah fled because he knew God was merciful and didn’t want Nineveh to repent. Jesus’s three references to “the sign of Jonah” are cited as evidence the story is historical.

The central point is that God pursues Jonah, and so pursues his people. Salvation and sanctification rest on God’s faithfulness, not on the believer’s obedience, and our disobedience cannot thwart his plan. Drawing on Psalm 139, Ezekiel 34, John 10, 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, and a quote from James Boice, he closes with a self-examination question about where we, like Jonah, are being stubborn or refusing to repent, always tied to Christ as advocate and the assurance that nothing can separate us from God’s love.

The sermon traces how Paul grounds the Christian life in what Christ has already done: Colossians 1-2 establish Christ’s sufficiency and that nothing can be added to his work, so chapter 3 moves to “stop being who you used to be, and be who you are.” The sermon uses the law and gospel distinction (including the three uses of the law) to argue that our standing before God rests on Christ’s righteousness, not our performance. When believers fail, as they inevitably will, they rest in Christ as their advocate, citing 1 John 2 and closing with Romans 8’s assurance that nothing can separate us from his love.