Looking in Before Reaching Out
November 2, 2025
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Jonah 1:1-17
1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying,2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. 6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”
7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” 9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.
11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” 13 Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.14 Therefore they called out to the Lord, “O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.” 15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. 16 Then the men feared the Lordexceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
17 And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
As 2024 was ending, our leaders sensed that God wanted our church to spend this year, 2025, focusing on two areas: building a culture of prayer and a culture of outreach. We have people who pray, and we have people who do outreach, but we were not sure if in these two foundational areas we were a church that has a culture of prayer and a church that has a culture of outreach. So that’s where we set the main goals for the year.
I’ve said before how much this has stretched me because I wouldn’t say I’m great at either of these. I’ve teased that next year I’m going to pick whatever thing I think I’m best at and make everybody do that for a year. Last week we had our own Minne Bouma preach to us, and he shared the statistic that in churches like ours, only 10% of the congregation shares with someone about Jesus twice a year. So maybe most of us also feel stretched by these goals.
What I can say is that so far I’ve seen good changes in us and in me, especially related to prayer. This fall we’re beginning to focus more on outreach. And that’s how we got here to the book of Jonah, and it’s how this decoration got here on the side of the stage. I’ll tell you what this is at the end of the sermon.
For many of us, our main association with the book of Jonah is the children’s Bible version of the story. A big prophet gets on a big ship and finds himself in a big storm and gets swallowed by a big fish before he goes to a big city to preach a big sermon.
That version is not wrong. But there’s more. The book is more honest about what it means to be fully human than we might expect, more honest about all our human glory and might, but also more honest about all our human depravity, the darkness in our hearts, the kind we don’t typically think about and certainly don’t talk about.
To give one example, consider how in the adult version of this book, Jonah sinks into a deep depression at different points. He becomes angry and bitter. By the end of the book, the mercy of God makes this prophet of God so mad that he becomes suicidal. The adult version of the book is not as pleasant and sanitized as we might expect.
In my first year in college we had a dorm room fridge, and the school required that you unplug in the room everything before you left for winter break. My roommate left some food in the fridge. We come back five weeks later, and you couldn’t open the fridge. Well, you could, but it was a science experiment now. I was like, “We can throw this out the window (which we really couldn’t because we were on the seventh floor), or you can take it downstairs, open this up, clean it, and let the light and air in.”
When we come to the opening of Jonah, we might expect a cute story about how we can better have a culture of outreach, but the story opens more stinky than we expect. Look again at how it begins in vv. 1–3.
1 Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.
“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me,” the prophet is told. God told many Old Testament prophets something similar. “Arise, and go,” the Lord tells prophets. And Jonah does exactly that. He arises. And he goes. But he doesn’t go where he’s told. Again, v. 3: “But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish.”
God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, and he goes toward Tarshish, which is the complete opposite direction by the complete opposite mode of transportation. It would be like if I told you to go to Los Angeles by train, and you arose and got on a boat to England. Nineveh is east by land, and he goes west by sea. At this point in the story, we’re not told exactly why he does this, although the last line says he’s fleeing the presence of the Lord. He’s going to try to do something that can’t be done.
And, wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as he goes, he just so happens to find a ship. Isn’t that convenient? Perhaps it’s even a sign from the Lord: Jonah needed a ship to get away, and the Lord allowed one to be there. When you’re fleeing the Lord, isn’t it funny how easy sometimes the steps just seem to be there? Perhaps it was the devil, not the Lord, who just so happened to put just the right ship there in his path.
Before we pick on him too hard, notice the task to “arise and go” was not so simple as, “Arise and go get me a gallon of milk from the grocery store.” God calls Jonah to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, the current world superpower at the time, and an absolutely ruthless country. They were renowned for their violent, merciless slaughter of conquered peoples. You don’t need to be a historian to know this. You sense this even from what God says about them: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” Note that God sees every wickedness and is keeping score.
The city of Nineveh is in modern-day Iraq, and I suspect most of us would still feel this same challenge were we told in a vision to go to an ISIS or a rural Taliban village in the Middle East. As a good Israelite, Jonah would have known that those people do not deserve God’s mercy. And telling them that they don’t deserve God’s mercy would be a dangerous event. Jonah had seen the beheading videos that went viral on the internet. He’d seen the orange jumpsuits. He’d heard the hostages read to the cameras. And he didn’t want to go, which you don’t either. So he arose and went. But not to Nineveh.
This is the adult version of this story. It’s stinky. I bet you have some Ninevites in your life, right here in Harrisburg. When you drive through a neighborhood where people are different than you, when you go to a store and wait in line, and people are different than you, and you have thoughts that just pop up about whether they deserve anything or not, whether they deserve God’s love and mercy the way you do. Oh, those are the rich people, or Oh, those are the poor people, or the whatever people. Those are the liberal, progressive people who don’t deserve love, and they mock Christianity. Those are the hard, hard right people who as so arrogant and selfish and greedy. Or whatever. They’re not even worth telling about Jesus because they don’t deserve him.
When these kinds of thoughts bubble up within us, we’re experiencing opening the book of Jonah. We’re opening up a college dorm room fridge, and—admittedly—the smell is rotten.
I’ll read the next section in one big chunk. In vv. 4–11 the action picks up.
4 But the LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. 6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”
7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” 9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the LORD, because he had told them.
The sailors and other passengers on the ship were in a deadly storm because they were in a fallen world. They had done plenty of things wrong in their life; they were sinners. But this particular storm, the danger to their lives and the loss of cargo and income, wasn’t about them in their particular sins. They were in a storm because they were in a fallen world.
That’s not why Jonah was in a storm. God sent this storm to chase him, to get his attention, to wake him up from his stupor. This storm was to be spiritual smelling salts, an uncomfortable experience to wake him up.
I don’t know why some of you are in the storms that you are in, whether because of your own sin and your own spiritual stupor or maybe just because you live in a fallen world. Both could be true.
But what we see is that, surprisingly, both reasons for the storm, in the end, are about mercy. God wants to show mercy to everyone, to the sailors, and even to this disobedient prophet. God’s uncomfortable storms of judgment are mingled with mercy.
You think about Jonah. He’s really stuck. The last lines tell us that he’s already told everyone he’s fleeing from the presence of the Lord. And this disobedience brings a kind of depression over him that he can’t get away from. Even when the most normal thing in the world would be for Jonah to show care and concern about the ship and the cargo and the other sailors—even to care about his own life—but Jonah is so stuck he can’t even be bothered to come above deck to see what all the fuss is about. His head is sliding from side to side on his bed and he just pulls the covers up higher. He’s down there below the deck, depressed and despondent and utterly stuck. He’s numb. The ability to feel pain and sorrow and shame has left him, and all he can do is experience the sleep of depression.
When called upon, he still knows the right answers. Look again at v. 9: “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” Certainly, they all had been thinking a lot about the sea and a lot about dry land, and Jonah says he’s from the people who worship and fear the God who made all of that.
But his confession of faith, while encouraging, rings a little hollow, doesn’t it? “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD,” says the guy who’s a thousand miles from where he was supposed to be. (Fear is being used as a synonym for referent obedience.)
I know at times some of you want us to be more political at church. I understand that. I think and talk about it all the time with our leaders and our members, trying to think together and pray together about how to best lead the church and preach the Word in our crazy times.
Some of you want us to side with one particular party. One particular party, you say, more accurately reflects the reality of the universe that God has made. They have it more right on this issue and this issue and this issue and this issue. I agree with that. In our current moment, I don’t weigh things equally.
But you also need to understand why I see wisdom in not going all in with any party from the pulpit. If our church were mainly filled with pagan, pluralistic sailors who believed all roads lead to God, just as these sailors did, then we’d often pastor in light of that error. But most of us, I think, are more similar to Jonah, and I feel compelled to point out the danger that any political party could say Jonah says here.
Jonah says, “I’m a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD,” just as one party could say, “I’m this party, and I fear the Lord.” And that’s great, if true. But if today we give from the pulpit an all-endorsing pledge to one party, we would lose tomorrow the prophetic voice of the church. And the church must maintain the ability to say to our church membership, “Yes, you might be saying the right things on this issue and this issue and this issue, but let’s also make sure that when we say the right things that our lives are not 1,000 miles in the wrong direction.”
Do you see why Jonah is an uncomfortable book? The guy we imagine to be the good guy and the one we imagine to be the hero, the one who has his name in the title of the book, is not so great and not so much of a hero.
And what is surprising is that everyone in the story, including Jonah, gets mercy, which means God is the hero. God in this storm is coming to Jonah, who is so, so stuck in his sin and depression, and God is saying, “Jonah, where are you?” Just as he went to Adam in his sin, who was also so, so stuck in his fig leaves and said, “Adam, where are you?” God should have just let Adam go—and Jonah go. And me too.
Maybe God has a storm in your life to get your attention. Maybe you’ve always understood Christianity as a story about how good people get better by following a good leader. That’s not true. The story of Christianity, like the story of Jonah, is the surprise of God’s mercy for people who didn’t obey, didn’t deserve, didn’t measure up, and worshiped other gods. The story of Jonah, as is the story of Christianity, is a story of substitution, the sacrifice of one for the sake of the many. Christ on the cross is the surprise story of mercy for sinners.
I’ll read the end of the story, make a few comments, and we’ll close. Look at vv. 11–17.
11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” 13 Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. 14 Therefore they called out to the LORD, “O LORD, let us not perish for this man’s life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you.” 15 So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. 16 Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the LORD and made vows. 17 And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
The sailors get converted to the Lord. Did you see that? The story has them each calling out their gods, as we would have expected. The story ends with them sacrificing and vowing to the Lord. They fear the Lord, we’re told. For all eternity, the lives of these men were changed. They went home, went to their fireplaces, and took down all the gods from the fireplace mantel, threw them in the fire, and began teaching their family about the real God, the God of god, the Lord of lords. I believe we’ll see these men and their families in heaven because God reached out to them with mercy.
And even Jonah, he’s gone into the belly of a great fish, but things in his own heart are starting to change. At the start of the story, he didn’t give a rip about anyone else except saving himself. But that has started to change. Notice the exchange.
11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. 12 He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you…”
Jonah is beginning to care about more than himself. And he’s going to have some more one-on-one conversations with the Lord in the following chapter.
I said at the start that this year we wanted to build a culture of outreach. When we wanted to help do that with prayer, we did a summer series on prayers from the apostle Paul, and in that series, we largely looked at the positive aspects of those prayers in Scripture and saw how we might bring those blessings into our lives.
We could have done the same with outreach. Paul did some praying, and Paul did some outreaching. We could have looked at how the Lord used Paul to reach out, and that wouldn’t have been wrong; it would have been glorious.
But something special confronts us when we come to these themes through the messy, tempestuous storm that is the book of Jonah. Before we’re invited to reach out, we’re invited to look into our own hearts and ask: Do we understand mercy? Do we see the ways we’ve disobeyed the Lord, and yet in Christ again and again experience mercy?
The adult version of Jonah—the real version of the book—vomits these uncomfortable questions on the page and into the sanctuary. And it’s smelly, like a fridge with rotten food. Except we see that God doesn’t just chuck it all away, does he? He doesn’t chuck the fridge out the window. God inserts himself into the human problem and cleans.
He could have let Jonah go to Tarshish. There could have been no storm, no great fish. But then there wouldn’t have been great mercy for him.
This was all a long way of saying that, before we can be a culture that reaches out to others, the first chapter reminds us that we need to look in. We need to see the surprise of God’s mercy, not simply for those wayward people out there but the wayward in here. And if we have the humility to look in the eyes the things we are not good at, we might just find what God’s mercy really means. And if we find out what mercy really means, then we might have something to share with others.
I said I’d tell you what this decoration is. This is one section of four. You might not be able to see it, but the screws on here make the bridge logo. And for the next five or so months, we want you to be praying and having gospel conversations. And every time you have one, we’d love for you to come to church and add a rubber band.
Maybe there’s a neighbor or a coworker or a family member who needs to find joy in the living Jesus. And having these around the church, and visibly filling them up over the next five months, I hope, will be a way for us to change our culture, from having a few people who might share the gospel, to building a church of people who share the gospel. We’ve thrown out the number 1,500 rubber bands, because that’s our 300 people having one conversation each month for the next 5 months. We’ll be saying more, but you can start this next week if you share with someone.
Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father…”
Sermon Discussion Questions
What did you learn about Jonah for the first time?
How can you identify with Jonah? What was going on in your life that made it so?
How is the surprise of God’s mercy a major theme in this chapter (and book)?
The Bible speaks of God as both just and merciful. How does the cross of Christ allow God to be both just and merciful? (See Romans 3).
