-Transcript-
00:24 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:29 Welcome to the Cafe. Pastor Clark Covington here with another episode of KJV Cafe. Thank you for joining me.
00:34 It is a blessed day today. So my little kid says, my little five-year-old Clark Jr., he’ll pray and say, Dear Lord, blessed day. Dear Lord, it’s a blessed day.
00:44 Amen. He’s learning how to pray. And I love that though.
00:48 It is a blessed day. Every day is good that God has given us and he’s given us another one here. Amen.
00:53 And we’re talking about really respecting God today, loving God and what comes from that. And you know what comes from that love of God, which we’re going to call fearing God?
01:03 Closeness to God. A closeness springs up from a proper fear of God.
01:10 And success happens. And so we’re going to talk about all these things that are applicable to us today that happened in true history that’s memorialized there in God’s living Word. We’re in the book of Jonah.
01:24 We are in the fourth part of a five-part series. In the book of Jonah, we’re going through the whole book of Jonah, all four chapters. We’ve talked about, you know, what it means to fear God, that it’s our duty, it’s the beginning of wisdom.
01:39 It’s both a literal fear and a reverential fear, respecting and so forth, and that we’re made safe by fearing God. You know, by the way, I could title this whole series, Made Safe by Fearing God. People cherish safety.
01:50 Look at the whole world of, like, survivalists and preppers and all this stuff. When I first moved to North Carolina from South Carolina, that was an introduction. That was like a cold shower.
02:02 Everybody I met at these old backwoods country churches, they were preppers, man. They had stuff buried in the ground, they’re ready for all these things, and it hasn’t gone away. I can’t blame them.
02:09 In fact, they probably benefited from that preparation during COVID and so forth. But yeah, I mean, you know, what is that? What’s behind that? What’s behind preparing for things?
02:18 And again, nothing wrong with it. I’ve been trying to be more prepared myself and for our family, but what’s behind that? Safety, right? Safety.
02:27 We want to have safety. And so we do things, we prepare, we get ourselves a generator, some candles, a weather radio, whatever. We try to prepare for the worst so that we’ll be safe.
02:37 And what the Bible’s teaching us is you want to be safe. Trust God and fear God. Fear Him in this deep way the Bible points us to fear Him, and you’ll be safe.
02:50 And Jonah both didn’t fear God and fell into great turmoil and feared God and was safe and successful. And we’re here in chapter two where he’s already been in the belly of the whale and he spit up.
02:59 And then we move to chapter three, because again, when he was in the belly of the whale, the preacher Jonah came out and he was repentant and he acknowledges his sin and he acknowledges God’s power and he acknowledges God’s will.
03:12 And that whale spits him up on the dry land. He got a little ride to the dry land by the whale. And now here he is ready to go do what God calls him to do.
03:22 So picking up in Jonah chapter three, verse one, and the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time saying, arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.
03:34 And just to stop here after verse two of Jonah three, the preaching that I bid thee was from chapter one, when God tells Jonah in verse two, I believe it is, to go and preach to that great city Nineveh that for their wickedness has come up before him, cry against it.
03:54 And so he was to go preach and tell them, look, God’s going to destroy your city because you’re living so wicked.
04:01 And that was his job. OK, so God’s reminding him that’s what he wanted done. Verse three of chapter three.
04:07 So Jonah arose and went unto Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey.
04:18 And he cried and said, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. Stopping at verse four here. That’s a pretty clear message.
04:30 Jonah gets there. And what was God’s message for the city of Nineveh, this great city, the capital city of Assyria in modern day Iraq?
04:36 But it didn’t look like Iraq does now. It looked like probably a New York City type place, a very bustling metropolitan area.
04:44 They were told, look, 40 days. And this whole thing was getting torn down and overthrown. I mean, you know, think about a city near where you live.
04:52 Can you imagine in 40 days? And it can be completely burnt to a crisp. That would be very scary. Verse five.
05:00 So the people of Nineveh believed God and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them, even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh and he arose from his throne and he laid his robe from him and covered him with sackcloth and sat in ashes.
05:11 And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles saying, let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock taste anything.
05:25 Let them not feed nor drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and cry mightily unto God. Yea, let them turn everyone from his evil way and from the violence that is in their hands.
05:39 Who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger that we perish not.
05:45 And God saw their works that they turned from their evil way and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them. And he did it not. That’s the end of Jonah chapter three.
05:58 Man, we’ve got a lot to look at here. So we see, I mean, number one, that Jonah at his worst time acknowledges God. So Jonah, imagine going through that near death experience.
06:13 Imagine getting spit up by the whale. You’re absolutely terrified. You don’t know where you are, what’s going on, but you know, God called you to do something.
06:21 You clearly see that God has spared you because you realize that there’s no earthly way that being thrown into the water. A whale is going to swallow you, uh, and you’re still going to live three days and then you’re going to end up on the beach and you’re going to end up, you know, alive. That’s all God’s providence.
06:41 That’s all his sovereign will. You think of Joseph, you know, he’s captured and enslaved as his brothers sent him off because they were jealous of him and wanted to kill him, but said, Oh, we don’t, you know, don’t let the blood be on our hands. And you see where Joseph ends up.
06:57 That’s God’s will. And so we see here a second time that God commands him. He goes and look at chapter three, verse five.
07:06 So the people of Nineveh believed God. Well, that was fast. Verse four says, and he cried Jonah and said, you know, Jonah cried and said yet 40 days and then of us shall be overthrown.
07:25 So Jonah’s crying, Hey, this is going to go down, right? This is like what he says when he gets there. And verse five tells us the people of Nineveh believed God. You know, think of that.
07:33 Think of today going into the abortion clinic and saying in 40 days, this whole city is going to be thrown down for your wickedness. Think about what they do to you or going into the casino or going into the, the, the, the great wicked places, the high places going into the, even let’s say the country club, not that all people in a country club are bad, but let’s say you’re going into one full of wicked people and telling them your city is going to be torn down.
07:51 Think about wherever wicked people congregate.
07:55 Okay. Think about going into the big city, a Las Vegas or a New York or LA or a Hong Kong or Shanghai and telling them 40 days and this whole city is getting torn down. Now think about how they’d respond.
08:08 Would they say, Oh, we believe you. And they’re going to repent. And you know, when you put on sackcloth and ashes, what that is, that’s a public repentance.
08:17 Like you are putting yourself on display for everyone to see that you’re ashamed of your own self. Okay. So that is a very public way to repent.
08:28 And what the King was saying here is verse nine of Jonah three, who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger that we perished, not King’s basically saying, Hey, it’s worth a try.
08:38 He’s going to, he’s going to tear us down. It’s worth a try.
08:43 But all I’m trying to get at here is that Jonah didn’t seem to do a whole lot of convincing. He simply did what God called him to did to do, and God clearly softened their hearts and they obliged. You see, it wasn’t some great struggle.
08:56 And the example I gave up, I gave to our congregation, I thought was similar. It’s like the Israelites. They’re in the wilderness.
09:02 They’re called to Canaan land. They’re supposed to get over there. God says, don’t worry about the people over there.
09:08 I’ll wipe them out. They say, no, God, we’re going to be worried. They send over spies.
09:13 They have giants in the land and the giants are too big for them to take in their own estimation. And God is telling them just go like, trust me. If you go, I’ll wipe them out and I’ll do it in a way that allows you to get to the land as you need to get to it.
09:25 I’ll do it in a way progressively. So the land doesn’t get overgrown for you. It’s incredible the way that God was thinking in the details, he had the details planned out and they didn’t believe.
09:34 And yet Jonah here, this is God saying, just go to Nineveh and preach this. He won’t do it. He ends up in a near death situation, a horrible, horrific situation, which by the way, had consequences for those around him.
09:48 That’s another thing there where we don’t fear God is there’s consequences for those around us. Jonah ends up going there the second time after this horrific thing. And guess what? God moved before him.
10:02 God had already softened their hearts. I guarantee you in the people’s hearts, in the King’s heart, there was that, that, that, that, that conviction already happening before he even showed up.
10:11 There were things that I needed to get cleaned up in my life where the Lord could use me.
10:16 And before the Lord would move to get those things cleaned up, I was already contemplating them all way already thinking on those things. You see, God is meticulous and all Jonah had to do was show up.
10:26 And so we need to stop thinking that we’re going to be doing things through our own power and stop and start thinking that it’s through God’s power and the work of the Holy Spirit.
10:39 Amen. That, that things get done. It’s incredible.
10:42 And you know, the irony is another irony of Jonah, uh, here in chapter three, and let’s look at verse nine again, real quickly. Um, they feared God who can tell if God will turn and repent and turn away from his fierce anger that we perish not. They feared God.
11:01 And so Jonah who had not feared God and ran from God, went to a people that actually feared God and believed in God. And so we see that the result of them fearing God is their safety.
11:13 If you read the book of Nahum and you understand biblical history, I believe it was about 150 years before God absolutely wiped out Nineveh for their wickedness.
11:23 But think of 150 years, that’s, you know, two or three generations or more of people that were spared. And some of those people got saved, I believe, and got right with God and they wouldn’t have if Jonah hadn’t done what God had called him to do. Uh, and so there was a great awakening there for that season.
11:42 And so what do we need to do? We need to take from this book that when we fear God, mighty things can happen with us and through us and success is not dependent upon us, but upon God.
11:55 And so why would God call us to do something that he doesn’t want done? He wouldn’t. And so when God communicates to us, uh, through conviction and, and through circumstance, through life, uh, through prayers, through open doors or through closed doors, when God communicates that to us, we have to follow him.
12:15 And if we don’t follow him, we’re not fearing him. A simple example I’ll give is when the Lord had convicted me to go plant a church in a town that I don’t think I’ve ever been to that I couldn’t remember ever going to, not knowing anybody in, in, in modern day era, right before COVID, the Lord had convicted me, go plant a church. You know, I have a role.
12:34 I’m a deacon in the current church. I’m a youth preacher in the current church. Uh, you know, I have a role and I have all these friends there and I really did love our pastor.
12:44 It was the hardest thing in the world. And yet I could not sleep at night. I could not sleep at night.
12:50 I, I felt sick. Okay. If you know me, you know, I love to eat.
12:54 I couldn’t eat, you know, there’s something, you know, I’m sick when I can’t eat. I mean, I couldn’t eat. I was absolutely disturbed because I was sitting still and God was convicting me to move and that conviction led to action.
13:08 And no, we didn’t grow a huge church over there. Uh, we’re very modest in size. And then we moved to Lincolnton, a bigger area, very modest in size.
13:17 Now we’re back here in Kings mountain. We don’t have a big fellowship, but we do have a radio ministry that’s growing and podcasts and social media, and these things are doing well.
13:27 And we do have a small congregation that’s growing in the Lord and it’s not all about the numbers.
13:31 And the Lord has me doing more now for him than I’ve ever done before. And I do, I can’t see his whole plan, but I do see, I mean, there was people that, for example, that were out of church that came to church, uh, one lady was having a, um, health issue and she hadn’t been in church in a long time and she came to church and ended up in the hospital.
13:51 And I went to go visit her and pray over her for that reason alone.
13:56 God could have called us to that area. You see it’s God’s marvelous plan that we fear him enough to follow those convictions in our life and to, again, acknowledge when a door is closed and to not say, oh, well, this is comfortable. I don’t want to leave to acknowledge.
14:16 Okay. This door is closed. He wants me to do this or to be patient, to realize we have to be still and know that he is God.
14:20 We have to do these things and fear God in order to see God have success in our life, like he had with Jonah there in chapter two and three
14:27 tune in next time for the last episode, take care of God. Bless. Amen.