Lessons from the Book of Jonah

In studying the book of Jonah, which is a fairly short book, I have found the following eight lessons.  There are more, but these stand out the most to me:

1. God calls us to service as is necessary to fulfill his purposes…
   
   When we choose to serve God, we are committing our lives to Him to guide and direct us according to His purpose.  We can't just opt out whenever we don't like the assignment.
   

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2. It is not our business to determine the suitability of those that God sends us to witness to.
   
   It is all too easy for us to decide who is worthy of the message of salvation and who is beyond hope, even though we have no facilities for making such a determination.  We need to leave those issues to God, and just witness as we have opportunity.
   

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3. The greater our knowledge of the Gospel, the greater our consequences for disobedience.
   
   The more light we are given -- the closer we have been to God -- the greater our 

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4. When we disobey, we not only bring problems to ourselves, we bring them upon others.
   
   When Jonah chose to run away from his responsibilities, he didn't only put his own life in danger -- he put the lives of all those other sailors in danger, and on account of him, they lost many of their possessions as well.  Had he been a better witness, they could have come to a saving knowledge of God without the loss they ended up suffering first. 

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5. Obeying the first time usually works out much better for all parties – especially us.
   
   Jonah gained nothing by initially running away except an opportunity to ride in the belly of some fish, and get vomited up onto land.  He took the scenic route because he didn't like the mission and was convinced that the Assyrians should not have been shown any mercy by God.

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6. God is always way ahead of us – His plans cannot be thwarted by us.
   
   God is the master planner, and He knows what is going to happen before it does.  We can't fool Him or frustrate His plans.  Ultimately, if we don't cooperate with His leading, He'll just work with other people who will cooperate with Him, and we will just reap the consequences of disobedience.  God is not going to force us to serve Him if that's not what we really want to do.

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7. The best responses to the Word of God are often made by those who appear to have the least religious knowledge.
   
   It is quite interesting that when Jonah finally went to Nineveh and preached to those people who were supposed to be so ignorant of God, they responded more fully than the chosen Israelites.  From smallest to greatest, they repented of their sins and asked God for forgiveness.  All 120,000 people.

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8. Just because the preacher appears to be successful, it doesn’t mean that he has been converted.
   
   Jonah is the Bible's best preacher, if you look at raw numbers. He had a 3-day evangelistic campaign where he basically told them that their time was up, and they responded by repenting, putting on sackcloth and ashes, and giving their hearts to God.  Essentially, due to his preaching, over 120,000 people were converted by the Holy Spirit.   Yet, Jonah himself seems to have been the least positively impacted by the events.  He spends the majority of his time waiting to see if his reputation will be impacted because he made a prediction that did not come to pass.  Success, as measured in earthly terms, does not automatically mean that someone is converted.  Jonah, even as a prophet, needed to have his heart right with God, when it came to his feelings about the Assyrians, who were massive oppressors of his people. 

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God doesn't require us to be perfect before He can use us, but the closer we stay to Him, and the more we surrender our wills to His, the less we'll ignore or rebel against His leading, and the more effective we will be as witnesses.

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