In the late 1800's, Charles Spurgeon was a Baptist pastor and preacher in London and he was widely recognized then, and still is today, as one of the greatest Christian preachers who ever lived. And over the course of his life and ministry, he said and wrote many, many things, but there is one quote in particular from Spurgeon about preaching that has stayed with me. This incredibly popular and prolific preacher once famously said of his work:

"To preach the whole truth is an awful charge."

I've always loved that quote and it's been especially meaningful to me as one who vocationally "speaks for God." Being a preacher is an incredible honor, but it is also an "awful charge."

When I first graduated from seminary back in 1996, I was sent to pastor a little church in southern California. And on one of the first Sundays I was there, a young couple showed up at our church and the woman was obviously pregnant. Now, I hadn't been there long but it was a small church and I immediately recognized them as first-time visitors and so I wanted to make sure they felt welcomed. So, I went up to them after the service and said "hello." And after we had chit-chatted for a few minutes, the man got kind of serious and lowered his voice and said, "Pastor, we'd like to come and talk to you sometime. As you can probably see, she's pregnant, but we're not married." Now, of course, that's not what God wants, right? God has reserved sex for marriage, but these people were obviously embarrassed and ashamed of what had happened and they wanted to get their life on a better course, so I responded with lots of grace and encouragement and said something like, "That's ok. Let's get together and figure this out together. I'm here to help you." And then the guy said to me, "Well Pastor, it's actually a little more complicated than that. I'm actually married to someone else and my wife has been committed to a mental institution for the rest of her life, so I'm really not sure what to do here. We're hoping you can give us some advice and counsel."

That's an absolutely true story. I was 26 years old when that happened and I had only been a pastor for a few months, at most. And they wanted me to enter into that mess and "speak for God." Like Spurgeon said, that was an "awful charge." Who could possibly do THAT with any confidence?

And sometimes it's an "awful charge" to speak for God not just because it's difficult, like that situation was. Sometimes it's an "awful charge" because frankly, you just don't want to do it. Sometimes what God wants you to say in a given situation is not at all what comes naturally to you to say and that can be especially hard and frustrating.

I say all of this by way of introduction to simply say that I can identify with Jonah, the reluctant prophet. And I'm hoping you can too because I don't think this is a situation that is unique to full-time preachers. All Christians are called to speak for God in one way or the other. You may not step into a pulpit on Sunday mornings and give a formal sermon, but as a follower of Jesus, you are speaking for Him in every conversation you have every day. The apostle Paul says in Second Corinthians, "We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us." [Second Corinthians 5:20] All of us, every day of our lives, are "speaking for God." And that's both an awesome and an awful charge God has given us. And it's why we all need to pay close attention to what is happening here in Jonah, chapter 3.

Jonah is no longer running away from God. God comes to him a second time just like He did in chapter 1 and He says again, "Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you." And it says, "Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh." But this is what you have to understand here. While Jonah was doing all the right things externally, internally—in his heart—he was still not in line with God. Jonah wasn't running anymore, but he was still a very reluctant prophet.

He goes to Nineveh and preaches an eight-word sermon! (And actually, it's only five words in the original Hebrew text): "Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned." That's it! That's his entire message. A five-word sermon. (Some of you would call that a "dream come true!")

But it wasn't a dream come true. One modern-day preacher says this about Jonah's sermon: "Jonah's message is incredibly vague. It lacks all the characteristic features of Old Testament prophecy. There is no word from the Lord, there is no naming of sins, there is no appeal for the victims of injustice. And most importantly, there is no mention of God." [Scruggs, Scott, "Lost and Found", preached at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, Menlo Park, CA, November 23, 2008.]

Another modern-day preacher notes, "Jonah is putting no effort into this at all. The idea is that he's just phoning it in... Jonah has not brought his "A" game to this revival..." [Ortberg, John, "Who Matters To God", preached at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, Menlo Park, CA, November 30, 2008.]

And yet—and this is just astounding—it works! The Ninevites get the shortest, lamest, most unclear sermon in the history of the world, and yet it works! Verse 5 says, "The Ninevites believed God."

Now, I have to tell you that I feel a little bit of a connection with this too, as a vocational preacher. I am always amazed at the feedback I get about my sermons. I would be the first to admit that some of them are better than others. But this is what's always odd. Whenever I preach one that I think is fantastic...no one says anything to me. But whenever I feel like I've really messed up, or it was just not my best effort, or it just wasn't as good as I had hoped it would be, invariably, THOSE are the weeks people come up to me after church and say, "Oh pastor, your sermon today was wonderful!" And I just stand there and I say to myself, "Really? I thought it stunk!" And I have to tell you that this used to bother me a lot, until I heard an older, wiser pastor say to me, "Remember. It's not what you say that really matters. It's what God does with those words between the time they leave your mouth and enter people's ears and hearts that matters." And that's so true. Somehow, God uses even our lamest of efforts to speak for Him to accomplish what He desires.

But what's happening here with Jonah is even more incredible than that. Because it isn't just that Jonah's off his "A" game here. Jonah is deliberately tanking it. He doesn't want it to be effective. He hates the Ninevites. He doesn't want them to repent and believe in God. He wants them to die. So, when he realizes there's no use in trying to run away from God, he says, in essence, "Fine! I'll go. I'll go to Nineveh and I'll preach. I'll preach five words and we'll just see what happens then."

And that's exactly what he does, and the most incredible things he had ever seen in his life happened. The Ninevites believed God! Oh, but not only that. No, they declared a fast! (That, of course, was a sign of some serious repentance going on!) And not just a fast, but they put on sackcloth too. (Again, a very significant sign of genuine repentance.) And it wasn't just a few people who did this—no, verse five says—everyone in the city did this, "from the greatest to the least." The famous people, the powerful people, the rich people did this, but so did the working class people and the poor people and the sick people and the people no one hardly noticed. And not only that—the King of Nineveh did it too. Their terrible, awful, wicked, evil king—the person everyone would have said had the hardest heart of all—even HE repented. And he didn't just repent. He issued a formal proclamation of repentance! And in that proclamation, he upped the ante. He said, "We're not only going to fast from eating food. We're not going to drink anything either! And it's not going to be just the people of Nineveh who do this. The animals of Nineveh are going to put on sackcloth too."

And all of this happened because of five words! Five words! Five vague, insufficient, poorly-motivated words. How could that possibly be? It happened because the power is not in our words, but in what God can do with our words.

All our words—even our best words—are ultimately powerless, but God's words have the power to change lives and eternal destinies. With just His word, "let there be..." God spoke the universe into existence! With just a few, simple words, "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" He joined you into the family of God. With His words, "Take and eat, take and drink, this was given and shed for you", your sins are forgiven! That's the power of God's words! And every good thing in your life today is the result of God graciously speaking those kind of words to you—words of love and forgiveness and grace and hope—even when you didn't deserve it. And only because He has done that—molded and shaped us by His own gracious words of life—that our words—even our smallest, most insignificant words—have power to touch lives and change hearts.

This last week, my wife Linda and I had the great honor of meeting one of our personal heroes: a man named Wess Stafford. Wess is the CEO of Compassion International. And he's recently published a new book called, "Just a Minute" where he talks about the power of simple words to both build up and destroy. And in that book, he says....

"I heard not long ago two nearly identical stories about two different boys in the early twentieth century trying to come close to God—with radically opposite outcomes. Both were young Catholic altar boys assisting their Priest during the Mass. Both of them, at a crucial moment, fumbled and dropped the glass cruet of wine—the very blood of Christ, according to Catholic theology. There could hardly be a more serious mistake.

The one boy, named Josip, was serving in his village of Croatia. As the glass shattered on the stone floor and the wine spilled irretrievably, the priest spun around and slapped him. "Leave the altar and don't come back!" he snapped.

Well...that is exactly what that boy did. He never did return to church, in fact. At age eighteen, he joined a leftist party, and by twenty-five he was active with the Bolsheviks. Young Josip Broz, eventually took an extra surname—"Tito"—as he led the communist takeover of Yugoslavia. He was a notorious womanizer and ruled as president for decades, severely restricting Christian churches all across the nation.

The other boy, named Peter, committed his faux pas at St. Mary's cathedral in Peoria, Illinois, in almost exactly the same year. He wrote later, "No atomic explosion can equal the intensity of decibels in the noise and explosive force of a wine cruet falling on a marble floor of a cathedral in the presence of a bishop. I was frightened to death. The celebrant that morning was Bishop John Spalding, and as that glass broke, he looked...and with a warm twinkle in his eye, said, "Someday you will be just as I am."

And indeed, Peter Sheen grew up to join the clergy, starting a popular nighttime radio program in 1930. Then in 1951 he pioneered a television show, Life is Worth Living, that drew as many as 30 million viewers a week and won an Emmy award. He too, like Josip, adjusted his name along the way; he decided to borrow his mother's maiden name—and thus became known as Bishop (later Archbishop) Fulton Sheen, a trailblazer of religious broadcasting." [Stafford, Wess, Just A Minute, Moody Publishers, Chicago, 2012, p. 121-122.]

There's no doubt about it: to speak for God is "an awful charge." Because every word we speak has the power to give life or to kill, the power to build up or to tear down, the power to create or to destroy. You have that power every single time you open your mouth. And yet, at the very same, Jonah's story assures us that God's words are not bound by the shortcomings of our words. God's Word and Will prevails, no matter what! Even through our sin and disobedience, our half-hearted efforts and hardened hearts, God Word and Will prevails! Let's pray...

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