The Powerful Word of God

[This was shared during worship services with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, today.]

Jonah 3:1-10

Pastor and writer John Maxwell tells about a junior high basketball coach who was smart. If he had a kid who was slow of foot, he named him Speedy. If he had a kid who seemed to lack the confidence to be aggressive on defense, he called him Mr. Hustle. He hung these nicknames on the kids not as putdowns calling attention to their deficiencies, but with a straight face and seeming seriousness. “Did you see how great Mr. Hustle was on defense?” he’d ask the team during practice. 

Guess what happened? When combined with the proper instruction and correction, kids whom the coach called Mr. Hustle really did become hustling defenders and those he named Speedy became among the fastest ones on the team, able to lead the fast break.

Somewhere this coach had learned the power of words. We see this confirmed elsewhere. I read about a study yesterday that said compliments outnumber criticisms by five to one in good marriages.

Our words have power. 

But no one’s word is more powerful than God’s Word! 

Hebrews 4:12 says that “...the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” 

Eugene Peterson paraphrases this same passage in The Message: “[God’s] powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting through everything, whether doubt or defense, laying us open to listen and obey. Nothing and no one is impervious to God’s Word. We can’t get away from it—no matter what.”

I like this last line because, in fact, we do try to get away from God’s Word. We do it because God doesn’t always say what we want to hear.

And we don’t only try running away from God’s Word only when it warns us against the sins we like to commit—be they gluttony or tax evasion, sexual promiscuity or personal arrogance. We also seem to run away from God’s Word when it forgives and affirms us because we convince ourselves that God couldn’t possibly forgive us.

A woman approached me after worship and told me that, in her mind, whenever she heard the absolution, the assurance of forgiveness for all who confess their sins to God the Father in the Name of Jesus Christ, she thought it applied to everyone but her. She eluded the Word of God for her.

We also run away from God’s Word when it tells us to do things we don’t want to do. Thing like...

• Forgive as we’ve been forgiven. 

• Lend a hand to someone who doesn’t deserve it. 

• Fight for justice and equality for all people, even those with whom we disagree. 

• Say a good word for the person nobody likes. 

• Tell someone else about the hope we’ve found in Jesus Christ.

And on that last point, I know that more often than I care to remember, I have been hesitant about sharing Christ with others. I've been a lot like Jonah in our first lesson for today.

There have been many times when God’s Word has come to me as it did to Jonah, clear as a bell, whether while I’ve been reading the Bible at home, or hearing it in worship, or an insight from another person in a Bible study. But do I heed it and do what God tells me to do? Not always. And so, I try to block God access to my heart. I try to elude God's Word. 

This was exactly what Jonah did. The Old Testament book of Jonah describes events in Israel and elsewhere in the 8th. century BC. A nation that neighbored Israel, Assyria, was less than neighborly. It was, in fact, Israel’s greatest enemy, murderous and warlike. Assyria’s capital city was a place called Nineveh. Ancient Nineveh set on the same ground as a modern city you may have heard about: Mosul, Iraq.

Please open your Bible to Jonah 1:1-2 (page 645 in the sanctuary Bibles). We’re told: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’” Jonah was not keen on this idea.

In fairness to Jonah, whose reaction to this call, his hatred for the Ninevites, and his surliness toward God throughout the four-chapter book that bears his name have given him a bad press through the centuries, if God told you to go to Mosul, a city where today the murder and intimidation of Christians has been so horrible and pervasive, would you go? 

Or would you, as Jonah did the first time God’s Word came to him, run in the opposite direction and book yourself on a Mediterranean cruise? 

But God’s Word is relentless and powerful! 

God was emphatic that Jonah needed to do what God’s Word had told him to do. 

Once the ship on which Jonah boarded was at sea, the God Who can control the wind and waves, sent a storm. Jonah convinced his shipmates that he was the cause of this life-threatening storm and that they needed to toss him into the drink so that God would bring calm seas. The second they did that, there was a dead calm. The storm had stopped and you might think that that was the end of Jonah, now experiencing the death penalty for his rebellion against God.

But, of course, God initiated a unique bailout plan for Jonah. There’s a lesson in this for you and me: God gives second chances and new starts even to people who don’t seek them. 

No matter how far you feel you’ve wandered from God, God wants to speak His Word of reconciliation, peace, purpose, and forgiveness to you. God wants you to have second chances. 

That’s exactly what happened to Jonah at the beginning of today’s lesson: “Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time: 'Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.’” 

Jonah still didn’t want to do what God’s Word told him to do. But when given this second chance, Jonah obeys God. Our faith is often measured not in our willingness to do what God asks of us, but in our obedience to do what God asks of us even when our wills cry out to follow completely different paths. 

So Jonah goes to Nineveh. There, he does the absolute minimum that God tells him to do. He only walks a third of the way into the city and delivers what is in the original Hebrew a five-word sermon. Here it is: "Forty days more Nineveh overthrown." That’s it.

If you had been a Ninevite and heard that sermon, how would you have reacted? 

Would you have laughed it off? 

Would you have gotten angry? 

Would you have ignored this strange foreigner covered with the stomach juices of the great fish that had swallowed and spit him out? 

I can imagine reacting in any of these ways.

During my first two quarters as a student at Ohio State, I commuted by bus, getting a transfer in downtown Columbus. There, most days, I saw and heard a guy who was well-known. He walked around the downtown area pushing a stroller filled with rolls of toilet paper. Attached to the stroller were posters with illegible scrawl. This man would go around telling people to repent for their sins and then, occasionally, he would crow like a rooster. Clearly, there was something wrong with the man. The Ninevites might have been expected to react to Jonah in similar ways.

But their reaction was more akin to that of a businessman in the Loop in Chicago one day. There, man was in the habit of pacing quietly back and forth among the throngs of people, then stopping, pointing to a single individual, and saying, "Guilty." The businessman was once the target of this performance, turned to a friend with whom he was walking, and asked, "But how did he know?"

When Jonah proclaimed Nineveh guilty, the whole city repented.

They turned from sin and turned to the God none of them had ever worshiped before. On hearing Jonah, the Ninevite king told his people in Jonah 3:8-9: “Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” 

Jonah 3:10 then tells us: “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.”

Nineveh was spared. Its people--at least the people living there in the eighth century BC--turned from sin and turned to God. God forgave them and they lived, reconciled to God.

What about that paltry sermon of Jonah’s changed the lives of all those Ninevites? 

It’s fairly simple and truly amazing, really: Jonah’s words weren’t just Jonah’s words; they were also the Word of God. The Word of God is powerful.

Think of it:

• God spoke His Word and the world and everything in it came into being. 

• God’s Word, the second Person of the Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--came into our world and came into your life in Jesus Christ to die and rise in order to set free from sin and death all who repent and believe in Word of good news about Him.

• God’s Word comes to us today in the Bible, in the water of Holy Baptism, in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, in the fellowship of believers, in our confession of faith, and even in sermons, paltry and otherwise.

God’s Word is powerful! It comes to us and, usually incrementally, imperceptibly, changes us from the inside out.

God underscores this in Isaiah 55:11, when He says: “It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.” 

God has unleashed His Word on the world so that all people will have the chance to repent--to turn from sin--and believe in Jesus Christ, the Savior. It has even, in the words of John Newton in Amazing Grace, “saved a wretch like me.” 

God wants His Word to come to and penetrate all the Ninevehs of the world, even the Ninevehs that reside in our own hearts, minds, and wills.

And God’s Word comes to you again today: to tell you whether to confront you for your sin, to confirm you in His forgiveness, or to send you like Jonah to your own Ninevehs at work or home or school, to believe God’s Word, trust it, and do what it tells you to do because God’s Word is still powerful, even today, even for you. 

By the power of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God convicts us of sin. 

It convinces us that Jesus died and rose for us and that His grace is for us. 

It guides us in living lives that honor God. 

May we hear it and heed it always. Amen

It Starts With Us

[This sermon was prepared to be shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, on January 22. We had to cancel worship because of icy conditions. But the sermon was shared via the local radio station that carries our Sunday worship services and has done so since 1962.]

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
This morning, I want to walk through the six verses that make up our first lesson, taken from the Old Testament, Jonah 3, verses 1 to 5 and verse 10, and see what God wants to reveal to us this morning.

Jonah 3, verse 1, says: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.” 

I love the understatement of this passage! You may remember the first time that God’s word came to Jonah, a prophet who lived in the Judean coastal city of Joppa eight centuries before Jesus was born. The first time God called Jonah is recounted in Jonah, chapter 1, verse 2. It says: “Go at once to Ninveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.”

God gave Jonah simple instructions. He was to go to Nineveh, the most important metropolis of the Assyrian nation and decry their sin.

In those days, all of God’s people, the Judeans, probably feared Assyria, a rising world power. But Jonah clearly hated the people of Assyria and its major city, Nineveh.

So, instead of doing as God directed, Jonah booked a berth on a ship headed for Spain.

Things didn’t go well for him after that! God stirred up a storm on the Mediterranean. Jonah knew that the lives of all on the ship were threatened by his faithlessness toward God.

So, he told them to throw him overboard. As soon as they did so, the storm ended. They were spared.

But what about Jonah?

As you know, God caused him to spend time in the belly of a great fish. Jonah was there for three days, praying. Finally, the fish vomited him onto dry land.

After trying to thwart the will of God, Jonah was exhausted, filthy, and smelly.

You know what I’ve learned over the years, folks? This world can be a hard place. We have no control over the evil that the devil and this world sometimes bring against the most faithful people we know. That’s hard and horrible.

But there are others kinds of suffering we may undergo over which we do have control. It’s the suffering that comes to us when we who claim to believe in the God ultimately revealed to the world in Jesus Christ, but deliberately contradict the Word and the will of God. It's the kind of suffering Jonah caused himself when he refused to do what God told him to do.

I once counseled with a man, a pillar of his church, who gave generously to Christ’s causes in the world, but who was deeply unhappy. As I scratched below his surface talk, I leaned that he was having an affair. He was alienated from the kids he constantly discouraged. He was drinking to excess, which, in turn, was a major cause for multiple hospitalizations and ever-worsening health. 

It was clear why he was so unhappy: As was true of Jonah when God sent the storm to disrupt his Mediterranean escape, God hadn’t given up on this man. So God was making this man miserable, waging war for his soul. He was still close enough to God to feel badly when he continued to do what he knew in his soul and from the Word of God was wrong!

When we who claim to be believers in the God revealed in Jesus turn our backs on the will of God, God will put us in the vise of what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance: the miserable condition that comes to those who claim to see reality in one way, yet live in a different way.

If people who confess Christ brazenly violate the will of God—using God’s Name for anything other than prayer, praise, and thanksgiving, for example; or, cheating others in business dealings; or, spreading unconfirmed rumors without knowing the facts; or, having a sexual relationship outside of the marriage of a man and a woman; or whatever the sin may be—God will hound them until they have either repented and returned to Christ or until they have totally stopped their ears and hearts to God.

After he headed for Spain, God didn’t given up on Jonah.

God had apparently not given up on Nineveh, either. If God hadn’t wanted the people of Nineveh to repent for their sins and believe in Him, He wouldn’t have called Jonah to go to them, either the first or the second times.


If you're listening to me today, having taken the time to go to worship or listen to the Saint Matthew radio broadcast, it shows that God hasn't given up on you...and, whether you're willing to admit it or not, God hasn't given up you either!

Listen, folks: Pray that God will always make you miserable when you ignore His will.

If your conscience bothers you when you realize you’re guilty of sin, that is a very good sign. Only those who have left themselves within range of God's loving arms feel guilt for their wrongs. And it's only when we're touched by guilt that we go to God for the forgiveness and the power for living eternally with God that only Jesus Christ can give.

The New Testament book of Hebrews says, “Endure trials for the sake of discipline. God is treating you as children; for what child is there whom a parent does not discipline?”

Followers of Jesus Christ will rise again to live in God’s new heaven and new earth and God disciplines us to prepare us to be the useful, joyful people you and I are going to be in eternity. Earthly pains can yield heavenly gains!

Verses three and four tell us that Jonah, battered from his battle with the God he claimed to serve, “…set out and went to Nineveh, according to the Word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, 'Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.'” 

Jonah may have said those words with relish. He hated the Ninevites, after all.

But even if Jonah meant his message for evil, God meant it for good!

Jonah hoped that the words he spoke from God would fall on deaf ears and that God would destroy the Ninevites.

He underestimated the power of the Word of God, though. Through the prophet Isaiah, God says, “My Word…shall not return to Me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.” God's Word has the power to melt the hardest of hearts and turn them to God! If we let it, God's Word can penetrate our darkest times with the comfort of His presence and the promise of eternity.

When I get up to preach on Sunday mornings, I believe that, even if it happens in the life of just one person, the sermon will accomplish something.

• It may cause one unrepentant sinner to ask for God’s forgiveness. 
• Or lead one atheist or doubter to turn in faith to Christ. 
• It may bring comfort to one grieving person, hope to one despairing person. 

I believe all of this because I’m confident that when we lift up the Word of God in all its fullness, God’s Word will accomplish great things.

Jonah was a less than enthusiastic preacher. It didn’t matter. He was speaking the Word of God and the Word of God has power!

Look at verse 5 to see how much power: “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.” 

I almost have to laugh every time I read this verse. Jonah never mentioned God! But the power of God’s Word is such that those who are open to it know it when they’ve heard it.

Folks, there are people you know who are steeped in sin who are just waiting to hear your invitation to turn from sin and believe in Jesus. You won’t be judgmental if you deliver this message to them. You’ll be sharing the greatest love the world has ever known: the love of God that saves sinners from death and futility to live with God, imperfectly today and one day in eternity, in complete perfection.

Don’t be discouraged when people aren’t receptive to your word about Jesus. I turned down people's invitations to follow Jesus for years before God used my wife, Ann, to introduce me to a group of joyful Lutheran Christians whose faith was so infectious, I wanted follow Jesus. During my atheist decade, I was once invited to a Christian movie at the Ohio Theater in Columbus by a friend. As we sat in the theater afterward, I told him, "No, I don't want Jesus in my life." Little did I know that thirty-plus years later, I would be captain of the team that counseled thousands of people who said, "Yes" to Billy Graham's invitation to follow Jesus during Dr. Graham's 2002 Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Mission at Paul Brown Stadium. Just because people say no to your invitations to experience or follow Jesus the first time doesn't mean that's their final answer. As a disciple-maker for Jesus, you aren't responsible for other people's answers, only for praying for them and sharing Christ's invitation.

And don’t be surprised when people take you up on your invitations to join you for church or Sunday School or Bible study or prayer. “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” Jesus once said. “I must bring them also, and they will listen to My voice.” You and I are called to be the voice of Christ in this world! If we’ll just be open about our faith in Christ, we’ll be amazed at how many people are receptive.



In Jonah, chapter 3, verse 10 we're told: “When God saw what [the Ninevites] did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed His mind about the calamity that He had said He would bring upon them; and He did not do it.” 

God’s character is never changing and constant:

• God will always love you passionately. (Sadly, hell will be filled with people God loves. But God will not force His love and forgiveness on anyone.) 
• God will always hate sin and not allow it in His presence. 
• God will always command that you repent for sin and trust in His Son. 
• God will always welcome those who repent and believe, like the father who welcomed the prodigal son.
• God will always have a place ready and waiting for you in His heart and in His kingdom if you're willing to turn from sin and give your life to Christ. 

Even though God is unchanging, God can change His mind. He did so when it came to His planned destruction of Nineveh. God used Jonah's half-hearted preaching to turn people from enemies of God into children of God. God wanted to save the people of Nineveh from condemnation and hell. He wants to do the same thing for every person in Logan and Hocking County today.

So, I challenge you (and me) to do two things with our lives. First, to take stock of our own lives, asking God to show us what we may need to repent for. Make this a daily practice. In Psalm 51, King David prays to God, “You desire truth in the inward being.”

When we get honest with God about our sins, He gives us forgiveness and helps us to live our lives differently. God’s Holy Spirit will help us to be sensitive to how we can keep walking in the will of God and to remain sensitive to the call to repentance that will put us back on the right track. When we daily repent and renew our trust in Jesus, God will help us to live the faith we profess.

Second, don’t be reluctant about going to your friends with the truth about their sin and their need of Jesus’ forgiveness. This is not being judgmental. When Jesus says, "Judge not, lest you be judged," he is warning us against making judgments that are unfair. But if a friend of yours was stepping out into traffic, you wouldn't decide to say nothing because of some fear that you would be casting judgment on your friend's bad decision, would you? No way. You'd yell loudly and clearly, "Stop!" Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, which Jesus commands of every Christian, must entail caring enough about others to tell them that their favorite sins are hurting them, hurting God, and putting their eternities at risk.

I'm convinced many people want to hear the simple message Jesus delivers in today’s Gospel lesson: “Repent, and believe in the good news.” They're just waiting for the Christian who is bold enough and loving enough to share it with them. It's a message I want to share with you today. If you have wandered far from God, then I invite you to turn from sin and death and turn instead to Jesus and the life that only He can give. Life on this earth isn't perfect. But you don't want to draw another breath or take another step without Jesus Christ as your God and companion. And you surely don't want to step into eternity, whenever that might happen, without Jesus as your Savior and king. Turn to Him now and live!

God has a simple plan for renewing the people of the world. It begins with us.

First, we daily and consistently repent and trust in the God we know in Jesus.

Second, we invite others to repent and trust in this same God.

If the Ninevites proved open to this message, maybe the Loganites will too. Maybe the people of the world will be open to it.

Are you ready for that?

Then, start with repentance for your own sins and trusting Jesus to forgive you and make you new each day.

Then, start telling others what an amazing God He is. Amen

The Most Powerful Word of All

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Pastor and writer John Maxwell tells about a junior high basketball coach who was smart. If he had a kid who was lackadaisical on defense, this coach would call that kid Mr. Hustle. If he had a kid who was slow of foot, he named him Speedy. He hung these nicknames on the kids not as putdowns calling attention to their deficiencies, but with a straight face and seeming seriousness. “Did you see how ferocious Mr. Hustle was on defense?” he’d ask the team during practice. “I want all of you to work at being like him!”

Guess what happened?

When combined with the proper instruction and correction, kids whom the coach called Mr. Hustle really did become hustling defenders and those he named Speedy became the fastest ones on the team, able to lead the fast break.

Somewhere this coach had learned the power of words. He understood the truth behind a confession Mark Twain made: “I can live on a good compliment for a week.”

Negative words are powerful, too. A pastor came home from worship one day in a sour mood. Her husband asked what was wrong. “I must have heard ten people tell you what a great sermon you had,” he commented. “Yeah,” she acknowledged, “but Gladys Milkenrucker hated it.”

The old saying is wrong: Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words can and do sometimes hurt us. That’s because words—good words and bad words--really do have power.

But nobody’s word is more powerful than God’s Word.

The New Testament book of Hebrews says, “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

Eugene Peterson translates this same passage in The Message: “[God’s] powerful Word is sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, cutting through everything, whether doubt or defense, laying us open to listen and obey. Nothing and no one is impervious to God’s Word. We can’t get away from it—no matter what.”

I like this last line because, in fact, we do try to run away from God’s Word. We do it because God doesn’t always say what we want to hear.

And we don’t run away from God’s Word only when it warns us against the sins we like to commit—be they gluttony or tax evasion, sexual promiscuity or personal arrogance, lazy indifference to God’s call on our lives or gossiping about our neighbors. We also seem to run away from God’s Word when it forgives and affirms us because we convince ourselves that God couldn’t possibly forgive us.

We also run away from God’s Word when it seems to tell us to do something we don’t want to do. Forgive as we’ve been forgiven. Lend a hand to someone who doesn’t deserve it. Fight for justice and equality for those whose life styles may be sinful. Say a good word for the person nobody likes. Tell someone else about the hope we’ve found in Jesus Christ.

And on that last point, I know that more often than I care to remember, I have been hesitant about sharing Christ with others. I've been a lot like Jonah in our Old Testament lesson.

There have been many times when God’s Word has come to me as it did to Jonah, clear as a bell, whether while I’ve been reading the Bible at home or hearing it in worship. But do I heed it and do what God tells me to do? No, I’m like Paul, writing in the New Testament book of Romans: “I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good [that is, when I make a resolution to do what God’s Word tells me to do or to trust the grace that God’s Word conveys for me], evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self…but the evil that I do not want is what I do.”

And so, I run from God and from God’s Word. In effect, I do what our daughter Sarah sometimes playfully does when she hears an off-color joke or when someone gives her TMI—too much information: I stick my fingers in my ears and say, “La la la la,” to block God’s access to my mind, heart, and will.

This was exactly what Jonah did.

The Old Testament book of Jonah, a fun book with a serious point, describes life in Israel, the land of God’s people, the Jews, in the middle of the 8th century BC. A nation that neighbored Israel, Assyria, was less than neighborly. It was, in fact, Israel’s greatest enemy, murderous and warlike. Assyria’s capital city was a place called Nineveh. Ancient Nineveh set on the same ground as a modern city you may have heard about in the news lately: Mosul, Iraq.

At the beginning of the book of Jonah, we’re told: “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’”

In fairness to Jonah, whose reaction to this call, his hatred for the Ninevites, and his surliness toward God throughout the four-chapter book that bears his name have given him a bad press through the centuries, if God told you to go to Mosul, a city where today the murder and intimidation of Christians is so horrible and pervasive that many have fled the place to find safety, would you go?

Or would you, as Jonah did the first time God’s Word came to him, run in the opposite direction and book yourself on a Mediterranean cruise?

I think that I’d take the cruise.

But, as those of you who have read your Bibles know, God’s Word is powerful. God was emphatic that Jonah needed to do what God’s Word had told him to do.

Once the ship on which Jonah boarded was at sea, the God Who can control the wind and waves, sent a storm. Jonah convinced his shipmates that he was the cause of this life-threatening storm and that they needed to toss him into the drink so that God would bring calm seas.

The second they did that, there was a dead calm. The storm had stopped and you might think that that was the end of Jonah, now experiencing the death penalty for his rebellion against God.

But you who’ve read the book also know that God initiated a unique bailout plan for Jonah. There’s a lesson in that for you and me: God gives second chances and new starts even to people who don’t seek them. No matter how far you feel you’ve wandered from God, God wants to speak His Word of reconciliation, peace, and purpose to you. God wants you to have second chances.

That’s exactly what happened to Jonah at the beginning of our Old Testament lesson for today: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim the message that I tell you.’”

Jonah still didn’t want to do what God’s Word told him to do. But he was grateful for a second chance and he’d learned a lesson out on the stormy Mediterranean about the power of God’s Word.

So Jonah goes to Nineveh. There, he does the minimum that God tells him to do. He only walks a third of the way into the city and delivers what is in the original Hebrew a five-word sermon. Here it is: "Forty days more Nineveh destroyed." That’s it.

Now, if you had been a Ninevite and heard that sermon, how would you have reacted? Would you have laughed it off? Would you have gotten angry? Would you have ignored this strange foreigner covered with the stomach juices of the great fish that had swallowed and spit him out? I can imagine reacting in any of those ways.

But Nineveh heard it and the whole city repented. They turned from sin and turned to the God none of them had ever worshiped before. It’s not in our lesson, but the king of Nineveh even issued a decree that said, in part, “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change His mind; He may turn from His fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

Nineveh was spared. Its people--at least the people living there in the eighth century BC--turned from sin and turned to God. God forgave them and they lived, reconciled to God.

What about that paltry sermon of Jonah’s changed the lives of all those Ninevites? It’s fairly simple and truly amazing, really: Jonah’s words weren’t just Jonah’s words; they were also the Word of God.

The Word of God is powerful.

God spoke His Word and the world and everything in it came into being.

God’s Word—the second person of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—was made flesh and came into our world—came to you—in Jesus Christ.

God’s Word comes to us today in the Bible, in the water of Holy Baptism, in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, in the fellowship of believers, in our confession of faith, and even in sermons, paltry and otherwise.

And God’s Word comes to you again today: to tell you “Whether to confront you for your sin, to confirm you in my forgiveness, or to send you to your own Ninevehs right here in Logan at work or home or school, believe God’s Word, trust it, and do what it tells you to do because God’s Word is still powerful, even today, even for you.” Amen

[THANKS TO: Mark at Stones Cry Out for linking to this post.]