What can we learn from God's most stubborn prophet?
Well, meet Jonah, the reluctant preacher who got everything wrong. Think about it. Jonah ran from God's call. He harbored racial prejudice. He preached with wrong motives and threw a tantrum when God showed mercy.
Yet somehow, this spiritual train wreck made it into scripture. Why? Because Jonah's failures reveal timeless truths about our own stubborn hearts. Today, on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindahl offers four life-changing lessons from a man who never got it.
so that we can. He titled his message, Lessons Learned from a Stubborn Preacher. We have been working our way through this strange little. 48 verse book. And uh It can easily be read in four, five, six minutes.
And I find each time when I get to the end of each chapter. our sigh. Because I feel uh he's not getting it. He's just not getting it. And you have to wonder how is it that God would include this.
In the canon of scripture. God knew what he was doing. He was writing the biography of many a soul who lives. Mao. I want to read just a selection from Jonah briefly.
I'll be reading from the New Living. Translation. Verse 1. Chapter 1. The Lord gave this message to Jonah.
son of Amatai, get up and go to the great city of Nineveh announce my judgment against it. because I have seen how wicked its people are. But Jonah got up and went in the opposite direction. To get away from the Lord. He went down to the port of Joppa.
where he found a ship leaving for Tarshish. Bought a ticket. went on board. Hoping to escape. from the Lord by sailing to Tarshish.
Verse 17.
Now the Lord had arranged for a great fish to swallow Jonah. Jonah was inside the fish. For three days and three nights. Chapter 2, verse 7. As my life was slipping away, I remembered.
The Lord. My earnest prayer went out to you. Verse 9: I will offer sacrifices. To you I will fulfill all my vows. Verse 10, the Lord ordered the fish.
to spit Jonah out onto the beach. Then the Lord spoke to Jonah a second time, get up. Go to the great city of Nineveh, deliver the message. I've given you this time, Jonah obeyed the Lord's command. and went to Nineveh.
Verse 10. When God saw what they had done, how they had put a stop to their evil ways. He changed his mind and did not carry out the destruction he had threatened. This change of plans. Greatly upset Jonah.
He became very angry.
So he complained to the Lord about it. Didn't I see before I left home? that you would do this, Lord. This is why I ran away. to Tartish.
Verse 10. And the Lord said, you feel... compassion about the plant. though you did nothing to put it there. It came.
quickly and died quickly. But none of us As thousands of people living in spiritual darkness. Not to mention all the animals, shouldn't I have compassion? For such a great City Ah. You're listening to Insight for Living.
To dig deeper into the story of Jonah on your own, be sure to purchase our Searching the Scriptures Bible Study Workbook by going to insight.org slash offer. Chuck titled today's message, Lessons Learned from a Stubborn Preacher. Sermon titles are important. Just as you would not think of having a brand new baby. and not naming the child.
So sermons need Titles. They need names. And some of the names that have been given to sermons have outlived. The ones who preach them by Decades, even centuries. Who will ever forget the title of Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon that he preached in the shadow of The Lincoln Memorial.
I have a dream. And along with his title, S. M. Lockridge titled It's Friday, but S Sunday's coming. To this day, people remember those words.
And they're repeated. The beloved chaplain of the Senate. the late Peter Marshall. For a Mother's Day message. Told the story of this.
Ranger that sort of spent his time in the back part of a forest, Uh keeping the stream clean and free from silt, So the village down below could enjoy fresh and clean water. It was a Mother's Day message. which he titled The Keeper of the Spring. I still remember his gospel message. Mr.
Jones? Meet the master. Simple, but And who can ever forget Clarence Edward McCartney's message title which he lifted from the words of Paul to Timothy. While Paul was in the dungeon awaiting his death, As he titled his message Come before winter. One of my profs at seminary chose an.
A chilling title for his biographical message on Judas. He titled it Post-mortem of a suicide. You don't forget that title. Believing in their importance, I always spend time pondering. The title for every sermon I preach.
I'm so involved in the content of the message. that I sometimes, in choosing the title, Uh Forget what that title may be saying to someone. who is not at all acquainted with thee. content of the message. Take today's title.
Lessons learned from a stubborn Preacher. A day after I chose that title, I smiled as I thought. About an imaginary event that could take place the following Sunday, which would be today. When one of our ushers is showing a First time visitor to the seat. And then hands him or her one of the programs, one of the bulletins, and says, Oh, look, this is your lucky day.
Our pastor is giving his personal testimony. Lessons learned from a stubborn preacher.
Well, for once, it isn't about me. It is about A really Really stubborn man. Who never got it? Never got it. And you know, you would think that since Jonah.
was a prophet. You would think that somewhere along the way, as he was pouring over. The scriptures that he had in his day Whatever the scrolls were that were extant at the time. It would have gotten through to him. For example, I think about the essentials you glean from just exposure.
to the word of God. Three come to mind. You discover first What's essential to know about God Himself? You learn from the Bible what no other book can tell you. You learn who he is.
You learn what he does. And while the book may not take away all of the mystery, It at least opens up the caverns. of bewilderment.
So that God becomes real. And we realize that He means business. And you know, when you gain that kind of understanding of the Lord Himself. You gain an inner security. That doesn't come naturally to any of us.
You no longer are afraid of God. He's not one to be afraid of. We fear him. As we worship Him, but we are not afraid of Him. We stand in awe of him in our worship, but.
We stand near him. Knowing he is Our very best. advocate and friend. We learn that from the scriptures. We learn about the Lord God.
We also discover. Essential things about ourselves. Bible tells us How we were made. How God put us together. Explains to us why we do what we do.
So that takes away a lot of the Question of our nature we We learn from studying the scriptures those things in ourselves we need to cultivate and those things within ourselves that. We need to correct We need to stop doing. Because they're unhealthy.
So, by learning more of the scriptures, we become self-aware. Which is an unusual trait in our day.
So we get security because we learn about God. We gain self-awareness because we learn about ourselves and the things that we do and why we do them and We also discover the essentials that relate to the world. to other people. We learn the truth about Others. We learn there are those we can trust and those we cannot.
We learn that there are those who are deceiving and treacherous. And dangerous and unreliable and unwise, and they should not be close friends. or it will damage our character. But it doesn't mean we turn them off. It means we do our best to help influence them.
toward another kind of lifestyle. which we learn about again from the scriptures. You see, all of this provides discernment. Get the pattern? We gain security from the scriptures learning about God.
We gain self-awareness from the scriptures as we learn about ourselves. And we gain discernment from the scriptures as we learn about others. Jonah got none of it. He missed it all. Jonah didn't get it.
The main reason, of course, was that Jonah was too important to Jonah. And I think if Jodah were in the audience today. And that would allow me to finish. I think Jonah would have to agree. The lessons that I'm going to point out here were lessons he missed.
Tragically And even more so that we would miss. Since we have a Bible in our own language, We've been spending our time Through these several messages, through These forty-eight verses And we have carefully allowed the scriptures to speak for themselves. That we might learn from them. I see these lessons as being backdoor deliveries. in the book of Jonah.
I smiled as I was talking with my wife Cynthia this morning over coffee about today's message. We sometimes do that on Sunday mornings, and we'll go over things I plan to say, and she always is a great listener. Uh which I appreciate. And uh she acts like she's interested. I I hope she is.
I think she is. And will often have very insightful comments to make. And I made the comment to her. Yeah, isn't it amazing? that the book has been preserved for all time.
And yet it's a book about how not to live your life. It's a book where a man appears. who did almost everything he did wrong. He never got it. Nevertheless, I think there are lessons to learn through the back door.
If we're willing to open the package. and see it for ourselves. These are not inspired. They're simply thoughts that came to me when I went through the four chapters. which I will do with you.
in the brief time we have that remains. Each chapter yielding Another Listen. From the story of a stubborn preacher. Chapter 1 seems to teach us this. Any attempt to escape from the Lord.
is an act of futility. Any attempt to escape from the Lord is an act of futility. Jonah's attempt was uh Amazing. I mean, he didn't wait around to run from the Lord. He did it immediately.
Soon as he heard, go to Nineveh. He made plans to go to Tarshish, opposite direction. His escape was immediate. Not delete. It was brash.
Not subtle. It was deliberate, not uncertain. He knew exactly what he was doing. I'm out of here. Didn't Jonah know that you can't flee from omnipresence?
Didn't it dawn on him that wherever he went, there would be God? He had the songs. Surely he had read: if I go up into heaven, you're there. If I go into the Depths of the earth, you're there. If I take the wings of the dawn, meaning they travel the speed of light and go to the remotest part of the sea, even there you are.
Surely Jonah knew that. He blanked it out. You can blank all of that out. You can know and yet not really Know it. Because you don't want to believe it.
So I speak today, I believe. To a few of you who are running or attempting to run from God. It's futile. I'll save you a lot of heartache. By telling you on the front end of your run.
God will have his way. All your running notwithstanding. It's a waste of your time. to run from him. I know who.
Because I've tried to. Like every one of us at one time or another. And it never works. Any attempt to escape from the Lord is an act of futility. So Jonah ran, wound up in the belly of the fish, and of all places It is the one spot where Jonah at least for a few moments did something right.
He called on God. Of all places out of the innards of this fish.
So here's the lesson I get from chapter 2. Any time and any place. We call on the Lord. is an acceptable time and place. Any time Any place.
It was in the fish he came to his senses. It was in the fish he called out to God. It was in the fish he said, I will fulfill my vows. It was in the fish. He finally.
at least for a brief period. surrendered. Over the years of my ministry, I've received letters from people in all different times and places of their lives. Had I kept all of them, there would be pile drawers full of them. Letters from prison.
An individual would write and say it took The bars of prison. to get my attention. And for the first time in my life, I have Come to realize God is God. And I began to call on him. I've received numerous notes from people on hospital beds.
after the fact saying I had to be leveled. Before God got my attention. There's an old saying I've often quoted. Pain plants the flag of reality. in the fortress of a rebel heart.
And these letters drip with that message. What an independent, self-serving rebel I was. until I hit the mat with a heart attack. Or until the stroke almost took my life. or until I went through this Dreadful emotional breakdown.
Where I wanted to finish things off. Speaking of that, I received a very moving letter a number of years ago from a young lady who had checked into a cheap motel. to take her life. Her letter to me after the fact And I'll explain that in just a moment, included words I'll never forget reading. She said in the letter, I can still taste the steel.
From the barrel of the gun in my mouth. Before my finger was on the trigger. Let me tell you what happened. She's sitting on the side of the bed. It's in the early, early hours of the morning.
Someone had set the radio in that little motel room. to click on automatically at that time.
So Click. On came the insight for living. broadcast. And out of that broadcast came A voice. she had never heard before.
She jerked the gun out of her mouth, thank goodness. And she thought, who in the world is this screaming at me? And She listened long enough to know. Taking her life was not the answer. And later told in the letter to me he often said.
trusting in Christ. One even more moving than that was the guy that had stolen a car. True story. He's racing out of town with this stolen car. He's flipping around on the radio trying to get some rock station or some kind of music he can enjoy, and he comes across Insight for Living, and the radio sticks.
And he can't get it turned around, and out of the radio comes this voice that says, You may be running right now from God. As a matter of fact, you might be breaking the law at this very moment. He goes, What on earth is this about? Long story short, he came to Christ. Wrote me a letter and said, I don't know how you knew, but it's exactly where I was.
Of course I didn't know. But the good news is that any time and any place we call on the Lord is an acceptable time and place. even here, even today, even now. For you. I hope you've run long enough and far enough for you to realize.
It's a feudal run. I hope it won't take something this. Dramatic. In your life. to turn you around.
Because the Lord Is ready. David wrote, I waited patiently. Listen to these words, Psalm 40. I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me and heard my cry. He lifted me up out of a pit of despair.
Says the New Living Translation, out of a pit of despair. Out of the mud And Mire. Any place. Anytime. He hears our cry.
And then we get to the third chapter, and it's. It's an amazing chapter. Jonah finally is given a second chance. He walks into the city of Nineveh. He announces God's message.
And even though in his heart He's hoping they won't believe it because he wants them all killed. His racial prejudice is so severe He hates these Gentiles he's talking to. But he's delivering the message God gave him to give. to the people. It's pretty amazing to see Jonah sabotage his own success.
You're listening to Insight for Living, and there's more teaching ahead, so stay with us. Just to let you know, Chuck Swindahl's in-depth biographical study on Jonah concludes tomorrow.
So if you've meant to request the support materials for your personal study, well now's the time to reach out. Insight for Living has prepared a Searching the Scriptures Bible Study workbook for this nine-part series. It's an interactive spiral-bound resource designed to help you dig into the book of Jonah on your own. In addition to the Bible study workbook, all nine of Chuck's sermons for this series are recorded on C D and MP three, and you can purchase them when you call us at eight hundred seven seven two eighty eight eighty eight. These daily programs and the study materials we produce are designed with you in mind.
In that same spirit, as you measure the value of Insight for Living in your life, would you be willing to reciprocate with a much-needed donation? Your gift will become a blessing to someone who hears this program and perhaps, for the very first time, understands God's mercy and grace as never before. When you give a donation today, we'll be saying thank you by providing a brand new booklet called Look Beyond. It features the final sermon that Chuck delivered to the congregation he shepherded for over 25 years. In his final sermon, Chuck reflected on the last words of the Apostle Paul, who in his letter to Timothy looked back on his lifetime of service to Christ and looked forward to eternity with him.
It's an emotionally charged booklet from Chuck as he describes the implication of Paul's wisdom for you and me. To support Insight for Living and request the booklet called Look Beyond, send your gift in an envelope addressed to us at Insight for Living. Post Office Box 5000 Frisco, Texas, 75034. You can also go to insight.org slash donate. Or call us at 800-772-8888.
I'm Bill Meyer. Join us when Chuck Swindahl continues to describe the lessons learned from a stubborn preacher. Thursday on Insight for Living. The preceding message, Lessons Learned from a Stubborn Preacher, was copyrighted in 2018, 2019, and 2025. And the sound recording was copyrighted in 2025 by Charles R.
Swindahl Incorporated. All rights are reserved worldwide. Duplication of copyrighted material for commercial use is strictly prohibited.
