The Message and the Messenger: In Sync with the Heartbeat of God...Continued from page 1

Jonah's indignation was not much different than that of another prophet. Habakkuk relentlessly questioned God over the seeming injustice of punishing his own people by using a far more corrupt nation: Babylon. But the similarities between the two prophets ended when God explained his intentions to each. Habakkuk praised God for his righteousness, even though he didn't completely understand it. Jonah was eaten up with bitterness—so much so that he asked God to take his life.

How did God respond? By giving Jonah an object lesson in a helpful vine he hadn't asked for. As the prophet fumed over the repentant city and this travesty of justice, God gave him extra shade to shelter him from the sun. The next morning, a worm ate away at the vine and caused it to wither, and a scorching wind beat against Jonah. This stirred up further anger, but God had made his point. The "man of God"—a frequent designation for a prophet—valued his own immediate comfort much more than he valued thousands of enemy lives. His ethnocentric focus had blinded him to the heart of his Lord.

Contrary to what we might expect, Jonah was the most effective prophet in the Bible. He ran from God, and sailors were converted. He went reluctantly to Nineveh with a five-word sermon (in Hebrew), and an evil city repented. He bitterly pouted over a withered vine, and the compassion of God was revealed in a prophetic book to a chosen but apostate nation. The irony is that Isaiah and Jeremiah spilled their lives out with many words over unhearing, unrepentant people and would have rejoiced to see even a hint of fruitfulness. Jonah saw fruitfulness in spite of himself, and he hated it.

Even then, God's compassion toward his prophet was relentless. He didn't disown his disgruntled servant. He patiently and persistently absorbed Jonah's anger, heard his questions, and even answered them. He did with Jonah what he had already done with Nineveh. He revealed his heart.

In fact, that's how the book concludes. "Should I not be concerned about that great city?" the Lord asks. It's a rhetorical question that leaves readers with a decision to make. Are we in sync with our creator's desires? Can we get on board with the big picture of his purposes? Will we align our hearts with the missionary heart of God?

Those are questions we all have to ask. God cares about our personal issues and desires, but he also has a bigger picture in front of him. When we focus intensely on our personal issues and give relatively little thought to that bigger picture, we tend to end up a lot like Jonah—out of sync with God and resentful that he is blessing others more than we think he is blessing us. It's a distorted picture, but that's what introspection often does; it distorts our perspective. It causes us to miss the heart of God.

God calls us to bring our hearts into alignment with his—to lift our eyes above our own agenda, to have his compassion, and to seek his agenda. When we do that, we find ourselves part of an enormous plan that will bring joy to both him and to us. We find a fruitfulness we wouldn't otherwise experience. We share God's heartbeat in deeper and deeper ways.

Adapted from A Walk Thru the Book of Jonah: Experiencing God's Relentless Grace, a small group study guide from Walk Thru the Bible and Baker Books. This small group study and others can be found at www.walkthruguides.org.