God Loves Your Neighbors More Than You Do
The Gospel According to Jonah: three sermon or Bible study ideas that highlight God’s radical love for our neighbors
The Old Testament book of Jonah is one of the clearest expressions of God’s love for humanity. While most of the Old Testament is focused on God’s special care for the nation of Israel, Jonah reminds us that God’s love for our neighbors is not a new idea that simply started with Jesus or the New Testament.
One might say that Jesus’s explicit command to the Church to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19, NIV) is present in seed form in the prophet Jonah.
God also declares of Israel in the Old Testament,
“I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6, NIV)
God loves our neighbors more than we do. That is why God has to keep reminding us to go to them.
Jonah has a special place in my own Christian calling
I was a teen in a Baptist church revival meeting God’s call on my life gripped my heart. One evening the traveling evangelist spoke of Jonah’s resistance to God’s call to share Good News to his enemies in Nineveh. I sensed deeply at that moment that I wanted God to use my life to share His love.
At the time, I thought this meant that God was calling me into vocational ministry. I did end up attending seminary and became an ordained Presbyterian minister.
What I am confident of at this point in my life is that God showed me at a young age that He deeply desires that our world know His love.
The book of Jonah has always occupied a special place in my heart since that evening.
Jonah is a treasure chest of teaching material on God’s love
If you have never read the book of Jonah, you should do it now. It is four short chapters and the story is pretty straightforward.
My heart is inspired with stories of God’s love and grace every time I return to Jonah. There are literally hundreds of sermons that could be preached from this tiny book that highlight the goodness of God.
The Church could use some fresh inspiration to share God’s love with our neighbors in this angry and lonely age.
The Gospel According to Jonah
I would like to offer three snippets of ways God’s love jumps off the pages from those four chapters of Jonah. These could be helpful for you if you need inspiration for writing a sermon, teaching a Bible study, or simply want material to pray over and journal for devotional use.
1. God’s Heart Has Always Said “Go”
“Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” (Jonah 1:1, NIV)
God tells Jonah to “Go.”
Notice that God is not running away from wicked, rebellious people. He runs toward them with great compassion and mercy.
God “sent” His own Son Jesus into the world to pursue humans who were lost and running away from Him. He is the God who “goes” after us. God is willing to leave the 99 in search of the one lost sheep (see Matthew 18:11–13).
Just as God tell Jonah to “go,” so too, Jesus tells us to “go” to our neighbors. He is the God who always pursues in love.
What would it look for God’s people to be on the go? Where would God send us that we might be avoiding?
2. The Only Way to Despise Your Neighbor is to Run from Love
But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. (Jonah 1:3, NIV)
Jonah was not irrational. Jonah’s theology was sound. He knew that God is the “God who relents from sending calamity.”
The only way that Jonah could continue to despise his enemies in Nineveh was to run away from the LORD. As long as Jonah was near to God, he was dangerously close to God’s loving heart for Nineveh.
We can’t be close to God and despise our neighbors. God’s heart melts our hatred even for our enemies.
Are there ways that our behavior shows we despise our neighbors? Does our avoidance, our speech, and action reveal our disdain for them?
Are there categories of people (ethnic, political, socioeconomic) for whom we have justified our hatred?
Is this a sign that we ourselves have run away from God whose heart is full of mercy and compassion for all of humanity?
3. Love Will Move Heaven and Earth to Find You
Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. (Jonah 1:4, NIV)
The LORD will use every weapon in His arsenal to pursue us in love. God literally moves all of creation throughout Jonah to pursue the hardened, rebellious prophet. Consider the list:
God sends a wind (1:4)
God forces the hand of the unwilling sailors to throw Jonah overboard (1:14)
God sends a huge fish with ample cargo storage (1:17)
God causes the fish to conveniently vomit Jonah (2:10)
God caused a “leafy plant” to shelter Jonah (4:6)
God sent a worm to destroy the plant (4:7)
God sent a scorching sun on Jonah’s head (4:8)
Jonah cannot run away from God, His plans, or His love. The story is a sort of dark comedy of the futility of justifying our hatred of our neighbors.
Jonah waited in hope that God would destroy Nineveh. As he sat under the leafy plant, one gets the sense that Jonah was hoping for a fireworks show. Instead, he sulks in fury because God has compassion on Nineveh.
It is as if the entire letter is written as a loving persuasion to God’s people to see their neighbors the way God sees them, not as objects of wrath, but rather as people God longs to show mercy and compassion.
“But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry. And he prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Do you do well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:1–4, NIV)
God loves our neighbors more than we do
I must confess that it saddens me when I hear stories of people leaving the Christian faith because they found God to be angry.
I have listened to narratives of departure where a kind of “enlightenment” has taken place. The individual has a new profound sense of self-righteousness. They have ascended to new heights of love for themselves and others. They now find “God” to be cold, unloving, angry, and harsh.
Something tells me that they found individual Christians or cold churches to be angry. Somehow they are now convinced that the God these people claim to worship must also be like them: angry and cold.
Real harm is done to people with fragile faith by believers whose words and actions make others think that God has made them nasty people.
Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, Jonah shows us that God’s people can often be cold and hardened to their neighbors.
Jonah shows us that God alway loves our neighbors far more than we do.
I often remind people of this as they toil over a loved one who is running from God. I remind them, “If your own love for your loved one makes your heart long and ache so much that you would go to any distance to reach them, then how do you think God’s heart feels?”
Is not our “love,” even for our loved ones, only a weak reflection of the deep, wide love of God for them?
Jonah shows us that God relentlessly pursues us in love, using every tool in His arsenal to reach us.
We know the rest of the story in a way Jonah never got to see. The Father would not spare any cost to show love to all humanity, not even the cost of the life of His own Son Jesus.
God’s love for our neighbors is ancient and radical, reaching back to Jonah and Jesus. This changeless God still loves our neighbors more than we do and invites us to join Him in His mission of love for the world.
