[0:00] Good morning. Can you hear me? Great. It's now a beautiful day. It seems to be, I feel very at home with the weather like this. It seems to be raining and then sunny and then raining. That's just like the UK. If you don't know me, my name's Chris. I oversee community groups here at Watermark. We've been going through a series in Jonah. Now, some of you may or may not know, I do a little bit of teaching at Hong Kong Youth Space just a couple of hours a week, teaching English. I started a course last week. I arrived about 40 minutes early.
[0:49] And just as I arrived outside the classroom, there was a 70-year-old guy standing there. And I kind of said, oh, hi, the usual pleasantries. And almost immediately he said to me, you know what? I'm hopeless. Now, I was a bit shocked. That's not the normal way you do small talk.
[1:12] And I said, oh, right. Why? He said, my life is just hopeless. I've got no hope for my future.
[1:23] There is no reason for me to really continue living. And trying to kind of decipher what was going on, I asked him, okay, why do you feel like this? And he said, you know, I went to university in London for one year when I was younger. I got kicked out after the first year. I then went to university in Manchester in the UK for one year. And I got kicked out after one year. And I said, oh, what did you do after that? And he said, the rest of my life, I've never worked. I've been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. And so now I feel like my life is hopeless. I've got no future. And as I thought about it, you know, we often say things like past performance is the greatest indicator of future results. Yeah. And if he was to look at his past performance in his life, his future results didn't look very good for him. And so he thought, my life is hopeless. And that may not be the most happy way to start thinking about the book of Jonah. But actually, if you were to look at Jonah and you were to think, what potential does he have for God to use this guy? You would look at his track record in the past and think, it's not looking too good, is it, Jonah? You see, Jonah seemed to be very happy obeying God when it was a nice message to give, when it was kind of, you're going to grow wealthy, you're going to expand. And Jonah was right there to tell everyone about that. But then God had given him a message to go to the city of Nineveh and to preach against them. And if you remember the story, God says, arise, go to Nineveh. And Jonah says, okay, I will arise. And he went as fast as his little prophet legs would take him as far away from Nineveh as possible. And then he gets on a boat. And when he's on the boat, the storm raises up. And some sailors say to him, arise, get up, pray to your God. And Jonah says to him, or says to them, nah, sorry, me and God, we're not on great terms at the moment. I'd prefer that you throw me overboard and kill me rather than me talking to God. And so eventually the sailors actually do that. And Jonah is going down, down, plunging into the depths of the Mediterranean
[4:07] Sea. He didn't bring his scuba diving kit. The marine life was not what he was looking at at that moment because he's right on the brink of death. And then God sends a giant fish to come and rescue him and save him. And that's where we've got to in the story. Jonah has a death and resurrection experience. And then you come to chapter three. Jonah knows that God has saved him and he knows that God has saved him for a purpose. But in chapter three, we see the story continue.
[4:52] So we're going to look at three aspects of the story going through chapter three. We're going to look at a reluctant messenger. We're going to look at an awesome task. And we're going to look at a God of miracles. Okay, a reluctant messenger, an awesome task, a God of miracles.
[5:08] So in chapters three and four are really the centerpiece of this book of Jonah. They're where the action is really meant to take place. Now, if I was Jonah, I think Jonah would have wanted to stop at the end of chapter two, go back to Galilee, and that's it for the end of the story.
[5:26] But you see, in chapter three, verse one, it says, the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. Now, some people think that Jonah was kind of vomited up by the fish. He's on the beach covered in fish sauce. And then God says to him immediately, get up, go to Nineveh straight away. Okay, he's still got seaweed in his ears and he's walking along to Nineveh. Now, I don't think that's what happened because I suspect that between chapter two, verse 10 and three, verse one, there's no time given. And I suspect that God is actually gracious enough to give him some time to recuperate because, you know, it's a 500 mile hike in the hot sun, which would take at least a month to get to Nineveh. So what happens is, we don't know, weeks, maybe months later, God comes again to Jonah and speaks the second time and tells him to get up and go to Nineveh. Now, it's interesting because if you think about it, I can imagine Jonah lying there on the beach. He knows what God has called him to do. He's had some time to reflect in the fish and on the beach maybe about what he should be doing. He knew that God cared for the city of Nineveh.
[6:46] He knew it. So why doesn't he go? Why does God have to speak to him a second time? Because he knows what he's got to do. Well, you see, Jonah didn't want to go. Jonah didn't want to go. He, I can imagine him sitting there with all the excuses going on in his mind. I mean, I can imagine him saying, okay, yeah, I know I need to go, but, you know, I'm suffering from post fish swallowing traumatic stress syndrome. Or maybe I'm planning now my new marine park in Galilee with the kind of fish, human fish swallowing simulation to teach the kids about how they should obey God.
[7:28] You know, that's what I, that's what I want to do. I mean, it's going to be better than ocean park. God, I'll do that for you. But he didn't want to go to Nineveh. He didn't want to go to Nineveh. He'd do anything. He'd tithe. He'd go on a mission trip. He'd do anything except what God called him to do. Why? Because he despises the people that God has told him to go to. He knows God cares for them. He knows God loves them. He knows that God's heart is for them, but he can't get over the fact that they have hurt his people. They have been so brutal towards his people that he doesn't think they deserve God's grace and his mercy towards them.
[8:15] And it's fascinating because when God calls someone, there's three responses that we can often make. And Jonah makes all three of them. The first response is to run. You know, God calls you to go to Repulse Bay and you go up to Shenzhen for a massage. Okay, that's, that's the first way. You can run.
[8:36] The second way is you can, God calls you to go somewhere and you just stay there, lying on the beach, thinking, maybe feeling a little bit guilty, wallowing in the fish sauce of your condemnation and guilt. But really, you don't want to go. It's so comfortable here. You don't want to put in any effort to move. That's the second way. We just be passive. Or the third way is to actually obey what God calls us to do. Three ways we can respond to God. And you know, when God calls you to do something, there's always a collision between God's word and what you want to do. Do you know that?
[9:17] When God calls you to do something, there's always a collision between your comfort, your security, your plans and dreams and what God calls you to do. And even this morning, you have a choice.
[9:38] You have those three choices to how you respond to what the message that God wants to speak to you this morning. And so the question is, who are we going to listen to? Who are we going to listen to?
[9:51] Now, if you think about it, God's call here to Jonah is actually a sign of his grace. It doesn't sound like Jonah didn't think it. Jonah wanted to be right out of there. But actually this, when God calls you to something, he calls you to go, it is God's gracious call on your life. Do you know why?
[10:14] Because if your past performance is the greatest indicator of your future results, Jonah shouldn't have been on God's list to be used. You know, God should have said something like, I'm sorry, Jonah, your prophet's resume is not looking too good at the moment. Go back to Galilee, get a couple of years obedience experience and then come back and then maybe I'll use you. But he doesn't. He doesn't.
[10:40] Maybe I think Jonah would have preferred that God had said that. But God's grace was evidence in calling him to a task because he wanted to use him. He'd already saved him. He was already part of his people.
[10:54] But now he says, I want to involve you in what I am up to in the world. You know, God calls us to obey him because he wants us to enjoy him. God calls us to obey him because he wants us to enjoy being involved with what God is involved with in the world. It's a call to enjoy God, actually, obedience.
[11:20] You know, my friend's disobedient child hid behind the sofa when he heard his daddy coming because he knew that he'd eaten the chocolate cake that his daddy had told him not to eat. You see, when he disobeyed, it put a barrier between his relationship between him and his father. And even though he was still his child, he couldn't enjoy the relationship with his father to that full extent because he disobeyed. It's the same with us. He knows if we want to live a fully satisfied life in God, you have to obey him. You have to obey his call and he wants to delight you in him.
[12:07] But maybe you judge your potential for God to use you based on your past performance. You know, you tried to be a good parent, but somehow you always end up getting frustrated with your kids.
[12:22] You try to share your faith with your colleagues, but then you end up shouting at them. And you think, man, I'm such a hypocrite. How can I share my faith? How can I be someone who is a witness for God if I am like this? Maybe you don't even care what God calls you to do, what God's go, get up to you and go is. Because really, you don't want to think about it. Maybe. Maybe it just seems too uncomfortable and there's too many other things on your mind at the moment. I spent a year in France studying. And at the time, I was struggling with depression. And God felt about as far away as Pluto at that moment. I felt totally distant from him. I didn't want to pray. I wasn't reading my Bible. I didn't even want to obey God. Didn't want to. And then one day, I suddenly started having all these people, all these French people coming up to me, asking me about Christianity. I had no idea why. And I remember having one two-hour conversation with a Hindu girl. And at the end of that two-hour conversation, she said to me, you know what? Talking to you was like talking to Jesus.
[13:46] She had never talked to Jesus before. And then somebody else became a Christian. And I was there kind of scratching my head thinking, God, I don't even want to obey you at this stage. Why are you bothering to use me? And suddenly something clicked. I suddenly understood that God's grace, God wanting to use me was not based on my performance. It was based on his graciousness. Because all the time I'd been thinking it was down to me how good I'd been.
[14:26] And because I wasn't very good, then I thought God couldn't use me. But God wanted to involve me in what he's up to because he wants me to delight in him and to enjoy his grace. And do you know what happened? That set off this kind of series where I suddenly thought, wow, I started to read the Bible. And then God started to speak to me. He started to show me that in the university restaurant, there were some international students who nobody else would speak to because their French sounded like they were having an asthma attack. And so I started going up to them. And that was the beginning as God started step by step taking me on the journey.
[15:09] I began to enjoy his grace so much more. That's what God wants to do with each one of us. That's why he wants to involve us in what he's up to in the world because that's when you'll find true living, satisfying life in God. Past performance doesn't indicate your future results with God because of God, not because of you. So we mustn't stay on the beach. God calls us to go. That's the second thing.
[15:49] Jonah is not just a reluctant messenger. He's also got an awesome task ahead of him. He says, go to Nineveh. Okay, go to Nineveh. And Nineveh, it says in verse two, is a great city. And it's repeated again. It's a great city to God. I mean, it's a humongous city in the time that they were living. It was one of the greatest cities in the world at that time. It was a center for mathematics and science. You know, locks and keys were invented there. You know, longitude and latitude. The first libraries were there. There was trading all over the empire. But not only that, it was a political center and a symbol of oppression and exploitation. It was a city of tyranny because the weak were crushed underneath the power of this mighty city. But this city was great to God. God had this city in his eyesight. And God said, this city matters to me. Now, I don't think Jonah felt excited by that prospect.
[17:07] It's an intimidating prospect. But it gets even worse for Jonah to go to Nineveh because God then tells him, I'm going to give you the message to preach. Now, you might think that's great. God's going to give me a great message. But you know, the message he gives him, in Hebrew, it's only five words. In our text, it says, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. There's no, come to God and he'll give you love, joy, peace and kindness. There's no, raise your hand and make Jesus your special friend here.
[17:43] This isn't a cool message to go and take to an intimidating city if you are a little foreign country boy coming into this great city. It doesn't look good because you're going to tell them God's going to judge this city. I mean, imagine in the Second World War and a Chinese person under Japanese occupation goes to Tokyo and says, Tokyo's going down. They would probably say, and your head's coming off.
[18:17] But you know, this was God's word to Nineveh. It's what the Ninevites needed to hear. And God's word comes on a collision course with everything that this proud, self-reliant, confident city believed in. It believed in itself. And yet God loved this city. He knew what they needed to hear and he tells Jonah to go to this city. And you know, we live in a great city.
[18:50] Hong Kong is a great city in God's eyes. God has got Hong Kong in his eyesight. And God, you see up here, we have three values, gospel, community and mission. And part of what it means as a church, what we believe God has called us to is to be on a mission to Hong Kong. That is God's go to us. Now, what does that mean in practice? I think of that meaning in four categories.
[19:21] I think his mission is to go to our work or to our schools. His mission is to go to our families. His mission is to go to our neighborhoods and to the marginalized and the poor. His mission is to go to our other friendships, the people we meet in the club. This is his mission to this city, which he's called us to go on as a church. And I don't know where you feel God has called you and where God is even saying, which one of those aspects is God now calling you to go to?
[19:55] Maybe it's your office, but you just can't see how on earth anything could possibly change in your office. It's dog eat dog. You've got to play the system out or you'll get eaten alive.
[20:06] And you say, Chris, it's a nice idea. Go to my office, but you don't know what my office is like. No, I don't know what your office is like. But you don't know what Nineveh was like.
[20:17] You know, you may feel like you'd be flayed alive and stuck up on a pole verbally by your boss or by your colleagues. But you know, in Nineveh, they were doing that physically. I don't know whether it's your family. You know, you've wanted your family to change. Maybe it's your husband. Maybe it's your wife. Maybe it's your kids that you desperately want to see them change to become, to lead spiritually.
[20:46] You want to see them become more considerate. You want to see them grow to know Christ. Or you look out on the injustice in Hong Kong and you see it's such a massive task.
[20:57] Where do I even begin? And you feel paralyzed. And maybe you look at your past record of where you've tried to engage and you don't feel you've got anywhere. You've tried to change your kids.
[21:15] They weren't changing. You tried to change your friends and share the gospel with them and they ignored you. And the task seems too big. So we'd prefer to just lie on the beach, feel a little bit guilty about ourselves because it's a bit more comfortable than obeying what God calls us to do.
[21:36] But if it doesn't look very hopeful for Jonah, maybe for us, you've got a disobedient messenger, you've got a crazy message, you've got an intimidating, hardened audience, it's not a great recipe for success.
[21:53] Which brings us on to the third thing, which is a God of miracles. A God of miracles. Read verse 5 for me. And the people of Nineveh believed God.
[22:10] The people of Nineveh believed God. They didn't believe Jonah. They believed God. And what's happening here is one of the greatest miracles in the whole Bible story.
[22:26] You have a whole pagan city, utterly self-reliant, utterly self-confident, falling on its knees before God and saying, God, we need you. We turn away.
[22:37] You've got the king of Nineveh the governor. He arises in verse 6. You see, the word reached the king, the word literally means it touched the king, it touched his heart.
[22:49] And he arises, he gets up from his throne, from the place where he was trying to control the world around him, and he goes out to sit in the ashes, outside, in the lowest possible place.
[23:02] And then he has his robe, which is a symbol of dignity and glory and honor and power for him. And he takes it off and he replaces it with this coarse material called sackcloth, which people used to put on at funerals.
[23:21] You see, what's going on here is he is being humbled. He is humbling himself. It's utter humiliation before God because God's word has changed him.
[23:33] And it's not even that. You see, what happens? He sees God's word so serious, he's got to go and proclaim it to everybody else. He calls everybody else to turn away from, he says, their evil way, which means just general sins, on and also to turn away from violence as well.
[23:53] And the violence is specific sins. For them, it was oppressing the poor and the needy and other nations. He calls them to turn away.
[24:05] I don't know about you, wouldn't you love to see that in your office? To see your boss? To see your colleagues? Maybe not on their knees in ashes, but actually changing?
[24:18] Wouldn't you love to see your friends? Wouldn't you love to see your family? Impacted by God's word and changed? Just think how different Hong Kong could be if that happened.
[24:35] You see, this is a miracle that is better than being swallowed by a fish and coming out alive. It's a bigger miracle. And you know, if I'm honest, I believe in my head that God can do miracles because I believe he's in control of the world, he can intervene.
[24:53] But in reality, I rarely believe that God can do miracles in the people around me. I rarely believe it. Because, I mean, just think for a minute.
[25:06] Think about the people around you that you would love to see change. Now, you want your spouse to be more considerate. Okay? You want them, your kids, to just be obedient.
[25:17] You want them to be more gracious to other people. Maybe you want your boss to stop exploiting everyone and making you work like a dog. Maybe you want your friends to come to Christ and it hasn't happened yet.
[25:31] Do you know, sometimes I get frustrated and angry. Why haven't you changed yet? And you know, what I can tend to do is I start trying all kinds of little magic tricks to kind of make them change.
[25:45] change. You know, I used to teach and I taught students in the past who would never hand in their homework. And so, my little tricks would be shouting at them to try and make them change.
[25:59] If that didn't work, I'd try bribing them with chocolate or movies or something. If that didn't work, you'd try emotional blackmail. Don't you see how I'm suffering at the moment as a teacher?
[26:10] And do you know what? Sometimes, sometimes people do outwardly seem to change but really they're just doing it because of fear or a desire to please me.
[26:26] Because it's often outward performance that looks like it's changing but none of you, none of us can change the heart of anybody. I don't know if you realize that but you cannot ever change the heart of anybody.
[26:47] What you need if you want to see someone change, whether it's your spouse, whether it's a friend, whether it's a colleague, whoever it is, you need a miracle. Only God is the one who does miracles.
[27:03] Think about it. How many times have you ever said to someone, can you just be patient for a while, at that point, did suddenly an aura of zen come over them?
[27:15] Did suddenly say, you're right, I am so impatient at this moment, forgive me, I will become very patient now. Do they say that? Normally, if I say something like that, what happens is sometimes they either shout back at you or they shut up but then you see the steam coming from their ears.
[27:35] You see, it's not your responsibility to change people. Our responsibility is to go. It's not to change people's hearts. God's responsibility is to change people.
[27:49] This changes everything. Our responsibility is to go to bless people, to pray for people, to love people, to share the gospel with people. That's our responsibility as God gives us grace to do that.
[28:02] God is the one who does the work of changing. Think about it. If it's God's job to change people, then for those people you want to see change in your life, you will be engaged in persistent, regular prayer for them because it's got to be God who does it, not you.
[28:22] How often are you engaged in prayer for your friends, for your family, for your colleagues? If it's God's job to change people, then you don't have to desperately try and control everybody around you by manipulating them, by emotional blackmail.
[28:42] Or we just give up on them because things don't seem to happen in our own timing. You just say, okay. And then you go and complain to everybody else that they haven't changed. If it's God's job, we can just trust Him.
[28:57] We do, we go. That's our obedience. We trust God to change people. You see, I tried reaching out to my neighbor when I came into Hong Kong and he just moved into the flat and I went around with a box of chocolates to him.
[29:15] The next morning he came around with a bottle of wine. I thought we'd end it there because this could get expensive. And occasionally I started trying to kind of just see him in the lobby.
[29:28] I said, hi, and hey, would you like to go out for a drink sometime? And he was kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I knew what that meant. That meant, no, no, no. And, you know, six months would go past.
[29:40] I wouldn't see him. I'd kind of sometimes knock on his door and he was always having a shower. I don't know why. But he probably saw me coming and I heard, and so for six months I'd kind of keep asking, oh, do you want to grab a drink?
[29:56] I'd be, no, no, no, no, no. And then I just kind of forgot about him really. He just kind of went off my radar for a while, two and a half years. And then about three weeks ago, you know, we had occasionally seen him on the stairs and just said hi, asked how he's doing and that kind of thing.
[30:17] And three weeks ago he came up to me, I saw him just getting out of the lift and he said, hey, do you want to go for a drink sometime? And I was like, yes.
[30:29] You could have said that two and a half years ago, but now's okay. I don't mind. And it got me thinking, actually, because that moment there was God telling me, get up and go.
[30:49] I think I'd been lying on the beach for quite a long time. I'd given up on him. I'd stopped believing God could actually work in the situation, so I just kind of got wrapped up in my own things.
[31:02] And I'd missed the heart that God had for him. And God used him to wake me up and say, get up. And so we did go for a drink the other day.
[31:13] I don't know what God's going to do there. I trust God to change his heart. My responsibility is just to try and be a good friend, to love him, to share the gospel with him when there's an opportunity.
[31:23] You see, God's the one who changes people, not me. But we need to go and God wants to give us his heart.
[31:36] Because where's the whole story going? The whole story of Jonah is not actually really about Jonah. You see, we have a reluctant prophet who turns and does what God says.
[31:52] We have Ninevites who turn and repent before God. But then we also have God who seems to turn and seems to change his mind.
[32:03] I'm not sure whether he thought, oh, didn't expect them to change. Oh, maybe I've got to stop bringing judgment on them. I don't think that's what God was doing.
[32:17] Why? Why does God seem to turn? Because that's the way God set the whole thing up. You see, it's the reason why Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh because he knew that if he went, God would do something.
[32:33] And so Jonah didn't want to go. So God was using his message of judgment to wake the people up because he wanted to show his mercy and his love to them.
[32:45] The story's not about Jonah, how good or bad he was. The story's not even about the Ninevites, how wonderful their repentance was. The story is about a gracious God whose heart is for the worst of his enemies.
[32:59] He wants them to know him and that he wants to turn away his wrath and his anger. And as Christians, we know that in Jesus Christ, God has turned away his wrath and anger and he then calls us as his people who have been saved by his amazing grace to get involved with what he's up to in this world because he wants you to experience the thrill and the joy of seeing God do miracles in and through you to see him changing people's lives.
[33:35] That's what God wants. and you know you will never truly understand the grace and the power of God until you start obeying him in what he's calling you to do.
[33:46] And that's when it gets exciting. But it's not based on your past performance because whoever God calls us to, we are too sinful, we are too broken.
[34:01] broken. The potential for change in people's life is not based on us, it's based on him. So what's the challenge for us?
[34:14] Are you running away like Jonah? God calls us to go to this city to look around us, to reach out to the people with his message, the gospel.
[34:25] But are you so wrapped up in your own busyness? Are you unable to see the people around you that God wants you to reach because life is all about yourself or just your kids' education?
[34:40] You know, if you're a Christian here this morning, you weren't saved for the rest of your life to be attending church services on a Sunday. Did you know that? You were saved for so much more than that.
[34:55] God wants you to enjoy life with him by engaging with what he is calling you, the people he is calling you to go to. Maybe it's your colleagues, I don't know.
[35:08] Maybe it's your family, maybe it's your children he wants you to invest time in. Maybe you're not running away, maybe you're lying on the beach still covered in the fish sauce of your condemnation and guilt and shame and you feel like you're not good enough.
[35:24] And God's word comes to you a second time and says, get up and go. I've forgiven you, I've restored you, I've saved you, I want to use you.
[35:36] Look at the people around you that I've placed in your life and I want you to take one step because when you take one step you'll begin to see me taking steps. We've seen this so many times in the church already, we see that with St. Barnabas, people in the congregation have taken one step and God has done amazing things.
[35:58] Maybe you've been going, maybe you've been obeying what God has called but it's actually got hard for you. You felt it's, you don't feel like you're getting anywhere.
[36:08] You're frustrated that change hasn't happened in the people you want to see changed. But remember, God's job is to change people. He's the God of miracles.
[36:21] You need to just keep crying out to Him again and again and again and trusting Him for the change. Don't give up, keep going.
[36:35] You see, I want to have stories, I don't know about you, I want to have stories to tell of you, to you, of things that God is doing in my life through me and in me. Do you want to have stories to see what God is doing?
[36:47] Do you want to have stories of God doing miracles through you? Because if you do, then get on His mission and you'll see God's grace in an amazing multicolored way.
[37:02] If you're like me, I hear this kind of message and I think, yeah, great. And three weeks later, I'm back lying on the beach again because life just seems to overtake me.
[37:14] That's why we need to remember this final thing. The call to go is not an individual one, it's a corporate one. If you look in your bulletin and look in the text on the back page here, I've written three questions.
[37:34] I'm going to give you a little bit of time to reflect on them because this is not a message for you just to say, oh, that was nice, I just lie on the beach for a little longer. It's a message that's a call to say, what step does God want you to take?
[37:48] But the thing is, we need other people around us. Number three is, who can I ask to pray with me about this? That means, not just once, that means, who am I going to share the people that I really want to reach out to so that they can keep coming back to me and saying, hey, how's it going?
[38:08] Hey, let me pray with you. When you're frustrated, hey, remember, God's the one who changes people. That's what community groups are about. If you're not in one, you need to be in one. If you're in one and you're not encouraging, you don't know who other people are trying to reach out to, you need to be talking about that because that's what God has given us the mission to do and God will do amazing things.
[38:32] So let me take a couple of minutes. Jeremy's going to come up and I want you just to take a couple of minutes to look through these three questions. Maybe you want to write down an answer and to think for yourself, who is it that God is calling me to go to?
[38:50] If you're not a Christian, God is calling to you that he wants to save you. So let's just spend a couple of minutes just thinking about this.
[39:01] Let's get serious with what God is calling us to do. Father, thank you that you don't call people who are sorted.
[39:18] You don't call people who have got their acts together in life. Thank you that there is, that we're all in so many ways like Jonah and yet you want to show grace upon grace to us.
[39:34] Father, I thank you that you were the greater Jonah, that where Jonah was disobedient, you were obedient.
[39:48] Where Jonah went to the depths of the sea for his own sin, you went to the depths of the sea for our sin. you were resurrected and then you called your disciples to go.
[40:08] Not to go because it's a heavy burden, not to go because it's a crushing weight on our shoulders which should make us feel guilty, but to go because that's where we experience the amazing power and grace of God in our lives and through us.
[40:27] Thank you that you want to use us. You want to involve us. You want us to share that excitement of seeing what you're up to in this world.
[40:40] Lord, it can seem daunting. We may not even know where to start, but I pray that you'd help us to see that you want us just to take little steps and you will guide us.
[40:52] I pray for all of us who feel maybe we don't really want to do it. We don't really want to bother. We feel too busy.
[41:03] We feel we've got too much on our plates at the moment to think about anyone else. Lord, I pray, change our hearts to see the people around us as you see them. Help us to see the people in our offices.
[41:14] Maybe we despise them. But Lord, help us to see with your eyes how you see them. To see that the gospel message for them is a message of bringing mercy, not judgment.
[41:31] Lord, I pray for us who may be struggling with feeling like we know we should do things, but it feels too hard.
[41:43] It feels too difficult. We've tried. We've failed. We look at our own selves and we think, God, how can you use me? I pray that you would show us that you're an amazing God of grace and you will get all the glory when we see you using and working through us.
[42:05] Please just show us very clearly that one or two people that you call us this week to just go and ring up. And if we're frustrated and we just, we feel like giving up, Lord, I pray that you just encourage us this morning that, Lord, whether things happen in our timing or not, you are the God who is the one who changes hearts.
[42:43] So, Lord, let us see you at work. Let us be the people that you've called us to be. Thank you. Thank you. That even if we mess up, Lord, that you come to us another time and you tell us to get up, I want to use you.
[43:00] Your grace is amazing. Let us enjoy it as we go. Thank you, Father. Amen.