CROSSroads -- The CROSSroad of Priority -- Jonah 1:1-3; 4:5-11

1. Introduction
There is something that every single one of us does every single day and that is we evaluate our priorities.
We plan a day that ordered by our priorities.
For instance, I was scheduled with my family to work at the 4-H fair earlier this week but, I did not make it because Kirstyn got sick on Monday and Valerie had to take her to the doctor.
Just Friday, I was heading to Kernersville to a book sale when a friend called with a particular need. I detoured for a couple of hours to see if there was some way to help meet that need.

2. Describing the Biblical Text
Our text is from two different parts of the book of Jonah but they show us one thing.
They show us someone who is patently dissatisfied with the calling of God on His life.
God calls Him and he runs.
God uses him and he whines.
Jonah was just an unhappy person who did not want to be inconvenienced by the calling of God.
Jonah was just so pitiful that when God finally got his attention and really used him in power, he was unable to even recognize how significant his ministry was.

3. Narrate the Contextual application
I think we all have a general understanding of the Jonah account.
He was called by God and rand the other way
The storms struck the ship he was on and the crew threw him overboard at his own request.
They then worshiped Jehovah.
Then Jonah was swallowed by the great fish and had a repentant moment in the bell of that fish and prayed a great prayer.
Then voile, the Ipecac syrup kicks in and the fish gets sick and deposits Jonah on the beach.
Then Jonah proceeds to Nineveh and preaches repentance for all his worth and revival break out and the people repent.
As they repent, Jonah leaves town and watches from afa but rather than equipping these new disciples he has made, he forsakes them.
He is now upset that they did repent and that the Lord is choosing to spare them.
Jonah had his own agenda.
Jonah was about Jonah and not about what God wanted.
He was a racist and he was a spoiled brat.

4. Life Application (thesis)
This is why a calling from God requires that the cares of the world lose their luster.

5. SO WHAT!! (Outline)
Let’s take a look at a couple priorities that we need to make sure that we have in place as we come to the crossroads of life and we sense the Lord calling us into His service.
I need to be where God wants me to be.
When we look at Jonah, he is all about being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Arnold Spaugh and I are a different as night and day. I hate to be lost and he just figures he is out to see some new scenery. When I miss an exit on the interstate, I get all over myself. It actually took me a year to figure out new 85 and old 85 south of town. I even missed a church renewal conference because I couldn’t figure out the directions. Bob Allen and I were going to see Glen Pierce at Britthaven and we never found it because of that. Nothing frustrates me more than being lost. You wouldn’t know it by my record, but I hate to be late also. I try to do everything I can to be on time.
Jonah did not.
He just did not want to be where God wanted Him to be.
God said Go to Nineveh which on the map was east of where Jonah was and took a ship headed to Spain.

Jonah is taking ship in the rain
I can see the rudder boards heading for Spain
Oh I can see Jonah waving goodbye.

I think that there are times when we don’t want to be where God wants us to be either.
I know you know what I mean. It is another ten days before payday and a friend calls you and need a couple of hundred dollars to make ends meet. This friend knows that you are Christian and that you try to be a loving and helpful Christian. With all your heart, you want to be somewhere else for the next ten days just so they won’t ask you to help.

Or, you know that the future of your church depends on you and your response to the Holy Spirit. Yet, you have a couple of kids who will soon be in the youth group and you don’t see as vital a youth program as you want to see so you look to other churches even though the Lord may not have told you to.
I think it is interesting that Rick Warren says that the average pastor leaves a church over the grumbling of 6 or less people.
It is so easy to run from God
You never really get away and that is where the difficulty really begins.
God is there wherever you are and he hounds you and he hounds you until you either get back into his will or you just unplug the spiritual phone line.
You can kind of tell when it is happening, when people are feeling that tug. They kind of hang around. They find excuses to show up for special occasions. Then they talk about how wonderful it is at the new place not to convince you but to convince themselves.

That is what Jonah had done. I am going to take off on this cruise and I am going to get some rest and just enjoy myself.
In Spain, I won’t have to see a merciful God do anything because the Tarshishites are not being called by God anyway.
Obviously, Jonah was not going where God wanted Him to go.
Jonah was about to find himself miserable.

Move Forward to 4:5-11.
It is so cool when God teaches a lesson
As we see what God is doing with Jonah, let’s keep this priority in mind.
My contentment is from my obedience, not from results or circumstances.
When we look at those first 4 verses, we see Jonah getting ticked so again he leaves the scene.
But, this time, he has preached and a great revival has taken place.
Chapter 3 tells us that people believed the Lord.
Most of us lament because more people don’t believe but Jonah was just the opposite.
I wan to tell you something.
Jonah was too busy being focused on Jonah.
First of all, He had problems with God’s nature.
People are the same today.
I was listening to a story about a preacher on an airplane who was talking to a woman about God. He asked her what God was like. When she described her opinion of God as she saw it, he told her that she just made herself God. When she seemed confused, he simply explained that as long as we can make God what we want him to be, rather than what the Bible teachs that He is, we are making ourselves God.

That’s what Jonah did.
He wanted God to be vengeful and destructive in His wrath against the Assyrians in Nineveh but God was being merciful to them.
Now days it’s just the opposite.
God is seen as some heavenly Santa Claus who sits around tolerates anything and everything because he is loving.
The only people who don’t identify with Him would be the faithful followers of Christ because they are judgmental.

What else has Jonah done here?
He is whining about his circumstances.
How often do we in the church do that?
All the time.
In Philippians, Paul says that he has learned to be content.
Most people who listen to Christians are leaning how to be malcontents.
We are a bunch of whiney people.
We complain about everything. And argue about even more.
We were at the pool about two weeks ago when a lady just began to caricature a particular strain of evangelical theology and two of us sitting there happen to embrace that set of teachings.
What does that look like?
It looks like followers of Jesus cannot get along.

So what do we need to do?
We need to focus our lives on being obedient to Christ.
We need to focus our lives on serving the God who sent His son to die for us.
If we were as worried about whether or not our lives were giving glory to God as much as we worry about some of the meaningless tripe in our lives and on our minds, we could actually get something done.
I think that it is especially true in church.
We really do haggle and discuss things that have very little if any eternal value as though they were issues of great importance.
Tony Compolo, a sociologist was once telling about a church in New York that split and do you know what issue was?
It was over stained glass windows.
Not that they were too expensive, the issue was that there was going to be a picture of Adam from the creation account in the Bible. Someone raised the question of whether or not Adam should have a belly button on the stained glass.
Now we all know that if he did not have a belly button, his birthday suit would fall off.
Why would a church let something like that split them up?
It is because their eyes are on gourds and vines and stained glass and not on the lost souls that God prepared for their ministry to reach.
Look at verse 9.
God is telling Jonah
Here you are missing a vine that you had nothing do with and you want that I should abandon people that I created.
But we do that all the time.
We spend so much time looking inward that we fail to focus our attention on mission.
The lost world is out there and out there is where we are going to look