Lesson 33: Sharing the Gospel

I don't remember when or where it was, but I heard a church leader say something like "The church must be true - if it wasn't, the missionaries would have killed it long ago".

I get that. As a missionary nearly 40 years ago, I saw that some of the missionaries there considered themselves to be on a two year vacation away from mom and dad. The damage they did was regrettable. Even a well meaning missionary, and I'm speaking of myself here, can cause damage. The language in Guatemala is Spanish. I walked past an outdoor preacher once and said in English "Is that so?" Now that alone was definitely not Christ like, but how it got interpreted was worse. He didn't speak english. He spoke spanish and thought I said "Sonso", which means he thought I was calling him an idiot. There was no recovering - I kept moving on. Damage - done.

So there is a little bit of understanding for Jonah. He was definitely a man, and like all of us, was much less of a tool for the Lord than the Lord would have him be. First, he tries to avoid a mission call by leaving the city. Apparently he didn't understand that the Lord was the Lord of more than just that city. The bigger picture was lost on this man - at least in that category.

Next, I find the story interesting. It looks like there is a chiasm in this story, but that's a subject for a different blog. All my life I had heard that a whale swallowed him up and blew him out right next to Ninevah. Not so. The old testament says it was a fish, and it vomited him, 3 days away.  It may have been a whale, but the bible just says it was a fish. The whale thing is "common knowledge", but it's also inaccurate.

So like so many of us, when we get a title, we think we're awesome. We're powerful. We are to be obeyed and feared. And whatever we say goes, because why? We have a title. In his case, he was a messenger of the Lord. To him, that meant that whatever came to his head, and whatever he said, must be backed up by the Lord. It wasn't about relaying the Lord's word to the people, it was about him being powerful. In a way, he misunderstood his role - he considered himself to be the Lord, and figured that if he said it (he had a title, right?) then the Lord had an obligation to make it so.

Credit: Garth Knox - Longroom.com

Now, the purpose of this discussion is not to just beat up on Jonah. It's to get all of us to look at ourselves, and decide how much we fail to understand our roles. Do we expect the Lord to back us when we don't listen to his guidance? Do we let a title of the Lord's trust make us proud? When we get a title, do we then humbly work to enlarge our pipeline with the Lord? Or do we consider it no longer necessary because now we have the title?

This passage is in the scriptures not because Jonah was a problem, but because we all are.

We all have leadership positions. Husband, wife, father, quorum presidency, manager, executive, bishop, nursery leader. It doesn't matter what the position of trust is. What matters is that we must rely on the Lord to guide us. What can't we rely on? We can't rely on ourselves, our intellect, our social circles, philosophical books, social trends, or "common knowledge". And we can't rely on our titles. We must develop that pipeline with the Lord, and do what He commands. And when we really wanted those tens of thousands of people to die so that we could be "right"? When it ruins our day that the Lord doesn't do what we command him to do? That's when we need to check our own souls.

It's not about the title - it never was. The prophets have long said that judgment day won't be about what title we had, it will be about how we lived. For me, that means it's about how well I've developed that pipeline to the Lord. May we seek that relationship. From what little I know about it, it's absolutely worth developing.