Reconsidering our motivation for evangelism, paired with the Sunday preaching series “Gone Fishing!” — six weeks in the book of Jonah.
Curriculum by W. Dennis Tucker, Jr., PhD (Truett Seminary).
God tells Jonah to go warn Nineveh, the capital of Israel’s most violent enemy, and Jonah does the opposite. He heads to Joppa and pays to charter an entire ship going 2,500 miles the other way — about as far as anyone could get in the ancient world. It’s not hesitation, it’s a flat no. The question underneath it: who would we rather God not show mercy to?
A storm hits, the pagan sailors panic and start praying to their own gods, and Jonah — the actual prophet — is asleep below deck. Woken and asked who he serves, he gives the right answer without a hint that his own life says otherwise. By the end it’s the foreign sailors offering sacrifices to the true God, not Jonah. Knowing the right answer and living it turn out to be two different things.
Swallowed by a great fish, Jonah finally prays — but notice what he actually asks for. He thanks God for pulling him out personally and never once mentions the sailors he left terrified on deck or the city he’s still refusing to warn. Even his gratitude is about himself. God answers anyway, and the fish vomits him onto dry land, which in Scripture is a picture of humiliation, not honor.
God gives Jonah the same commission a second time, and he actually goes — but watch how. Nineveh takes three days to cross on foot; Jonah preaches after one day’s walk and calls it done. His entire message is five words in Hebrew, with no mention of God’s name and no invitation to repent. It’s obedience with the substance scooped out.
Despite Jonah’s bare-minimum, five-word sermon, the whole city — from the king down — puts on sackcloth and turns from its violence. Israel’s most feared enemy repents faster and more fully than the prophet God sent them ever did. God sees it and relents. For a moment, the people Jonah wanted destroyed respond to God better than Jonah does.
Nineveh is spared and Jonah is furious — he says he’d rather die than watch mercy land on people like that. God grows a plant to shade him, then kills it, and Jonah gets just as angry over the vine. The book ends without Jonah answering God’s last question, mid-argument, on purpose. It’s the one chapter where the problem isn’t Nineveh — it’s Jonah’s own idea of who deserves God.
This series follows the church’s Sunday preaching. Watch First Baptist’s worship services →
A follow-up group that meets the Thursday after each Sunday lesson, pairing that week’s Jonah passage with a cross-reference elsewhere in Scripture.
Draft: these Thursday lessons are draft cross-references, not the church’s finalized material. Titles and content may change.
Peter needs the same vision repeated three times — a sheet of unclean animals lowered from heaven — before he’ll even consider that God has cleaned what he’d always called common. He still shows up at Cornelius’s door not fully sure why he’s there. Same resistance as Jonah, centuries later: it was never really about the mission, it was about who counts as reachable.
Two men pray in the temple: one lists his credentials — fasting, tithing, not being ‘like other people’ — and the other won’t even lift his eyes, asking only for mercy. Jesus says the tax collector goes home justified, not the Pharisee. Same reversal as the sailors and Jonah: having the right religious résumé isn’t the same as being in right standing with God.
Ten lepers are healed on the road to Jerusalem, and only one comes back to say thank you — a Samaritan, the outsider of the group. Jesus’s question lands hard: ‘Where are the other nine?’ Like Jonah in the fish, gratitude that stays private and self-contained hasn’t actually finished doing what gratitude is for.
Paul says you can speak in the tongues of angels and give away everything you own, and if it isn’t done in love, it’s nothing. It’s the sharpest possible commentary on Jonah’s five-word sermon: technically obedient, entirely hollow. The passage everyone reads at weddings is actually about exactly what’s missing from Jonah 3.
The father sees his son ‘while he was still a long way off’ and runs to him — an undignified thing for a man of his standing to do. Nineveh’s turnaround gets a similarly fast, generous response from God: he sees it and relents before anyone’s proven anything long-term. The parable’s second half, the older brother sulking outside the party, previews next week’s Jonah 4 almost exactly.
Workers hired at daybreak get paid the exact same as the ones hired an hour before quitting time, and the early crew is furious about it. The landowner’s answer could be pasted straight into Jonah 4: ‘Are you envious because I am generous?’ Both stories end on a question aimed less at the characters than at whoever’s reading it.
Each session stands on its own, so you don’t need to have been there from the start.