Relentless Compassion

Sermon:             Relentless Compassion                  Jonah 4:1-11

I.  Jonah’s Angry Prayer  (1-4)

     Exodus 34:6 The LORD passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

     “The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who He is. This is hard work. It takes lots of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.”  Gentle and Lowly, p. 151.

II.  The Lord’s Lesson on Compassion  (5-11)