Spring City Fellowship
260419Sunday
Sunday April 19, 2026 10:15AM Service

      • Psalm 150:3NIV2011

  • We Will Ride
  • It's Time For The Reign Of God
  • Days Of Elijah
  • Goodness Of God
  • Here I Am To Worship
  • I See The Lord
  • You're Worthy Of My Praise
  • Teach Me Lord To Wait
  • Our theme for 2026 is “Embrace Transformation”
    Transformation is the inward change that we experience when we become more like Jesus.
    Someone once said, “God never forces people to change.’
    Do you agree or disagree?
    I wonder what Jonah would say about that?
    You could say he wasn’t exactly “forced” but he didn’t have much of a choice either!
    Jonah is a case study in what happens when someone does not embrace transformation.
    Change happens anyway.
    God has a way of bringing us around to His purpose.
    Transformation happens: you can resist it or you can embrace it.
    We want to be people who embrace transformation.
    So this series is called Jonah: Escaping the Belly of the Fish.
    We haven’t even begun the story, but I’m going to go right to the punchline to explain the title.
    The belly of the whale was the turning point.
    That’s what it took to get Jonah back on track.
    Maybe you have been in a place like that?
    What does it take to get out?
    That only happens when you have learned your lesson?
    That’s how you escape.
    Or the other way is to learn you lesson to begin with?
    It’s a short book, but we are going to move through it slowly.
    Let’s see what lessons we can learn that might help us to “escape the belly of the whale.”
    We are going to do our scripture reading all together at the beginning.
    So lets stand together for the reading of today’s passage.
    Jonah 1:1–10 ESV
    1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, 2 “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. 4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. 5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. 6 So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.” 7 And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” 9 And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” 10 Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.
    Jonah was fleeing from the presence of the Lord - that is what he told them.
    Have you ever done that?
    Have you ever tried to run from God?
    Do you remember the story of Adam and Eve hiding in the garden after they disobeyed God? They tried to play hide-and-seek with the Creator! It’s a funny mental image—hiding behind a tree as if that could help them escape God’s gaze. We can do the same in our lives, hiding from responsibilities or truths. Yet, God is always calling us out. Why don’t we stop running and start reconnecting?
    The first lesson is this...

    You can’t escape who you are.

    Titus 3:3–5 CSB
    3 For we too were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved by various passions and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, detesting one another. 4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, 5 he saved us—not by works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy—through the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
    You can’t escape who you are - that is true both in the bad sense and in the good sense.
    We can’t deny we have a sinful human nature.
    But similarly, once you become aware of God and His great love for us- you can’t deny that this is what you were created for.
    You were created for God and were made to have fellowship with Him.
    At the LIFE Seminar that Karie and I attended this week, we were reminded that we need to balance being and doing in our lives. We spend most of our time doing things, but we are human beings - not human doings. We were first and foremost created to be with God and then to do things with God.
    Furthermore, the point was made that we often see being as a prerequisite to doing. We treat being as if it is something that we do so that we can get to the doing - and to do that better.
    But being is it’s own objective. That’s what we were created for - to image God and to have fellowship with Him. And that was before God ever gave us anything to do!
    And that is why it is important that we begin our study with a simple fact:

    Jonah was a real person.

    You may or may not realize that Jonah is one of the more controversial books of the Bible.
    What’s the debate about?
    It’s about whether or not the story really happened.
    Can a fish really swallow a man?
    So I asked AI and it said this:
    From a purely biological standpoint, yes—certain marine creatures possess the physical capacity to ingest a human whole. The spermaceti whale has a gullet spacious enough to accommodate a man without difficulty, and the white shark, which sometimes reaches thirty feet in length, is quite capable of swallowing a man entirely. Fish of sufficient size to swallow humans whole have been documented in the Mediterranean, and historical examples exist of sailors who were swallowed by sharks and subsequently disgorged alive.
    Another debate is from a literary point of view. Jonah is written in a style that makes it sound like a fairy tale.
    The Hebrew vocabulary used is so simple that beginners learning to read Hebrew will often start with the book of Jonah - its easy reading - in Hebrew.
    This has cause some to speculate that it’s a children’s story - and maybe it is - but even children’s story can be based on true stories.
    The thing that identifies this story as a true story is that Jonah is a real person, the son of Amittai, mentioned in 2 Kings.
    2 Kings 14:25 ESV
    25 He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.
    And the Bible even tells us where he was from, a place called Gath-hepher, which is in the region just west of Galilee, not far from a town called Nazareth.
    Hmm does that place sound familiar?
    Someone else is going to come hundreds of years later and is going to cite Jonah as his predecessor.
    Luke 11:30 ESV
    30 For as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation.
    and a few verses later...
    Luke 11:32 ESV
    32 The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
    The fact that Jesus cited Jonah also tells us that Jonah was a real person.
    a person whose story, in many ways, foreshadowed that of Jesus.
    I think it helps to know that Jonah was real - after all - we can relate to Jonah.
    We relate to how he felt and to what he did.
    And we relate to the way God brought him around.
    God gave him a second chance - that’s our God!
    And that is how he deals with us as real people.

    You are a child of God.

    1 John 3:1–2 NLT
    1 See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are! But the people who belong to this world don’t recognize that we are God’s children because they don’t know him. 2 Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.
    Do you understand what the Bible is saying - you don’t just become a child of God when you choose to follow Jesus.
    You were made by God to be His child and Jesus restores us to that reality.
    Sure, the sinful nature is part of our humanity, but so is the image of God!
    One of the reasons it is so hard to resist God is because we are going against the Creator Himself.
    We are trying to go against the way He made us to be.
    He created us for relationship with Himself.
    That means there is something missing in each of us that only God can fill.
    The early church father, Augustine of Hippo said it like this, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
    People today like to shop around for a church or a religion like you would buy a house or a car. They want to find something that is uniquely suited to them - you know something that is a good “fit” to their taste or to their lifestyle.
    The truth is that God created us for Himself. He doesn’t have to “fit” to accommodate us. We find our “fit” in Him. We were made for Him, not the other way around. That means that even though the idea that God has a will or a plan for our lives may be scary, there is no better or more satisfying place that we can be than in the will of God.
    I don’t think Jonah felt that way, at least not at the beginning...
    That’s why he demonstrated the second lesson.

    You can’t run from God.

    You can try… but it won’t work - not in the long run.
    Psalm 139:7 ESV
    7 Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?
    I wonder what made Jonah run.
    God tell Jonah to go to Nineveh and in the next verse Jonah is headed in exactly the opposite direction.
    Not only is he headed in the wrong direction, but the scripture describes it as “away from the Presence of God.”
    Which way is the presence of God?
    Psalm 139:8–10 ESV
    8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! 9 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.
    It seems to me that no matter which direction you run, you can’t escape the presence of God.
    So why does the Bible say that he rose to flee to Tarshsish, away from the presence of God.
    Doesn’t God know where Tarshish is?
    Is Tarshish such a God-forsaken place that even God doesn’t go there.
    It seems to me that if there were such a place, it would be Nineveh.
    God is everywhere - so how can you flee from His presence?
    On one hand - you can’t!
    But there is, perhaps, a way that you can...

    God give each of us a free-will.

    Deuteronomy 11:26–28 ESV
    26 “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: 27 the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, 28 and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today, to go after other gods that you have not known.
    By the way, the term free- will is nowhere in the Bible, but the concept is clearly evident.
    God gives us choices and He respects our choices.
    He gave His people rules to live by and he promises blessings for obedience.
    One of the blessings is that His presence would go with them and he would establish them in the land He would give to them.
    However, there is not promise of blessing for those who are disobedient.
    There is no guarantee that His presence will go with them if they choose to go after other gods.
    The Bible is very clear that God is very patient (slow to anger, abounding in mercy) but that patience also has a limit.
    No, God will never abandon His people.
    He will never leave us nor will He forsake us.
    But that doesn’t rule out the possibility of us forsaking Him.
    You might say, “why would anyone do that?” - yes, why exactly!
    Except that they have been lulled into some false comfort thinking that God will never do anything about it.
    If God continues to bless and to protect us while we do our own thing - that is only going to reinforce what will soon become a series of bad choices.
    So God says, “fine, but you’re on your own!”
    His presence only goes with us so far in the wrong direction.
    I hope that scares you - I should!
    That is the whole purpose of judgement - not to be mean.
    Judgement is simply letting people experience the consequences of their own wrong choices with the hope that they will realize it and turn round before it’s too late.
    back to the question that I asked at the beginning - does God “force” people to obey Him?
    Categorically no - He gives us a free will....

    But He also knows how to persuade us.

    Deuteronomy 30:19–20 ESV
    19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, 20 loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, for he is your life and length of days, that you may dwell in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.”
    The lists of blessings and curses that Joshua and the Israelites recited upon entering the promised land was a sort of contract
    but it was also meant to be a deterrent.
    Here is what you should do - and here is what will happen if you don't
    Guess which choice they made? - Yeah - eventually, they did everything your not supposed to do.
    So God lets their enemies take them off into exile.
    You would think that would make the difference - well, sort of yes, but no.
    Ezekiel prophesied what was necessary for real and lasting transformation.
    Ezekiel 36:26–27 NLT
    26 And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you so that you will follow my decrees and be careful to obey my regulations.
    The only way to keep us from running away from God is to give us a new heart.
    Literally put God inside us.
    You can’t get away from His Spirit if His Spirit is in you.
    There is only one condition… you have to want it.
    In fact, you have to turn around and stop running away to get it.
    Acts 2:38 NLT
    38 Peter replied, “Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
    Jonah fled from God’s presence and ran into a storm.
    The storm was like an outward manifestation of what was going on inside of Jonah.
    He was being tossed back and forth between God’s will and his own desires.
    There is no peace in that place and it only gets worse the further you get from obedience.
    The Psalmist says it this way...
    Psalm 139:11–12 ESV
    11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
    Jonah somehow knew that the storm was directly related to His disobedience.
    He wasn’t just running from God’s assignment - he was trying to escape life and reality.
    He was asleep while the storm was going on.
    Who else slept through a storm? - Jesus.
    Except Jesus wasn’t hiding from the storm - He was at peace.
    Jesus is peace - and the storm quieted at His command.
    When everyone else was looking for a reason, someone to blame, they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah.
    Drawing lots is supposed to be random - but this time it was not random.
    It was sign from God.
    The storm was from God.
    The lot was from God.
    Jonah couldn’t even hide in the bottom of the boat.
    If you are like Jonah, running from God..
    First of all, you are going to find that God is with you far longer and in places that you never thought He would be.
    And even if you somehow manage to get far from His presence, you are going to find that He is still the God of the impossible.
    Yes God can be very persuasive and in way that you might not have suspected.
    Romans 2:4 CSB
    4 Or do you despise the riches of his kindness, restraint, and patience, not recognizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?
    If you think God wrath is a strong motivation - try contemplating His kindness.
    Think about what could have happened, what should have happened and what almost did happen.
    Yeah - that will get you!

    Sometimes God asks us to do hard things.

    Why did God tell Jonah to go to Nineveh?
    Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire.
    The Assyrians were known for their wickedness and brutality.
    It was founded by Nimrod the legendary king whose name means “we will rebel”
    He was also one of the originators of the tower of babel.
    Going to Nineveh was essentially going to the most wicked city on earth and the ancient source of wickedness.
    It was “the belly of the beast”
    Some of the most violent cities in the US are Washington DC , Baltimore and Detroit
    What if God called you to one of those places?
    What if God called you to a neighborhood like Kensington or Camden NJ.
    You would be like - are you sure?
    What if God said - I want you to go and preach on Main St. Spring City?
    Sometimes God asks us to do hard things - like what?

    Like loving your enemies.

    Luke 6:27 ESV
    27 “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
    Nineveh was definitely Israel’s enemy.
    Like the US and Russia during the cold war.
    Like US and Iran right now.
    You know there are many Christians in Iran right now - imagine how it must be for them.
    Anybody want to go to Iran? - I didn’t think so.
    But God asks all of us to do some hard things - like loving our enemies.
    For some of us, that might be our neighbor or our family member.
    You might say - “God, send me to the ends of the earth, just don’t send me across the street!
    Or don’t send me back to my old neighborhood.
    Guess where God sent me...
    Is God allowed to ask us to do hard things...
    or do we only serve Him when it is easy and convenient?
    If God asks you to do hard things - just know that He is not asking you to do anything that He hasn’t already done.
    Philippians 2:5–7 CEV
    5 and think the same way that Christ Jesus thought: 6 Christ was truly God. But he did not try to remain equal with God. 7 He gave up everything and became a slave, when he became like one of us.
    Loving your enemies may be one of the hardest things that God asks us to do.
    But it helps to know that He has already done it.
    And we can ask Him to help us.
    Sometimes God asks us to do hard things like loving our enemies...

    Or obeying God when it doesn’t seem to make sense.

    Going to Nineveh sure didn’t make sense to Jonah.
    It probably felt like God was sending Him on a suicide mission.
    He must have thought… there is no way the people of Nineveh are going to repent - they will kill me first!
    Oh - but you don’t know what God may have in store....
    We are going to see that the whole story - including Jonah’s running away and his near-death experience are all going to work together to create exactly the right scenario that the people of Nineveh will respond to.
    Jonah doesn’t know it, but by running from God’s plan, he is playing right into God’s plan.
    Of course, there may have also been an easier way if Jonah were just obedient.
    This brings to mind another scripture.
    Romans 8:28 AMP
    28 We are assured and know that [God being a partner in their labor] all things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose.
    I’m sure if someone had quoted this scripture to Jonah, he would have been like “yeah, right!”
    But it was right… God was with Jonah even when he was running from God.
    And God was not just bringing Jonah around, but he was using Jonah for an even greater plan that he had in mind from the beginning.
    Escaping the belly of the whale might look like trying everything you can not to go there in the first place.
    It might not work...
    But if it doesn’t, just know that God has a reason for you being there.
    And take comfort in the fact that He has a plan.

    Questions for reflection:

    Have you ever tried to run away from God? Or from something that God told you to do? How did that go for you? What would you say to someone like Jonah?
    Have you ever come across a storm, a life circumstance that was the direct result of your disobedience? Did you try to hide? What finally brought you out of your denial? What did Jesus have to say to that storm?
    Does God sometimes ask us to do hard things? Maybe even impossible things? What should you remember from the story of Jonah at those times? What should you remember about God?

      • Jonah 1:1–10ESV

      • Titus 3:3–5ESV

      • 2 Kings 14:25ESV

      • Luke 11:30ESV

      • Luke 11:32ESV

      • 1 John 3:1–2ESV

      • Psalm 139:7ESV

      • Psalm 139:8–10ESV

      • Deuteronomy 11:26–28ESV

      • Deuteronomy 30:19–20ESV

      • Ezekiel 36:26–27ESV

      • Acts 2:38ESV

      • Psalm 139:11–12ESV

      • Romans 2:4ESV

      • Luke 6:27ESV

      • Philippians 2:5–7ESV

      • Romans 8:28ESV

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