Matthew chapter 16, right preceding the scripture I read this morning says, (KJV) 13. When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?14. And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.15. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?16. And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.17. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. You see, over here when we started out on our scriptures the Pharisees and Sadducees wanted to see a sign. They wanted to see a sign, not in the signs Jesus was doing. They were looking for a Messiah as someone who was going to come and deliver them from the oppression they were under in the Roman Empire. They thought this Messiah was going to come and set them free from all the trouble and care of life and give them rule and rule the world. But you see, this is not what Jesus came to do. I think Jesus actually got a little disturbed when they asked him to show them a sign. But you see, they looked on things on the outward appearance. They looked for signs in the flesh. The signs that Jesus was giving them were signs of the spirit. You see, Jesus has a whale of a tale to tell, but we must be able to hear it. We must be born again. We must come to Jesus, come to God, through the faith in Jesus Christ. And in doing so, he opens up and whole new realm for us. We are able to worship God. We are able to understand things in the spiritual realm. See, the Pharisees and Sadducees, they had all the laws. They had what the Prophets had told them about the coming Messiah, but they didn’t see it. They were looking for some magnificent sign. Somebody to come in flesh and blood and show them some miraculous sign on this earth. But Jesus told them, you will see no such sign. The only sign you will see is the sign of the prophet Jonah. Looking back to Jonah were Bob read; I’m going to recap a little bit of Jonah, the story of Jonah. Most of us know the story of Jonah. How God worked through Jonah. Where Bob started out it says, (Jonah 3:1) 1. Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time What happened to the first time? Jonah was a prophet. A prophet of Israel. The word of the Lord came to Jonah from the Lord. He told him to rise and go to Nineveh, for the city had great sin. Well, not only did they have great sin, but they were a very wicked generation. A second point was, they were Gentiles. They were not Jews. Jonah, a prophet of the Jewish nation, a prophet of God, God was telling him to go to Gentiles. Jews had nothing to do with Gentiles. Not only that, the people of Nineveh were an enemy under Israel. And here is God telling him to prophecy to Gentiles and also an enemy. Whatever reason Jonah had, he decided he didn’t want any part of this so he went the opposite way. It wasn’t God’s way. He went his way. He ended up on a ship with a bunch of people from a surrounding town called Joppa. And as they were sailing, the Lord sent a mighty, great wind that causes a very bad tempest in the lives of these sailors and Jonah. These people served pagan gods. They worshiped their gods. It wasn’t the true God, but they worshiped their god. And they looked to their own gods to see why this trouble was coming on them because it was a great trouble. It was a great storm that they were afraid that they were going to die. That they were going to parish. So they decided to cast lots. Of course, the lots fell on Jonah. We say, well, that sounds a little bit like gambling. But this was a common tradition in the Jewish elders was to cast lots to see what God would direct them and what they should do. But God caused these lots of the pagan gods to fall on Jonah so these people would know that it was Jonah that was causing there problems. So what did they do? Even by Jonah’s request, they threw him overboard. And the seas ceased to raging immediately. That is a sign of Jonah. That is one sign. If we do what God wants us to do, or if we follow what God wants us to do, we will see the signs that God wants us to see. The world seeks for a sign in the flesh and blood. But we, as Christians, we see signs in the spiritual realm. How often do we wonder why we are going through such turmoil in our lives? Here we are Christians. We are suppose to be the blessed people of God. But yet we have turmoil, trials and tribulation in our lives. Sometimes I think we need to look at our lives and make an evaluation to see if we are a Jonah. How much of Jonah’s life is in our life? God calls us to do certain things with our life. And we don’t follow. If we don’t follow we will find trouble and distress in our lives. I feel I am speaking out of experience in my own life. I know I gave my testimony a few weeks ago. The Lord called me to preach and I didn’t follow his ways. I have had a lot of distress in my life. A lot of troubles. And at times I knew it was God trying to correct me and direct my life back on a path that he would have me do. So you see, God gives us a lot of signs from Jonah. Those are the signs we get. The signs that are from God that have to deal with our life in following and obeying Him. But you see, the Pharisees and Sadducees didn’t see these things. They lived their lives full of rituals. They controlled their own set of guidelines and rules. They didn’t feel God. They didn’t see God with their hearts. They were looking through the wrong eyes. So we come to chapter 3 where the Lord had spit Jonah out of the whale, and he had decided, finally, that he would go and preach the word. And what happens when he does? Reluctantly he goes there and preaches to the people of Nineveh. And they willingly accepted what he had to preach. You see, that is the sign of Jonah. It is not what Jonah did. Jonah did it reluctantly. But it was what he did for God. God knew these people would repent. God knows all things. When God calls us to do something, we should follow. It is not always the easiest thing. He did not say it would be a bed of roses if we followed what he had for our lives. But he said he would always be there. God has reasons for different situations that he calls us to do. And we don’t always know. In this case, it brought revival to the people of Nineveh. It brought salvation to a group of people who did not know God. They were alienated from God. Now we say, wasn’t God’s law for the Jewish people? Didn’t they have to be converted to be Jews in order to have salvation? Abraham had salvation without the works of the law. We just talked about this in our Sunday school class. You see, it is by faith. They believed in God. They believed what Jonah had preached to them. And they turned from their wicked ways out of the goodness in their hearts. Out of that beckoning that God was telling them that they needed to change their ways or they would parish. They changed their ways and God gave them salvation. This is a sign of Jonah. Looking back at Matthew chapter 12. Jesus speaks here of Jonah again. And here is another thing that God has brought to my heart. As we look to the story of Jonah, we look at it as a story. How in the world could man have survived in the belly of a fish? I have to take credit that my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, has used this as a story to the Jewish leaders. Therefore, I take it as fact and truth. (Matthew 12:38-41) 38. Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, "Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you." 39. He answered, "A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 41. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, See, in a sense here, Jonah was the salvation to the people of Nineveh. Just as Christ is salvation to us. They were alienated from the things of God. Unless God would have made something miraculous happen, which he did, the people of Nineveh would not have had any opportunity at salvation unless they had been converted to Jews. So you see, Jonah is a sign of our salvation to us. Christ died and was buried for three days and He rose again. Those are the signs the people of this world are going to get from God. We see, we have to take Christ for who He is. We have to take him by faith. Sometimes we need a little revival within our own hearts. Sometimes we need to realize we need to take things by faith and not by sight. Moving on here, Jesus’ disciples said they forgot to take bread with them. This touches on where our faith should be. Jesus told them to be aware of the doctrine of the Pharisees. But he did it in a parable and they didn’t understand fully. They thought he was upset with them for not taking bread with them. How often do we forget all the miracles God does in our lives? It seems all too soon that God does things for us in our life, in this daily walk, it’s not too awful long when we put all that stuff aside and we have forgotten where he has brought us from. He have forgotten all those prayers that He answered and delivered us from. Sometimes we need revival in our lives. Sometimes we need to step out on faith when God calls us to do things for Him. So Jesus said, don’t you remember how many baskets of bread you took up? And then he said, he did not warn them against the bread of the Pharisees, but he warned them not to be part of that doctrine, that belief. What is that belief of the Pharisees? What is their doctrine? They were full of rituals. They took all of God’s laws and they tried to live that to make themselves righteous. They didn’t have it in their heart. They didn’t trust and believe and walk daily with God in their heart with an intent to please him. They thought they had to do all these rituals and festivals and feasts and whatever. The cleansing and washing of their hands before they ate. And those were the things that made them righteous in God’s eyes. But you see, they had forgotten the faith of Abraham. The father of us all. In closing, I have a little testimony to give you that happened to me and my wife’s life this week. We have been going through a lot of things in our lives and we have had to go through a lot of hours of prayer. Been with Bob several times. God is working things out and that is because of prayer. That is what we need. Revival starts with prayer in our own lives. It starts with us seeking God. It starts with us seeking God’s will for our own lives. The story I want to give a testimony of here this morning is; we changed schools this year. Me and my wife feel our kids need to go to a Christian school. And we feel that is what God has called us to do is to send them there. Believe me there is not a lot of Christian schools around. We found a school we thought would be fitting. The only one they could take at that time was my daughter Samatha, the oldest. So we decided we would home school and that we would send her to the high school there. They have so much to offer. There is not many Christian schools that have as much to offer as this school. We prayed about it and we earnestly feel that is what Gad wanted us to do. But we tried home schooling last year and that didn’t work out well for us. So we decided we would pray about this. And in this time period, this system we are in, kindergarten and first grade are in the same year. And we realized right before we put Samatha in school that our kids were actually behind a grade than what we had thought because of their age. We don’t want our kids to graduate ahead. We feel they need to be in their age group and need to be with their peers and grow in the Lord. So we found out, Melanie, our youngest daughter, there was an opening so she could go. This is the faith of a child. It disturbed her so that she could go and he couldn’t. What did she do? She didn’t say a word. She went to her room and cried. Now here we were, we are adults. We knew God would answer prayer. We knew we needed to pray about this. We had been praying for it for four or five days. But here is the faith of this little child, not wanting to go to school, leaving her brother behind. Him alone at home. She wanted him to go, too. She felt the sadness in her heart that he had to be left out and she got to go. This story has a happy ending. We go to the orientation and we went around to all the rooms and things. We thought, well, Stephen may be going here, too, so we’ll go and talk to the fifth grade teacher and talk to him. Just so we can meet him incase Stephen does get to go this year or soon. We went and talked with him and right before we left, he thought we were a different parent. He thought we had two kids to put into that class room which was already full. Come to find out that we had figured out that our younger daughter actually needed to be in a lower grade and he needed to be in a lower grade which was still in his class. And he says, well, I just had a cancellation this morning. I don’t think God answered me and my wife’s prayer. I truly believe he answered the prayer of my daughter’s heart. Jesus has a whale of a tale to tell us if we only listen. Let us pray.

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