God Doesn't Care About What We Care About(From our 9-8-24 Worship)

West Side Church of Christ - Elkton Ky

View the video version here: https://youtu.be/21cEX3Y1KD8

Transcript:
As far as companies go, it was, it was a behemoth. In 1970, in the primary market in which it operated, it had 90 percent of the market share. In the secondary market that it operated in, it had 85%. And everyone thought that this company was just gonna be one of those greats that just went on forever. And yet today, it's name, for a lot of people aren't even known.

I was doing my research for this lesson and I had something pulled up on the computer about it. And just to give you an example, my son walked in, called it and said, Dad, who's And he called off the name. He'd never even heard of them before. In 2012, they went bankrupt. And it's a pretty interesting study as to why they went bankrupt.

But most of us here, if you drove here today at least, you probably remember Kodak. I mean, they were such a big player in the market that when you captured those special moments in life, what'd you call them? A Kodak moment. I mean, they were, they were just massive. But in 2012, when they declared bankruptcy, they were put out of business.

Some people say because of the digital camera. In the 1990s, in the 2000s, digital photography took off and you didn't have to, you didn't have to send that little roll of film off and, and wait a week or so for it to come back and you had the little print that had all your pictures in about a, you know, a quarter by quarter square and you're trying to, you know, look at them.

Now you can just take the picture and pull it up, hook it to your computer, and, and go ahead and, and just get it right there. And you say, well, Doug, people miss trends all the time in business, right? Businesses go out of, out of operation because they just can't see the future. But that's not exactly the case with Kodak.

They were taken out of business by the digital camera, but guess what? In 1975, one of their employees invented the first digital camera. He's got it on his shoulder right there. It looks like a One of those old beat boxes, one of those, you know, radios that you used to pack around. So it wasn't like they couldn't see the trend coming.

They invested some in this technology, but for most of, most of the time, they just, they didn't care. They didn't care because film was such a profitable industry. They focused more on the wrong thing. Because at the time, when the film industry was still booming, it had a markup of like 70%. And they really liked that.

And they wound up caring more about the profits that film was making than where the future happened to be going. And because of it, it took them under. You see, it's easy for a large corporation to care about the wrong things. Because a large corporation is filled with people. And a great number of times people what care about the wrong things.

And this morning, I don't know any better way to illustrate this fact than the book of Jonah. Now Jonah is a nursery, a nursery room favorite, right? We, every time we think about Jonah, all we can think about is the big, huge whale. And yes, that's a pretty cool part of the story. I gotta admit, you know. God, I'm just not gonna do what you want me to do.

I'm gonna run away. Okay, God, God. In that instance, what we what I'd like to call a range transport right for Jonah to get him to go to where he wanted him to go. But the real story to me in the book of Jonah is not in chapters one, two or three. It's in Chapter four and in Chapter four, I want us to zoom in there this morning.

And I want us to look at what God cares about. And I want us to look at what and what Jonah cared about, because you're going to see that those two things are drastically different. And I hope the things that we see this morning keep us from getting eaten by a whale. I mean, help us to be better Christians.

You don't know what I'm trying to say. Now, as we get started here, I need to kind of I guess I I need to tell you where the idea for this lesson come from. I need to give you some structure before we get all the way down to the end of this to say what's he been talking about for for 20 30 minutes. If you look at the end of Jonah chapter 4, there's a verse in verse 11, and there's a word in that verse that depending on the English translation you have in your hand is translated one of several different ways.

The ESV says this is God speaking to Jonah. And should I not pity Nineveh, that word pity there in the ESV, in the NIV, should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh? The Christian Standard Bible says it this way, so may I not care about. You see this word here in, in the original Hebrew is a word that, it talks about an emotion, an emotion.

But it also talks about an action that's caused by that emotion. You think about pity or concern or or care? I think care is the best English word that we have today for that, right? If you look at something and you care about it, you're gonna move, you're gonna take action. And Jonah, Jonah cared about some things.

Jonah was very passionate about what he cared about. But God, God cared about some things, too, and there's a great disparity there between what Jonah cared about and what God cared about. And maybe this is gonna be a shocker for you, but I still think today for a lot of human beings, there's a great disparity between what God cares about and what we care about.

So with that being said, let's we're gonna set the stage for Chapter four. I think we need to look at Chapter three to do that. So this is after Jonah's been swallowed up. He's chapter three. He gets spit back out on dry land. I have no idea what he smells like. It had to be horrible. But look at what? What happens in Chapter three.

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise and go to Nineveh, that great city and call out against it the message that I tell you. So Jonah rose and went to Nineveh. According to the word of the Lord. Now, Nineveh was exceedingly great city, three days and journey in its breath.

Jonah began to go into the city going a day's journey and he called out yet 40 days and then it will be shall be overthrown. And the people of Nineveh believe God. They called for a fast and put on sack cloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh and he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth and sitting ashes.

And he issued a proclamation and published throughout Nineveh by decree of the king and his nobles. Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water. But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hand.

Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we may not perish. Amen. When God saw that they did have a turn from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said what he would do to them. And he did not do it. You imagine you imagine sit out and walk across Elton or Trenton or Guthrie and preach.

Yeah, 40 days in this town will be destroyed and everyone in it comes to God. You imagine what that had to be like. I mean, we would if that happened, we would talk about it for hundreds of ...