Its funny, but I've heard 2 different Reformed preachers use Father Mapple's Sermon on Jonah as a basis for there own this last week. Father Mapple is a fictional pastor in the classic Moby Dick, and while it is heavily influenced with sailing and nautical references and imagery it is a very good sermon.
But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do - remeber that - and hence, He is more often to command us than endeavoring to persuade us. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, where the hardness (or difficulty) in obeying God lies.
The best part of the sermon may be the description of Jonah on the wharfs fleeing like a criminal and the sailors suspicion of him.
He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contending himself with this, that spite all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the violent sea and the whale. I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin, but I do place him before you as a model of repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.
The other more awful lesson of Jonah is this, as a Preacher of the living God, or a speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord, to teach unwelcome truths to the ears of wicked sinners. Yet despite the fact that Jonah did not want to, Jonah did do the Almighty's bidding. And what was that? To preach the Truth to the Face of Falsehood! That was it!
And Eternal delight and deliciousness will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath, here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than the world's, more than mine own!
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