Amen and amen. How are we doing, church? Everybody good? You're looking good. Happy Super Bowl Sunday, or as in Jacksonville, we call it Sunday. It don't matter to us, okay?

Whatever. Enjoy your nachos. Hey, if you got your Bible and I hope you do, go to the very beginning, go to the table of contents, and look for the name Jonah, because it's very hard to find in your Bible, okay?

It's going to be way back.

He's a minor prophet towards the back end of the Old Testament.

If you start getting around names that look like Star Wars characters like Obadiah and Nahum and Micah and

Obi-1, you're really close, okay? It's right in there. And so go there. Or you can take your

worship guide and we printed at least the part out of Jonah that I'll be preaching. And so all

your notes are there. Somebody on Thursday night asked me if that was a picture of me. Oh, and you

laugh. Hurt my feelings. I'll have you know. I didn't look like this until you people came into

my life. I was all young and fun. All right. And so you did this to me. So that's not me. Not yet,

but I'm on my way. Hey, Jonah's a very, very familiar book. If you've been around America at all,

I guess you've probably heard of Jonah in theale and all that stuff, but it's often very

misunderstood. I'm not sure why we turn stories like this into children's story. It's about

idolatry and racism and rebellion and all this kind of stuff. And so we're going to be studying

it for the next four weeks or so, and ultimately it's about God's relentless pursuit of his

rebellious people through this reluctant missionary.

And I think what we're going to find is there's a lot of Jonah in all of us.

We're going to pick it up in Jonah, chapter 1, verse 1.

I did all of that stalling to give you time to find it.

I don't want you to be at the end of the sermon, and you still hadn't found it yet. So if you still hadn't found it, ask your neighbor, they'll show you where the table of contents is. Here we go. Jonah 1-1 says this. Now the word of the Lord

came to Jonah. Got to stop here because Jonah was a prophet. The prophet spoke on behalf of the Lord.

The Lord will give them a word and then the prophet would give the people the word of God.

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