Do We Care?

“But the Lord said, ‘You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?’” Jonah 4:10-11

As I read through the book of Jonah recently I was reminded of his reluctance to obey God. Nineveh was a huge, important city, and it was a wicked city. God was ready to destroy it and told Jonah to go and proclaim His message. Apparently, Jonah wasn’t interested in obeying God or taking His message to the people. He ran the opposite way and ended up in the belly of a great fish.

When the fish couldn’t stomach Jonah any longer it threw him onto the shore and God again told him to go to Nineveh.  This time Jonah obeyed and told them God’s message. The people of the city, including the king, repented and God didn’t destroy them.  Jonah wasn’t happy. He was angry. He sat outside the city and asked God to take away his life. The sun was hot and he was miserable so God provided a vine to grow up and give him shade, but the next day He sent a worm to chew the vine and it withered. No more shade. Jonah said, “I am angry enough to die.”

Jonah was not only reluctant. He was selfish. He was more concerned about his own comfort than the salvation of the great city of Nineveh. I, too, am sometimes reluctant to obey God. I find myself being more concerned about my own comfort and preferences than I am about the salvation of lost souls.  There are lost people all around us. Do we see them? Do we care?

“Then he (Jesus) said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field’” (Matthew 9:37-38).