
·S7 E13
God's Got Guts (Yea, Though I Walk Through the Valley of a Shadow of a Giant Whale)
Episode Transcript
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Welcome to Kingdom Now, the podcast featuring Faith with an Edge.
As we recognize the Kingdom of God within you, I am your host, Dr.
Lee Ann Marino, apostle, overseer, author, podcaster, blogger, professor and theologian, and founder of Safe Ministries and all the works that go along with it.
I am excited to share this program with you as we explore the ins and outs of counterculture Christianity present as you live out the Kingdom of God in your everyday life.
And to learn more, visit KingdomPowerNow.org.
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Interviews on a variety of relevant topics, teaching and preaching taught everywhere from our ministry studios to sanctuary and beyond.
And powerful insights here for today as we turn the world upside down everywhere we go.
Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, happy whatever time of day is wherever you are.
And to our listeners in Hungary, we say, Jó napot kívánok.
We hope that whatever time of day is when you are listening that you are having a good one.
And I welcome you to this edition of the Kingdom Now podcast.
And I am your host, Apostle Dr.
Lee Ann Marino here as the Spitfire serving as the voice of counterculture Christianity, where we feature the theme of faith with an edge.
And if you'd like to learn more about the world of counterculture Christianity, feel free to visit my website at kingdompowernow.org.
This episode of Kingdom Now titled God's Got Guts and Subtitled, "Yeh, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of a giant whale, was recorded live at sanctuary International Fellowship Tabernacle in September 2025." We have selected this very important and timely message as the intro for our winter hiatus.
We look forward to returning in February with more episodes for you all.
So in the meantime, here is God's Got Guts.
If you'd like to learn more about the work of sanctuary, feel free to visit our website at welcomeinthisplace.org.
Okay.
Well, hey, everybody on the internet?
Hey, everybody who's here?
Yo.
Hey, we're all here.
We're just praying Father and Jesus' name.
We thank you for bringing us together for another Sunday, even though we're doing something different today.
We ask that you would be with us and we all know that we're all kind of having an off day.
And we often find that you kind of move more powerfully in our off days and so we're going to trust that you're going to do that.
And we ask that you would be with us and to help us to be receptive to what you want to deliver through this message in Jesus' name.
Amen.
Okay.
So it's titled God's Got Guts was actually kind of a secondary choice.
My first choice was the subtitle, "Yay, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of a giant whale," which I think is catchier, but the only problem is for social media.
It's way too long.
So the other thing is the secondary message kind of really conveys what I'm talking about a lot more than the first one, which would make me more appropriately be God's Got guts might be a better way to put it.
But we're talking about Jonah.
So Jonah is not exactly a foreign Bible figure for me.
In fact, they wrote a whole commentary on the book of Jonah that I meant to bring a copy of to hold up for the sake of the camera, but I don't have it with me here.
Do you have one?
Okay.
If you've got one, you can give it to me.
But I'm going to see what Chuck is doing.
I'm not judging you.
Apparently you keep your copy of my book near your keys.
So that's kind of cool.
Okay.
And it is the new tower.
Okay.
Perfect.
So this is the copy of my book on Jonah.
The only difference is my picture on the back is different now because my hair is dark now.
And so the book is called Stumbling to Nineveh.
And it's not a real big book.
It's a real relatively easy reading, although I will say it's a little bit philosophical importance.
But Stumbling to Nineveh is the whole concept that that's exactly what Jonah did is he stumbled to Nineveh.
That he let his own issues and he let his own thoughts and feelings influence his prophetic ministry.
And before we all sit here and scale at Jonah, every single one of us does this all the time.
We do it in different ways.
We do it in different fashions.
And when I wrote the book, I focused mostly on Jonah's bigotry.
And I stand behind that's still something that we need to deal with.
You can't be called the nations and be a bigot.
I've met an awful lot of people who think that they can and they're just going to go here or go there or go over here and do this, that, but you can't really be effective in God and be a bigotry.
And I think that Jonah teaches us that in a really, really, really important way, we don't get to decide where God is going to assign us.
And that's all true.
And I'm not re-nigging anything I said in the book.
This is not to redo the book.
This is not because I don't believe in what I said in the book.
But it's kind of an addition because a recent experience I had made me understand Jonah.
Now when we read the Bible and when we read about Bible characters, sometimes I know I do it.
I'm going to openly admit I judged them.
I sit there and I go, you cannot possibly be that stupid.
I mean, you know, I sit there and I said it.
And I'm admitting that because whether or not we want to admit it, we've all done the very same thing in different fashions.
Maybe we don't openly say it that bold, but it's like the whole Samson and Delilah thing.
All of them came and tied them up and they kept doing it a couple times.
Okay, after the second time I would have had some questions unless something else was going on there, which that's not actually for me to really address.
That's minister's next department.
But we've all had these experiences and I had one where I finally figured out Jonah.
I got it.
God working was coming from I cannot even actually fathom now what God asked Jonah to do.
Okay, because God asked me to do what and anywhere near what he asked Jonah to do.
But that this entire thought process caused something that I never noticed before to be really, really apparent.
God told Jonah to go to Nineveh.
Okay, he didn't tell him to go to Hollywood.
He didn't tell him to go to Jerusalem.
He didn't tell him to go to Washington, DC.
He told him to go to Nineveh, which was the capital of a Syria at the time and preach repentance to his captors.
That's like if a slave was told to go to his master and tell him to repent.
Or if you've got an abused person goes and they're told to go to preach repentance to their abusers.
Think about that.
I mean, that is just like, oh my God, wow, because their wickedness was going up before God.
Now, there's a few things in the story that makes this even a little bit more interesting.
But as the occupier of Israel at this point in time in history, God told Jonah to go preach repentance to his occupiers.
And in this, we kind of find a message that I think Paulo Friere said in pedagogy of the press, who it's only the oppressed who by freeing themselves can free their oppressors.
But we don't often think of it that way.
So that made me for a couple of reasons.
So the first is that if we really study scripture and I say study scripture beyond what's comfortable for us.
Okay?
I'm going there for a reason because we all like to be comfortable with scripture studies.
We like to read how much God loves us and how God's always there for us.
Now, even if everybody in our life leaves us, God is going to always be there.
And we like to read about prosperity, even though we have absolutely no concept of understanding of what the Bible is talking about.
We love that stuff.
We like to hear that God wants us to be healed.
We like us to hear God wants us to be saved.
We like us to hear God wants to favor us that we're the head and not the tail.
We all like all that stuff.
And that's the stuff we often tend to hear in a lot of different contexts.
But if we start studying the Bible beyond that, we learn a lot of very uncomfortable things about our relationship with God and about God's relationship with His people throughout history.
That really kind of might almost be an factor that makes us wonder.
So the first one is that God used Assyria to judge Israel for its idolatry.
So every single time we start sitting back and we look at oppressive regimes or leaderships or things that might even be going on in the world right now with leaders that we don't all particularly like, they're there for a reason.
Now I'm not going to say that God put them all there.
We have a different understanding of government today than they had in ancient times.
Assyria conquered.
And so in the ancient world, the fact that Assyria toppled everybody else was the big hint that they got the victory from the gods.
That's the way that they kind of understood the world.
It's not really done that way in terms of government and modern times.
And it's not that simple and I'm not going to get into all that for the sake of this.
But if something is there, we need to learn something from it.
God is trying to teach us things, even wicked things, even wicked people, even people that don't hear from God, even on righteous rulers.
God has the ability to use all of that.
And like I say, it's not saying that it's a godly power or that God has shed it there, but it's there for a time.
And it's the idea of what the Bible talks about times or governance for powers that are in power for certain periods of time and then suddenly aren't anymore.
And so it has to do with that reign that even under oppressive and horrible and unfair regimes, God can teach us something about ourselves.
And that's the message that we don't want to get today.
Okay?
God uses the idols of our captors to deal with our idols.
And we're going to see that later in this text because it's mind blowing.
I tell you when you start to sit down and think about it's mind blowing, he doesn't do it so we can build up all new idols.
And that's exactly what we do now.
We think that the answer is to find somebody with more power, equal power and put it in there and do this thing.
And that's been throughout history like we say that's what the Jews thought in Jesus' day that they should do that they should have someone more powerful than the Romans.
And Jesus came and wanted them to deal with themselves.
All right.
So this also proves that nobody's untouchable.
So a serial might have been used by God in judgment against Israel, but that still didn't mean that everything that they did was okay.
But it still didn't mean that God didn't deal with them at an appointed time about their issues.
And so that's in here.
And so nothing is beyond any reach, God's reach.
Nobody's untouchable.
It just doesn't exist.
Okay.
It's not a thing.
So, but even if God uses something or someone, they can still go too far and everybody needs a little reminder that they're not God.
And a serial still needed that.
So second, God used Jonah who was under their occupation to bring the message of correction.
So apparently occupied or not, somebody can still be called of God to bring forth the Word.
Okay.
And the message is to repent.
It's for them to experience a divine conviction, to realize themselves that they're wronged that they need to change their ways.
And this is revolutionary among the Assyrian because that wasn't their narration.
Okay.
They had different deities.
They much like much of the ancient world had favorite gods.
They followed more than one.
But the gods of the Assyrians expected loyalty.
And the loyalty was mostly through ritual.
So if you look at ancient pagan religion, that's typically how they function.
But they made offerings to the gods as kind of like here, if we do this, make it rain.
Here if we do this, God's not have a drought.
Hey, if we do this, don't have a flood.
Hey, if we do this, if we give you our firstborn, maybe it'll be nice to us.
And a lot of the gods in these areas were very, very, very brutal.
Let me talk about some of the things that really hit me about the whole idea that Jonah was sent to his captors.
So Assyria is the captor of Israel, particularly the northern kingdom at this point in history.
So what happened is that Assyria captured Israel, which was the northern kingdom.
Later Babylon would capture the southern kingdom, which was Judah.
So the northern kingdom fell first and then the southern kingdom fell later.
And what we find is that God used Assyria to judge Israel for its idolatry.
Okay.
In other words, there's a whole thing in this that people don't like and that we don't like studying scripture in areas that make us uncomfortable.
We like God is love and we like God always loves us and Jesus loves me this I know.
And we like the idea of the comfort and that God is always with us, even if people leave us and people get into prosperity, which the whole thing with that is not even a the way they teach it is often a very biblical, but we're going to just deal with the fact that if we start studying scripture, we're going to hit stuff that we're not going to like.
And one of them is that God uses leaders, whether they're good or they're wicked a lot of the time.
Now that's not to say that every leader is good.
That's not to say that every leader is godly.
That's not to say that every leader is quote unquote, somewhere because of God.
They understood that differently in the ancient world because people understood stuff by conquering.
So what would happen is a Syria, a hundred Israel, so in other words, they won.
So Israel was handed over to the Assyrians and they saw that as a divine process.
We don't really see things that way today.
It's not really that I would say simplistic and that's not to say that every leader that's in power is there by God's provision, but it is to say that just because somebody is there does not necessarily mean that God can't use them to deal with us.
And there's something that I said God uses the idols of our enemies in order to deal with our own idols, to deal with our own adultery.
We're going to see that later.
And that is a mind-boggling life-changing thing.
That is something that when you really come to understand the things of God that you really come to it in a very different way and it really kind of looks at the way that things are dealt within a different sense.
It also means that even though things might be used, nobody's untouchable.
We kind of have that attitude today that certain nations are certain people that we can't correct them or can't deal with them.
Nobody's untouchable.
God can deal with anybody.
God can deal with anything.
And so the next point is that God used Jonah who was under occupation to speak to his occupiers.
So God can use anybody to speak a message that needs to be spoken.
And understanding that message is to repent is for them to experience divine conviction.
So I don't know why we have this attitude that we shouldn't address things today.
Why we shouldn't address matters.
Because if we don't, how is conviction ever going to reach a point where it's going to come?
People need to be able to realize themselves and realize what they're doing.
And that doesn't mean you become a sin nag.
It doesn't mean that you're in everybody's space all the time.
It doesn't mean that you're annoying, but it does mean that when a message to speak to power comes, that it's done.
And that's important because Jonah was speaking to power.
He was sent to Nineveh.
He was sent to the Capitol.
So he was supposed to be influencing the leaders.
He was not just kind of walking around a city and doing something and hanging out somewhere in the country trying to get a few people to repent.
This was supposed to bring change on a very big level, on a national level.
And so this is revolutionary because like we were talking about, the gods of the experience, as serians, expectable allty, but they didn't really have the narration of doing the right thing.
So like I say, they had some very specific expectations of loyalty that was to come through ritual.
But they had some very unusual beliefs about right and wrong.
So like one of them was it was considered wrong.
You know, they had the normal stuff like you couldn't murder or you couldn't steal, but throwing up in a river was equal to murdering somebody.
And that probably was considered a besmirch on the gods or something they probably had a river god or a water god.
They do have a fish god.
Very interestingly enough, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
And it's not day gone.
A lot of people think day gone was associated with a fish.
Day gone was associated with wheat and it's an entirely different thing.
So that's an example of where we have information off.
But what we are able to see is that you could also not sit in the chair of a person who had been found guilty.
They would say that you would then be found guilty.
But the whole concept if we see this and if you look in Jonah 4, God actually tells Jonah that these people have no concept of right and wrong.
And he said if he wants to spare these people who really don't understand right and wrong, what is it to you kind of thing because you know what's it to you type of thing.
So they didn't really have any sense of it because it wasn't their narration.
So he's going to the Capitol.
He's going to do this.
They were brutal, violent, wicked people.
This whole thing is unheard of that you're going and that God's addressing you just because you're doing the wrong thing.
And we learned that Jonah didn't do it because he didn't feel like it.
So it says here, the word of the Lord came to Jonah's son of Ammitai.
Go to the great city of Nineveh, preach against it because its wickedness has come up before many.
But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarsus, which is the total opposite direction of where he was supposed to go.
He went down to Japa where he found his shit down for that port.
After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarsus to flee from the Lord.
So he just pretty much did whatever he wanted.
He didn't think twice about it.
He didn't bother him.
It didn't even cross his mind.
Maybe I shouldn't do this.
No, I'm just going to go do what I want because I don't want to.
I don't want to go and speak to my captors because he didn't want them to repent because he didn't want God to spare them.
Okay.
He wanted them to get what was coming to them, but doesn't this sound enough a lot like what we do?
That we kind of pick and choose who we want to get saved or who we want to our church or who we kind of want to around us.
Okay.
And we sit there.
That sounds enough.
Like it's okay.
We kind of see where Jonah was coming from.
So yeah, he did this so bad.
God but so do we.
And you know, yeah, he wasn't jerk about it, but so are we.
And look at what God asked him to do.
God asked Jonah to be instrumental in the conversion of his enemies and Jesus actually challenged the disciples to do the same thing with the Romans.
Hey, take their pack another mile.
Hey, they asked for your coat, give it to them.
They smack you on one cheek, turn it the other way.
He asked them to be instrumental in the conversion of his enemies and Jesus challenged the disciples like this only it was the Romans and we're still challenged to do the same thing today.
But we take the oh God wouldn't ask us to do that round.
Well, sure he would.
Why shouldn't he?
Why shouldn't he ask us to do hard things?
Why shouldn't he ask us to, you know, not be instrumental in people finding him?
Why shouldn't he?
Why not?
It's whoever.
Whosoever?
And you know, oppressed or not or mistreated or not or enemies or not, our hearts are often also wrong mostly like Jonah's.
So our part in this salvation process of other people is just as much for us as it is for them.
And we don't like that and we don't like to think about that, but it's the reality that Jonah made God in his own image.
That's why he was so comfortable running off.
He said God would ask me to do that.
God wouldn't bother that.
I don't have to worry about that.
I'm spare.
I'm this and I'm that.
And you know what?
We did the same thing.
We made God in our own comfortable image.
And no Jonah did not have an excuse.
And so we can prove that so.
So Jonah according to scripture was a prophet who was very well renowned and who was very well known and was a very good report.
And I'm going to say part of why he was probably chosen to go to Newarkville was for that reason.
It was because they probably inherited him.
He was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel, that's the king.
They're talking about from Lee, Bohemans to the dead see in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant, Jonah, son of Emma, tie the proper from God.
That's hard.
That is in 2 Kings 14That is in 2 Kings 14:25.
So he was a prophet.
He had a good track record.
He knew how to speak to power.
He knew how to hear from God.
He knew what he was doing and he rejected the assignment.
And what happens is God uses the very thing that innervites worship in order to deal with it.
The fish goddess, Nance, was a giant fish.
And that's what swallowed him up and led him to think about things for a few days.
So God used their idol to deal with him.
Got some context.
We don't talk about that.
It wasn't just some random fish in the sea.
He didn't go surfing on the back of it.
It was, this was a real thing.
Hey, okay, you think you're better than these people.
You can sit in their idol and think about yours.
Yeah.
So it was kind of a reverse with the flakes.
Yeah.
And you pointed out, Chuck, that it was an attack on each of their idols.
So that is like using the idols to deal with their idol.
Yeah.
God uses the idols of our enemies to deal with ours.
And we don't like that.
Not to bring up Epic the musical.
No, the idol of my enemy is my judge or something.
Yeah, the idol of my enemy is my judge.
There you go.
Somebody tell my Jonah story.
So this is my Jonah story.
It all started when I was praying one day.
And you know, God, who can I speak to today?
Who can I give a word to today?
You know, I got stuff they shouldn't ask.
You know, although stupid prayers we pray that we shouldn't do, well, but you know, I was thinking maybe God was going to say I could talk to one of you.
I could give you an encouraging word about your job or I could give Brad an encouraging word about something or I could tell my mom something or I could tell Chuck, oh, no, no, of course, not.
You know, we can't just do it among people.
We know and that we're close to it's like, who can I give a word to today, Lord?
So I got a word for somebody who used to be part of this ministry.
Now there's no dirty story to tell.
It's not one of those stories where anybody left on bad terms or anything really major happened.
It was just one of those situations where life kind of separated things or life kind of put people in different directions.
And there really wasn't any animosity.
I really maybe I kind of felt at a certain point in time, maybe a little bit used or you know, like pretty much maybe I had felt a little bit disrespected by a couple of things.
But it wasn't enough to talk about it.
It wasn't like anything where I was walking around with it and they moved away and started I and that's pretty much the long and the short of it and you know, down the line, we kind of kept moving and they did.
And more or less they kind of moved out of ministry.
And when I first got the word for them, I didn't want to think it was God.
So you know, because I felt for any number of sort of reasons that I should have to give the word.
And one of the major one was I felt that over the years this individual had had a lot of word and had a lot spoken and they didn't heat it.
And so it was like I was done.
I was retiring from word in this particular instance.
I didn't feel like I should have to do it.
I felt like I did enough for this person.
I had done a lot over a lot of years and I felt like I was justifying and saying that I had done enough.
So I didn't do it.
And I kept, you know, God kept bringing it to mind and kept bringing it up in different ways and kept bringing stuff up through different people and I kept not doing it.
And you know, life went on and I was not interested.
I was like, God, bring it through somebody else.
You know, I don't feel like doing it.
And so, you know, there's the whale just, you know, kind of goes by, you know, you know, you know, I walk through the valley of a shadow of a giant whale.
I'm just, you know, kind of like, you know, whatever.
And much like Jonah, God just didn't let me go in my merry way.
He kept bringing it up and kept bringing it up and kept dealing with it.
And I went about five.
I don't remember exactly how many days it was at least five.
It was five to seven, somewhere in there where I just, you know, kept not doing it, kept not doing it, kept not doing it, God keeps bringing it up.
And I keep telling God, no, I'm not doing it.
And I just keep going on and buying my own business.
And when I finally went to do it because, you know, I guess I kind of figured I couldn't get away with this forever.
And, you know, I had to include a thing about returning to the ministry in the message.
So longer I didn't do it, the more God kept expanding it and you know, that when you're ready to do it, that, you know, we have a place for you.
And I finally do this.
And I mentioned it to minister Nik over here who says to the me and I quote, and that's why I have the notebook open and non-conventional growth could be the main one that matters for us.
And let me tell you every fiber of my being spent every part of me screemed because, like it or not, God expects room for everyone.
Unconventional growth.
I want a bunch of people.
I don't know.
I don't want all these people from afar again.
But how do we expect the world to change if people don't repent?
And if people don't know they have a place and people don't know there's somewhere that they can come that's safe for them as they go through their process.
And how can they repent if we are unusually difficult when it comes to doing all the hard things?
Okay, and look, my situation wasn't anywhere near Jonah.
I wasn't going to talk to a chapter where somebody who enslaved me or somebody who abused me or just was a situation I didn't want any part of.
And, you know, whether we want to deal with it or not, we are very comfortably picking shoes so we want to do stuff until we want to be around as every fiber of our being screams when we actually come to the point where we know that this is what we have to do.
And in the gospels, we really have to think about the connection to Jonah that is made, that is not necessarily obvious, but actually does apply.
So it's called the sign of Jonah.
So that's where Jonah stayed, the huge belly of the whale where he stayed for three days and three nights.
So that's where I went to three days and three nights thing.
But there's a deeper thing in here that becomes a little bit more relevant.
So literally we understand the sign of Jonah to be the resurrection.
So staying in the belly of the earth three days and three nights.
Okay, that's why I made sure I mentioned that slide.
The last thing, this is Matthew 12The last thing, this is Matthew 12:30, intro for you.
Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, "Teacher, we want to see a sign from you." He answered, "Awake in an adulterous generation, ask for a sign, but not what we give in it except the sign of the Prophet Jonah." For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the son of men will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
The men of men of will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it for the repentant at the preaching of Jonah.
And now something greater than Jonah is here.
The queen of the South will rise from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's, of the judgment with this generation and condemn it for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom and now something greater than Solomon is here.
Now that part is not really what we're going to look at, the second part which queen of the South was the, no, no, I think it was even, but we're not really going to get into that right now.
So we understand the little context of this to be the resurrection, but this is the reality is that this also refers the sign of Jonah is our own personal resurrection.
It's our own personal things that we rise from.
Now notice that a lot of the songs had a water thing and I was trying to be funny, that you know, in other words beneath the waters I will rise and that you know, come to the river of race that, you know, that we come up out of the waters because Jonah went in and came up.
And since Jonah experienced a baptism, like we talk about the going on here and we come back up, but at the same time in relation to all of this sort of stuff, we all have things that we want God to do and most of us want God to do things over the top and incredible and amazing and beyond anything that we can ever think about and we don't like small victories.
We don't like these little things that God tells us to do that maybe we don't want to do that we have to kind of overcome within ourselves.
And we're used to this idea that God should want to prove himself.
God is not insecure.
Okay.
God is God.
God does not need to prove himself to us.
He doesn't owe us an explanation.
Does he often give us one?
Yeah, but that's within grace.
It's not because we deserve it or we do it, but you know, with Jonah, a lot of the times, he lets us make our own choices whenever they may be and deal with the consequences of them.
Deal with the consequences of our own idol tree and our own idols because we consider all day long and point out what's wrong with everybody else.
And there's something I used to talk about in message years ago.
You know, people would find all these reasons, particularly online.
They come up with this big huge long list of reasons why they shouldn't follow this ministry or shouldn't do this or shouldn't do that.
We can talk all day long about me.
We can talk all day long about that I dye my hair and that I'm not up here to skirt down in the floor.
We can say that somebody are like my shirt.
We can talk about the journal like that I'm a woman.
You can talk about that.
We didn't use the King James Bible once today except for my recollections.
We can talk all day long about me, but the truth about me won't set you free.
We can talk all day long about what you don't like about me or you don't think is good about me, but that's not going to do anything for you.
God is not going to ask you about me.
And so, yeah, God does miracles and you got this wonders and you got this signs and God does incredible and amazing things.
And you know, that's wonderful, but our own personal experience with God is the sign of Jonah.
And what I mean by that is that point where we come to realize that God is God and we're not.
And we are sent to sit in the belly of the well for several days and some of us it's way longer than three days.
Some of us have been down here sitting there for a long time.
It's like I said about a certain situation that we're going on in the world today is that you know, instead of you know, rising through all this stuff, we just go sit in the belly of the well for four years.
While we point out everybody else's idol tree not deal with our own.
And that God brings us to a place where we're uncomfortable, where we have to deal with ourselves, where we are right in the heart and the middle of everybody else's idols and we all of a sudden have to deal with and look at our own.
That we are looking at ourselves that recognizing our enemies, our captors, the people we don't like, the people we might find reprehensible, that this is the reality that we need God as much as they do.
And that's kind of the inverse because we're always going, oh the world means Jesus, everybody needs Jesus, well you need Jesus too.
And sometimes we need Jesus a lot more than we think we need Jesus because we're so busy looking at them, we forget us.
The log versus speck.
What did you say blog?
We just get put in that little time out until we're ready to see God at work.
Like I say, some people went down there way longer than three days.
So if you don't write, tell God, no, don't be surprised if you find yourself sitting inside the walls of your enemies idle because God's going to have to deal with you about yours.
And maybe Jonas assignment was about converting a Syria.
I mean the reality is that they did have a repentance but I'm going to tell you a few generations later we get to Nihom where they were destroyed again.
So maybe it worked for that generation, maybe it worked temporarily, maybe it was for their conversion.
Maybe it was just about God dealing with Jonah, maybe it was about both.
But all of the assignments that we get from God have a purpose.
And if we're going to be the people who sit in walk in the shadow of the valley of the giant whale, we need to make sure that we're learning the lesson that we need to as we come out of our places and recognize that it's not just our enemies that have idols, it's us too.
Thank you for joining us on Kingdom Now.
I pray that it is proven to be a blessing in your life, offering an on time word for you.
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Lee Ann Marino, reminding you that the Kingdom of God is within and that is the Kingdom is now.
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