Introduction to Luke 11
Well, I invite you to turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter 11. Luke chapter 11, and we're going to consider this morning verses 29 through 36, where Jesus is preaching a very brief sermon. Luke is recording this, what I would call, short passage from Jesus' teaching to show us the importance of belief in the gospel. And as we see that, we see Jesus confronted by even to religious leaders that have rejected his message so far. So let's read what this says and then consider it for our own lives.
Luke 11:29: As the crowds increased, Jesus said, "This is a wicked generation. It asks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was a sign to the Nineveh, so also will the Son of Man be to this generation. The queen of the south will rise at the judgment with the people of this generation and condemn them. For she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom. And now something greater than Solomon is here. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. For they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand so that those who come in may see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it then that the light within you is not darkness. Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you."
Here we have Jesus preaching to his opponents, and he's preaching a very direct message where he even identifies them as a wicked generation. And he's preaching so that they could be exposed in their unbelief and come face to face with the light of the gospel.
At different times in our lives, we come across warnings. And we come across instructions that we don't like. And sometimes those warnings and those instructions are such that we take them to be an invitation to do the opposite. Consider the words "danger, keep out" when they're posted on a sign outside someone's door or around their property. Rarely do curious people stop when they see that sign. Instead, the words "danger, keep out" almost tantalize them with an invitation to come on in, check it out, see what's going on here.
In fact, you can watch videos on your favorite social media platform of urban explorers who visit abandoned buildings and they video record the sign that says "danger, keep out," "danger, threat of death or dying," or "danger, you may be arrested for trespassing." And yet they walk right past the signs into abandoned buildings. They tour defunct amusement parks and they go into places where they are not supposed to be. These curious seekers ignore the warning signs and they take enormous risks for the thrill of the adventure.
Jesus in this sermon that he preaches to his enemies is giving a danger warning to the people listening. He calls them a wicked or perverse generation because they are corrupted by their sin. And Jesus is warning them that their sin will end up costing them the kingdom of God. Yet, unlike the thrill seekers who walk past "keep out" signs, many in Jesus' audience will hear his warning and ignore it. They'll ignore it not because they're looking for an adventure, but they'll ignore it because they don't see the inherent danger.
Jesus Rebukes Our Unbelief
They think that they're just fine. They think that they are okay, that there is no danger to avoid. Yet Jesus is giving them a sign that he compares here to the sign of Jonah to rebuke them for their unbelief. And that leads to my first point this morning from this passage, and that is that Jesus rebukes our unbelief. Jesus rebukes our unbelief.
Throughout his ministry, Jesus confronted people who were hardened in their unbelief against his preaching and miracles. Although many people had witnessed Jesus perform amazing acts where he healed sick people, he cast out demons, he brought the dead back to life, they looked at those miracles not as warning signs, not as validation of Jesus' identity as the Son of God, but they looked at those miracles and they accused Jesus of being associated with Beelzebub, the prince of demons.
That was in the previous passage that comes immediately before this sermon, that they tried to reframe Jesus' divine words and works that were signs of his deity and authority, and they interpreted them as signs of evil. They saw the danger sign not as a warning of their unbelief, but they saw the danger being the one giving the warning. They were not receiving the message. They were shooting the messenger.
Yet Jesus was patient with them, and he continued to preach. He continued to expose their unbelief. Some of them, in verse 16, had demanded that Jesus give them a sign from heaven, as if Jesus' life and ministry were not a sign on its own. They wanted him to do something more miraculous than cast out a demon, more miraculous than prove that he was the Son of God. They wanted Jesus to work as if he were a genie in the bottle, that they could simply wish on the count of three for three wishes for Jesus to do whatever they wanted.
But Jesus did not respond to that kind of thinking with answering their wishes. Instead, he gave them a stern warning. And that warning was a rebuke for unbelief. What's interesting is as Jesus is ministering, the crowds, it says, are increasing in verse number 29. The reason for the increase, it seems, is simply because Jesus spoke with authority and he performed miracles and everybody wanted to be near the excitement and the action.
Most of the people, though, were only following Jesus because of his signs and wonders. Perhaps some of them hoped that Jesus would heal their diseases or cast out what seemed to be a demon in themselves or someone else. But they were not interested in the message that Jesus came to preach about the kingdom of God and repentance.
So Luke records this excerpt from Jesus' teaching immediately after the confrontation about Beelzebub. And he records this shocking excerpt because Jesus directly confronts their unbelief. Notice he doesn't start his sermon by saying, "Fine citizens of Israel," "God's chosen people," or "this righteous and holy generation." No, Jesus identified them as wicked. The idea here is that they were ill-intentioned, that they were evildoers, they were sinners who were opposed to God. Jesus knew his audience well. He knew their individual hearts and minds, and he knew the sins that each of them had committed.
The Blindness of Sin
Their most recent sin being they were asking Jesus for a sign, verse number 29. The sign is, again, a reference to what they were asking before, that Jesus' life and ministry and preaching were not enough. The fact that he had turned water into wine, that he had healed the sick, that he had cast out demons and raised the dead and many more acts were not convincing to this crowd. No, their hearts and minds had been blinded by their sin. It was blinded by their pride and blinded by their unbelief. They expected Jesus to give them any sign that they wanted, any sign that they demanded, but they did not accept the signs that he had already provided.
Jesus responds to them not with a miraculous sign of their liking, but with a sharp rebuke. They had already had multiple signs, including the testimony of the law and the prophets, that themselves all pointed to Jesus. So Jesus says to them in verse number 29, there will be no sign given except the sign of Jonah.
The sign of Jonah referred to the preaching of Israel's ancient prophet to God's enemies in Nineveh. We often think of Jonah as a Sunday school lesson or a character on a coloring sheet or a flannel graph. But the sign of Jonah was a sober warning for them to confess their sin and repent before God.
God had sent Jonah to preach repentance and salvation to the Ninevites. But Jonah, knowing that God was full of mercy and grace, rebelled against God and he ran away from Nineveh. This is where we talk about him going to Joppa and getting, or Tarshish and getting in a fish that he was swallowed alive and then spit out after God dealt with his hard heart.
But really what Jesus wants his audience to hear here is that Jonah did not want his evil audience, the Ninevites, to hear that salvation comes from the Lord. Jonah wanted the Ninevites, who were people who opposed Israel, people who were wicked and vile.
The Sign of Jonah
He wanted them to face God's harsh justice and judgment. But God used Jonah, a reluctant, even rebellious preacher, as a sign of God's mercy and grace to the Ninevites.
Tommy read for us from Jonah chapter 3, where Jonah spent three days preaching in this expansive city of Nineveh, and the people responded, including the king himself. God had sent Jonah to warn Israel's enemies of God's pending judgment because of their wickedness. And this unprompted warning was demonstrating God's grace, God's compassion, his patience, his love, his mercy toward wicked evildoers who only deserve divine wrath for their sins. This is again why Jonah didn't want to go, because he knew God would be gracious to people that Jonah despised.
In all the same ways and many more, Jesus, the Son of Man, provided a gracious sign to wicked, evil people who rejected him. Even though they were saying, "Give us another sign, a different sign, a better sign, a sign from heaven, a sign that we like or that we want," Jesus is essentially saying that he has appeared to them, preaching the kingdom of God, like Jonah was preaching repentance from evil. And Jesus' preaching ministry was an undeserved sign of God's mercy and grace to his wicked enemies, even in Israel.
Essentially, he's saying, "You Israelites are like the Ninevites. You have no regard for God. You only do what is right in your own eyes, which is exceedingly evil. And you are so wicked that I will come and destroy you." Jesus was preaching repentance as a sign to the crowds who were increasing in number, but crowds who desperately needed the message of repentance. These unbelieving crowds, people Jesus called wicked, were demanding more signs rather than confess their sin and believe in Jesus.
So Jesus connected the sign of Jonah, as if they were dull of hearing and not getting it, to another figure from Israel's history, the queen of the south, he says here, or the queen of Sheba we see in 1 Kings chapter 10. This again is to show the people of Israel that they are under God's judgment and that he is bringing them the remedy of repentance. When the queen of Sheba had heard about Solomon's wisdom in the Old Testament, she traveled from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon's wisdom, it says in verse 31. And we see this in 1 Kings 10 as well.
This queen marveled at Solomon's wisdom and his expansive wealth. She, upon hearing him, asked incredibly hard questions, Kings tells us. And Solomon was able to answer all of her questions to her satisfaction. And as a result, the queen of the south praised the Lord God of Israel for his justice and his righteousness. In other words, this pagan from Sheba, which in modern times is in the area of Yemen, recognized that the God of Israel was the one true God. And she received and believed his truth as it was revealed to her through Solomon.
Now Jesus was appearing to the Israelites in their own country. They didn't have to travel from the far ends of the earth. He was appearing to them according to the scriptures, the very words of God that they studied and said that they believed. But they remained wicked and rebellious, rejecting Jesus. The crowds and the religious leaders of Israel were opposed to Jesus. They did not recognize him as the Son of God. In fact, they said that his claim to be that were claims of blasphemy. And they also rejected his signs, saying that they were the work of Beelzebub.
Therefore, Jesus concludes this part of his sermon with a sharp rebuke and a stern warning. He says, the queen of Sheba will rise at the judgment with the people of this generation and she will condemn them. And the men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. In other words, undeserving believers from Yemen and Syria, which were way outside God's covenant promises in Israel, will one day judge the people of Israel for not believing Jesus.
The queen of Sheba eagerly listened to Solomon's wisdom. And she praised the Lord God of Israel and returned home speaking of his glories. The men of Nineveh earnestly listened to Jonah's preaching and they repented of their sin. That was all the more remarkable because Jonah was, in a way, a half-hearted preacher. He didn't want his audience to catch what he was saying and respond with repentance. And yet he spoke God's words, and the men of Nineveh considered it and repented.
Now Jesus, speaking to the first-century crowds in Israel, alongside the religious leaders, wanted them to see that there was something greater than Solomon and Jonah in their midst. It was the Son of Man, the Christ, the promised Messiah, the one that the Old Testament had foretold, was standing in their midst, preaching to them in clear language they could understand, a message that they would not receive. In our sin, our pride, and our rebellion against God, we all naturally reject the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. In our sin, our pride, and our rebellion, we also naturally reject the gospel of Jesus Christ and his grace.
It's not that we don't feel the weight of sin or observe the brokenness of our world. And it's not that we don't sense that there must be another shoe to drop, some impending judgment because of the guilt and shame we feel with this sin. But our natural response to the gospel is arrogant resistance. It's like the people in this crowd saying, "But show me another sign. Make it personal to me. If it's real, help me understand what it says." And we make the message very self-centered and we ask God to meet us on our terms.
Yet Jesus is saying here that God has sent him to meet the people on his terms, that he is preaching a message of repentance to that generation and to every subsequent generation. And it's a message that demands confession of sin and clinging to God's grace. If the queen of Sheba responded to Solomon and the people of Nineveh repented after hearing Jonah, then we also must respond to the ministry of Jesus.
Jesus is the greater Solomon. Jesus is the wisest human being that's ever lived because Jesus was God in the flesh. And Jesus is far greater than Jonah. Jesus was not a disobedient preacher or a reluctant messenger. Jesus was the obedient son of God who spoke forcefully for his father. And if Jesus, the Son of God, calls us to repent of our sin, then we ought to repent. We ought to confess that we have erred and we have done wrong things transgressing the righteousness of God and that that must be dealt with.
Historically, many people have tried to deal with their sin through some form of self-atonement. That self-atonement might take on the form of a religion, that perhaps they create a whole system of rituals or things that they do to make themselves feel better about themselves. Even among well-meaning Christians, we can create rituals of saying, "Well, I'm just going to read a few extra chapters of the Bible this week because I really flubbed it up and messed up last week when I sinned." Or we can say, "I'm going to really double down and make sure I get in that new Bible study this cycle because I really messed up last time."
Whatever the case, we can use good things as ultimate things, good things as atoning things when that's not what their purpose or function is at all. God certainly wants us to read his word. He definitely wants us to participate in Bible studies, but he doesn't want us to do that as a way to atone for our sin because our sin has been dealt with. He wants us to read our Bible and delight in him because our sins are forgiven. He wants us to study the Bible with other Christians and remind each other of this grace because our sins have been forgiven. God's word leads us to repentance and salvation.
Sadly, there are some, even in our day, that reduce Christianity to God performing signs and wonders for our unbelief. There are whole churches and even movements built on signs and wonders for today, believing that God uses signs and wonders in a way that are contrary to the way he designed them. God gave a sign to this wicked generation and the sign was himself. The sign was his presence and his call to repentance of sin.
Jesus used signs and wonders to validate his message and prove his identity. He didn't offer signs and wonders as a response to anyone's demands. He didn't say, "Oh, well, you want to see me turn that water into wine? No problem," and snap his fingers and do it. Or, "Oh, you want me to heal this particular child as opposed to that one? Sure thing." Or, "You want me to do what? You name it, I'll do it." Jesus was not doing signs and wonders to simply please the nonstop, ever-changing demands of sinners. Jesus did signs and wonders to expose their unbelief, to show that they needed to recognize him as the Son of God, the one who had came to take away the sins of the world.
When we think about this in terms of church and how we organize our ministry, it means that we want to emphasize the gospel of Christ and let the gospel be the sign that calls people to repentance and faith. We don't want to simply offer an entertaining show on Sunday that is better than the other churches out there. We're not in a competition to have the best preaching and the best music and the best this and then end with a display of signs and wonders or end with some sort of ministry that calls for some kind of demonstration from God.
The sign that Jesus left is the sign of Jonah, a message of repentance and faith. And the evidence of that sign are the changed lives of those who believe this message. We are fruit of the sign of Jonah. That if we have heard the message of our sin and our need to confess our sin, and we have placed our faith and hope in God, then we are proof that this sign is effective. We don't need to have a healing service or some miracle crusade.
We simply see the evidence of conversion as the miracle of God's grace, just as the queen of Sheba and the men of Nineveh believed the message that they heard from Solomon and Jonah.
We have the opportunity to believe the message of the gospel through Jesus Christ. Jesus exposes our unbelief not to shame and embarrass us, but so that we can find relief in Jesus Christ. He rebukes our unbelief so we can find relief in Jesus Christ.
And that leads to the second point of Jesus' sermon, where he shares an illustration.
Jesus Reveals Our Hope
And the second point is that Jesus reveals our hope. Immediately after rebuking the crowd for their unbelief, Jesus offers a vivid illustration about the sign of Jonah. I take it in this context that the sign of Jonah is, in fact, Jesus preaching of repentance. It's not about the sign of Jonah being the life, the death, and the resurrection of the ancient prophet through the fish; instead, it's about Jesus preaching.
So Jesus illustrated it this way. He said, "No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden or under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand so that those who come in may see the light." In other words, Jesus is comparing his preaching to a bright lamp that's put on public display for everyone to see its gleaming light. This is why he says, "No one lights a lamp to hide it." You light the lamp to benefit from the light.
This is why his preaching is a bright beacon of the grace of God. He's calling men and women to repent, but he's calling them to repent because God wants to show them mercy. And this is something that is for all to see. Notice that the examples that he used in his sermon of the Ninevites and the queen of Sheba were both Gentiles. God had sent his message even in the old covenant to people that were outside of his covenant promises. And God showed mercy and grace to those undeserving sinners just as he was showing mercy and grace to them and to us.
Jesus wants us to see the bright light of the gospel. It's here for all to see. It's not a secret message. There are no secret handshakes or winks and nods in the church of Jesus Christ. But instead, it is open for all to see. This, for example, is why we have wide open windows in most Protestant churches, where there are other groups that I would call cults, from the Mormons to the Jehovah's Witnesses and others, that have no windows on their buildings.
The Lamp of the Body
That says more than they mean. We have windows because we look in on Christ and his gospel because he has made it clear to us.
So Jesus continued in verse number 34, "Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body is also full of darkness." Jesus was connecting the idea of the shining lamp to a person's eyes. Healthy eyes see light and they direct a person's body according to the light that they are experiencing. But unhealthy eyes cannot see the light no matter how hard they try, and they keep the body in utter darkness.
I grew up in Kentucky, which is known for having an expansive network of caves in the western part of the state. Perhaps you've heard of Mammoth Caves. Maybe you've even had the chance to visit Mammoth Caves. I remember going there when I was growing up, and my family went there on a summer vacation with another family of ours, and we decided we would take one of the tours of Mammoth Caves. The particular tour that we signed up for was eight hours in length, which is pretty much a whole day. They provided lunch in the middle of the cave as we went through. And it was a fascinating tour underground, entering another world that we had never experienced before. And those caves, though we spent eight hours there, we only saw a tiny fraction of what lay beneath.
Many believe that Mammoth Caves continue all the way from Kentucky down into Tennessee. As I was saying about Mammoth Caves, many people believe they continue for hundreds of miles under Kentucky and Tennessee, and they've not yet been fully explored even to this day. Well, one of the things that stood out going into this environment was not only that it was cold and damp and there were bats there like Batman and all that good stuff, but it also was incredibly dark.
And we reached one point on the tour where the tour guides gathered us all into a group, and I don't remember how many people were there, but there were quite a few. And they said, "In just a moment, we're going to turn off the lights. So we want to encourage you, before we do that, for everyone to literally grab the person next to you. Either put your arm around them, hold their hand, grab their arm. But this experience could be disorienting. Because when we turn out the lights, you won't be able to see the hand in front of your face. You may lose your balance. So if you are prone to that, we would encourage you to sit down on the ground before we turn out the lights. But we promise you that we will turn the lights back on and you will find your way out of these caves."
Well, sure enough, the park ranger stood next to a pole, an electric pole where the lights were, and he prepared us probably with more instructions. But when they turned out the light, it was dead silent. People that may have been murmuring or whispering to one another, even kids that were making kid noises, everybody went dead silent. The darkness was overwhelming. You could feel the darkness. You could put your hands up to your eyes and not see them. Your brain would tell you, "My hand is in front of my face," but your eyes could not recognize them.
Then after what seemed like a very long time of uncomfortable silence, you heard the scratch of a match being lit. And then we looked and there was the park ranger holding a single match that illuminated the whole cavern that our group was stopped in. And as he let that match burn, he started some commentary about, "In utter darkness, just a little bit of light overwhelms the darkness."
I don't know if this park ranger was a Christian or not, but the message that he was saying was awfully parallel to what Luke records about Jesus' message: That when the eye can see the light that is external to itself, it directs everything. But when an eye is unable to see, it doesn't matter what you tell yourself, how close you may hold the thing to you, you simply cannot see it.
Jesus' illustration here confronted the religious crowd, including the Pharisees and the scribes, with a hard truth. The truth was that a blind person standing in a dark room will never see the light. No matter how brightly the light shines around them, if they're blind, they remain in darkness. But a sighted person standing in a dark room, no matter how dark, will recognize the light no matter how dimly it shines.
God has lighted the darkened world through the ministry of Jesus with shining evidence of his mercy and grace. His mere appearance is a sign that God is merciful, that he is slow to anger and full of compassion, that he sent Jesus to save undeserving sinners. We often quote John 3:16, and it's a great verse.
But this is what Jesus said in John 3:19–21. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.
There, John is recording a similar theme from Jesus' teaching that men on their own love the darkness. They're not only blind, but they revel in being blind.
A Call to Action
They even boast of their blindness. Yet Jesus is saying, the light of the world is Christ, who has revealed himself so that sinners can come out of the darkness and into the light. Here in Luke, Jesus concludes this sermon with a convicting call to action. He says, "See to it then that the light within you is not darkness."
Jesus was challenging his listeners with a play on words: See to it whether you can see the light. He didn't say that they naturally had light inside themselves. There was no inner light guiding them. There was no inner goodness that would draw them to God or direct them to God. Instead, he was challenging them to make sure that they were not mistaking the darkness of their religion for the light of the gospel.
This is why Jesus said in verse 36: "If your whole body is full of light and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines." In other words, once we receive the light of the gospel, our lives shine like the source of the light itself. Then the light, though a reflection of God's grace and truth, can shine brightly as a beacon of gospel light to our friends and family who may remain in the darkness.
Jesus is not saying that we are the light or the source of the light. He is the light of the world. But when we receive the light, our lives show forth that light. We're like the single match that the park ranger lit in Mammoth Cave; our lives shine in the darkness and illumine the gospel for others to see.
Jesus says that we are full of darkness without the gospel. We desperately need the light of Christ to penetrate our darkened and depraved hearts. However, if we see the things of this world as being more valuable than the things of God's kingdom, then we remain in darkness. What's worse, we can be consumed with darkness while thinking we have the light. There are churches filled today with people who think they're doing good, who think that they're impressing God and other people, and yet they're living in darkness.
The word of God shines brightly and it pierces the darkness of our sinful souls and the darkness of this broken world. Yet despite the testimony of God's word and the evidence of our transformed lives, there are people who continue to reject the gospel. We must pray for God to open eyes so that people can see Christ and reveal him to others.
As I said earlier, in the context of our church, we want to be a church that makes much of Jesus, that does the simple task of lifting Christ up for others to see and respond to. We don't have to come up with manipulative techniques or with ways to wow crowds in order to win friends and draw them to Christ. Instead, we want to let Christ speak on his own terms and he draws people to himself.
And God does this through the preaching of his word, through the worship of God's people, through the prayers of the church, and through the testimony of the gospel. We don't have to depend on one person or on a technique or on some gimmick in order to see the gospel advance. We simply have to shine the light of Christ like the match in the cave.
But think of it this way: Rather than a single match burning in Mammoth Cave, there are 100 matches in this auditorium. That would be burning brightly, illuminating more than simply the cavern that our family was standing in, but lighting multiple passageways off of that cavern. And God wants us to take our gospel light and share it with others, knowing that some will respond in repentance and faith, while others may reject it even in the name of religion.
The Moral Problem of Unbelief
R. C. Sproll observes this related to this passage. He says, there are people who are seeking a sign, but they don't need more light, but they need better receptiveness to the light they've already been given. What God has done in Jesus is plain enough.
He continues, unbelief is not an intellectual problem. It's not that God has made himself unclear. It's that the problem is a moral problem. We don't want to believe Jesus because we know that if we acknowledge the goodness of God and the deity of Christ, that means we must repent of our sin. And therein lies our pain and our resistance. In a world filled with the light of the majesty of God, people choose to remain in darkness.
The task ahead of us is the same task that Jesus faced, that Jonah faced, and that Solomon faced: that we simply declare the glories of Christ. And Christ draws people to himself. But we must not flinch or apologize for preaching a gospel of repentance that means we call people sinners. I may not start a sermon by saying, "You wicked generation," but apart from Christ, we are indeed ill-intentioned evildoers.
And what we need is not a moral pat on the back, not a rah-rah speech to motivate us. But what we need is the hope of Christ. It is only in Jesus that we can find the relief from our sins and our guilt and our shame. And it's only in Jesus that we can come to know God for eternity.
Jesus starts this chapter by teaching the disciples how to pray. And then things start to go sideways when people hearing his teaching, getting excited and yet accusing him of being the problem that is actually their problem. Jesus pushes back and says, what they need is him. And what we need is Jesus.
So let's make much of Jesus in our church and in our families and in our lives. Let's not look for gimmicks or for entertainment or for some other alternative that says Jesus is not enough. We've got to help him. But instead, let's declare Christ on his own terms, calling men and women and children to repentance and watching God grant salvation.
Let's pray. God, we come to you this morning humbled by this message because all of us in this room who believe the gospel had to come to the point where we admitted our sin and we confessed it and we forsook it and we believed in the healing balm of the gospel. Help us to never lose sight of the fact that you saved sinners. You didn't come to save good people that you wanted to make better. You didn't come to save self-righteous people that you wanted to commend. Instead, you saved sinners who deserved your wrath and judgment.
So God, help us to not only be humbled by that, but help us to be hopeful and motivated by that, that we would share the sign of Jonah, the preaching of the gospel and repentance and faith to all who would listen. And God, we beg of you that by your mercy and grace, you would save the people in our community, save people in our families, people in our sphere of influence and add them to your kingdom. And God, we pray that you would build up this body of believers not according to the works of a man or men or women, but that you would build up this church according to your gospel. And we ask this in Jesus' powerful name. Amen.