You may be seated and you can turn to Jonah chapter three. It's funny that Chaz should call me any sort of doctor seeing as he's actually getting his doctorate in Jonah. And now I am preaching a sermon to a guy who has literally written a book or is about to write a book or something, about to do something really important that I haven't done. So this is a little nerve wracking. But I want to thank you for allowing me to be a part of this. Also, this was supposed to be like a five-part sermon series where each of us were supposed to like trade spaces in each other's churches, kind of creating this space for a little bit of like a pastoral break in our preaching rhythm. Well, somehow I'm preaching three out of the five weeks. How did I—what's going on? I feel like I've gotten the short stick. But actually, I've been greatly blessed because this series has meant a lot to me. It has worked its way into my heart and I am truly grateful for it and truly grateful to be able to preach it here again, even in front of such a great body of believers. Jonah chapter 3, we will be looking at verses 1 through 10. Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time. saying, arise go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I am telling you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days journey in breadth. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's journey, And he called out, yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown. And the people of Nineveh believed God. And they called for a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them to the least of them. The word reached the king of Nineveh and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth and sat in ashes. And he issued a proclamation published through Nineveh, by the decree of the king and his nobles, let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth and let them call out mightily to God. Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn his fierce anger so that we may not perish. And when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it. This is the word of our Lord. Sometimes we wear our emotions, don't we? You've heard the phrase, he wears his emotions on his sleeves. It's actually an old Shakespearean phrase. The phrase is reserved for people who instinctively allow their most intimate of feelings to be portrayed publicly. And it kind of depends. Sometimes it's a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing. Sometimes it's positive in connotation when we wear emotions like joy or excitement or love or passion. We look at a guy like that or a girl like that and be like, man, she's great. She wears her emotions on her sleeves. It's awesome. I think this would probably be said of my middle son, if you guys, some of you may know my middle son. He wears his emotions on his sleeves, and a lot of times that looks like way too much joy and excitement and energy and passion. But overall, it can be seen as a good thing. It has a negative connotation, certainly, though, as well. We would say, you gotta be careful of him. He wears his emotions on his sleeves. Things like anger, resentment, or impatience might carry that connotation. I have been claimed or said to have at times worn my emotions on my sleeves. In fact, let me bear my emotions to you. I one time, this is unknown, so this is partly confession, part story. I actually wore my emotions on my sleeves one time. I have only received a red card one time in my soccer career. And that happened the day before in this very room I was ordained to public ministry. I was playing in a soccer league, I don't even remember the particular circumstances, but it was so demonstrative and vehement in front of the referee that it was a straight red, if you're familiar with soccer. If that goes to show you how I have worn my emotions on my sleeve, that would be a negative connotation if you're keeping score. But I suppose wearing your emotions on your sleeve is directly tied to which emotion is being exhibited. Yet there is one emotion that is rarely, if ever, exhibited by us, regardless of whether you are emotive or not. And this is especially true in the life of most Christians that I meet, including myself. This is the emotion, or the feeling, of guilt. And similar to it is its close cousin, shame. You see, none of us naturally love to express feelings of the condemnation that we feel at times for the wrong we have done. That's guilt. And none of us would choose to flaunt the truth we all feel deep inside that we are actually bad people dressed up in good people's clothing. That's shame. But biblically speaking, it is a very dangerous place to not want to wear our feelings of guilt or shame on our sleeves. Biblically speaking, it is a dangerous place. to not want, desire, or actually get about wearing our emotions of guilt or shame on our sleeve. You say, what on earth? What are you talking about? Because to be honest with you, biblically speaking, the people of the Bible who actually expressed these deep emotions of guilt and shame were those who were most often in the process of repentance. Repentance is wearing the emotions of guilt and shame on our sleeve. Repentance, the desire when God's glory confronts us to turn from our sin and fall into God's mercy, is central to the rhythm of the Christian life, as well as an important theme for the Bible and characters in the Bible, and is especially a Christian theme for the Advent time. See, time and time again we are brought face to face with God's good and perfect standard, the beauty and the weight of which brings us to our needs. And like the angel of the Lord clothed in radiant splendor who appeared to the lowly shepherds who were then, quote, sore afraid, God's glory humbles us to the ground, fills us with regret, and makes us yearn for grace, which the Father gladly gives to us as the angel so graciously goes on to explain, unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord. Time and time again, God is at work to repent us, to restore to us the joy of our salvation, to bring us back to life as we look at, lean on, and rest in his son. And Advent itself, along with its close cousin Lent, is intended to be a penitential season. That's what Advent is actually all about. We tend to think it's about lights and chocolates and rainbows and unicorns. It's actually about repentance. It's a penitential season, a time when we squint our eyes and look even more intently at our weakness, our mortality. and our failures revealed by God's law feeling and expressing outwardly our guilt and our shame. And doing so creates an extra sense of expectation and urgency for Christmas morning when the grace of God will arrive in flesh and blood in a newborn's cry from a back alley in Bethlehem. Advent is all about repentance and repentance is all about wearing our guilt and shame on our sleeves and receiving the gracious gift of Christ's robe of righteousness in the story of Christmas. We find a very powerful example of wearing repentance on our sleeve in a strange place with an unexpected people in our Bibles, and that's the story of Jonah and the Ninevites. That's what we have gathered around today, which you would probably never heard in a Christmas Advent series, but here we are. I actually think it's perfect. I want us to read again chapter 3 verses 1 through 5, but I'll give away my point here first. I want to look today at two particular things. I want to show you the blessing of repentance and what repentance actually looks like, or maybe I can say this, what repentance instinctively does. Number one, repentance listens to bad preaching. Repentance listens to bad preaching. The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. You heard that right, a second time. This is not the first time Jonah was asked to do something or to say something. It says, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out to it the message that I am telling you. So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Jonah here in this story is a person who is supposed to proclaim the realities of God's mercy. In fact, I can actually argue the book of Jonah is all about the unswerving and fully suffocating mercy of God, the drowning in the belly of a giant whale depths of God's mercy. And no one, no one escapes God's mercy in Jonah. It is fully comprehensive in its scope. Everybody receives mercy at the end of Jonah. Jonah receives mercy, praise God. And he's probably the biggest story, part of that story. Random pagan sailors receive mercy. Violent, treacherous Ninevites receive mercy. And cows receive mercy. Yes, even cows. But not everybody in Jonah demonstrates repentance. In fact, I could argue there's one person and only one person only who doesn't demonstrate repentance and that's Jonah, the one man who's supposed to know all about it. Jonah was a half-hearted prophet with a half-hearted message. He was a half-hearted prophet with a half-hearted message. First he ran away because he wanted mercy for only half the people. See Jonah had this scope of Christian existence that there are good people out there and that there are bad people out there and he had fit obviously into the good person category and the Ninevites had slipped for a long time into the bad person category, and Jonah only wanted mercy for half the people. Only the good people should receive mercy. Bad people have no business receiving mercy from God, and so when God says, hey, I want you to proclaim mercy to bad people, Jonah ran. He also then, because he ran, ran into a storm. met up with some pagan sailors who miraculously play Yahtzee trying to figure out who's gonna be responsible for this storm and for this scope of judgment. They find out, oh, it's Jonah. They throw him overboard. The sailors repent and believe and they find mercy, but Jonah finds himself sinking to the bottom, baptized in the mercy of God through the mouth of a whale. Jonah at the bottom of the whale in the bottom of the ocean offers up a half-repentant prayer for mercy in chapter 2. Sure, he claims responsibility for some of his actions, but most of it is actually pinning it all on God. God, you're after me. God, it's your fault. You've come after me with your judgment. You're the bad man here. You're the boogeyman here. He makes some half-hearted truths regarding the salvation of the Lord, which is true, but he has no intent on trusting it or even thinking that it's actually salvific for bad people. He goes halfway into the city for the second time around when God calls him to go preach. You see this in chapter three, verse three in our text. So Jonah arose, went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city. It would normally take three days of journey to cross it. Jonah goes in one day, he goes halfway through, and then he preaches a half-cocked message. It was pure judgment. 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. And you might be saying, well, maybe Jonah didn't know that God was really intent to show mercy. Maybe he didn't know that God was being gracious in this moment. My friends, couldn't be further from the truth. He himself had just experienced Jesus' entrenched mercy. Jesus' saturated mercy. He himself was spit out of that whale. He found mercy even after half-hearted repentance. And God says, that's like the salvation I'm going to bring to the Ninevites. Death and resurrection. In fact, he goes, Jonah, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, call out against it the message that I am telling you. We actually have it in our passage that it's like the message that I have told you maybe, but no, it's like the message that I am speaking to you. Yes, there is a message of judgment. We deserve to die. See great fish. But there's also transcendent mercy. See spat up on shore. Now go to Nineveh and tell them the message that I am speaking to you, Jonah. And Jonah, with a half-hearted repentance and a half heart for mercy, cries out, it's judgment, people, and it's coming. And he only does half the job. He only preaches to half the people. How do we know this? Well, go to verse six. The word about what was going on reached the king. But it wasn't through Jonah's lips. Jonah did half the job. Jonah was a half-hearted prophet with a half-hearted message, but the Ninevites were full-blooded sinners and in need of full-hearted forgiveness. This is amazing. It's actually pretty, it kind of just happens. And he just states it right out there in our text. 40 days and Nineveh will be overthrown. And verse 5, it's almost soft spoken. And the people of Nineveh believed God. They believed Him. They got it. It hit home. Jonah comes to them with a message of judgment. People, you don't understand. Your sin costs you everything. And it hit. It landed. That message resonated in their sinful souls. No excuses, no ifs, no buts. It resonated, it rang out. We're doomed. This is crazy. This is a helpful understanding for us here in this room, that judgment for our sin, yes, the sin of this week, the sin of this morning, the sin of this service, judgment for sin is 100% real. You guys understand that, right? You guys understand that the sin that we commit today, the sin that we will continue to commit today, judgment for that sin is real and exacting. It happened or it will happen. You understand that, right? There's no getting away. It looks all clean and nice, but you understand judgment is coming, right? Judgment for our sin. It's there, it's real. There's no escaping it. Sometimes in our world, it gets so bright and with lights and with treats and with soft clothes. It looks all nice, but you understand judgment is coming, right? I can speak that into a room like this and we resonate with it, right? It hits home. It hit home for them. Judgment against your sin is real, and it might beg the question, well, then, okay, well, what is sin? Well, then what is that? Well, folks, to be very frank, sin is anything that is not of faith in Jesus. Sin is anything not trusting Jesus. And that actually maybe shifts the goalposts a little bit. Maybe you just thought sin was just bad things you do. That's part of it. That's one expression of not trusting Jesus. That was what we call unrighteousness. That's one category of no faith. But there's also another category of no faith that looks inherently more Christian, and we call that self-righteousness. So there's unrighteousness, there's the bad things we do, but then there's unrighteousness, and it's the things that we do that we think are good that aren't. There are things that don't need Jesus to save. There are things that we bring to God by ourselves and say, God, aren't these things good enough? Sayings Jesus. that also would be sin. See Pharisees. This is what we call religion. There's a view of Christian sanctification that is all about this kind of performance, where you merely take your good works and bring them to God as if these things are actually accomplishing righteousness. This kind of performance is called self-righteous sanctification. It's all about this mechanism in our hearts of due. One of the problems with a performance-based view of sanctification is that it often forces us into an attitude of self-justification and performance rather than a heart of confession and repentance. In other words, sanctification is not growing in your resolve to try harder next time and succeeding. That is not sanctification. Rather, sanctification is confessing your inability to live up to God's perfect standard and repenting of your own sin, both unrighteous and self-righteous in subsequent attempts to self-covering and then desperately crying out for mercy like it's your last breath. That's sanctification. The growth in the Christian life is learning to trust in your performance, your strength, and your righteousness less and less. and learning to trust in Christ's performance for you, Christ's strength for you, and Christ's righteousness for you more and more. It's about confessing and repenting of your failed attempts to save yourself, and it's banking everything on Christ's successful sacrifice and resurrection to save you. It's about needing him more, not less. It's about your growth in righteousness. It's not as much about your growth in righteousness as much as it's about growing in your need for his righteousness. Do you hear the difference? The Ninevites, when confronted with the reality of their sin, yelled out, we're doomed. We've got nothing. That's repentance and confession. That's sanctification. My friend, when was the last time you repented like that? Do you even know where the sackcloth is stored in your spiritual closet? Do you know where the ashes are kept? Why not? Is it possibly because you don't fully understand the bottomless mercy of God? Is that it? I don't know about that. Or is it more because you're so confident in your own self-covering that at times you just forget to pull out the sackcloth like it's needed? This is what the Ninevites were facing. And my friend, even though you and I are just as bad and broken or worse than the Ninevites, like me this week, maybe you possibly have recognized at this moment that it's possibly been a while since you've shed a tear over your sin. let alone sat in the ash. And really, to be honest, shame on us. Why are we so afraid of this desperation? Why are we so afraid of this kind of humility? True repentance is so desperate, so humble, that like the Ninevites, that even it repents of even its own repentance. For even in this we fall short. Like Jonah, all of our repentance is half-hearted. True repentance isn't about the quantity of its fullness, that is, how much of the sin you're actually admitting and repenting of. It's about the desperateness of its emptiness, that is, it has nothing else but mercy. True repentance wears the emotions of guilt and shame and turns to the unconditional mercy of God as its only hope. Two things I want to highlight about the Ninevites' repentance. Number one, it was fully God-fearing repentance. In other words, it says very clearly, they believed God. In other words, they didn't believe Jonah. They could have picked that Jonah, right? They could have been like, you? You, man? You're going to tell us about repentance? Nah, listen, they didn't do that. They heard Jonah's words as if it was the very voice of God, because it was. It was God's truth that resonated in their heart because they feared him at that moment. They might not have been fearing him all along, but when the word hit, they feared God. It was all about God. It wasn't about Jonah, but also it was an indiscriminate repentance. Look what it says at the very end of verse five, from the greatest to the least of these, they repented. In other words, it wasn't about each other. They could have gone to one another and be like, I'll repent if you repent, because you're pretty bad. They could have done that. They could have said, you're repenting? Come on, get out of here. You have a lot to repent of. They could have done that, but they didn't make it about each other. It was indiscriminate. Each one owned their own sin and owned their own desperation. In the words of a great man sitting here today, it's not about who is right, is it? It's about what is right. And my friends, if God has said that we have sin and that it deserves his full eternal judgment, then we ought to be the first to lead in confession and repentance. Can we stop talking about the sin out there, please? Can the church of Jesus Christ pick up the sackcloth for the sin in here? Can we do that? Can we start here? From the least of these to the greatest of these? Repentance listens to bad preaching. It's totally fine with it. But number two, repentance responds to God's judgment. This is what I want to talk about secondly. Repentance responds to God's judgment. Verse five, the second part, the Ninevites called for a fast. and put on sackcloth from the greatest of these to the least. The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and he sat in ashes. The first thing I want us to see is that when we respond to God's judgment, we must embrace our mortality. We must embrace our mortality. The people of Nineveh immediately begin to fast. Now, I'll be honest, I fast. I fast regularly, but it's only for reasons related to diet, exercise, and science. I just feel better, all right? It just helps me, right? And I can go a long time without food or water, but it has no direct spiritual effect if we're just doing it willy-nilly. In fact, I actually think, biblically speaking, really, I've heard it this way, fasting is the kale of spiritual disciplines. That's beautiful, I love that. It's really true. And maybe, maybe it's not so rhythmic as it is at times forced upon us, like kale, right? It's not a rhythm we pick up regularly and get some magic Christian juice out of it. Sometimes it's particularly forced upon us. Maybe I can say it this way. Fasting is oftentimes directly circumstantial, based upon what we're going through. This is certainly true in the biblical stories. When we experience profound grief and shame, or when we're in the throes of lament or repentance, those are not normally the times we gather around to throw great feasts. I've never had prime rib at a funeral. Just never had it. When we're grieving together, oftentimes it's often that we'll say, no thank you, I've actually just lost my appetite. And you're like, no, no, no, no, really, I think you need to eat. I don't think you're doing well. They might see that maybe our face has kind of gone gaunt maybe after several days of not eating. Or we just look a little tired and famished and it's like, no, I think food would actually do your body really well. Why? Because at the moment we've probably taken on a natural fast where we feel this mortality, where the only food we have to eat, like Job, are the tears that fall from our face. We're kind of eating ourselves away in our own depression. I don't know if you've ever been there before, but that, my friends, that's the perfect time to fast. That's the time to do it. And it's not so much this time where we just, like, try to find mortality as if mortality finds you. As one author says, fasting is not about creating personal suffering and loss in order to teach ourselves we need God. Fasting is harnessing the pain that inevitably comes when we try to obey God in a fallen world, and leveraging our weakness as an opportunity to hide in Christ, run to him for strength, and to throw ourselves at the foot of his throne. So we fast because our sin and the toll that it takes on others. We fast because as long as we're breathing, we are not yet done sinning. We fast because natural disasters ravage the world. We fast because people die of starvation and thirst, lacking the necessities of life. We fast when cancer tears through our bodies or those of our loved ones. We fast because the entire cosmos is groaning for redemption. We fast because Christ has not yet completed the work he began in the manger, that he comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found. There will be times this Advent season that even the best of Christmas sweets seem dull and lifeless because of the immense grief, sorrow, and even repentance that we feel. And my friend, that's the perfect time to fast and pray. And may God feed your soul during those lifeless moments. Embrace your mortality. And know only Jesus and Jesus alone is the resurrection and the life. Remember that he ever lives above to intercede, his all-redeeming love and his precious blood to plead. But that his blood atoned for all our race and now, as the living one, now sprinkles the throne of his grace. My friend, embrace your mortality. But also embrace your humility. Not only do they fast, they adorn themselves in sackcloth, In a true sense, no one can really see you fasting, spiritually speaking. And in fact, Jesus warned us about fasting and publicly so as to be seen, maybe contorting our face or displaying our gauntness in order to be seen. But wearing sackcloth is actually totally visible. You can't help ignore that reality. And this is the most crude and coarse of fabrics. It's not comfortable. You wouldn't take your burlap sack to a tailor or a seamstress and ask them to do a proper fitting or a proper hemming. It's a humble and base way of living that reflects the truth that nothing matters except the grief that I am experiencing, not even what I look like. Maybe it would be the equivalent of guys having disheveled hair or women going out with no makeup. That might be kind of the equivalent today of what we go through when we speak of wearing sackcloth. We're not caring about what we look like. We wanted to just ooze out of us our grief, ooze our repentance straight into our faces and into our clothing. It merely fills the base need to be covered, much like the fig leaves Adam and Eve sewed together in the garden. And like John the Baptist's coarse-haired, honey-stained garment in the wilderness, it preaches a desire for repentance and renewal, a longing for leaving this old life behind and humbly crying out to God for deliverance. I guess all that is to say is, like, sometimes it's alright to come to church messy. In fact, can I encourage you? Maybe sometimes just roll right out of bed. If your grief, if your grief is something you can't shake, my friend, just know you're welcome to church in any condition. You're welcome here. And the grief that you are experiencing, God doesn't ask you to make amends for or fix up or doll up before you come to his throne of grace and find mercy to help in time of need. My friend, you can come in any condition. Embrace your humility. We say this often at our church, and I mean it, it's actually part of like what we believe to be fundamentally true about our mission. God will often use your confession more than he will use your competence. There's a hurting world out there that is dying for a world without makeup. They're dying for a world, they're dying for a Christian world that has its hair messy. Can I just bring this into the house? I was putting my coat up, my kid's coat up in the hallway, and I was just kind of like rumbling through, trying to get a hanger and rustling through. And you know what I smelled? And I'm sorry if this was you. I'm not trying to point you. I don't know who it was, but I smelled cigarette smoke. Honestly, you're welcome here. It doesn't matter what you're struggling with. It doesn't matter what kind of guilt and shame you're wrestling with on the inside. I praise God that you're here and there's a throne of grace for you. Whatever you're struggling with, it doesn't matter. It could be cigarette smoke. It could be whatever you're bringing in here that's hidden. It's not worn on your clothes. My friend, you're welcome at the throne of grace at any time. And there is enough mercy in Christ to confess and repent of anything you need to confess and repent of. And you don't have to leave. You don't ever have to leave that. Embrace your humility. And finally, remember, the king takes the curse. The word reached the king of Nineveh. he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes." If you notice, the people fasted and wore sackcloth. You notice also in the back end of our passage here today that the king issues this order from his throne and his nobles demanding and commanding all the people, and even the beasts, even the cows, to dress up in sackcloth and to fast. Everybody should fast. Remember their mortality. Everyone should wear sackcloth. Remember your humility. But the king is the only one recorded in this story who actually sits in the ashes. And his edict does not command anyone to sit in the ashes. It's almost as if it was reserved solely for the heart of the king. This reflects right back to Genesis 3, out of the dust you were made and to dust you shall return. This act of heaping dust on yourself, of course, has happened several times through the passages of scripture, biblical stories. Job, probably most famous of all, where the king now himself puts on the ashes and remembers the curse, embracing for himself and for all the people the curse of sin. What a beautiful moment here. and a representative for the entire nation and its repentance. The king himself adorns the curse. This reflects Galatians 3.13 that Christ himself, the king of the universe, adorned the curse by becoming a curse for us. He redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming the curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who hanged on a tree. Not only did he wear the curse, he also rang out the curse from his lips, this cry of dereliction, just like we have from the King here in verse nine. Who knows? Who knows if God will save me? Who knows if God will redeem me? Christ from the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Who knows if I'm even gonna be saved from this. The King of Nineveh cried out in repentance with at least a glimpse of hope for mercy and deliverance. But my friend, Jesus, the ultimate King repenter is the one who cried out in the midst of judgment, except this King had no hope of escaping judgment. He was not delivered. He was not shown mercy. And he was not shown mercy for our sake. so that we might be shown mercy. He was despised, he was rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, but he bore our griefs and he carried our sorrows and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He is the ultimate king of Nineveh. Both in his living and his dying, Jesus embodies perfectly the humility that you and I, when faced with our sins, so often fail to embrace. It's one thing for God to take on flesh and be made man, but for him to do so in utter weakness as a baby, that's absolutely incredible. He was born to an unwed girl on a cold night with less than little renown, and he makes himself utterly vulnerable, susceptible to the brutalities of this world, capable of even death, and Jesus was the kind of guy you'd first pity rather than praise. This is the king of the universe, embracing rejection from his own people, despised by his generation, treated as a sinner, even though he himself knew not a speck of sin. And in his incarnation, in his living and his dying, Jesus wears humility, the weakness and the shame, the rejection, the mortality that rightly and only belongs to us. And he did it so that we might receive membership in the Father's family that only rightly belongs to him. This perfect weakness, this substitutionary humility of Christ covers over our limp and lame shows of sorrow and repentance. It replaces our impotent expressions of regret, and we are free to have no faith in our own repentance, though repent we must, but instead to have faith in Christ and his repentance, who had been perfectly humble, weak, and frail and mortal on our behalf. You wouldn't know it, but as you gaze intently on the advent of Jesus with his attendant humility, that it is used by God to move you back into the rhythm of repentance. As you look at his repentance, it gives you a perspective on your own sin and the heart for the motion and rhythm of your own repentance. Seeing Christ wrapped in weakness, God's aim is to lead you to publicly confess your own sin. You might ask, well, when does that happen? At the very least, it happens right here in church. God gathered us into his house to confess verbally, boldly, and honestly, as part of the worship, that we are wretched sinners and desperate frauds. He then causes us to respond with joy, real and palpable joy, when you hear him say through the voice of your pastor, the words that I'm declaring to you now, there is no judgment in Jesus. Every piece and every part of your sins that you have confessed are freely and forever forgiven because of Christ, your repentant King. Maybe we can say it this way, like in verse 10, in Christ, when God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented from the disaster that he said he would do to them and he did not do it. I pray that you would make the most of this Advent season, and I pray that you'd repent. I pray that you would be cut to the core with grief over your sin, that you yourself would adorn yourself with sackcloth and ashes and even fast because of the realities of your sin. For without Christ, you are a short time away from the judgment of God. But as with Nineveh, you are called to repent so that you might receive and rejoice in this. You are forgiven. That is the clothing we now wear, the repentance and delight of forgiveness. And as God convicts us, let us confess. And as he brings to us life with the gospel, let us party. Perhaps you'll sing a little louder this Advent season. It's good to not just feel what God works in us, but to actually express it. Just like we were actually express our repentance, it's good to actually express the joy of this Advent season. After all, God has gone to the greatest of lengths to express how he feels for you. He sent Jesus right up to your doorstep. Sure, it might feel a little awkward, and that's okay. But Christ has already done all of this perfectly for us, so it matters not how you come, but that you come. And besides, even if a cow in Nineveh can do it, why can't you? This is God's heart, by the way. In case you're wondering about the cow, you can go all the way back to the very end of Jonah, chapter four, verse 11. God asked Jonah very quickly, should I not pity Nineveh, have mercy on Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand for their left, and also much cattle? God loves him some cows. God loves him some redemption. God loves him some mercy. And there's plenty for you. So repent and rejoice. Let's pray. God, we ask that you would give us hearts, that delight in the repentance that you give us in Christ. Father, what an amazing time to repent where we have the glad tidings all around us. We hear of endless bliss and, Father, we walk through those doors under the gateway of repentance. And so, Father, what a joy it is to confess loudly and to express that even with sackcloth and ashes. to come into church all gaunt and smelling like smoke. Father, we get to walk in knowing we have sin to bring to the table of which Christ has fully forgiven us and has plans to redeem us all from. And so, Father, we get to delight in sitting at your table. And Father, we do so knowing that this isn't just our joy, but Father, this is joy that's reserved for the entire world. And so I pray that you would allow us to proclaim and outwardly express, yes, our repentance, but maybe even in a more significant way and louder way, our joy. And we pray these things through Christ, amen.