Are you on the run from God?

Jonah was a prophet / evangelist who ministered around 800 – 750BC. He was an Israelite and at that time they were under threat from the Assyrians whose capital city was…Nineveh. Hence his reluctance to go and preach repentance. He didn’t want them to repent – he would have been happier to call down fire from heaven on the city instead! Jonah hated the idea that God might not judge them.

In Jonah 1:2,3 the word of the Lord came to Jonah – ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah did run away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish’

How often do we run away from the Lord? How often do we sense God is saying something to us but we push it away to the back of our minds. We move in the opposite direction - either mentally or perhaps even physically. We can run away from God in various ways...

We can run away from sharing our faith
We can run away from doing something God has called us to do
We can run away from giving our lives to Christ
We can run away from fellowship with God and other Christians

When we flee from God, the vessel in which we travel in is always a temporary, vulnerable and unstable one – unlike the Rock who is Jesus Christ. We are tossed about, exposed to the elements of worldliness and we are in constant danger of sinking. A ship has to come into port at some time – it can’t stay on the seas forever. We can’t stay all at sea for the rest of our lives – we’ve got to come into port sometime – but which one will we arrive at - Joppa (which represented God’s territory) or Tarshish (which represented heathenism)?

Are you on the run from God? If so, stop running - He'll always catch up with you!