Hello my name is reagan gill and passer of adult discipleship. Here christ united and. We're delighted that you're joining us for our two week. Series on the book of jonah. Now in order to prepare for sermon preachers will do a lot of different things. Obviously we pray a lot. We're asking the hoi spirit to reveal something new to us as we often look at scripture. That's very familiar to us things that we've looked at time and time again. We obviously dig into this scripture reading it over and over again. We sometimes search the internet We check out these big bulky books. I have won a big set. It's a commentary on different books of the bible and we go through those over and over again but one thing that i love to do especially when we're looking at stories at most of us learned sunday school as children is to look at a children's bible so i thought i would this morning by reading from my son's children's truth be told it's a hand me down because he's second child so clearly he doesn't get anything new but the story jones. This is what it says. God told jona share my message but jonas said no and sailed away from god. God sent a terrible storm. Throw me into the sea and they will stop. Jonet told the sailors gulp. A huge fish swallowed jonah inside the fish. Joe told god he was sorry. God made the fish spit out. Joanna he was safe than shared. God's message you can say. I'm sorry to god so there's not a lot there but there's still things we can learn from it but the book jonet is only four chapters. It's actually only forty eight versus or so and kind of total. And i book this book and i think okay. What can we learn from jo now now. This book is like other prophetic books. But it's also very unique. The biggest difference is that it set as this big long narrative while other prophetic books have elements of narrative. And it's not a big majority of it often. Those book a big majority of those are the prophet giving their divine annoucements. Those big oracle's things that got us and go tell these people what i have to say what we find in joan is that very little is him announcing things to the people now again. This book is short. And it's been this sort of puzzle this maze for scholars for so long. They've questioned the who the what the where the win. Why the person of joan most likely derives from a fictitious character found in second kings. Fourteen twenty five in the book. There's all these different traditions and time periods kind of influencing the book of jonah..