Surgeons have incredible skill.  I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it before, but it takes great skill to be a surgeon.  You have to have a steady hand and be able to keep your cool under pressure.  But sometimes surgery is necessary—maybe you’ve had one before.  Sometimes the best option is to open up and look inside and get to work. 

I brought with me something to illustrate this—the game “operation”.  You may have played this game.  It’s a game that reminds us of the importance of getting to work on our inside.  The game is set up so that there’s foreign objects inside the body that shouldn’t be there, and you play the part of the surgeon, trying to skillfully get each piece out.  But if you make a mistake and touch the edges of the incision with your tweezers, the game puts off a loud buzzing sound.  It’s quite a riveting experience!  But the game reminds us that sometimes we need to do surgery—we just need to open up and find out what is there.

This is very similar to our spiritual lives.  Sometimes we need to open up what’s on the inside and do an operation on our spiritual lives—sometimes we need to get to work on our heart.  Just like a doctor might perform heart surgery if there were a severe heart issues, sometimes we need to look inside at our spiritual hearts and get to work.  Take care of business; deal with what is on our inside. Often times, if our hearts are not right, this becomes most evident when we are exposed to the heart of God. When we see God working and come to understand his heart and the things he cares about, oftentimes that reveals where our hearts might not be in line with the heart of God. That’s what we find this morning as we look at the life of Jonah.

Big Idea: Exposure to God’s heart often exposes our own