A Runaway Prophet

Martyn Payne

On Your Marks:

Again and again throughout the Bible we find God searching for those who are lost. In many ways the whole Bible is a story of 'lost and found'. People choose to go their own way and leave the security of God's love but God does not give up on them. God comes searching to bring people home because, as St Augustine's prayer puts it, 'we are restless, until we find our rest in [God]'.

This session is part of a series that explores this theme in stories from the Old and New Testaments. In each we see individuals who are lost for a variety of reasons, but God rejoices to find them again and bring them back to his loving arms.

The following outline focuses on the story of the prophet Jonah, who ran away to sea to avoid a difficult calling from God.

Get Set:

Use the retelling of this story from The Barnabas Children's Bible, stories 186 to189, pages165 to 168.

You can find the story in the Bible in Jonah, chapters 1 and 2.

Focus particularly on the runaway part of the story, stories 186 to 188 in The Barnabas Children's Bible.

Go!

1. Some people are just careless and lose their way; some people never mean to get lost; but there are others who deliberately choose to go missing. However, no matter what the motives or circumstances, God comes searching. Jonah is perhaps the most famous example of someone who deliberately chose 'to get away from God'. But that is impossible. It is like trying to escape your own shadow.

Play a game of 'guess where I am hiding'. In their head each child in turn should choose a hiding place somewhere about the premises. It can be as tiny or as impossible as they like but it must be a real place. Give the others 15 questions to try and see if they can discover the location of the hiding place.

At the end of this game you might like to read what David said about trying to hide from God in Psalm 139:7-12, where he reminds himself that nowhere is out of reach of God's love.

2. Jonah thinks that putting as much distance as he can between himself and Nineveh is the answer.

Read the story from The Barnabas Children's Bible, stories 186 to 188.

Now use any tables or chairs that you have in your meeting area to make a boat, including a place for Jonah to hide himself away from the crew in its hold. Choose one child to be Jonah while the others become the crew in the middle of this unseasonal and violent storm. Ask them to get into character and feel the story from the inside:

What is going on in their minds as the storm rages?

What are their hopes and fears of getting out of this alive?

What different actions do they recommend taking?

When something goes badly wrong, it isn't unusual to want to find something or someone to blame. Jonah - that strange passenger hiding away down below - is an obvious target.

Hot seat the crew now as, one by one, you ask them what they think should be done. There are ideas in the story already, of course, but let the children explore all sorts of attitudes that might have come up in this situation.

3. Jonah's response makes it clear that deep down he knows all along he couldn't ever run from God. He also knows that running away only makes things worse for himself and everyone else.

Set up a Choice Circus activity, in which half the group is Jonah's conscience trying to urge him to do the right thing by the sailors and allow them to throw him overboard; while the other half is Jonah's inner voice still arguing that he can get away with it and bluff his way out of the situation.

Ask one person to represent Jonah during this. Which voice will he/she follow?

4. Jonah's prayer about his deep-sea experience is one of the literary gems of the Bible. It is the honest thanksgiving of a person who has been found by God but who didn't expect or deserve it. This is an experience that literally turns Jonah's life around and gives him a second chance.

Talk with children about what this means in relation to their own lives:

I wonder why God bothered to go to such great lengths to rescue and restore Jonah?

If someone turned his or her back on you as dramatically as Jonah had on God, I wonder if you would have bothered about him or her again?

Have the children any examples of situations where they felt like giving up on their friends?

Or indeed have they ever felt that people have given up on them?

This story, among other things, reminds us that none of us is ever too lost as far as God is concerned.

5. As a way of illustrating the depths out of which Jonah cried, why not create a group undersea collage, on to which parts of his prayer in the form of speech air-bubbles can be attached?

The prayer (see Jonah 2:2-9) has some great imagery, including swirling waters, seaweed, underwater rock formations and murky depths.

Maybe some scenes from the films Finding Nemo or A Shark's Tale might give some inspiration for this group picture.

The speech air-bubbles will contain some of Jonah’s last gasps before the whale comes to the rescue, including (quotations from the CEV):

'When I was in trouble, Lord, I prayed to you' (v. 2).

'I thought I was swept away' (v. 4).

'I was almost drowned by the swirling waters' (v. 5).

'But you, Lord God, rescued me' (v. 6).

'You heard my prayer' (v. 7).

'You are the one with power to save' (v. 9).

You could compare this prayer with David's experience expressed in Psalm 40:1-3. Here is someone else who felt lost, but God found him.

6. You and your group might like to go on reading to find out what happens next for Jonah. Things still did not go smoothly for this runaway prophet. He runs away again when the judgment that he prophesied would fall on Nineveh doesn't happen (because God loves even these foreign enemies too much!) It seems that we have to be lost and found many times by God before we begin to realize just how great his love for us is.

7. For a time of prayer together, play a game of pairs using a set of cards but using only those cards numbered 2 to 5 (in other words, 16 cards in total). Place these face down in the middle of the group.

As a child turns a card over and before he or she begins to search for a pair, pause to think about somebody or a situation where people feel lost and in need of help. Then he or she should search for a pair - it doesn't matter how many times cards are tried and anyway it shouldn't be too long before a matching card is found - as a reminder that God is looking for us to rescue us. Then pause again before the next card search to give thanks that God never gives up looking for us and offering us his love.

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