If I were to come to your house—let’s say you invited my family over for dinner.  And we pulled into your driveway and walked up your sidewalk and came to your front door, what would I do?  The first thing I would do would be to knock on your door.  You would here this “knock, knock, knock”.  Or maybe I’d ring the doorbell, or use the door knocker.  I used to think door knockers were for rich people until I lived in an apartment and every door had them.  But I knock.  And that knock is a sign to you—help me out: what does that knock say to you?  It says someone is here, and it says come open the door right?  Not always.  For you it may elicit several different responses.  Maybe it’s excitement: “oh, they’re here, let’s get the door.”  It could be confusion: “now who could that be at this hour?”  Perhaps it’s: “shhhh!  Go hide!  It’s the neighbor kids selling candy, let’s pretend we’re not home.”  Or it could be “turn up the tv and pretend we don’t hear it, it’s that salesman again.”  All kind of different responses, but we know when we hear that sound, we have to make a choice.  It’s a universal symbol in most of the first world—that sound means someone is at the door, and I have to choose; am I going to open it and see who it is, or am I going to run and hide. 

Believers in Jesus have a very similar spiritual decision they have to make, because we have that same knocking sound in our spiritual lives.  Sometimes God comes knocking at the door to our spiritual lives.  And we have a choice—a decision to make.  Are we going to open up and let him in, or are we going to run and hide.  And as we come to Jonah, we find that he had this same decision to make.  Let’s review where we’ve been so far.  God tells Jonah “Go cry against Nineveh, that wicked city.”  Jonah says “No way!”  And boarded a ship to flee from God.  And then we hear it—knock, knock, knock.  God comes knocking at Jonah’s door by way of a storm—God hurls a storm on the waters to get ahold of Jonah, but Jonah wasn’t through running from God.  He told the sailors to throw him overboard, and they do.  But again we hear that all too familiar sound—knock, knock, knock, as God knocks on Jonah’s door again by way of a fish.  And we pick up our story as Jonah is swallowed whole and we find him sitting inside of the fish and we hear the knocking again as God waits for Jonah to open up the door.  And God begins to work on Jonah’s heart, and eventually he does open up.  God is knocking at the door to our spiritual lives as well—will you let him in?  From this section in our story of Jonah this morning we learn one key truth for our lives: 

Big Idea: God's grace knocks at the door to our hearts, and God expects us to answer