Jonah's Preaching by Bishop Latimer

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 25, 1868

Jonah's Preaching

By Bishop Latimer

JONAH'S PREACHING.—Jonah was but a man, and he preached but one sermon, and it was but a short sermon either, as touching the number of words, and yet he turned the whole city, great and small, rich and poor, king and all. We be many preachers here in England, and we preach many long sermons, and yet the people will not repent and convert. This was the fruit, the effect, and the good, that his sermon did, that the whole city, at his preaching, converted, and mended their evil living, and did penance in sackcloth. And yet here, in this sermon of Jonah, is no great curiousness, no great clerkliness, no great affectation of words, nor of painted eloquence; it was none other but, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed!” It was no more. This was no great, curious sermon, but this was a nipping sermon, a pinching sermon, a biting sermon, it had a full bite; it was a rough sermon, and a sharp biting sermon. Do you not here marvel that these Ninevites cast not Jonah into prison; that they did not revile and rebuke him? They did not revile him, nor rebuke him; but God gave them grace to hear him, and to convert and amend at his preaching. A strange matter, so noble a city to give place to one man's sermon!—Bishop Latimer 1530.