This six-study guide will excite and challenge you with God's heart to reach the lost, and His patience with his disobedient people. Taking you through the incredible story of Jonah, it shows how Jesus saw Jonah as a shadow of himself, and unpacks how the book's message is as relevant now as it was when first written.

he story of Jonah and the whale is one of the most famous in the Bible: but its message is perhaps one of the most ignored.

It’s a story about storms and sailors, rebellion, and rescue, preaching and protest. And it’s a story about one reluctant evangelist’s experience of speaking to people who knew nothing about God. So its message has great relevance today for God’s people, living in an increasingly non-Christian culture.

Jonah’s story will encourage believers who find themselves ill-equipped to share God’s message with colleagues, friends and family: and it deeply challenges our priorities in life.

But most of all this is a story about God. The book of Jonah reveals to us the depths of God’s grace, both to “outsiders” and to “insiders”. It shows us God’s compassion for the lost and His patience with His wayward people.

Use this guide to uncover the wonderful message of Jonah, and to come face to face with the greatest evangelist of all—the Lord our God Himself.

Table of contents

Introduction
Why study Jonah?
Timeline

1. Running away - Jonah 1 v 1-3
2. Judgement and mercy - Jonah 1 v 4-16
3. Jonah's fishy faith - Jonah 1 v 17 – 2 v 10
4. Repent, relent, rage - Jonah 3 v 1 – 4 v 4
5. Lesson learned? - Jonah 4 v 5-11

6. Jonah and Jesus - Matthew 12 v 38-42
   Leader's Guide

   Be amazed at the God of gracious love for his rebellious prophet and for his world.