What Can We Learn From Jonah? — Spurgeon on the Reluctant Prophet
⏱ 14 min read
You know the part of the story that has the fish in it. Most people do. The reluctant prophet, the storm, the belly of the great fish, the spitting-up on the shore, the second call. The Sunday-school version stops there because the fish is the memorable picture, and once the picture is in the head it is hard to make room for what the story is actually about. The story is not about the fish. The story is about a man who ran from God’s mercy — and then, when he had been carried back, ran from it again, in a different direction, with the same heart underneath.
This is the slow version. Charles Spurgeon, reading Jonah from a Victorian pulpit and a small writing desk in Surrey, would not let his hearers stop at the fish either. He kept turning the lamp back on the reluctance — the inward part — because he knew his hearers, like you, would recognise the reluctance long before they would recognise the storm. What can we learn from Jonah in the Bible, slowly read with Spurgeon at your elbow, is less about the dramatic geography of the book and more about the quiet, stubborn part of the heart that says not that, Lord, not that direction, not those people — and the patience with which the mercy keeps tracking it. The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion, if you want a place to keep the practice after the article. For now — read slowly.
If the journal itself has felt like the part that keeps breaking down — that you sit at the page and have nothing to write — learning the Bible as a beginner is the quieter starting place. And if the morning has been the time the resistance is loudest, 10 Bible verses for morning is the consecutive-morning version of this same return.
The reluctance you already recognise
Before the fish, before the storm, before Nineveh, there is the first verse — the word of the Lord coming to Jonah, and Jonah getting up to go the other way. That is the part most readers skim, because the dramatic chapters are still ahead. Spurgeon would slow you down here. The first verse is the whole book in miniature. The Lord speaks. The prophet hears. The prophet moves in the opposite direction. Every subsequent event in the story is the Lord patiently re-routing him toward the original word.
You will recognise this shape. It is not the dramatic running-from-God of the lapsed-faith memoir. It is the small daily running — the gentle re-direction away from the conversation you sense you are being asked to have, the relationship you sense you are being asked to repair, the prayer you sense you are being asked to pray. The reluctance has a thousand small forms. None of them look like Tarshish on a map. Most of them look like the next email, the next chore, the next reason the difficult thing can wait until Sunday.
What Spurgeon would have you notice — and this is the merciful part — is that the call did not stop. The Lord did not let Jonah stay in Tarshish. The storm came. The fish came. The shore came. The word came again. And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time. Spurgeon loved that phrase. The second time. The mercy did not give up on the prophet who had given up on the mercy. (For the wider context of running from the call and being re-routed, what does the Bible say about death is a sibling Spurgeon slow-read for the season when the running has been long.)
The first passage: perfect peace and the meditating heart
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the verb — meditating. Spurgeon does not say praying or interceding or studying. He says meditating. The Victorian English is older than the modern self-help version of the word; what Spurgeon meant by meditation was the slow turning of a single thought over in the heart, the way a stonemason turns a stone over in the hand before he decides where to place it. Spurgeon was sitting, in the evening, with one thought — God’s mercy and love — and letting it turn slowly until something inside him quieted.
This is the practice Jonah refused, until the fish. The reluctant prophet had never sat with the thought of God’s mercy long enough to let it land on the city he was being sent to. Nineveh was, for Jonah, the wrong recipient of mercy. The Ninevites had been the violent imperial enemy of his people for as long as anyone could remember. The reluctance was not laziness. The reluctance was a deep, principled refusal to carry mercy to a people Jonah felt did not deserve it. He had not sat long enough with God’s mercy to recognise that the deserving was not the point. The mercy was the point.
For you, this is the part of Jonah’s story most immediately translatable. The reluctance you have been carrying — the small one, not the dramatic one — is most often a reluctance to extend something you yourself have received. Patience, with the family member who has not earned it. Forgiveness, of the colleague whose apology was thin. Attention, to the friend whose suffering is inconvenient. The mercy is being asked to move through you to a recipient you have quietly decided is the wrong one. Spurgeon’s delightful sense of perfect peace arrived only after he had sat long enough with the mercy to stop measuring the recipient. The peace was the by-product of letting the mercy be larger than the worthiness question. Jonah refused that sitting. The fish was, in some sense, the Lord’s enforced sitting — three days in a dark place where the prophet had nothing else to do but turn the thought over.
(If the practice of the slow morning sit has been the part you cannot yet manage, 10 Bible verses for morning walks ten short verses for the woman whose mornings are too rushed for a meditative paragraph but who can manage a single line before the phone.)
The second passage: Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth! O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. The whole paragraph rewards the slow second reading.
The opening phrase is Samuel’s, not Jonah’s — Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth — and Spurgeon places it at the head of the meditation deliberately. Samuel is the contrast to Jonah. Samuel, as a boy, is the one who learned to hear and to answer. Jonah, as a grown prophet, is the one who heard and ran. Spurgeon would have you put the two prophets next to each other in your mind. The question is not whether the Lord has spoken to you. The question is which prophet you have been imitating in the hearing.
Notice the next clause — every other thought is hushed. This is the inward condition that allows the hearing. The prophet who cannot hush the other thoughts cannot hear the one word that is being said. Jonah’s reluctance was, in part, the noise of his own political and ethnic loyalties drowning out the call. Yours is more domestic. The reluctance is loud because the next-thing on the calendar is louder than the one quiet word being asked of you. Spurgeon’s every other thought is hushed is the precondition for hearing. The hushing is yours. The speaking is His.
I am only asking what he delights to give. This is the line that turns the whole passage. Spurgeon, in the Surrey twilight, names the misunderstanding that drove Jonah onto the boat to Tarshish. Jonah had assumed the asking would cost him something the Lord was reluctant to give — that the call to Nineveh was a test, a hardship, a duty that the Lord himself was indifferent to the cost of. Spurgeon corrects the assumption gently. I am only asking what he delights to give. The fellowship Spurgeon is asking for is not an imposition on the Lord. The Lord delights to give it. The hearing of God by the prophet is not the Lord begrudgingly opening the line; it is the Lord answering, with delight, a call the Lord himself initiated.
For Jonah, this would have meant: the Nineveh assignment is not a burden the Lord is reluctantly handing him. The Lord delights in the mercy that the assignment carries. The reluctance was on Jonah’s side, not the Lord’s. The merciful thing the prophet was carrying was a thing the Sender of the prophet was already enjoying the giving of. Jonah’s only failure was to assume the heaviness was on God’s end. It was on Jonah’s.
For you, the application is closer than it looks. The small reluctance you have been carrying about the difficult conversation, the inconvenient call, the patient kindness with the difficult person — you have been assuming the heaviness is the Lord’s. That He is asking of you a thing that costs Him to ask. Spurgeon, with Samuel’s old phrase still on his lips, would correct you the way he corrected himself. I am only asking what He delights to give. The mercy moves through you because He loves to send it. Your reluctance is not a protection of His resources. He has not run short.
(For the woman who has been carrying the heaviness of a long obedience, what can we learn from King David is the sibling article on the man whose obedience was failure-streaked but whose heart kept turning back; and what can we learn from Paul the Apostle walks the long obedience of the apostle who, unlike Jonah, finally said yes the first time.)
The somatic that goes with the reluctant heart
Pause here. Jonah’s story is a story the body knows about. The body of the reluctant prophet is a stiff body — the shoulders are up, the jaw is set, the small unconscious bracing is the body’s version of the prophet’s no. Before you read further, let the body un-brace by a small amount.
Sit somewhere quiet. Press both feet flat against the floor. Notice where, in the body, the small no is being held. Most often it is at the back of the jaw, or in the small ridge between the shoulders, or in the held tightness across the upper chest. Lay one hand lightly on the place where you feel it. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale — slower than the inhale — let the held place lower by a small fraction. Not a full release. A fraction. The body knows how to soften. It has been bracing for so long that the bracing has felt like normal posture.
Then take the hand away and read on. The body learning to un-brace, even by a fraction, is a small piece of the inward yes Jonah finally said in the belly of the fish. The yes was bodily before it was theological. Reluctance lives in the body before it lives in the mind. The slow exhale is where the un-reluctance can begin.
The middle: the workbook the slow practice has its home in
The slow reading you are doing right now is the kind of reading the Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women was built around. One short passage a day. One slow turning of one verse over in the heart, the way Spurgeon turned God’s mercy and love over in the Surrey twilight. Room on the page for the honest sentence about where the reluctance is still sitting. No pep. No verse-of-the-day with three forced reflection questions. The format of this article, made into a daily companion, for the woman who has decided to stop running and is ready, slowly, to let the second word arrive. Two hundred and forty pages built for the hearing.
The third passage: the heart in right tune
“‘Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace.’ Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly. The second reading is where the image lands.
Spurgeon is using a musician’s metaphor. The heart is an instrument; the fingers of mercy are the player; the communion is the resonance the strings make when the instrument is tuned. The reluctant heart is an out-of-tune heart — when mercy touches its strings, the sound is wrong, or thin, or absent altogether. Jonah is Spurgeon’s exhibit. The Lord’s fingers were on the strings the whole time — the call, the storm, the fish, the second word — and the prophet’s heart was out of tune, so what came back was not communion but resistance, then panic, then begrudging obedience, then, in chapter four, the angry sulk under the withered gourd. The instrument was being played the whole time. The sound the instrument made was the sound of an instrument that had not been tuned.
The practice Spurgeon prescribes is small. Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune. The taking-of-good-heed is the daily tuning. The small inward checking of where the heart has gone out of true since yesterday — the resentment that has crept in, the reluctance that has settled, the political loyalty that is louder than the call, the small grievance the heart has been carrying without naming. The tuning is not dramatic. It is the daily un-snagging of the strings. The communion that follows is not the result of a heroic effort; it is the natural sound a tuned heart makes when the fingers of mercy land on it.
For Jonah, the tuning never came until chapter four — and the book ends, famously, with the question still hanging. The Lord asks the prophet whether his anger over the gourd is right. Jonah does not answer. The instrument is still slightly out of tune at the closing line of the book. Spurgeon would say: the book ends there because the question is now ours. We are the reluctant prophet whose heart the Lord is patiently asking to come back into tune. The answer is not in the book. The answer is in the small daily tuning of your own heart, the slow re-aligning of the strings, until the fingers of mercy, when they land on them, make the sound they were meant to make.
What we can actually learn from Jonah
If you came here looking for a single sentence — what can we learn from Jonah in the Bible — the slow Spurgeon answer is this. We learn that the mercy is patient. That the call comes a second time. That the reluctance is more about the worthiness of the recipient than it is about the difficulty of the task. That the heart out of tune cannot hear the call, even when the call is loud. That the slow daily tuning of the heart is the practice. That the delight is on the Sender’s side; the heaviness is only on ours; and the heaviness lifts in proportion to the heart’s slow return to tune.
The story ends with a question the prophet does not answer. Spurgeon would have you sit in the question. The unanswered ending is the merciful pause — the place the Lord leaves open so that the reader, generations later, can answer for themselves. Has the gourd you have been sulking under been a gourd worth sulking under? Is the mercy you have been withholding the mercy that was supposed to move through you? Is the heart in right tune for the next time the fingers of mercy come down on it?
The question is yours. The second word, when it comes — and Spurgeon would say it always does — will find a different prophet than the first word did, if the tuning has been done in between.
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Bible Study Workbook for Women. Each day, a short passage and room for the honest sentence — the small daily tuning that holds the reluctant heart in proximity to the second word, until the second word arrives and the heart is ready to hear it.
The Everspring Bible Study Workbook for Women carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the heart in right tune, the fingers of mercy, the delightful sense of perfect peace — into a daily companion built for the woman whose quiet reluctance is, at last, ready to be brought home.
