The central idea
“Choose the good side.”
Nahum shows both God’s righteous judgment and God’s steadfast goodness. Pastor Jeffery L. Smith gives four reasons to choose God’s good side: escape God’s wrath, experience God’s patience, express God’s goodness, and enjoy God’s refuge.
The sermon begins with Nineveh’s story: a people who had received grace but repeatedly returned to cruelty, arrogance, idolatry, and violence. That warning becomes a pastoral call to examine the side chosen by every person. God is slow to anger, but God’s goodness is never permission to dismiss justice or remain unchanged.
The framework
Four stated reasons
“Choose the good side so you can escape God’s wrath.”
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith begins with the history behind Nahum’s warning. More than a century after Jonah preached to Nineveh and the city received grace, the Ninevites returned to cruelty, arrogance, idolatry, and violence. Nahum therefore announces judgment against a repeat-offending empire while giving hope to the people it oppressed.
The warning exposes what Pastor Jeffery L. Smith calls both sides of God: God is genuinely loving and good, yet God also exercises wrath and vengeance against persistent evil. The sermon names idolatry, deliberate rejection of God, and cruelty toward God’s people as conduct that provokes divine anger. The pastoral question is not whether God has power to judge, but which side of God one’s choices place a person on.
“They threw the grace away and returned to their own vomit.”
Nineveh’s earlier response to Jonah did not become lasting faithfulness. Pastor Jeffery L. Smith uses the city’s return to old practices to warn against receiving grace without allowing grace to change one’s choices.
“He’s gonna judge the oppressor and deliver the oppressed.”
Nahum’s judgment is also good news for people living beneath oppressive systems, cycles, and circumstances. God sees both the violence of the oppressor and the suffering of the oppressed, and God acts in God’s own way and time.
“It helps us to see both sides of God.”
The sermon refuses to reduce God to love without justice. God’s good side offers patience, goodness, and refuge, while the other side confronts defiance, hostility, and unrepentant evil with wrath.
“It gives you a carnal mindset, gives you an evil mindset.”
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith connects false worship with distorted conduct. Turning from the God who creates, provides, and forgives reshapes the mind, while authentic worship should become visible in joy, kindness, and how believers treat other people.
Verbatim subpoints
“Choose the good side so you can experience God’s patience.”
Nahum places God’s wrath beside the declaration that God is slow to anger. Pastor Jeffery L. Smith treats that contrast as evidence that judgment is not impulsive: God repeatedly gives people time and opportunity to turn, including people who fail after they already know better.
Divine patience becomes a model for Christian conduct. Drawing from Proverbs 19:11, Pastor Jeffery L. Smith urges believers to control their tempers, overlook offenses wisely, and resist the impulse to personally punish every unfriendly, ungrateful, hypocritical, or uncooperative person. God’s patience should produce patience in God’s people.
“In spite of that, he’s slow to anger.”
Even after identifying God’s foes, enemies, and adversaries, Nahum immediately says God is slow to anger. The placement shows restraint before judgment rather than uncontrolled anger.
“God gives chances after bad choices.”
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith invites listeners to remember the chances God gave before salvation and after salvation, turning doctrine into gratitude for personal mercy.
“We ought to learn how to be slow to anger ourselves.”
The sermon applies God’s patience directly to emotional self-government. Sensible people control their tempers, and spiritual maturity includes asking God for the discretion to respond differently.
“Let God handle the wicked.”
Because God is judge, believers do not have to make every wrongdoer their personal assignment. Trusting God includes releasing retaliation and allowing God to address guilt in God’s own time.
Verbatim subpoints
“Choose the good side so you can express God’s goodness.”
The sermon moves from what God opposes to what God continually gives. God remained good while Israel faced violent adversaries and political leaders obsessed with power and war. God’s goodness was also extended to Nineveh through Jonah’s preaching, many years of patience, and another opportunity to turn.
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith calls the congregation not merely to acknowledge goodness privately but to express it through testimony and praise. God’s protection, continued presence, healing, provision, opened doors, and sustaining help become reasons to speak—even while a difficult season is not yet over.
“The Lord is still good.”
God’s goodness is not cancelled by wicked adversaries, oppressive circumstances, political turmoil, or seasons of waiting. The claim is made in the middle of trouble, not only after trouble ends.
“God was so good even to the Ninevites that he gave them grace.”
Grace was extended even to the people facing judgment. Jonah’s earlier mission and the long delay before Nahum demonstrate that God’s goodness included warning, patience, and a genuine opportunity to return.
“I would have fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord.”
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith uses the language of Psalm 27:13 to connect God’s goodness with endurance. Believing and waiting keep the worshiper from collapsing under what is happening around them.
“I either made it through it, or I am making it through.”
The testimony includes both completed deliverance and present perseverance. God’s goodness is the reason the believer survived previous trouble and continues moving through what remains unfinished.
Verbatim subpoints
“Choose the good side so you can enjoy God’s refuge.”
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith identifies the fourth reason near the close and develops it from Nahum 1:7. God is not only good in the abstract; God becomes a stronghold in the day of trouble—hiding, protecting, and covering those who trust God so that opposition does not have unrestricted access to them.
The final phrase, that God knows those who trust in God, reverses the usual emphasis. The believer knows God through experience, but God also knows the believer through God’s experience with that person. Trust cannot be performed for appearances because God knows whether it is genuine. The sermon therefore closes with an invitation to choose the good side and the God side through faith in Christ and committed discipleship.
“He’s a stronghold in the day of trouble.”
Refuge is presented as protection within trouble, not a promise that trouble never comes. God’s covering distinguishes those who trust God from the foes and adversaries who face judgment.
“He’ll hide you. He’ll protect you.”
Pastor Jeffery L. Smith makes the stronghold image concrete: God limits what the enemy can reach and provides security when circumstances are dangerous.
“Those that are on the good side get his covering.”
The sermon’s contrast reaches its practical conclusion: adversaries receive wrath, while those who trust God receive covering. Choosing the good side means entrusting oneself to God’s protection.
“He knows us by his experience with us.”
God’s knowledge of the believer is relational and discerning. The text’s promise belongs to people whose trust is known by God, not merely claimed before other people.
Verbatim subpoints
Timestamped highlights
Highlighted phrases
- 1:06:19“Choose the good side.”
- 1:06:44“Choices have consequences.”
- 1:06:55“The choice is yours, but the consequences are not.”
- 1:09:07“They threw the grace away and returned to their own vomit.”
- 1:10:42“He’s gonna judge the oppressor and deliver the oppressed.”
- 1:12:43“It helps us to see both sides of God.”
- 1:14:25“Choose the good side so you can escape God’s wrath.”
- 1:16:21“It gives you a carnal mindset, gives you an evil mindset.”
- 1:22:37“Choose the good side so you can experience God’s patience.”
- 1:22:53“In spite of that, he’s slow to anger.”
- 1:24:36“God gives chances after bad choices.”
- 1:26:32“We ought to learn how to be slow to anger ourselves.”
- 1:28:37“Let God handle the wicked.”
- 1:29:41“Choose the good side so you can express God’s goodness.”
- 1:31:04“The Lord is still good.”
- 1:31:16“God was so good even to the Ninevites that he gave them grace.”
- 1:32:40“I would have fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord.”
- 1:36:47“Choose the good side so you can express God’s goodness.”
- 1:36:57“Choose the good side so you can enjoy God’s refuge.”
- 1:37:07“He’s a stronghold in the day of trouble.”
- 1:37:19“He’ll hide you. He’ll protect you.”
- 1:37:40“Those that are on the good side get his covering.”
- 1:39:20“I either made it through it, or I am making it through.”
- 1:40:46“He knows us by his experience with us.”
- 1:42:10“Choose not only the good side but the God side.”
One-sentence takeaway