Pastor Nate continues our study through the Bible in the book of Jonah.
[00:00:00] All right, Jonah chapter two is where we are today.
[00:00:03] And I want to read the whole passage last week.
[00:00:06] If you missed it, just a quick recap and Jonah chapter one, Jonah heard God's call to go preach to Nineveh rejected it,
[00:00:13] ran from God in the opposite direction.
[00:00:16] Great storm came upon the boat that he was in.
[00:00:19] He was thrown into the ocean and swallowed up by a great fish.
[00:00:23] And chapter two is Jonah's prayer to God from the belly of that fish.
[00:00:28] Let's read it together.
[00:00:30] Then Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God from the belly of the fish, saying,
[00:00:35] I called out to the Lord out of my distress.
[00:00:39] And he answered me out of the belly of Sheol.
[00:00:42] I cried and you heard my voice for you cast me into the deep into the heart of the seas.
[00:00:49] And the flood surrounded me all your waves and your billows passed over me.
[00:00:54] Then I said, I am driven away from your sight.
[00:00:58] Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.
[00:01:02] The waters closed in over me to take my life.
[00:01:05] The deep surrounded me weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains.
[00:01:11] I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.
[00:01:15] Yet you brought up my life from the pit.
[00:01:19] Oh Lord, my God.
[00:01:20] When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord.
[00:01:24] And my prayer came to you into your holy temple.
[00:01:27] Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.
[00:01:34] But I, with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you what I have vowed.
[00:01:39] I will pay salvation belongs to the Lord.
[00:01:44] And the Lord, verse 10, spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
[00:01:51] Let's pray together.
[00:01:52] Lord, the encounter that Jonah had with you to me is an encounter that we need often.
[00:02:02] And so I pray that as we look into your word today by your spirit,
[00:02:07] you'd refresh us in your grace just as you were refreshing Jonah,
[00:02:13] trying to teach this man who was living out of step with your nature and character.
[00:02:18] And so Lord, our heart, our desire as your people is to not just know who you are and
[00:02:24] to be correct about it, but then to live out the nature that is revealed to us in your word.
[00:02:32] So Lord, we pray that you'd help us with that.
[00:02:34] Strengthen us by your spirit.
[00:02:36] In Jesus' name we pray.
[00:02:38] Amen.
[00:02:40] OK, and last week's study of the book of Jonah, one of the things that I said
[00:02:46] to you at the very beginning is that there's not a lot of background material
[00:02:51] in the Bible about the prophet Jonah.
[00:02:55] Very little is said of him in some of the books of the Old Testament that you might
[00:03:00] expect to hear about a prophet, books like First and Second Kings or First
[00:03:04] and Second Chronicles where other prophets and what they did is spoken of.
[00:03:09] Jonah really isn't mentioned there very often, except for one time.
[00:03:14] In Second Kings chapter 14, Jonah appears to the king of Israel at the time named
[00:03:20] Jehoshaphat and he tells him that God is going to restore the borders in Israel.
[00:03:28] And so what that means is that before the events of the book of Jonah, Jonah
[00:03:34] as a prophet was known as a man with a positive message for God's people.
[00:03:42] Now what we saw last week in Jonah chapter one is that Jonah was tasked
[00:03:47] in the book of Jonah with a negative message for people who did not belong to God.
[00:03:53] He was told by God to go 500 miles or over 500 miles away from Israel
[00:03:59] to a serious capital city, the city of Nineveh and to preach against them
[00:04:06] a word of judgment because their evil had come up to God.
[00:04:10] He was conscious of their evil.
[00:04:11] He wanted it to be dealt with and addressed.
[00:04:16] But Jonah, as we saw last week, he did not want to go to Nineveh.
[00:04:22] And in the final chapter of the book of Jonah, as we saw last week,
[00:04:26] he told God the reason why he didn't want to go.
[00:04:30] He knew that God is gracious and merciful and slow to anger
[00:04:34] in a bounding and loving kindness.
[00:04:36] And he thought, if God is that and if he's sending me to Nineveh,
[00:04:42] he's not just telling me to cry out against them from far away.
[00:04:45] He's actually sending me to their town.
[00:04:48] Then it probably means that he's open to disposing his grace and mercy
[00:04:54] and patience and loving kindness on the Ninevites.
[00:04:58] They might just repent as a result of my preaching
[00:05:01] and come into God's grace and mercy.
[00:05:04] And Jonah did not like that.
[00:05:07] He despised the people of Assyria.
[00:05:10] He despised the Ninevite people.
[00:05:12] He thought of himself and his people as good.
[00:05:15] And he thought of them and their people as bad.
[00:05:19] And he did not want to cross those boundaries
[00:05:23] that had been firmly fixed in his mind.
[00:05:26] And as I said to you last week, Jonah, to me, was like a train car
[00:05:30] unhitched from the locomotive.
[00:05:33] There's God's nature, the locomotive who God is.
[00:05:36] And Jonah is disconnected from that.
[00:05:38] God is going to Nineveh.
[00:05:39] God has a heart.
[00:05:40] God has a perspective.
[00:05:42] But Jonah has disconnected himself from it.
[00:05:45] He won't go where God is going to go.
[00:05:49] Jonah needed to reconnect with God's grace.
[00:05:54] And that's what the book of Jonah is about.
[00:05:58] God's goal for Jonah was that he would comprehend who God is
[00:06:03] and that he would connect to it, that he would know of God's grace
[00:06:07] and that he would connect to it.
[00:06:09] And God has the same goal for us in the book of Jonah.
[00:06:14] He wants us to know of his grace and to live accordingly.
[00:06:20] OK, but what is the grace of God?
[00:06:22] One theologian said it this way.
[00:06:24] I'll put it up on the screen for you.
[00:06:27] The grace of God is God's goodness manifested toward
[00:06:32] the ill-deserving.
[00:06:33] His grace manifested toward the ill-deserving.
[00:06:37] In this chapter, Jonah 2, Jonah is the ill-deserving figure.
[00:06:42] He does not deserve God's rescue.
[00:06:43] He does not deserve this fish.
[00:06:45] He does not deserve a second chance.
[00:06:47] He does not deserve any of these things.
[00:06:48] But God is going to extend his grace to his man.
[00:06:52] The goodness of God manifested toward the ill-deserving.
[00:06:55] Another set of authors said it this way,
[00:06:58] actually in a parenting book.
[00:06:59] They said, Grace is not a novel fail-safe catch phrase
[00:07:03] that will ensure success.
[00:07:05] No, it's something so much better than that.
[00:07:08] It is God's assured favorable attitude
[00:07:12] towards undeserving rebels whom in his inscrutable love
[00:07:18] he has decided to bless.
[00:07:22] That's a great description of what Jonah
[00:07:23] is about to experience.
[00:07:25] He is an undeserving rebel.
[00:07:28] And God in his inscrutable love decides to bless this man.
[00:07:35] So God's mission was to hitch Jonah up to his grace once again.
[00:07:40] He needed Jonah to reconnect to his nature.
[00:07:45] And as I've been saying, he wants the same for us right now.
[00:07:49] And as we study this book,
[00:07:51] he doesn't want us to merely have a correct theology about him.
[00:07:55] Many of us could probably pass a basic theological exam
[00:08:00] about God.
[00:08:01] What does the Bible say about who God is?
[00:08:05] Jonah had that, he could pass that exam,
[00:08:08] but God wants us to do more than that.
[00:08:10] He wants us to live out the implications of his nature.
[00:08:15] If God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger
[00:08:18] in abounding and loving kindness,
[00:08:20] he wants us to demonstrate the same to our world.
[00:08:24] And so God will do for us what he did to Jonah,
[00:08:29] right there in the midst of the sea.
[00:08:31] He'll reach us wherever we're at to teach us,
[00:08:34] to remind us, to inform us about his grace.
[00:08:39] All right, so that's what I wanna think about today.
[00:08:40] What do we learn about God and how he extends his grace?
[00:08:44] What do we learn about his grace
[00:08:45] from this prayer from Jonah?
[00:08:48] To say this to you today,
[00:08:50] one of the things that needs to happen right at the outset
[00:08:55] is we need to get kind of a cartoonish image
[00:08:58] of how this all worked out of our hits.
[00:09:02] It's like we've all seen like kids' cartoons
[00:09:04] about the life of Jonah.
[00:09:06] So we might be imagining like there's a boat
[00:09:08] out there on the Mediterranean,
[00:09:10] maybe there's even like blue skies and some clouds
[00:09:13] and just a little bit of rain fluttering in the distance.
[00:09:16] And we might imagine Jonah kind of going out
[00:09:18] to the edge of the boat and like doing a perfect dive
[00:09:21] out into the ocean.
[00:09:22] And there's like a big whale that's there
[00:09:24] just with its mouth wide open
[00:09:26] and Jonah just bloop, bloop, just goes right into it
[00:09:29] or something like that.
[00:09:29] We gotta get that out of our minds.
[00:09:32] What we have to picture is a man
[00:09:35] who is desperately clinging to life at this.
[00:09:40] He is confident at the very beginning
[00:09:43] of this song that he is going to die.
[00:09:46] He's drowning, he might not even know how to swim
[00:09:49] and he's in one of the worst storms
[00:09:52] that these sailors have ever seen
[00:09:54] in all of their years on those waters.
[00:09:57] He believes that he is going to die.
[00:09:59] It's as if in Psalm two everything else fades away.
[00:10:02] Last week we were on the boat,
[00:10:04] we were with the sailors,
[00:10:06] we were thinking about a fish,
[00:10:07] we were watching the storm, all of that fades away.
[00:10:10] Now we just have Jonah a man who thinks he's dying
[00:10:14] and his thoughts, his prayers.
[00:10:17] What he thinks about God.
[00:10:19] And I think what we'll discover along with Jonah
[00:10:22] is that God's grace was right there with Jonah
[00:10:24] in the depths of the ocean
[00:10:26] and the depths of that great fish.
[00:10:28] He prays this prayer, it's poetry,
[00:10:30] it's the only time that poetry appears
[00:10:34] in the book of Jonah.
[00:10:36] It's not something that he pulled out a scroll
[00:10:38] and began to write right there.
[00:10:39] He prayed something like this
[00:10:41] and then later would have written this prayer.
[00:10:44] But it's a song of God's grace.
[00:10:47] It's about God's salvation.
[00:10:49] Okay, so let's inspect this song
[00:10:52] for what we can learn about God's grace.
[00:10:53] The first point that I want to make
[00:10:55] is that God's grace can be found in the dark.
[00:10:59] God's grace can be found in the dark.
[00:11:03] I didn't want to say that God's grace
[00:11:05] is only found in the dark because it's not.
[00:11:08] It's found in the places of blessing and beauty
[00:11:10] throughout our world, the good times in life.
[00:11:14] And it's not always found in the dark either
[00:11:17] because there are times we enter into the dark
[00:11:20] and our hearts aren't opened up to the Lord.
[00:11:22] But it can be, as Jonah discovered, found in the dark.
[00:11:27] When he was cast into the sea,
[00:11:29] he was thrown into the chaos of darkness.
[00:11:33] In verse two and three,
[00:11:34] he said that he was in distress
[00:11:37] because he was cast into the deep.
[00:11:40] In verse three through five,
[00:11:42] he spoke of waves and billows and waters
[00:11:45] that closed over him.
[00:11:46] He said to take his life.
[00:11:49] And in verse six,
[00:11:51] he felt like he was at the very bottom of the ocean,
[00:11:56] the roots of the mountains, he said,
[00:11:58] with bars that he thought were closing in on him forever.
[00:12:04] Now, when you read the book of Jonah,
[00:12:06] it's hard not to smirk a little bit at this man
[00:12:08] and the experience of his life,
[00:12:10] but this was no laughing matter to Jonah.
[00:12:12] This is not comedy at all to this man.
[00:12:15] He was in the disorienting experience
[00:12:18] of drowning and dying before being swallowed
[00:12:21] by a sea creature.
[00:12:22] I don't think a lot of us have the experience in life
[00:12:26] to be able to even imagine how stressed
[00:12:29] Jonah's system would have been.
[00:12:32] Perhaps somebody who's been in the midst
[00:12:34] of the chaos of war might have a little bit
[00:12:38] of the feeling that Jonah was having in that moment.
[00:12:43] I read of one study this last week
[00:12:46] that was done in the 50s that they conducted
[00:12:48] to try to determine why United States prisoners of war
[00:12:52] in the 50s were being turned against the United States
[00:12:56] while they were imprisoned.
[00:12:58] What they discovered was that the enemy
[00:13:00] was using a tactic of putting them in total darkness.
[00:13:03] And so to understand it,
[00:13:05] one psychologist took volunteers
[00:13:08] and put them in a sensory isolation.
[00:13:11] He put them in small soundproof cells.
[00:13:14] He made them wear frosted goggles
[00:13:17] so they could see but not really see clearly
[00:13:21] and even put gloves on them,
[00:13:23] special gloves that would decrease their sense of touch.
[00:13:27] And the results were shocking to those researchers.
[00:13:31] The subjects were completely disoriented
[00:13:34] within just a few hours.
[00:13:36] When some of them went to take a bathroom break,
[00:13:38] they would get lost in the bathroom.
[00:13:41] Goggles off everything normal, they would get lost.
[00:13:44] They couldn't even get out of the bathroom.
[00:13:46] One of them after completing the assignment was released,
[00:13:49] got in his car and just crashed in the parking lot.
[00:13:54] And all of them, most of them saw hallucinations.
[00:13:58] They saw things like squirrels dancing around
[00:14:01] an old man driving a bathtub.
[00:14:03] One subject even saw a second version of himself
[00:14:07] and had a difficult time differentiating
[00:14:10] between who was real and who was an image.
[00:14:15] It seemed that without the normal stream of input,
[00:14:20] each subject's brain produced its own stream of input.
[00:14:26] And I just try to share that story
[00:14:28] to kind of help you understand the gravity
[00:14:30] of what Jonah was experiencing there
[00:14:32] in the belly of the fish.
[00:14:34] I think that his senses were being pushed to the limits.
[00:14:38] And as his senses were submerged under the water
[00:14:41] or in the sliminess of that fish,
[00:14:44] it seems that his spiritual senses began to arise.
[00:14:49] The man who didn't even think about God
[00:14:51] when he was on the boat began to realize
[00:14:54] his deep need for God.
[00:14:57] It's like there in the water and in that fish,
[00:15:00] Jonah was stripped of everything but God.
[00:15:05] He had no one else, nothing else,
[00:15:07] it was just him and God alone.
[00:15:10] He even described this moment like death.
[00:15:14] He said, I was in Sheol, he said in verse two.
[00:15:17] That's the Old Testament place of the dead.
[00:15:22] But in the midst of that darkness,
[00:15:23] the light of God began to shine.
[00:15:26] He began to realize God is with me,
[00:15:28] God has rescued me, God has saved me.
[00:15:31] I think this is why at the end of his song,
[00:15:33] Jonah prayed this beautiful line.
[00:15:36] He said, those who pay regard to vain idols
[00:15:40] forsake their hope of steadfast love.
[00:15:43] That's what he said in verse eight.
[00:15:45] Now when Jonah said that personally,
[00:15:47] I don't think that he was referring to the sailors
[00:15:51] on the boat who used to sacrifice to idols.
[00:15:56] I don't think he was referring to the Ninevites
[00:15:59] that he was going to go to who did sacrifice to idols.
[00:16:03] I think that Jonah was thinking about himself.
[00:16:06] I think he realized that God's steadfast love
[00:16:08] was toward him, for him,
[00:16:10] but that he had made an idol of his perspectives.
[00:16:15] He had made an idol of his positions.
[00:16:18] He had made an idol of his identity
[00:16:21] as a man against the Ninevites.
[00:16:24] Because he'd set that idol in his heart,
[00:16:28] the steadfast love of God,
[00:16:30] that's a word that is loaded in the Old Testament
[00:16:33] and describes the people of God,
[00:16:36] what they're supposed to receive from God.
[00:16:39] The steadfast love of God was blocked from Jonah.
[00:16:43] He couldn't experience it.
[00:16:44] It's not that God didn't have it.
[00:16:46] It's that Jonah had removed himself from it, so to speak,
[00:16:50] experientially, because of the idols within his heart.
[00:16:55] And God was doing everything he could in this moment
[00:16:59] to destroy those idols from within Jonah.
[00:17:03] The first of the Ten Commandments says,
[00:17:05] "'You shall have no other gods before me.'"
[00:17:09] Tim Keller describes idolatry this way.
[00:17:13] He says,
[00:17:14] "'An idol is whatever you look at and say
[00:17:16] in your heart of hearts, if I have that,
[00:17:20] then I'll feel my life has meaning.
[00:17:22] Then I'll know I have value.
[00:17:24] Then I'll feel significant.
[00:17:26] Then I'll feel secure."
[00:17:29] And I think down there in that fish,
[00:17:32] Jonah came to terms with his worship.
[00:17:35] He realized that his opposition against the Ninevites
[00:17:40] and people like the Ninevites
[00:17:41] was what made him feel secure.
[00:17:44] It had become his functional God.
[00:17:47] And he realized that he thought of his hatred
[00:17:49] of the Ninevites as more core to who he was,
[00:17:53] his identity than his connection to God.
[00:17:57] And as he began to realize this,
[00:17:59] the steadfast love of God began to break into his heart.
[00:18:03] God stripped away Jonah's idols
[00:18:06] and showed him how foolish they were
[00:18:07] and how little they could do for him.
[00:18:10] And he began to see God again.
[00:18:14] Sometimes God will do this.
[00:18:15] Sometimes God will allow darkness to come into our lives
[00:18:20] so that we can recognize afresh the value of God,
[00:18:25] how valuable he truly is,
[00:18:27] how important he truly is to us.
[00:18:30] I read a story recently, I think in the last year or two
[00:18:34] that interested me.
[00:18:35] It was about a woman named Laura Young
[00:18:38] who one day in Austin, Texas,
[00:18:40] she walked into her local Goodwill.
[00:18:44] She's an antique collector.
[00:18:46] She knew a thing or two about things from history.
[00:18:50] And as she was shopping the aisles,
[00:18:52] she looked and saw this statue, just a bust,
[00:18:57] and looked at the price.
[00:18:59] It was $35.
[00:19:00] And she began inspecting it
[00:19:02] and she realized this is not new.
[00:19:04] This is an old piece.
[00:19:07] She thought to herself,
[00:19:08] I think it's probably at least a thousand years old.
[00:19:12] She knew that it was very valuable,
[00:19:14] much more valuable than $35.
[00:19:17] So she did what any of us would do.
[00:19:19] She bought it for $35.
[00:19:22] And she walked out of that store
[00:19:23] and then began the process of getting it verified.
[00:19:26] And they discovered that it was 2000 years old.
[00:19:29] It was actually a bust of the man
[00:19:32] who is said to have assassinated Julius Caesar.
[00:19:37] So she did a good thing at that point.
[00:19:40] She didn't sell it, but she donated it to a museum
[00:19:44] where now everybody can appreciate its value.
[00:19:48] This was a moment in Jonah's life
[00:19:50] where what was really valuable was coming to the surface.
[00:19:54] He had devalued God and highly valued
[00:19:58] his perspective about those Ninevites,
[00:20:00] but God was changing that in this moment.
[00:20:03] Jonah in the belly of the fish,
[00:20:06] was seeing reality.
[00:20:09] So grace can be found in the dark,
[00:20:13] but I also wanna say secondly,
[00:20:17] that grace illuminates us without crushing us.
[00:20:23] Grace illuminates us without crushing us.
[00:20:27] What do I mean?
[00:20:29] Well, through the whole song,
[00:20:30] it's clear that Jonah understood
[00:20:34] that God was responsible for the different elements
[00:20:37] that had been brought against him.
[00:20:39] We as the readers know that,
[00:20:40] we know that God brought the storm,
[00:20:43] that God brought the fish,
[00:20:45] that God calmed the storm,
[00:20:47] that God directed the casting of lots.
[00:20:50] We know and can see God's hand
[00:20:53] in the events surrounding Jonah's life.
[00:20:55] But during this song, Jonah recognized it as well.
[00:20:59] Look at verse three with me.
[00:21:01] He said to God,
[00:21:03] you cast me into the deep,
[00:21:06] into the heart of the seas.
[00:21:08] All your waves and your billows passed over me.
[00:21:14] Now what I wanna point out about that is not only
[00:21:17] that Jonah recognized that all this had come from God,
[00:21:22] but I also wanna point out
[00:21:23] that Jonah is not positioning himself,
[00:21:26] it seems in an argument against God.
[00:21:29] In other words, you gotta get the tone right
[00:21:31] of how he said verse three.
[00:21:34] It wasn't God, I can't believe
[00:21:37] that you have done this to me.
[00:21:40] I can't believe that you have let this come into my life.
[00:21:44] No, it was God, I've deserved this.
[00:21:47] I am that rebel who has been running from you.
[00:21:50] And so you graciously brought this into my life.
[00:21:54] Jonah in other words,
[00:21:55] it seems realized that he had all this coming to him.
[00:21:59] He sensed the gravity perhaps for the first time
[00:22:03] of his own personal rebellion, his own personal sin.
[00:22:08] This hard-hearted prophet who thought that he knew better
[00:22:11] than God was now being softened by God's grace.
[00:22:14] That's what I mean.
[00:22:15] He had an illumination of himself,
[00:22:19] but he wasn't crushed, he's still going to God.
[00:22:22] He knows that he deserves this discipline,
[00:22:25] but he realized that this was God's discipline
[00:22:29] and it was also God's rescue.
[00:22:32] That if God wanted to end Jonah,
[00:22:34] he could have done that just as easily as he saved Jonah.
[00:22:39] Storm and the sea and the fish
[00:22:41] were all uncomfortable for this man,
[00:22:43] but he knew that they were necessary vehicles
[00:22:46] that God was using to drive Jonah
[00:22:49] right back into his loving arms.
[00:22:51] And as a result, Jonah began to hope
[00:22:54] in the middle of this song.
[00:22:56] In verse four and in verse seven,
[00:22:58] he tells God twice, I'm gonna go back to your temple.
[00:23:02] Now he was a long way from the temple at this point.
[00:23:05] He's in the belly of a fish
[00:23:06] out in the middle of the Mediterranean ocean.
[00:23:09] If you're a prophet, where do you wanna be?
[00:23:11] If you're a prophet of Israel,
[00:23:13] prophet of God and ancient Israel,
[00:23:14] where do you wanna be?
[00:23:15] You wanna be at the temple.
[00:23:17] It might have even been
[00:23:18] that he had been at the temple when God said,
[00:23:21] Jonah, I'm telling you to go to Nineveh,
[00:23:24] that huge city and say to it against it
[00:23:28] what I proclaim to you.
[00:23:30] But Jonah now is saying from the belly of the fish,
[00:23:33] God, I'm going back to that very place
[00:23:36] from which I came.
[00:23:38] You are here with me right in the belly of this fish
[00:23:42] and I'm going to go back to your holy place.
[00:23:46] And I think what's happening here
[00:23:47] is that Jonah's self-righteousness
[00:23:50] was evaporating at this moment.
[00:23:53] God was birthing a new thing inside the prophet.
[00:23:57] It was an imperfect thing
[00:23:58] and I'll talk about that in a moment,
[00:23:59] but he was birthing a new thing within his prophet.
[00:24:02] In fact, some scholars even point out
[00:24:04] that throughout this song,
[00:24:07] Jonah mixes up the gender of the fish.
[00:24:11] On the book ends of the song,
[00:24:12] he speaks of the fish as male,
[00:24:15] but at the beginning of the song,
[00:24:16] he speaks of the fish as female.
[00:24:19] A lot of people think that the reason
[00:24:20] that Jonah did that is because he's saying
[00:24:22] it's like this fish is pregnant with me
[00:24:27] and I am going to be reborn at some point
[00:24:31] because God is doing a new work in me right here
[00:24:35] in this dark place.
[00:24:37] Jerry Bridges once wrote it this way,
[00:24:39] he said, your worst days are never so bad
[00:24:43] that you are beyond the reach of God's grace.
[00:24:47] That's the Christian perspective.
[00:24:49] God upholds us when we're at our worst.
[00:24:52] In the dark illuminated by God,
[00:24:55] we are not crushed by God
[00:24:57] because Jesus was crushed for us.
[00:25:01] Now you have to contrast this
[00:25:02] with some of the modern thoughts that we often have
[00:25:05] or that our flesh might have.
[00:25:07] There's a little book that gives an example
[00:25:09] of what I'm talking about.
[00:25:11] William McRaven wrote a great book,
[00:25:13] I really loved it called Make Your Bed.
[00:25:15] I think it was based off of a speech
[00:25:17] he gave to the University of Texas,
[00:25:20] but at one point he said,
[00:25:23] we will all confront a dark moment in our life.
[00:25:27] In that dark moment reach deep inside yourself
[00:25:32] and be your very best.
[00:25:35] All right, I get the sentiment,
[00:25:36] even kind of to some degree like the sentiment,
[00:25:40] but what do we do when we are the cause
[00:25:43] of the dark moment?
[00:25:45] That was Jonah's issue.
[00:25:47] He looked within and realized
[00:25:49] there's nothing good there.
[00:25:51] What do you do in that moment?
[00:25:54] It's there that we must know
[00:25:55] that we are not beyond the reach of God's grace.
[00:25:58] I can't say that enough.
[00:25:59] You're not beyond the reach of God's grace.
[00:26:02] You are not the singular case
[00:26:05] that has gone further than God has ever experienced.
[00:26:09] You know, like looking at your life
[00:26:10] and going wow, we got a real doozy here.
[00:26:14] We don't know what to do.
[00:26:15] That's not God.
[00:26:17] Within his triunity, he's seen it all.
[00:26:21] You're not beyond his grace.
[00:26:23] If Jonah shows us nothing else,
[00:26:25] he shows us a God who does not give up on his people.
[00:26:30] He keeps reaching out to those who belong to him.
[00:26:33] Okay, let me conclude with one last element
[00:26:36] of God's grace that I want you to see today.
[00:26:40] And it's this.
[00:26:42] God's grace produces a beautiful response.
[00:26:45] This to me is a framework for the Christian life
[00:26:49] that many believers are missing today.
[00:26:52] Okay, when God's grace truly impacts your heart,
[00:26:56] when you really begin to understand just a degree
[00:27:01] because I don't think on this side of eternity
[00:27:03] we'll ever comprehend it fully,
[00:27:04] but when we just begin to understand to a degree
[00:27:08] the favor of God towards his undeserving people
[00:27:12] when we begin to understand that,
[00:27:14] to begin to comprehend that,
[00:27:15] when we begin to realize the magnitude of his mercy
[00:27:18] and kindness towards us,
[00:27:21] we can't help but respond in a certain way.
[00:27:26] I'm firmly convinced by this.
[00:27:28] I'm convinced by the idea
[00:27:29] that an understanding of God's grace,
[00:27:32] no matter how small that understanding
[00:27:34] of that magnificent grace is,
[00:27:37] I believe that it can have many different ways
[00:27:41] I believe that it can have major results
[00:27:43] in a Christian's life.
[00:27:45] I believe that human life becomes most human
[00:27:48] when it's lived in the light of God's grace.
[00:27:50] Grace produces, in other words.
[00:27:54] That's a major reason why we even have
[00:27:56] the vision statement Jesus famous here in this church.
[00:28:01] Jesus is the one who brought God's grace.
[00:28:05] His cross gave God's grace access to us.
[00:28:11] Like a dam blown up with dynamite
[00:28:14] so that the old river can flow again,
[00:28:17] Christ's cross blew up sin
[00:28:21] so that the obstacle of God's grace,
[00:28:25] sin could be removed and his grace could flow
[00:28:28] towards us once again.
[00:28:29] And the more appreciative of that you become,
[00:28:31] the more Jesus becomes famous to you,
[00:28:35] the more grace driven you will become.
[00:28:37] It will have results in your life.
[00:28:40] And grace will produce.
[00:28:43] To illustrate what I'm talking about from scripture,
[00:28:46] I'll point you to Titus chapter two, verse 11 to 14.
[00:28:50] It's a longer quotation so just track with it.
[00:28:53] He says, for the grace of God has appeared
[00:28:57] that offers salvation to all people.
[00:29:00] So God's grace has come.
[00:29:03] And it, he says, teaches us.
[00:29:05] So grace teaches us.
[00:29:07] What does it teach us?
[00:29:09] To say no to ungodliness and worldly passions
[00:29:13] and to live self-controlled, upright
[00:29:15] and godly lives in this present age.
[00:29:18] This is an age Paul says that where we are waiting
[00:29:22] for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory
[00:29:24] of our great God and savior Jesus Christ
[00:29:27] who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness
[00:29:31] and to purify for himself a people
[00:29:34] that are his very own eager to do what is good.
[00:29:37] So what is Paul saying?
[00:29:39] He's saying that God's grace is the thing
[00:29:41] that best teaches us to live holy lives.
[00:29:46] Not fear, not worry, not panic, not pride,
[00:29:52] not legalism, not guilt, not shame.
[00:29:58] The best mechanism for teaching us to be a people
[00:30:01] who are zealous for good works
[00:30:03] is a comprehension of God's grace.
[00:30:07] Because when you get it, you never respond.
[00:30:10] People who respond this way don't get God's grace.
[00:30:13] When you respond with, oh, that's grace
[00:30:16] so I can do whatever I want.
[00:30:20] You don't get God's grace.
[00:30:22] When you get it, you say,
[00:30:25] I can't believe that he would do that for me.
[00:30:31] What in the world can I do for him?
[00:30:35] Okay, this is what God's grace does.
[00:30:38] It's a concept that I've wanted to have color this pulpit.
[00:30:44] That's why I hand wrote these verses from Titus 2
[00:30:46] on the floorboard beneath the pulpit
[00:30:50] when we built this stage.
[00:30:52] As God's grace is taught,
[00:30:54] we will respond in the best of ways.
[00:30:57] So how did Jonah respond?
[00:30:59] Okay, I'm saying that grace produces
[00:31:02] a beautiful response.
[00:31:03] How did Jonah respond?
[00:31:04] Well, he renewed his relationship with God.
[00:31:07] You see that all throughout this song, right?
[00:31:09] He's calling out to God.
[00:31:10] He's interacting with God.
[00:31:11] He's speaking with God.
[00:31:13] In chapter one, he's trying to flee
[00:31:15] from the presence of the Lord.
[00:31:16] That's what he said to the sailors.
[00:31:18] Now, he wants to talk with God.
[00:31:20] He wants to engage with God.
[00:31:22] He wants to relate to God.
[00:31:24] He wants to go back to God's temple.
[00:31:27] But he didn't stop with prayer.
[00:31:29] He went on to devote himself to God afresh.
[00:31:34] He said in verse nine,
[00:31:35] with the voice of thanksgiving,
[00:31:37] I will sacrifice to you
[00:31:41] what I have vowed I will pay.
[00:31:47] Jonah was saying,
[00:31:48] I'm gonna go back to the temple.
[00:31:50] I'm gonna offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving,
[00:31:52] but it will be more than just a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
[00:31:54] It will be me making a vow
[00:31:56] where I'm dedicating afresh my life to you, God.
[00:32:00] Perhaps you've had a moment like that
[00:32:01] where you become conscious of his grace, mercy, love,
[00:32:05] forgiveness and some new facet or wrinkle of your life
[00:32:07] and you wanna say to him,
[00:32:09] God, I wanna recommit and give my life to you
[00:32:12] for what you've done for me.
[00:32:14] That's what Jonah was doing, a prayer of dedication.
[00:32:16] Now, we don't offer animal sacrifices
[00:32:19] to do this kind of dedicating.
[00:32:21] We offer instead ourselves as living sacrifices.
[00:32:26] Pastor Jeff actually read this earlier
[00:32:28] in our worship service this morning
[00:32:30] from Romans chapter 12, verse one.
[00:32:33] I'll read it from the new living translation.
[00:32:35] Paul said,
[00:32:36] And so dear brothers and sisters,
[00:32:39] I plead with you to give your bodies to God
[00:32:43] because of all he has done for you.
[00:32:45] Let them be a living and holy sacrifice,
[00:32:47] the kind he will find acceptable.
[00:32:50] This is truly the way to worship him.
[00:32:53] That's what Jonah did.
[00:32:55] He spoke of sacrifices in the temple
[00:32:57] but his life was going to be a sacrifice also.
[00:33:02] He knew that his commitment to God,
[00:33:03] he knew that his vow was gonna require him
[00:33:07] to go minister to a Ninevite people
[00:33:10] that he was very uncomfortable around
[00:33:12] that made him squirm but he believed,
[00:33:15] I need to do it because God is who God says he is.
[00:33:19] He knew it cost him but God's grace
[00:33:21] drove him back into devotion to God.
[00:33:24] But Jonah also responded to God's grace
[00:33:28] with a really beautiful shout of praise
[00:33:31] at the very end of the song.
[00:33:32] It's kind of the pinnacle of the song,
[00:33:34] the crescendo of the song.
[00:33:35] It says salvation belongs to the Lord.
[00:33:39] Salvation belongs to the Lord.
[00:33:40] It was a statement of recognition on one hand.
[00:33:42] Jonah's just saying like,
[00:33:43] Hey, you've been saving everybody in this story God.
[00:33:47] You saved the sailors, you've saved me
[00:33:50] and you're probably gonna save the Ninevites.
[00:33:53] Salvation belongs to the Lord
[00:33:55] but it wasn't just a statement of recognition.
[00:33:58] It was a statement of submission.
[00:34:01] What Jonah is saying is God,
[00:34:03] you can give salvation to whoever you want to.
[00:34:07] I have been trying to act
[00:34:09] like the little arbiter of salvation.
[00:34:12] I've been trying to act like the one who says,
[00:34:14] no, the Israelites get it
[00:34:16] but not the wicked Ninevites.
[00:34:18] Surely they're outside the scope of God's saving grace
[00:34:23] but here he's saying, God, I submit to you.
[00:34:26] You decide.
[00:34:28] But it was also, if we're being honest,
[00:34:31] a statement that was intermixed with a lot of tension.
[00:34:34] Some of us might even be feeling a little funky right now
[00:34:37] because here we read of Jonah in the fish,
[00:34:41] singing a song, praying a prayer of dedication
[00:34:44] and saying, God, you can save whoever you wanna save.
[00:34:48] You can reach into lives that I've deemed too evil
[00:34:51] for your grace.
[00:34:52] You can rescue anyone,
[00:34:53] but we know that this is not really the attitude he had
[00:34:56] at the end of the book of Jonah.
[00:34:59] He's pictured arguing with God.
[00:35:01] He's pictured frustrated when a whole city has a revival
[00:35:05] and submits to God and repents of their evil.
[00:35:09] He struggles with it.
[00:35:11] Now I would say that the struggle
[00:35:13] and the fact that it's even written down
[00:35:16] might give us a little clue
[00:35:18] as to if this lesson eventually fully permeated Jonah's heart.
[00:35:23] Had it not, I don't know you'd have ever heard
[00:35:26] the story of the prophet Jonah,
[00:35:28] but I think God did break through into his heart
[00:35:31] at some point.
[00:35:32] Some people seen the conflict.
[00:35:36] Here's a guy in chapter two saying,
[00:35:38] God can save whoever he wants.
[00:35:39] And in chapter four saying, I'm so mad
[00:35:42] that you saved whoever you wanted to.
[00:35:44] Some people in seeing that conflict say,
[00:35:46] that must not be what's happening in chapter two.
[00:35:48] He probably isn't even celebrating or at best it's hypocritical,
[00:35:54] but I think what we're seeing
[00:35:57] is the complexity of the human heart.
[00:36:00] Don't you feel that complexity sometimes?
[00:36:04] God, you can save anyone.
[00:36:05] You can do anything.
[00:36:07] You can reach anyone.
[00:36:08] And then a minute or two later,
[00:36:12] oh man, I'm so mad at that group of people
[00:36:14] and I'm so upset about them.
[00:36:15] And I'm so, we're just the same way.
[00:36:19] We vacillate wildly between revelation and blindness,
[00:36:23] love and anger, grace and law.
[00:36:26] And here's the deal.
[00:36:28] Like Jonah, we so often see the grace of God for ourselves
[00:36:35] but have a harder time seeing it for others.
[00:36:38] When we're tempted, when we struggle,
[00:36:40] when we do something bad, what do we do?
[00:36:42] We go to the Bible, we see that his grace
[00:36:44] and mercy is new every single day.
[00:36:46] We confess our trespasses to him and his grace.
[00:36:49] He cleanses us from all of our unrighteousness.
[00:36:51] We're able to preach it to ourselves
[00:36:55] but it's a little more slow going for us
[00:36:57] to proclaim it for others.
[00:37:01] What this tells me is that we as human beings
[00:37:04] need constant exposures to God's grace.
[00:37:08] We have to constantly be exposed to it
[00:37:09] because the human heart is prone to law and judgment.
[00:37:14] So we need to be constantly exposed to God's nature.
[00:37:17] It's so antithetical to what we're naturally like.
[00:37:22] When cancer is treated with chemotherapy,
[00:37:26] multiple rounds are required, right?
[00:37:28] You don't go in once, you go in many times.
[00:37:31] There are many exposures to try to kill that cancer
[00:37:35] and our hard hearts require ongoing rounds
[00:37:39] of God's grace.
[00:37:41] That's part of the reason that we need church gatherings
[00:37:43] and small group gatherings and worship songs and sermons.
[00:37:47] We need constant reminders of God's grace
[00:37:51] because we will constantly be pulled
[00:37:53] in the opposite direction.
[00:37:56] So Jonah here became a recipient of God's grace.
[00:37:59] He was revitalized in it in this moment.
[00:38:02] And my prayer is that we also would grow
[00:38:04] in our understanding of God's grace
[00:38:08] and what it does to our lives.
[00:38:11] I'd like to close with a quotation
[00:38:15] from Pastor Chuck Smith,
[00:38:17] actually the pastor of the first Calvary Chapel.
[00:38:19] He said, grace transforms desolate and bleak plains
[00:38:25] into rich green pastures.
[00:38:29] It changes grit your teeth duty
[00:38:31] into loving enthusiastic service.
[00:38:35] It exchanges the tears and guilt of our own failed efforts
[00:38:40] for the eternal thrill and laughter
[00:38:44] of freely offered pleasures at the right hand of God.
[00:38:49] Grace changes everything.