Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I want to jump into the book of Jonah. Let's dive in.
[00:00:06] All right. That's my only. That's my only thing for you this morning. So if you have not been, if you were not with us last week, many of us know the story of Jonah. But for just a brief moment of review, chapter one starts off in Jonah.
[00:00:25] It says this. Now, the word of the Lord came to a certain prophet, and his name was Jonah. And we know that after the word of the Lord came to him, it wasn't a directive that God gave that Jonah wanted to hear. He was told to go to a massive city, the capital city of Assyria, a really bad, bad nation, nation that was not God honoring. And that nation, that city was called Nineveh. And Jonah said, nope, I'll go somewhere else. And we find that in chapter one, that he doesn't just flee away from to create greater distance between him, who he was in Israel and the city of Nineveh. It says that he fleed from the presence of the Lord. It says he went the other direction from not only where he was, but he was trying to get as far away from the nation of the Lord, which was Israel. And so he begins to go on this journey. And God says, nope.
[00:01:22] And sends a. Actually, it doesn't say, just say sends. It says, he hurls a storm. And this storm causes the sailors to be terrified and to realize that it wasn't just any natural storm, but this was a storm sent by God.
[00:01:40] And Jonah confesses that he is running from the presence of the Lord and says, you should throw me overboard. You. You might know this story already. And so it says that in verse 17 of chapter one, you can look in your Bibles. It says, the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three, three nights. So there's some review for you. We're going to look particularly today at just chapter two. Let me read the passage and then we'll pray and we'll look at your outline. Hopefully on the YouTube, if you have a bulletin on the back of your bulletin, it has the outline that we'll be looking at, or lines you can be filling in as we walk through this text. Look with me chapter two of Jonah. Starting in verse one, I'll read these ten verses is all that it is, but it's powerful. It says, then we know Jonah has been swallowed up by the belly, by the fish he's inside. And then look what it says. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God, from the belly of the fish saying, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
[00:02:53] For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea. And the floods surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me.
[00:03:02] Then I said, I am driven away from your sight. Yet. Can you say yet?
[00:03:08] That's going to be an important word later on. Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. The weeds were wrapped around my head. This is quite a picture we have here. At the roots of the mountain I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.
[00:03:29] Yet you brought up my life. For, O Lord, my God.
[00:03:37] When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you into your holy temple.
[00:03:44] Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope in steadfast love. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed. I will pay. Salvation belongs to the. Can we say it together?
[00:04:00] The Lord and the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out on dry land.
[00:04:09] Well, dear Jesus, we are, as we sung moments ago. We are grateful this morning for your mercy, for your great mercy that you continue to lavish upon us as your word says, your mercies are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. And as we here today, remember your mercy and your faithfulness help us to have our eyes and our hearts open to this text. What you want to say here? That your spirit would instruct us, you would keep distractions far from us, that you would show us how you want us to change because of what you have before us here in this passage.
[00:04:47] We're grateful, Lord, for your character, for your love and your mercy, your faithfulness and your holy holiness, your grace that we get to experience in so many ways.
[00:04:57] This morning, Lord, help us to worship you with a right heart in Jesus name, Amen.
[00:05:03] Well, as you know, I titled this sermon Worship in a Fish. As you can see. But as you know, prayer is an important part of our walk with the Lord. Amen. All right, cool.
[00:05:14] There are some strange places that we might pray, right?
[00:05:18] Some unique places. Some of us, we find a closet and we pray there. We find. It's our bedroom. Maybe it's in the living room. Maybe it's. As we're driving in the car, some of you might be praying as you're walking down a dirt road somewhere out in the fields. Any Other strange places? Any other places you've prayed before?
[00:05:35] In the shower? Anyone else?
[00:05:38] In your bed, in the bath, on the couch? How many of you have prayed inside of a belly of a fish?
[00:05:49] Anybody?
[00:05:52] Most likely.
[00:05:54] That would be the most unique place that any of us could offer a prayer. In this prayer, I entitled this. Not a prayer in Aphish, but worship. And I think as we read through this text, you will see that there is not just a prayer that we see here, but. But this is a heart of worship that Jonah has, which is quite different from, remember chapter one. What was his response to God running the other direction? But here we see that he turns his eyes towards the Lord. Also what we saw last week, if you were with us. You remember when I said this? It says that he fled from the presence of the lord. But Psalm 139 says this, that you cannot flee from the presence of the Lord. If you try to run away in any direction, the Lord's presence is there. You know that, don't you?
[00:06:41] And I said last week, it seems that Jonah hadn't read that psalm because he thought he could flee from the presence of the Lord. What's unique about this passage is this at least 8 times Jonah quotes from the Psalms.
[00:06:55] It's like he knew the Psalms, even perhaps that passage, that you can't flee from the presence of the Lord. And yet his actions acted like he didn't know that passage.
[00:07:05] Maybe that's true of your life as well, where we act like we aren't in line with what we already know to be true in the word. But let's look at verse one and then verse two. We'll start on what you can start writing and look at with me. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord from the belly of the fish. And now it's probably been maybe a couple days since initially the word of the Lord came to him. It says, then he went down into Joppa. He went down into the bottom of this boat, into this ship. And then later on we see that he goes down into the water. It's been a few days that he's been journeying from the presence of the Lord. And now that he's hit, what do we say? Rock.
[00:07:45] Rock bottom, quite literally. Or maybe fish bottom. I'm not sure he looks up because he can't get any lower than where he is right now. Now, I wanna. Just for the sake of proper context, some believe, including some Jewish tradition believe that Jonah died when he went into the belly of the fish. And when he died, then a couple things One, this was a vision. This was some experience that he had with God in this prayer. And then, so there's that view. There's also another view that maybe he was physically unconscious because how could he live inside a fish for three days and stay alive? And so there's that view as well. And then others said, no, he was awake. He was aware of the situation.
[00:08:33] But we don't know exactly when we, I hope, get to heaven, we'll see him. We don't know what happens with the rest of his life.
[00:08:42] When we get to heaven, we'll know one way or the other that we know a few things about this prayer. One, it seems to be pretty heartfelt.
[00:08:51] He says at the beginning that he calls out, and we'll see this in just a moment. He calls out in his distress. We see something else.
[00:08:58] This prayer occurs while he is in distress. He doesn't wait until God has saved him from the problem for him to say, now I'm going to pray, or, now I'm going to thank you for this. He, in the midst of the hardship, looks to the Lord. And then thirdly, when we see it's heartfelt, we see secondly that it occurs while he's in distress. But thirdly, we see that he knew the heart of God and he was willing to speak that in the midst of his hardship. He knew.
[00:09:29] He knew the Word.
[00:09:31] And he uses that in the midst of his prayer. It is a good thing, by the way, to pray the word. It's not that God doesn't know it, by the way.
[00:09:38] So it's okay, though, for us to say God in your word, you say blank in your word, you say this. And it's not God saying, oh, that's right, I forgot. But it's us reminding ourselves and our forgetful hearts of. Of the character of God. And so here we see. And you can write these in as we go through them. Six straightforward yet incredibly significant truths about God, the character of God that we maybe write this in somewhere that we must remember when we are in distress. Because that's Jonah's opening line. Here we see that the situation that he is in is he is in distress. Right now, there's two things before you write in point one, there's two things that we're gonna see. The first, we're gonna spend a lot more time on at the tail end. We're gonna see the end of it. When we look at the Scriptures, we often have this privilege.
[00:10:32] We can see and use the Scriptures as a window to see the character of God. And the heart of God, the mission of God, his desire for the lost. We look through Scripture or look at Scripture, and we can see this is the heart of God. Are you with me? Does that make sense?
[00:10:50] So it's a window into the heart, the character, the nature of God. God's word is here. Jonah, the book of Jonah. And even more particularly, we're going to see at the very end of the message that it's also something else for us. Jonah is. The book of Jonah is. It's not just a window into the character and the heart, the nature of God, it's also a mirror back to us.
[00:11:13] And we're gonna see in a minute, in a few minutes how Jonah is also a mirror, not just a window. So hold that kind of in your mind as we go through this point one in your outline. You can write this in the Lord. We're gonna first see. Look through the window at the character of God. The Lord say this out loud with me. Listens. The Lord listens. We look at. See this in verses 2 and verse 7. This is Jonah praying. I called or I cried out.
[00:11:38] The original language here is, I proclaimed to the Lord, that is Jehovah, out of my what?
[00:11:45] Distress. Some of your Bibles might say affliction. Now, notice this. It says, out of my distress. It is okay to come before the Lord and say, I am distressed.
[00:11:57] I don't have peace right now. God is not gonna scold you and say, you can only come to me when you're feeling good. And if you're not feeling good, I don't wanna deal with this. Like, there's a lot of messy going on right now, and I can't handle that. God can handle whatever that is. And so Jonah comes to the Lord out of his what?
[00:12:15] His distress. And the Lord, we see here's that window into the heart of God. God doesn't say, that's too much for me. I can't handle that. But it says this. Then the Lord listened to me. The Lord answered me. You go to the next slide. And he answered me out of the belly of Sheol. And as I said earlier, this is kind of this prayer, but it's also. There's an aspect of worship here. There's an aspect of almost a song. And so there's some alliteration we're going to see. There's some pictures that Jonah is going to draw for us in the midst of this prayer. So out of the belly of Sheol or Hel, or the underworld, the pit, in other words, the depths I have hit rock bottom and the Lord has heard me here. Isn't it good that you don't have to have your life cleaned up before you come before the Lord?
[00:13:06] Isn't that a good thing?
[00:13:09] Sadly, times for us as Christians, we don't demonstrate the Lord in that way. The Lord is good, taking us with whatever mess we bring and saying, I'm here and I will answer. Too often as Christians, even in the life of the church, we can say, get yourself cleaned up first and then you can come.
[00:13:30] We see the heart of God here as in the midst of you, at rock bottom, as messy as you are in distress that you are, come and I will listen. I can handle that. And so I want to encourage you. If someone comes to you with burden, with distress on their heart, be willing to sit there with them. Be willing to listen to them and not push away because you're feeling uncomfortable. Ask the Lord. Go ahead, help me.
[00:13:58] Help me to have peace right now so that I can model your heart to this person who is in distress. Notice, Continue. We see what out of the pit you heard my voice. Verse 7 says, when my life was fainting away, when my soul, when I was crumbling within myself, is the picture we get here. I remembered the Lord and my prayer, my supplication, my request came to you into your holy temple. What do we learn about the character of God here? Before we move on, we learn at least three things. One, he will listen to us even if we have been running away from him.
[00:14:39] When we turn back and look at him, he's not going to say, well, I'm going to wait until you've been good enough for a long enough period of time and. And then I will listen to you. Secondly, we see this, he will listen to us even if he is the last place that we turn. Notice that Jonah was at rock bottom before he turned to the Lord. The Lord doesn't say, well, you know what? If you had turned to me earlier, then I would listen. But because you have nowhere else to turn, now that I'm a last resort, I'm not going to listen to you. That's not what the Lord says.
[00:15:09] And thirdly, he will listen. Even though we see this in verse seven, even though he is perfect, even though he is one who is without sin, he will still say to us as people who struggle with sin on a daily moment by moment basis, he will still say, come, I'm ready to listen. Isn't that a good thing?
[00:15:33] Psalm 66:1 2 says this. I cried to him with my mouth and high praise was on my tongue. And if I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly, God has listened. He has attended to the voice of my prayer. Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me. What do we see both in Psalm 66 and here with Jonah? A humble heart. If you want the Lord to listen, it's not a matter of how cleaned up your life is. It's a matter of the posture of your heart.
[00:16:05] God, I need help. And when we come before him with a humble heart, our Creator will listen. Number two on your outline. You could write this in.
[00:16:13] Not just is the Lord one who listens, he's also one who disciplines.
[00:16:20] And this is a subject that we don't spend a whole lot of time talking about, but it's one that is important as we look through the window, if you will, of Scripture at the character and the heart of God. The he disciplines us. Look at verse three with me. For you, that is, God cast me into the deep, into the heart of the sea. And the floods surrounded me. All your waves and your billows, they passed over me. And if you read that, you might say, wait a minute, starting off in verse three. For you cast me in the deep. Who cast Jonah into the water?
[00:16:57] I heard mixed answers there.
[00:17:00] Jonah told them, if you throw. Told the sailors, if you throw me into the sea, then the sea will go from its raging to a peaceful, calm storm. A peaceful, calm waters. But here we see that Jonah doesn't say, those sailors threw me overboard.
[00:17:17] He says, for you, Lord, cast me into the deep. That is an important piece to catch. And here's why. Because Jonah, Jonah ending up in the waters here was an act of God.
[00:17:33] And this is not God's catch. This. This is not God's judgment towards Jonah as much as it is God's discipline. Now, what's the difference? 1. Here's the difference. The purpose of Jonah being thrown into the sea and going into the belly of the fish was not for the purpose of retribution, but for the purpose of restoration.
[00:17:54] He desired Jonah's heart to be turned, to be changed. It wasn't bad on you, Jonah. Shame on you. Now you get to be punished in the fish for a while. It was, I'm putting you in this very, quite literally stinky situation so that your heart would be changed.
[00:18:10] Hebrews 12:6 says this for the Lord. You know this. For the Lord disciplines the one. He what loves discipline is not pleasant in the time is It. But we look back and say, oh, that's why that happened. The Lord used that time. Now, just out of raise of your hands, how many of you either have children at home now or have raised children before?
[00:18:36] Okay. How many of you have disciplined your children now? Hopefully, the same amount of hands go up.
[00:18:42] If you are loving parents because you love your children, you do what when they do something wrong, discipline because you love them, you say, I see that you did something that was wrong, and I'm going to provide an opportunity in your life for there to be discomfort.
[00:18:59] Not because I'm mad at you and it's shame on you so much as it is. I'm going to insert this piece of discipline, whatever that looks like for that child, that personality, whatever that looks like, so that you don't do that again. The purpose of discipline is to bring about change. Can you say change now? Change is something that many of us don't often like people saying that we should do.
[00:19:23] I would like to change when I'm ready to change.
[00:19:26] But when someone else says, I don't like that about you and I think you should change, it's how dare you judgment rude. But when God says you should change, we can sometimes do a couple things. One, we can say, God, just make this stop.
[00:19:41] Or secondly, and this is preferable especially to God is God. What do you want me to learn from this? How do you want me to change through what is going on right now? So just as the Lord disciplines not in anger parents, so too should our discipline not be born out of anger, but out of love, out of a care. I see what you're doing is not right, is not good, is not healthy. And so I'm gonna put a situation around you that is not pleasant. But because I love you, this discipline is to bring about change in your heart.
[00:20:16] It did not bring the Lord joy to cast Jonah off the side of that boat and into the belly of the fish. He wasn't all excited and pumped about that, just as you parents hopefully are not excited. This doesn't bring you great joy when discipline has to occur.
[00:20:33] When you and I go through hardship, it might be not all the time, but it might be God calling attention to a part of our life, a part of your life, hoping that your relationship with him or maybe others might be changed. God desires to change us, doesn't he?
[00:20:52] He says, I see you as messy as you are, and so you can come as you are, but I don't want you to stay as you are. That's the heart of God, as we look through the lens, if you will, of Scripture at this text, God will take you as you are, but he does not want to leave you as you are.
[00:21:11] Why? Because he's called us to be holy, hasn't he? He says, I want you to be different, to be set apart not only from your old self, but also from the sin that so easily entangles you. Jonah sees the character of God as not just one who disciplines and one who listens, but one who is holy. You can write that in point three on your outline. The Lord is.
[00:21:33] Verse four goes on and says this. Then I said, I am driven away.
[00:21:41] Another way to say that, another interpretation of that same phrase, driven away, is I am cast out from your sight.
[00:21:49] And I said, when we were reading through this at the beginning, there is a particular three letter word there. Do you see that? It's in bold on the screen.
[00:21:56] I am driven from your sight.
[00:21:58] Yet. Can we say that together?
[00:22:00] Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. What is he saying with this holy temple? He's saying, well, I'm go back to Jerusalem. I'm going to see the temple or the tabernacle. What he's talking about with this holy temple is I'm going to yet again see your presence, experience your presence.
[00:22:17] Holy means what? Here's some pop quiz here.
[00:22:21] Set apart, set aside, consecrated. Yes. It's not just perfect because we know, especially as we look back in Scripture and we see, like Isaiah 6, and we see the angels that are around the throne, and we see this in Revelation as well. And they're looking at the throne and they're declaring three words, holy, holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. Now these angels, you have to remember, are also perfect because they're in the presence of God. But are they holy? No, not like the Lord. And so we see here it's not just a matter of being perfect, if you will, but being separate. And God desires us to grow in our distance and our separateness from our old self. That's why he put his spirit inside of us. He says, now be a new person. I want to change you. Now, Jonah's response to God's holiness is our focus here because. And we'll lean into this word holy for just a couple minutes, because God is holy. He can't be with sin. In the Old Testament, they understood this more, I think, than we do today. Remember Mount Sinai? The people were terrified about approaching the throne of God. You remember that? They said, moses, can you just go for us? We can't do that. God is too holy. We are terrified. They had a fear of the Lord that most of us have no idea about.
[00:23:39] Too often for us, this idea of God being our Lord or our friend, we use other terms like, yes, he's my friend. There's other derogatory things that people might say. In my opinion, derogatory things that people might say, like, Jesus is my homeboy and so on, that we're just lowering the value of God.
[00:23:57] And when that happens, friends, that's a crime against the throne.
[00:24:02] Because he is not just our buddy who hangs out with us. We see if we look through the lens of scripture, the window, we see that he is a holy, holy, holy one who deserves our attention. And when we diminish the holiness of God or forget him in our hearts, the result is always sin. When we say, God, you should be up here. But I would like to lower you either to my perspective or lower than my perspective. The result is us moving away from God, not towards him. And isn't this what happened with Jonah? Jonah, as a prophet of the Lord, he may have even said, yes, the Lord is holy. But then the call of God came upon his life. And. And he said, I'm gonna take the call of God, which should be up here, in my opinion, which should be down here. I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna reverse them.
[00:24:49] And when he did that, did he stay and obey the Lord? No, he ran the other direction.
[00:24:56] And that led him to sinking into these deep waters. As he sank, this reality seems to have permeated his mind, and he finally realized quite literally the depth of what he had.
[00:25:09] And we see here in this passage, Jonah's greatest distress was not the possibility of drowning, but rather it was his separation from the God he said he would serve.
[00:25:20] We see the Word, yet here it's Jonah now counting on the mercy of God.
[00:25:26] That's why we see that I was driven away because of my own sin. I was driven away from your holy presence. Yet I am counting on your mercy.
[00:25:37] Friends. Can we count on God's mercy?
[00:25:39] We should also not only count on it for ourselves, but for others. And we're going to see something here, just kind of a glance into the future. In this message, we're going to see something. And even chapter four is, Jonah counted on God's mercy and desired God's mercy for himself, but he didn't desire it for Nineveh.
[00:26:00] How terrible.
[00:26:02] How terrible.4.
[00:26:05] The Lord is not only holy, yes, but he sees us. Even though he is distant and separate. He is also one who is near. And because he is near, he sees us in the midst of hardship. And he will deliver. You can write that in point four. The Lord delivers. Look what it says. Verse five and six. The waters. This is quite a picture. The waters closed in over me to take my life.
[00:26:28] The seas surrounded me.
[00:26:30] Weeds were wrapped around my head at the root of the mountain. I went down.
[00:26:37] These bars, they closed over me. And then we have this three letter word again. What is it yet?
[00:26:43] You brought me up my life from the pit. You brought me up there again. We see him counting on the mercy of the Lord. And this is still while he is. Where is he praying this?
[00:26:54] In the belly of the fish. He's counting on God's mercy. In the Bible, we see over and over again that God is one who delivers. We see that time and time again. People like the nation of the Hebrews from the nation of Egypt. God does what? How does he deliver them? Through plagues. And then he parts the Red Sea and he leads them into freedom. We see somebody like David being delivered from the hand of Saul. We see someone like Daniel being delivered from the den of lions. We see three faithful young men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, being delivered from this fiery furnace. Really, the list can go on and on, but the question you might be asking is this.
[00:27:38] Does God deliver today?
[00:27:40] Does he deliver outside of that?
[00:27:43] When you and I hear the stories of deliverance, it's pretty moving, isn't it?
[00:27:47] When we see God stepping in and delivering, it is a powerful, powerful thing.
[00:27:52] Corrie10 Boom, as you might know, was the concentration camp in the midst 1940s.
[00:28:00] Corrie ten boom, a Dutch Christian watchmaker, was imprisoned in his concentration camp in World War II for hiding Jews from the Nazis.
[00:28:10] Facing brutal conditions, she and her sister Betsy clung to their faith, sharing God's love with fellow prisoners.
[00:28:17] In 1944, Corey was miraculously released due to a clerical error just one week before all women her age were sent to gas chambers.
[00:28:27] She later wrote in the Hiding Place that she believed God orchestrated her deliverance to spread a message of forgiveness, including reconciliation with a former camp guard. Years later, you might have read that story.
[00:28:41] More recently, a story that I ran across.
[00:28:44] A contemporary testimony, 2021, from a sermon that was shared, recounts a grandmother who struggled with alcoholism for decades. After hitting rock bottom, she prayed desperately for freedom from addiction. She described a moment of clarity during a prayer, feeling God's presence lift her burden.
[00:29:06] She joined a recovery program and now is able to mark 20 years of sobriety, attributing her deliverance to God's grace and God's strength.
[00:29:18] Harriet Tubman, born into slavery in the early 19th century, believed God guided her to freedom and beyond. After escaping slavery in 1949, she felt called by God to return to the south multiple times, leading over 70 enslaved people to freedom via the underground rail. Or.
[00:29:35] Harriet often spoke of divine visions and promptings that helped her evade capture, such as sensing danger on certain routes. Her deliverance from slavery and her role as a Moses for others are celebrated as acts of God's guidance and God's delivery.
[00:29:54] Over and over again, we find that God shows up. And friends, even though God might not deliver physically, he is one who delivers spiritually. Every single time, no matter what bondage or what slavery that somebody is in, God shows up and says, my name is deliverer. My name is Deliverer. I own the right God does to the name deliverer.
[00:30:20] So what do you need delivery from?
[00:30:22] And this subject can be an entire message in and of itself. But I want you to think about that as you consider God as we look through the window of Scripture at the character of God and see him as deliverer. What do you need delivery from? I'll name some things, maybe, that might be going on in your life right now. Do you need delivery from anger? Or from alcohol, from pornography, from drugs, from foul language, from pride, from overeating? From comparison, debt, laziness, bitterness, apathy, depression, anxiety, violence, controlling personalities, fear, whatever those things may be. Maybe you need to spend a moment right now and think, God, what do you want to deliver me from that I've been holding onto?
[00:31:04] Because here's the reality, friends. Hiding from what keeps you in bondage isn't going to bring deliverance.
[00:31:11] Just as Jonah named what he needed deliverance from, so too we must do the same. Unless you and I name it, confess it.
[00:31:20] Unless we do that, we are allowing the enemy to control that part of us.
[00:31:27] And we'll never be able to experience deliverance as long as we keep that in the dark.
[00:31:33] As long as we say, this is my own thing, I'll handle it myself. Until we name it and bring it before the Lord. We won't experience the deliverance that the Lord wants for us, the freedom that John 8:36 says when he says, so if the Son has set you free, you will be free indeed. In order to do that, you must take the bondage that you're in, the thing that you need to be delivered from, whatever that is and bring it before the Lord and say, I Need freedom from this. Will you help me? And the Lord again, He owns the rights to the name deliverer, and he will do that in your life and my life.
[00:32:09] Fifth, you can write this in on your outline. The Lord is not just a deliverer. He is also one who is jealous.
[00:32:15] He is jealous for our attention.
[00:32:18] He is jealous for our hearts.
[00:32:20] And shouldn't he be? He created us.
[00:32:23] Look what it says in verse 8. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of the steadfast love of.
[00:32:32] Forsake their hope of steadfast love.
[00:32:35] The new living. That's what ESV says. New living translation says this. It's kind of a uniquely phrased sentence in the original language.
[00:32:43] It's really like this. Those who pay attention to or guard or obey. Empty idols or idols. Because they're all empty. If they're idols, they forsake their faithfulness to God. You can't both hold on to I'm going to be faithful to God, and I'm going to be faithful to this other thing out there, whatever that may be. You choose. Is it going to be the Lord that I'm trusting in that I'm holding to? Or is it going to be these other things that bring me comfort or. And satisfaction? Verse 9 says this. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed. I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. The Lord's saying this. Don't look anywhere else.
[00:33:25] Don't look anywhere else. I love. There's this passage in Jeremiah chapter two. It says this. Listen, for my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves. Broken cisterns that can hold no water.
[00:33:46] Here's what we see. The Lord saying is, there are plenty of times you and I do this too. By the way, where we say, there's gonna be a part of my life that I'm gonna look for satisfaction in. And maybe it's when I'm anxious, I'm gonna run to Facebook and I'm gonna scroll or to TikTok or to the shorts or whatever that is.
[00:34:02] Maybe it's I'm gonna go to this music or I'm gonna go to this book, or I'm go these things, not that they're in themselves, bad things, but they can't hold up. They can't hold you up. And the Lord says, I'm the only one who can hold you up. These things are fine in and of themselves. But when you are Feeling drained and empty. When you need some direction. When you are. As Jonah starts off this entire passage, he says, out of my distress. When you are in distress, he says, there's so many things you could turn to. But that's not what I want you to turn to. I want you to turn to me. I'm the one who's going to hold you up when you need to be saved from whatever this distress is. Salvation belongs to who?
[00:34:45] To the Lord. To the Lord.
[00:34:47] Number six on your outline, it's this.
[00:34:51] The Lord, he is merciful.
[00:34:56] The Lord, he is merciful.
[00:34:59] Verse 10 says this. And the Lord, after all the things that Jonah has just said, the Lord spoke to the fish. Because the Lord can speak to any animal. And they always listen, right?
[00:35:11] Every time. No animal is gonna ignore him and says, I'm gonna do my own thing. Only people do that.
[00:35:17] So I don't know what you wanna take from that.
[00:35:20] But when the animals, they hear from the Lord, they always obey. Maybe we need to get in line with that. Making sure.
[00:35:25] Always listening to him. The Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited. That sounds pleasant.
[00:35:32] Vomited Jonah. Like I said, there's a lot of pictures going on in this chapter.
[00:35:36] Vomited Jonah up out onto dry land.
[00:35:40] Now, scholars assume that Jonah was dropped off back at. Do you remember where he left from? Back at the beginning in chapter one.
[00:35:50] Joppa.
[00:35:52] Imagine being a guy who sells tickets there.
[00:35:55] Just like for a second with me. Jonah walks over. He looks like he's in a hurry, and he's distressed, because he is. And he's on his way, running from the presence of the. He pulls out his money, he gives it to the ticket guy, and he's like, what's the farthest place? He says, what's the farthest place you're going? Oh, that ship's going to Tarshish. He's like, I'll do that. Gives him a bunch of money, gets on the boat thinking, I'll never come back, and then he leaves. And who knows how much time goes by? And then the storm happens and all that. The ticket guy comes back the next day or the next day and the next day, and it's announced the third or fourth day in, and he's there selling tickets to people going to other places.
[00:36:28] And then this. I don't know. Does a fish just kind of show up off the shore a little bit?
[00:36:34] And then it says that.
[00:36:36] If you look in your Bibles with me, it says that he vomited Jonah up onto dry land. Now, I don't know if that's just, like, on the shore or if that's actually dry land. And I'll be honest. I know it's kind of funny, and I'm kind of laughing about this, but actually, there's people who consider. They're not sure what this is, what this would have looked like. Was it just the fish opened its mouth and Jonah was able to leave, or literally, the fish projected Jonah out along with everything else that was in his stomach for that long.
[00:37:04] And so here's the ticket guy, right? He's selling tickets, and then he's like, what's that water going? That's strange. And then he sees something leaving the water, and Jonah ends up on dry.
[00:37:16] On dry land. Now, I don't know if that's actually what happened, but that's just looking at the text. Vomited Jonah out on dry land. And he's like, what happened? And then Jonah kind of gets up. He takes the seaweed off or whatever, and the guy's thinking, I don't want him coming close to me.
[00:37:30] And then Jonah realizes. He looks around, and he maybe nods at the ticket guy.
[00:37:36] And then Jonah begins his journey of about 500 miles or so to.
[00:37:41] Now, we're gonna see that in a couple. Couple of weeks. But we see here the Lord is merciful. The Lord did not need to save Jonah. He could have called on a couple other prophets. There were other prophets at the time. Hosea is around. Amos is around at this time, but he says, no, Jonah, I want you.
[00:37:58] Psalm 145. 8 says this. The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
[00:38:06] Now, that's the last point there. But there's some key things we need to look at as we look at this whole picture of chapter two. What do we learn from this passage?
[00:38:15] Jonah is. Maybe we think about. You can go to the next slide.
[00:38:18] Think about this title that I put here. And this is really where it leans into your life and my life. And so I really want you to hear what this passage is telling us. Jonah, he remembered, and he praised the nature, the work and the character, the goodness of God while he was in the fish.
[00:38:39] Is this not what worship is?
[00:38:41] We often put songs to it. If we're singing worship songs, but we're talking about the character of God. We sing songs about God having amazing grace, right? We just sung about God's mercy. We sing about his holiness. All we're doing is we're saying, God, you already know that you are like this. And All I'm doing is saying it back to you because my soul is forgetful and I need to remind myself.
[00:39:02] And so in the midst of this prayer, this worship, if you will, we could say it's like this for all of us.
[00:39:13] It's worship while we're still in darkness, not after we've been saved from darkness. It's worship while we are in despair. That is remembering, celebrating and calling upon God in his character. It's worship when you don't know what's next. It's worship when you know you just messed up royally.
[00:39:33] It's worship when God is upset with your actions. It's worship when you remember the character of God in light of your own faults. It's worship when you are worried.
[00:39:45] It's worship when you're anxious. It's worship when you're confused.
[00:39:48] It's worship when life literally stinks.
[00:39:52] It's worshiping God for who he is, not because of our circumstances.
[00:39:57] It's remembering that God is our hope.
[00:40:00] That's what we see here in this passage. It's in the midst of how hard my life is, the distress that I'm walking through. I'm going to turn my eyes up and realize he is the God who never changes. Jonah 2 teaches us this. Jonah's worship didn't come after he was saved, though he had faith that God would save him in some way he would be saved. He held to God's character even while he was in the sea, in the midst of the problems, in the midst of the darkness.
[00:40:29] Doesn't that teach us something?
[00:40:31] It's not just saying, God, make this stop, but God, teach me through it and help me to have a heart of worship in the midst of it.
[00:40:40] Three things that I want you to conclude with that we'll conclude with application.
[00:40:44] You can write down. If you're writing things down and haven't put all the pens away.
[00:40:49] Firstly, it's this.
[00:40:50] If you've never trusted in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, remember this. There's a particular phrase that Jonah said, salvation belongs to the There is no one else on earth that can save you from the hardships that you're experiencing, but primarily from the biggest hardship, your sin.
[00:41:12] Every one of us criminals against a holy God. And he says, there is no one else, no one in all. No matter how far you look to the east or the west, no one can save you. And except me, it takes God maybe putting us in a hard situation for us to look up and say, I guess there's no one else who can help me. And God might just do that.
[00:41:34] I'm gonna let you go through hardship because I want you to realize you might have to hit rock bottom. But I want you to realize I am the only one who can save you.
[00:41:43] Or instead of us hitting rock bottom, maybe we could be like some of these animals and listen to God the first time when he says, hey, I want you. Yes, God, I'm coming. I'll do whatever you say. So if you are not, if you have never trusted in Jesus, firstly, He is calling you today, Trust in me, because salvation belongs to me. You can't do it by yourself. No matter how much work you do, no matter how many good things you do, no matter how many church services you go to, good things that you do to other people, you cannot save yourself.
[00:42:15] Secondly, the thing we learn from this application piece is if you are in a place of despair today, or uncertainty or hardship, questioning, fear, maybe remember this, that he is the God of both the hills, the good times and the valleys.
[00:42:34] He is the God of both. And while Jonah at first was in his own nation, doing his own things, God was God in control of all things. And while Jonah is in the midst of despair, God. God is still God. He is in charge. Sovereign is the word we use over all things. And not only is he the God of the hills and the valleys, but he is with you when you're on the hills and the valleys. He is with you in both of those places. And he's calling us to do this. Hold on to my character, no matter where you are in the spectrum of my life is fantastic to. My life is at rock bottom. Hold on to me is what he's calling us to do. And lastly, I said at the beginning that there was two pictures that we could have with Jonah. Two. One of them was using Jonah as a window, right? And the second one was using Jonah, too, as a mirror.
[00:43:28] There is some debate, some conversation around this. And I think as we look at Jonah 4, in a few weeks we'll see this is. Was this prayer one of true repentance?
[00:43:39] Was it of true repentance? Now, at first glance, we might say, of course it was. Look at all these good things that he says. But then if we go just a little while later into chapter four, we see Jonah's heart is again far from God. He is not seeking mercy for these people. He is seeking their destruction. And what does that tell us? It says something to all of us here today.
[00:44:02] Too often we come to places like this. A church service, a Bible study, we sing the songs of God's character and God's goodness and God's faithfulness, God's kindness.
[00:44:16] But then you go home and you yell at your spouse.
[00:44:19] You go home and you yell at your kids. You go home and you lie at work.
[00:44:25] You go home and you show no mercy to somebody else. Love is far from your language when you talk to somebody that you disagree with.
[00:44:32] And yet we come to places like this and we sing, as Jonah did, of God's goodness and God's kindness.
[00:44:40] This is a mirror.
[00:44:42] It causes us to look at ourselves and say, oh my word, am I like that?
[00:44:47] Is that me? Do I go to church and sing all the songs and put my smiley face on and tell everyone that life is fantastic? And then I go home and mercy is far from me.
[00:44:57] God's heart, that's not reflected in me.
[00:45:02] There are some here today that is you to be very pointed that you will leave here today. You left here for however many years in the past after have sung the songs and smiled and all the things, and know all the things about the scriptures.
[00:45:17] You can talk all about the character of God through the lens of God, but you've never actually held up the word of God as a mirror and said, do I display the heart of God when I'm not in front of the people of God like this.
[00:45:34] It requires our repentance, requires us to say, today, God, I'm sorry that I was like Jonah in chapter four. I praised you in one day and I forsook you in another.
[00:45:47] I declared your mercy one day and I showed it to no one else. Later, I spoke kindly to these people and I cursed other people.
[00:45:57] Just a matter of days and maybe a matter of hours.
[00:46:00] Friends, this is where it's a mirror to us, where we have to say, God, I'm sorry. I don't want that to be me.
[00:46:08] Our repentance and our humility is what will change us. And God desires us. Remember, he will take us as we are. But he says, I don't want you to stay as you are. And so here today, friends, it's don't stay like you are.
[00:46:24] Ask God, how do you want to change me? I'm willing to be changed today.
[00:46:28] And if you're maybe one of those people, we sing of God's goodness and go home and not show it at all to anybody else today. Ask God to forgive you. Repent of that sin.
[00:46:43] Lord Jesus, we are grateful today of your mercy.
[00:46:47] We know that you are one who, no matter what we have done in the past, you are one who forgives us and you have a heart for us to change to look like you.
[00:47:01] And so, as we consider this prayer and we are reminded of your beautiful character, your beautiful love and mercy. You as our deliverer, you as a holy God, you as one who listens to us when we're in despair. You. You as one who desires to lift us up when we are in need. You are also one who says, repent and keep repenting.
[00:47:23] Turn to me and don't look away.
[00:47:26] Hold tightly not only to your mercy for us, but Lord, you ask us to show mercy to others, to reflect you in every area of our life.
[00:47:37] And so we're grateful this morning of your mercy for us. Help us to be a people that show that to the people in our lives.
[00:47:43] Help us to look to you when we're in despair.
[00:47:46] Help us to know how to reflect you as people. Come to us who are in despair.
[00:47:53] Lord, this morning we lean on your character and your spirit.
[00:47:57] We sit under the cross today as one who has redeemed us, who has bought us, who has shown grace to us, who are straying from you at times, and you continue to call us back over and over again.
[00:48:10] We find peace today knowing that we can sit together as one under the cross.
[00:48:16] In Jesus name, amen.
