And Father in heaven is we open your word, receive what you Holy
Spirit intend to do, cause us to leave this place shouting as
desperate people whose needs have been met.
Jesus, Jesus, Father in heaven, for your glory and our good.
Would you wake up complacent souls?
Would you shake us from the consumeristic, critical way in
which we so often treat your means of grace?
Speak now and remind us that apart from You we have nothing,
and in You we have everything we will ever need.
Give us expectation that we would be transformed even this
day. For your glory and our good, we
pray in Jesus name, Amen. This morning I'm going to read
from the book of Jonah. We started this series last
week. I'm going to read verses one
through 6. Will continue in this section
next week as well and go a little bit beyond verse one,
Jonah one. Now the word of the Lord came to
Jonah the son of Amitai, saying arise, go to Nineveh that great
city and call out against it for their evil has come up before
me. But Jonah rose to flee to
Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish.
So he said he paid the fare and went down into it to go with
them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
But the Lord hurled a great wind up on the sea, and there was a
mighty Tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to
break up. Then the Mariners were afraid,
and each cried out to his God. They hurled the cargo that was
in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them.
But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had
lain down, and was fast asleep. So the captain came and said to
him, What do you mean? You sleeper, arise, call out to
your God. Perhaps your God will give a
thought to us that we may not perish.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Please be seated. When we open the Word of God, we
are opening the Word that is alive, that is living, that is
God breathed. When we open the word to
familiar stories and passages, it's easy to forget that the
purpose of this word that is God breathed is to teach us, correct
us, to rebuke us, and to train us in righteousness.
This is an amazing book of God's word, 48 verses that speaks so
much to the darkness and descent of sin in our lives and so much
of the depth of God's mercy descending to us.
But it's easy to think, what more can I learn about Jonah?
You can learn something every time you open it.
Every time you open it, you can be taught, corrected, trained,
rebuked in righteousness. And friends, I want to tell you,
I think many of us don't expect that to happen.
And the reason we don't expect it to happen is because worship
is not much more than checking a box, moving through a service,
and going on to whatever's next. It's not the purpose of God's
Word. God's Word is to make us shape
us more and more like the one he saved us to be.
Every time you enter this sanctuary in Christ, you and I
still come as beggars, desperate for God to do what only He can
do. But so often that's not how we
enter. We near end with our own sense
of preferences. Am I going to enjoy this?
Am I going to get something out of this?
And we become complacent consumers as opposed to
desperate women and men who need to hear again, Jesus, Jesus,
what must I do now with Jesus? This morning's sermon is not
going to be very long. And we're going to come to the
table. We're going to pick up right
where we lift off. But I want you to hear you were
tempted to think there's not much in your life that really
needs to change. And I want to tell you, Jonah is
going to show you, Jesus is going to show you that there is
so much in us that is not what God desires and so much mercy to
meet that every day we live with every breath we take.
So let's start here. Jonah was a prophet of the Word
of God. He not only knew the word of God
and heard the word of God, he knew the character of God.
He's going to say so later in this little book.
The God is a God of mercy. But what happened to him?
As we look at Jonah's life, we're going to see this descent
into deep, deep darkness of sin. And it all starts with how he
viewed the word of God, God himself.
Look with me, verse one. Now the word of the Lord came to
Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh,
that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has
come up before me. The word of the Lord, not a
different word, not some other word.
The word of the living God came to Jonah and God was clear.
Friends, God is always clear with what He seeks to be clear
about. He doesn't lack the ability to
make His word clear. Some things aren't as clear as
others. But Jonah received a clear
message. And what was the message?
Go to the great city of Nineveh. The instructions were clear.
Thus begins Jonah's descent into the darkness of sin.
How did Jonah get where he was? Verse 2, Jesus says arise.
The Lord says arise, go to Nineveh, that great city.
Well, verse 3 tells us what happens.
But Jonah, remember that phrase? But Jonah?
But Jonah rose, So he did rise. Sin doesn't keep us neutral, OK,
Sin doesn't keep us neutral. God said arise, go to Nineveh.
Jonah rose and he went the opposite direction, and if you
pay attention to the scene, he just keeps getting lower and
lower and lower. Here we see the most precise
picture of what happens to us when we reject the Word of God.
There are two categories of sin in our lives.
Many of you know these. There's sins of Commission.
These are the sins where we actively do something against
what God's word clearly forbids. Sins of Commission.
Thou shalt not steal, but we steal.
Thou shalt not gossip, but we gossip.
Thou shalt not lust, but we lust.
Thou shalt not murder, but we murder.
Those are sins of Commission, but they're also sins of
omission, failing to do something that God requires.
Love thy neighbor. Pray for those who are your
enemies who persecute you. I have not committed adultery
against my wife. That would be a sin of
Commission. But there are many days I have
failed to love her as Christ loved the church.
Sins of omission. Jonah, in these few short verses
reveals to us that he is on the downward spiral of this darkness
because of both types of sin. He does not like what God made
clear. Go to that city once.
We don't like something that is in God's Word.
We then will use different things to begin to inform the
way we see God and see His word. Jonah's anger towards God we
will see and towards the people of Nineveh and his hatred is
actually understandable. Here's why.
The people of Nineveh in Assyria were evil people When they would
attack a country that they sought to occupy.
It was common for them to cut off both legs and one arm of the
soldiers they were fighting in order to shake their hand.
While they suffered and bled to death, it was common for those
who were the victims of their violence to have their heads cut
off and then family members to have those heads put on a post
in which they had to March around the city.
It was common for them to be stretched out and flayed, their
skins put up on walls. It was an evil people and Jonah
knew it. And they were not God's people.
He despised them and it's understandable that he did so.
God brings the message that he doesn't understand that he
doesn't agree with that. He wants to be no part of it.
And so his hatred towards that people now informs his theology
of God. His hatred towards those people
influence what he is going to do in terms of obeying God.
And what does he do? He gets up.
He doesn't rise towards Nineveh, but he descends as far away as
possible from the presence of the Lord and watch what happens
to his theology. He actually believes that he can
move far away from the presence of the Lord.
This is common for all of us and it goes back to our first
ancestors. It was about the word of God.
Eve heard Satan say, did God really say?
She says God did say. She succumbs to that dark
temptation, believing it would be light.
She eats the fruit, gives some to Adam.
They ate, and then what do they do?
First thing they hide. They hide from each other and
they hide from God. Then they make garments to cover
their nakedness. They're hiding from the presence
of the Lord. That's why God's first question
in the Bible is so powerful. Where are you?
It's not to indicate that he doesn't know.
He's to show that I know you're hiding and I'm coming for you.
That's the essence of Christianity.
Where are you? Jonah's hatred towards the
people of Nineveh, his distrust at the Word of God and the will
of God, informs how he now sees God and is influenced by what
he's going to do. So he flees.
It was his intention to flee God today, Friends, without getting
on a boat, where are you tempted to flee the Lord?
Without getting on a ship, where are you rejecting the Word of
God, whether in terms of sins of Commission or omission?
And if you right now are saying I'm not, then I'm telling you
right now you are. And you are blind to the things
that are going on inside you. All of us this side of heaven
are going to experience that war, that temptation to not take
God at His word. Was there.
Has there been a time in your life when you simply said, I'm
not praying that prayer, I'm not going to do that or I just can't
help it. It's how I'm made.
Where are you fleeing the Lord? Maybe it really is, I don't
know. That's OK Ask Him to show you.
Is there any part of my life where I am fleeing the Lord?
Any people I'm not willing to love, any place I'm not willing
to be courageous, any forgiveness that I've been
unwilling to give Jonah in The Dark Descent, The Spiral does
not take God at his word. He's angry.
There's hate, but I want you to notice two other things.
He's isolated, as best we can tell.
Nobody's giving him counsel, and he certainly hasn't taken
counsel from the Lord. And he is exhausted.
Sin, trying to flee from the Lord, trying to hide your sins
from the Lord. How do you do that?
You might be able to hide something from your husband or
your wife or your parents or your friends or your pastors.
Can't hide anything from the Lord.
Hitting Clear History doesn't wipe it out.
Slandering somebody and then offering to pray with another
person that you've slandered somebody about with doesn't wipe
it out. We all try to hide, We all flee.
The dark descent into this sinful spiral leaves us
exhausted. Jonah pays for his trip, goes to
the belly of the ship and goes to sleep and sleeps soundly.
But Jonah, I want you to put your name there.
But Mark but Ed. But Christina.
But Emily, where are you being tempted to flee from the Lord?
But now look at verse 4. But the Lord, but God.
Bill Lamberth often says this. My favorite 2 words in the
Bible. But God, now I want you to see
this. Jonah, informed by really bad
theology of his own making, believes he can flee from the
Lord. He's exhausted by this pursuit.
He sleeps what Scottish pastor Hugh Martin calls the sleep of
sorrow when all of a sudden the depth of God's love and mercy
descend up on the sea surrounding that ship.
The depth of darkness in the spiral of sin that we find
ourselves in cannot out sail the specific sovereign depth of
God's strategic strike to make us His own.
He loves us too much. Jonah is asleep above.
The storm has come. The storm has come at the hand
of the sovereign God. Sin, yours, mine always brings
with it a storm. I'm not saying that every
difficult thing you encounter is a result of some specific sin
you've committed. That's not biblical.
But every sin brings a storm with it.
And we may think it's only going to impact us, but it doesn't.
It impacts the people around us, our family, our church.
Jonah is asleep. The sailors above are
experiencing this specific strike.
The word in verse 4 says the Lord hurled.
It's like the image of a javelin being thrown towards a specific
target, and the target is the sea.
And it was a mighty Tempest. This Tempest was so great that
it threatened to break up the storm, but Jonas Sin and the
sorrow of his sin was so great, he was able to remain sound
asleep until the captain of the ship.
Have you watched all of the sailors throw all the literary
says hurl, same word, all of the stuff into the water?
And by the way, that's their living.
They're sailing with goods to make money.
That's their living. They're throwing it away to
survive. They're praying to their gods.
The one who should be praying isn't praying.
The prophet who had received the word of God is not believing the
word of God. And So what does God do in the
midst of the storm? He calls the captain to go
below. And the captain, without
understanding what's taking place, uses the exact same word
that God used to Jonah arise. What are you doing, you sleeper?
Wake up, arise. That's a good word for us.
Are you sleeping the sorrow of sin?
Is your Christianity just a cruise control?
Just happy to make it to the end?
Are you sailing away from the Lord?
The captain says arise, call out to your God.
Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not
perish. Hundreds of years later, Jesus
is going to be sound asleep on a boat.
This is powerful, the Sovereign Lord sound asleep as the
Sovereign Lord creates A Tempest, a squaw to come up on
the sea. And when it does, the disciples,
like these sailors, are doing everything they can to survive.
Finally, one of them asked Jesus, don't you care?
Don't you care that we're about to drown?
Mark Ford tells us that Jesus arises, speaks to the wind, to
the sea, to the storm he himself, as God Almighty, has
made, and says be calm, be still.
And it was. The greatest storm that Jesus
was going to face though was when he would be sent from the
Father descending to this earth, hanging on a cross that he would
die atone for all of our sins that belonged to him.
Jesus's body hanging on that cross as the sky turned black
said it is finished. Into your hands I commit my
spirits. His body taken down, put in the
tomb. And three days later he rose.
He conquered death. All of that was necessary
because I have fled. You have fled.
We all, like sheep, have turned to our own ways.
The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
The depth of our sin, of Jonas sin and the darkness cannot
outdo, outrun, or out sail the mercy, love and grace of God.
The depth of Jonas sin descending cannot overwhelm the
depth of Christ descending. Love for you.
So friend, hear the good news. Come to this table to be
reminded. Don't rush out of here to
something else without being impacted by what you've heard,
what you've experienced. His love is for you, even though
we flee all the time. Rest in Him, rest in His
promises. Table we're about to come to is
a table for believers, those who have trusted in Jesus today.
If you know you're not in Christ, we invite you not to
come forward, but to stay in your seat and think about the
things that you have heard. But for those who are in Christ,
it is not for us to clean ourselves up and then come.
It's not for us to stay in our seat because last Sunday we had
a better Sunday than today. This table's for you, brother,
you sister. So as we lead through the rest
of this service, calm, expectant, don't sail away from
this moment now, but be still. Know that He is God.
Trust Him to show you everything about your life and turn to him
and say, Lord thank you for making me yours.
Father, as we come bless this time we need you.
We're desperate for you, so wake us up and fill us.
Holy Spirit, for your glory and our good we pray in Jesus name,
Amen. Please stand.