Something massive happened that went down in history as one of
the biggest volcanic eruptions. That town of Pompeii in Italy
was covered in volcanic ash and people to this day can be found
frozen in time before the volcano hit them.
So how were people found? Some were found underneath their
Cellars, hiding. Others were found at the top of
their buildings, as if they were trying to escape from all of
this volcanic heat. But one man, a guard, was found
doing something very interesting.
There he was found holding on to his weapon, stood by the city
gate. So as all of this volcanic
eruption had come towards him, that man stood there clutching
his weapon, refusing to move. Why didn't he move?
Because his captain had told him to stand guard.
And here he is frozen in time, thousands of years later, and
everyone remembers that man as a faithful man to his captain.
And the question I want to ask you today is when the Lord Jesus
Christ returns, will he find you faithful to him, the captain?
So today I've got sort of five signs I'd like to share with
you, 5 signs that you might just be backsliding, that you might
just be lukewarm, or you might be drifting away from God.
The first sign is this. And we're going to look at the
prophet Jonah as we do this. But the first sign is that
you're running from God. Jonah, chapter one, verse 3,
says, But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of
the Lord. You know the story well.
Jonah was a prophet of the Lord God and God.
God told him, I want you to go to that place, Nineveh, and I
want you to preach repentance. Tell them to to flee from their
wickedness. Tell them to turn to me.
Tell them that there is a wickedness that they are doing
and they must repent of this sin.
But what did Jonah do? Instead of obeying the Lord
gods, he ran in the opposite direction.
Now, we're very good at giving Jonah a hard time, aren't we?
Why? Because we think, well, if God,
the Lord God, had given you this task, why didn't you just do it?
It was a privilege to preach the Lord's message, was it not?
And yet history tells us that this people who lived in
Nineveh, the Assyrians, were the most terrible people that has
ever lived. Do you know what they used to do
to their their captors? You can see this in museums if
you don't believe me on on paintings, in archaeology, we
can see. Do you know what they did?
They used to skin them alive, so it's no wonder that Jonah was
terrified. It's like us going to one of
these dangerous countries and being told to preach repentance.
Many of us would be fearful to do that.
And so Jonah also was scared, and he ran in the opposite
direction. Now the question needs to be
asked, why did he run to Tarshish?
What was special about Tarshish? Well, Tarshish is known in
history for being traders of tin.
It's also known for being a place where there was lots of
gold, there was lots of wealth. To some people, Bible
commentators believe, well, maybe Jonah went there because,
you know, he wanted to get rich, he wanted to make a bit of
money. You know, like the the typical
Tele evangelist we see on TV, it was all about money.
But it's very likely the main reason he chose Tarshish is
because he was Nineveh and Tarshish was in the complete
opposite direction. In other words, he wanted to get
as far away from where God had told him to go and to run in the
opposite direction. Can I ask you a a personal
question right now? I wonder, are you running from
God? There was a Brazilian woman who
grew up in a Christian home. Her parents smothered her with
love. They loved her to pieces.
But as this girl grew up into her teens, she got in with the
wrong crowd, and she started following that crowd into the
wrong scene, taking the wrong things.
And what happened to this young girl?
Well, eventually, because she had a habit that she needed to
somehow finance, she became a woman of the streets.
And one night, after a very hard night on the streets, she came
back to a dingy flat and she sort of just sat slumped on the
floor. As she sat there, she noticed
that someone had posted a picture through her letterbox,
and she looked at it. It was a picture of her mother.
As tears filled her eyes, she turned it over and read on the
other side these words. We don't care what you've done,
we just want you to come home. And perhaps that's a message for
someone listening to me right now.
God is saying to you right now. I don't care what you've done, I
just want you to come home. OK?
The second sign that you might be backsliding is that you are
justifying your sin. Just look at verse.
The second part of verse three with me.
He went down to Joppa, that's Jonah and found a ship going to
Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went
down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of
the Lord. Do you notice this?
It almost feels like, OK, Jonah's being disobedient, but
now all of his circumstances are aligned.
Everything's sort of weaving together perfectly.
It's almost as if God is smiling upon his situation.
So Jonah needs to get away. He needs to get away as fast as
possible. He goes down to a port in Joppa.
I don't know if you've been at a seaport, but there's not always
ships around. And here we have a ship that
very conveniently is going in the opposite direction to
Nineveh. So Tarshish.
So Jonah reaches into his pocket, and again, rather
conveniently, he's got just the right amount of money to pay the
fare to get onto the ship. He then gets onto the ship, he
goes right down to the bottom deck, and what does he find?
A nice cosy bed. So he gets into the bed.
And what do boats do when you're on them?
They Rock You back and forth. So here he is, being cradled
like a little baby to sleep. When Jonah looks at the
situation, it's not as if God's pouring down his wrath, his
anger on him. It's it seems like, oh, maybe
God's OK with me doing this. Maybe God really didn't care
that much about me going to Nineveh.
Maybe everything's going to be OK.
And if you've ever backslidden, or if you're about to go to a
sin, you can often find yourself justifying the sin in your mind.
I remember years ago when I found myself in a a certain sin
and I'd read online, you know about health benefits to doing
this sin if you like. And I started to justify in my
mind, no, I need to do this. It's so easy, isn't it, for us
to deceive ourselves? The Bible says that the heart is
deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.
Here's another example of this. I had a friend and he was a
pastor and my friend. One night his family were away
from home. Now his family never went away,
but his his wife and children had gone to visit their their
parents on the other side of the country.
So here he is, This man is home alone.
And because he wasn't the greatest cook, he thought, do
you know what I'll I'll just walk to McDonald's and I'll get
myself a a fast food, a burger or something to eat.
As he's walking down the street for the first time in his life,
a beautiful woman stops him in the street and wants to get to
know him. This woman, we don't know
exactly, but he believes she could have been, yes, a woman of
the night and she wanted money from him, but this woman just
wouldn't leave him alone. He was very attracted to this
woman. And he's never had this
situation happen before. And he's all he had to do is
say, come back to my house. I've got an empty house.
There was no accountability. He was OK.
He was safe. He could get away with the sin.
And he might think in his mind, well, maybe God's OK with this
happening. Why, out of all the nights in
the in the year, why did this woman approach me on this night?
That's how the mind could work. Now, in the Lord's grace, that
man, as you know, he's a pastor and the Lord gave him the
strength not to walk into this temptation and to be strong.
But you can see what I'm trying to say here.
Just be careful, because the devil is very crafty and he
knows how to get into our minds and how to deceive us.
OK, The third sign that you might be drifting away from God
is this. God will send a storm to get
your attention. Just look at verse four with me.
But the Lord sent out a great wind on the sea and there was a
mighty Tempest on the sea. So the ship was about to be
broken up. OK, now if you are living in
willful sin and if you are truly a child of God, if you have been
adopted into God's family, I want you to know something.
God will not allow you to stay comfortable in your sin.
God will send a storm. Something big, something
powerful will come into your life to wake you up.
Hebrews 12 verse five says this My son, do not despise the
chastisement of the Lord. You see, God disciplines every
son or daughter that he loves. And sometimes God will send
these things that will really hurt.
They'll really sting. But it's a way of us coming away
from the sin and drawing back to the Lord Jesus Christ in
sacrifice, in repentance and obedience.
In my own life, very recently, I had a a horrible situation that
hit me really hard. Now, you know, sometimes I
struggle to say these things on the Internet in front of
everyone because I think, wow, it was OK when there was just a
few thousand people watching. But now it's getting very
public. So there's been a lot of sin.
There's been an idol of YouTube. I've changed.
There's no two ways about it. In the last year I have changed.
I've fallen from that closeness, that intimacy we've got.
And so God sent something massive and as honest as I want
to be with you, this is too embarrassing to share on the
Internet. But he sent this thing, and for
basically 9 days straight, I was crying.
I was weeping, I was spending long hours just walking miles
and miles, pleading with the Lord God.
In the end, I made two vows to the Lord.
Again, I won't share those with you, but I made these vows
because I needed God so badly, and I believe that in the Lord's
grace. Now this situation, I've come
out on the other side. It seems that things are
positive. I believe God used that to
chastise me, to discipline me. And I'll be honest, I can now
see clearly. I can see what life is about and
what the Lord wants me to do. OK, the the 4th sign that you
might be drifting away from God is that you are self preserving
yourself. You're trying to look after
yourself. You're just caring about your
needs above everyone else's. Look at verse five of me of
Jonah chapter one. Then the marinas were afraid and
every man cried out to his God and threw the cargo that was in
the ship into the sea to lighten the load.
But Jonah had gone down into the lowest parts of the ship and had
lain down and was asleep. You know, in the Bible it says
in the last days, the love of many will grow cold.
And one of the signs that we just truly don't care about God
in the same way is when we just become so obsessed with
ourselves that we don't care about other people.
We're just self preserving. A bit like my OC DS where I'm so
obsessed with trying to look after myself and that I'm OK and
I'm safe, but I don't care about other people.
That's a dangerous sign when you're like that.
It's a dangerous sign when you forget that acronym, which goes
like this. The real way to have joy is
Jesus, others, and then yourself last.
So it's others before you and then Jesus is at the top.
And I believe 20/20 was a very strong demonstration of this.
So let's go back to the story of Jonah here.
This storm has hit the ship. It's there because of Jonah and
the sailors. They're terrified.
They're getting their belongings and they're throwing them
overboard to make the ship lighter.
They're calling out to their their false gods.
Gods save us. And what is Jonah the Believer,
the man who has the word of God inside of him?
What is this man doing? He couldn't care less.
He's fast asleep in the lowest deck as if nothing is going on.
And friends, I believe that is a picture of the church.
In 2020 and even 2021, this big thing hit the world, as you
know. And all these unbelievers around
us were were feeling the storm. They were feeling the stress.
They were crying out to their false gods.
They were crying out to the scientists to save us.
They were crying out to the experts to save us.
But the only one who could save us, or at least give us hope in
this situation was the Lord God. He was the one we should have
been looking at. And yet what was the church
doing? The ones who had the answers,
the ones who should have been a light, a beacon on the hill,
What was the church doing? For the most part they were just
self preserving, self preservation, caring for
themselves, terrified of sharing the truth during that time.
Friends, right now as I film this message, there is a
terrible war going on in Israel, Gaza.
There are babies, children, mothers, men.
They're dying. It's a terrible, terrible
situation. And I want to ask you, do you
truly care or are you just so concerned about your own
problems in the Ukraine and Russia, Afghanistan, when they
were all those Christians were, were left there.
Have we just forgotten Armenia, all these people who are
suffering in the world is all we care about is do I have food in
my house or am I OK? Is my family OK?
But yeah, the Lord God, Jesus Christ, told us to love thy
neighbour as thyself, to help those who are in need, to care
for them, to support them. So if your heart has grown cold,
I pray that you would call out to the Lord God and ask him to
set it on fire again. The 5th sign that you might be
drifting away from God is that unbelievers start to notice that
you've backslidden. Just look at verse six with me.
So the captain came to him and said to him, what do you mean,
sleeper? Arise, call on your God.
Perhaps your God will consider us so that we may not perish.
If I asked you right now in the comment box, write down who is
your favorite Bible character. Just do that now so I know that
you're still watching because you know some people will have
clicked off a long time ago. Here are the faithful ones who
are really listening to the message.
Just write down who is your favorite Bible character apart
from Jesus Christ. So maybe you're writing now, the
apostle Paul. Maybe you're writing Moses, King
David, Jeremiah. Who are you writing right now?
Can I tell you who one of my favorite, I might even say my
very favorite Bible character is?
It's Jonas Sea Captain. This man that we see right now.
Now that's a bit of a strange thing to say.
Why do I like him so much? Because here he is, This man is
an unbeliever, and this man knocks on the door.
He sees the prophet of God. He sees the believer is fast
asleep. And what does this unbeliever
man do? He rebukes the man of God and
says you should be praying you aren't doing what you should be.
You need to wake up and call out to your God.
And let me tell you, my dear friends, the world as blind as
it is, the world as is, as a moral as it is, they still hold
a standard for us as Christians. And one of the signs that we
have unbelieving hearts, one of the sides that were drifting
away from God, is when the unbeliever starts to call us out
in our sins. I used to work at a supermarket,
a grocery store called Sainsbury's, and I used to pour
coffee there, and I used to serve and wash dishes, those
kind of things. And I remember one of my
colleagues who I worked with, and one day he was telling me a
story, and it was a serious story about a man who was ill,
And this is many years ago. But as he told the story,
because I was so immature, I burst out laughing.
There was another time when a very similar example happened
and they were sharing a rude joke in the kitchen.
And again I laughed. I found it funny.
And what did those unbelievers do on those two occasions?
Joe. Joe, why are you laughing?
You're supposed to be a Christian.
You should know better. So just remember that the world
is watching and although we might think our our sin only
affects us, no, you're ruining your witness for the Lord Jesus
Christ because you're showing the world that this one, the
Lord Jesus who has risen from the dead, doesn't really matter
to you. OK, later we're going to come
back to the solution, to the hope, the only hope that the
backslider has. But first I'd like to speak to
the non Christian right now. Now if you're a non Christian,
you can't slide down the mountain.
You can't slide, you can't backslide because you're already
at the very bottom. So what do you need to do?
Well, you need to start the climb and you don't climb in
your own strength. You climb in the Lord Jesus
Christ strength. Look at verse 15 with me.
Now it says. So they picked up Jonah, threw
him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging again.
You probably know the story very well.
So here we are. The storm starts to hit.
They wake up Jonah and the sailors say, well, why is this
happening? And Jonah says I'm a Hebrew.
I serve the almighty God. And this storm has fallen on you
because I am in this ship, I am in this boat.
And I'm telling you guys, if you throw me into the sea, suddenly
the sea will be calm. Suddenly this storm will stop
because God's anger will be appeased.
But what did the sailors do? They did everything in their
power to not have to do that. They were good moral men.
They did not want to, and they started to row as hard as they
could. But eventually they realized it
was futile. There was no hope for them.
And there is a lesson in this. If the Lord sets his will, the
Lord had his mind on something. No human effort can stop the
hand of God. And you might take lots of
pills. You might eat organically.
You might be the healthiest person on earth.
But I'll tell you this, your death day is on God's calendar,
and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
If God sets his mind to something, if God wills
something, we as humans have no hope, if that makes sense.
Now, I'm not saying this, that we have this robotic theology.
No, the Lord has given us free will and choices.
But I am saying don't think that you can overpower the Almighty
one of Israel. So how is this a picture of the
Lord Jesus Christ? Well, the Lord Jesus Christ on
the cross took the wrath of God. The Bible actually says that he
is the propitiation for our sins.
I know I say this a lot in my videos, but that is a big word.
Propitiation means basically here is the wrath of God, OK?
And and here we are, all of our sins, all of our rejection of
God, all of the wrong things we've done and that wrath, it's
coming for us. We deserve to take that wrath.
But the Lord Jesus Christ's, he stands in the gap.
He intercedes for us and on the cross, the Lord Jesus Christ, he
turned that wrath away like a mirror reflects the sunlight.
So he reflected the wrath of God away from us.
And he absorbed himself when he was nailed to that cross, when
he suffered and died there. The Bible says it pleased the
Lord to crush him, not because he hated his Son, but because he
hates our sin. And our sin was laid on Christ
Jesus, and their Christ suffered.
Their Christ was in a storm on the cross for your sins and my
sins. And as soon as Christ took the
punishment for that sin, if you put your trust in him, if you
come to him and cry out for forgiveness and say, Lord God
have mercy on me, wash away my sins, suddenly that storm which
is coming for you will be stilled.
Just like as soon as Jonah was cast into the water, the ocean
went still because God's wrath was satisfied.
When Christ died on the cross, God's wrath was also satisfied.
It was met in fullness with the Son of God.
A friend of mine, Roger Carswell, actually saw this in
reality. A really helpful illustration.
One day he was visiting the Concorde.
You know, that plane that that went really, really fast.
It was it was like a lightning bolt.
You remember it, don't you? Well, when Roger went around the
the tour guide said on the end of the Concorde, on its nose
it's got a an engineering design called the propitiator.
And what the propitiator does is it absorbs the heat that is
picked up on the plane. As that plane is going really,
really fast, it picks up a lot of friction, a lot of heat.
And the propitiator, it absorbs all of that heat to protect the
rest of the plane. And friends, as I've just said,
that is what Jesus Christ did on the cross.
He absorbed the heat to protect us, his church, if we will
become part of it and bow the knee and put our trust in the
Lord Jesus Christ. Now very sadly, because of
science and secular thinking creeping into the church, people
now change their theology and they say are we really to take
the Bible literally? I mean, did God really send a
fish to swallow Jonah, how could that be possible?
Well, if you believe that, what did Jesus say in Matthew 12,
verse 40? When the Pharisees, when people
are asking for a sign, what did Jesus say?
No other sign will be given of me of who I am other than the
sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah was in the belly
of the fish for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man
will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three
nights. So just like Jonah, there was a
fish that swallowed him, as you know.
It was a picture of the most important thing, Jesus Christ's
bodily resurrection. And if this was a load of
nonsense, if we're not to take this seriously, why was Jesus
pointing to the most serious thing that he would ever do,
that he would rise from the dead and give eternal life to men and
women? Why would he point to an A
fictional story, to a character who isn't even real?
So if we're to take the Lord Jesus Christ, death and
resurrection seriously, I think Jesus is saying very clearly.
Now you take my word seriously. Jonah really was swallowed by
that fish and spat out after three days.
OK, back to the backslider. Now just look at Jonah chapter
3, verse one. Now the word of the Lord came to
Jonah the second time saying arise, go to Nineveh, that great
city and preach to it the message that I tell you.
So what is the hope there, my dear friends?
Well, God gives Jonah a second chance.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.
Our God is the God of second chances.
Third chances, fourth chances, fifth chances.
As many times as we come to him and we're truly meaning it, we
truly come to him in repentance and asking for forgiveness.
The wonderful message is God will forgive us.
God will give us a second chance.
And that's the hope I need because I've fallen many times
and it's probably the hope that you need.
Also, let me leave you with one final thought.
There was a a young man and this young man, he was a Christian
for just one year and he was sort of told by different
Christians, can you go in a nightclub or not?
Some people say, oh, you can be a wonderful witness in the
nightclubs for Jesus. And some people said, no, stay
1,000,000 miles from nightclubs. And this was going back and
forth, this conflict in his mind.
Should I? Should I?
Not until eventually this young man thought, I'll just try it
for myself. So at university he went in a
nightclub that one night that young man met a woman, a very
beautiful woman, and he fell in love with that woman.
The woman was not a Christian, and that man ended up in a
relationship that was very sinful, where he lived with her
and as you can imagine, did the things that couples do outside
of marriage in that relationship.
But because this man was a believer, he became miserable in
his sin. He was so depressed for one
year, he did not leave his flat. He looked outside and he could
see the seasons, the snow, the leaves changing in the fall, in
autumn, all that beauty, the sunshine in the summer.
But he was just depressed because he was just living in
sin. Until eventually that young man
went and spoke to a dear friend of his, a wiser Christian.
And he said to that young man, this is my situation.
I've really messed up. I love this woman and yet she's
not a believer and I'm running from God.
This is what his friend said. What you need to do right now is
come back to the Lord Jesus Christ in total obedience.
So you can't be sleeping with this girl anymore.
You can't be not going to church.
You can't be not reading your Bible.
You need to be on fire for God and what will happen?
It will either go one of two ways.
Either the girl will say I don't want anything to do with this
guy, he's a a God botherer. He's boring now.
I I don't want him anymore. Or the Lord might just use this
situation in His grace and might just save this woman.
Now, before I tell you the outcome of this, I want you to
know I have told this story before and there was a young
girl who heard this story. And because of that she thought,
well, that's basically a message for me, that I can go out, and I
can go out of unbelievers and I might be able to win them for
Christ. I can flirt to convert.
That young girl is now a woman, and she's nowhere with the Lord
right now. In fact, she's in the worst kind
of situation you could ever imagine.
So just hear this story. Remember, the Lord worked in
grace. OK?
That doesn't give us permission to go out and date unbelievers.
So what happened to this young man?
He did. He set his heart the Lord, and
he started bringing his unbelieving girlfriend to
church. And one day that woman read
Psalm 51 and she saw the words wash me, and I shall be whiter
than snow. The blood of Jesus Christ, she
realized, could wash away all of her sins, and she got saved.
And the other man was restored. So why do I believe that the
backslider can be restored? I'll tell you why.
Because that young man was me.