Remembering God

Let their praise share, and their joy they resource,

Unto them they will trust and obey.

Trust and obey, for there's no other way

To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.

In fellowships we, we will sit at His feet,

Our blood won't by His side, it'll go away.

But in sins we will do, very sins we will go,

Never fear only trust and obey.

Trust and obey, for there's no other way

To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.

Amen. Thank you Jennings and Macy and the choir.

It's now time for children's church, if we got any children.

Alright, we will be in Jonah, Jonah chapter 2 this morning.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Jonah chapter 2, that's in the Old Testament,

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Kinda close toward the back of the Old Testament,

It's a short little book, among some other short little books,

So it might take you a second to find it.

Jonah chapter 2, we'll try to do the whole chapter this morning.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Jonah chapter 2, this is a story that some of you may be familiar with.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Let's pray and we'll get started.

My God we come to you this morning and we come to seek you dear Lord.

We need you in our life, we need you to help us dear Lord.

We need your grace, we need your strength, we need your love.

And I pray God that we would seek you today and that we would find you,

That you would meet us where we are in life.

I pray that you would just bless us today from being in your house.

I pray that your Holy Spirit would be in this place dear Lord.

That you would move in our lives, that God you would speak to us through your word today,

That your word would be crystal clear for us this morning.

And I pray dear Lord that you help nothing I say to muddy the waters,

But that you would hide me behind the cross,

That you would take away any pride or any fear that is within me this morning.

That every word that is spoken would be for your glory.

That we would all come to seek you this morning,

That we would hear from your word, that we would learn from your word,

And that we would grow in your word.

And I ask these things in Jesus name, Amen.

The story of Jonah is a good story.

If you've never read it before, you should read it.

It's a relatively short book.

It won't take you but just a few minutes to read the book.

But even if you have read it before,

I find myself turning to Jonah chapter 2 more often than I would like to admit.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Because more often than I would like to admit,

I find myself in trouble.

And perhaps you find yourself in trouble.

And by saying I find myself in trouble,

that's a way of taking the edge off of saying I sin when I shouldn't sin.

Now Jonah's situation started off very simple.

God had told Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach to the people there.

Now this was a very simple instruction.

This could be the shortest book in the Bible if Jonah would have listened.

It could have said God told Jonah to go and Jonah went,

and the people heard the message of Jonah and repented.

But Jonah didn't listen to God.

And maybe we can relate to that more often than we would like to admit.

God had called Jonah and told him what he wanted him to do.

But instead of doing what God called him to do,

instead of following the command of God, which was pretty simple,

instead it says three different times in Jonah chapter 1

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

that Jonah was fleeing from the presence of the Lord.

He was fleeing from the presence of the Lord.

Now we may not recognize in our life when we are sinning that that's what we are doing.

But when we begin to sin, when we stop following the commands of God

and the instructions of God, and we quit listening to what God says,

and we say to ourselves, God, I'm not going to listen to what you say

because I don't want to do what you want me to do.

Now that was Jonah's problem.

He simply said to himself, I do not want to do what God wants me to do

because I disapprove of God's ways.

Now we probably wouldn't be so bold this morning as to say

that we disapprove of the ways of God.

Yet our actions may say something different.

There may be things that God calls us to,

and we simply don't want to do what God says

because we don't see how that's going to benefit anything.

We don't like the way God wants to work.

And so we just decide we're not going to listen to God.

We're going to continue in our sin, and we're going to do things our way.

And that was Jonah's problem.

He disapproved of what God wanted to do.

Now what God wanted to do was he wanted to save what the Scripture calls

a very large city, that of Nineveh.

He wanted them to be spared from destruction.

It says that God heard of the evils that were going on in Nineveh.

They'd been brought to his attention, and he was going to destroy the city.

But before he destroyed the people of Nineveh, he said, I'm going to send Jonah.

Now Jonah, if you read through the rest of the book, spoiler alert,

Jonah preaches the message, and the people hear the message, and they repent.

They respond appropriately.

They hear the word of God.

They repent of their sin, and God relents from sending disaster on them.

And Jonah should have said, praise God.

All these evil people have turned from their sin, and God has spared them.

Praise God. Nineveh, let us praise God together.

But you know what Jonah did?

Jonah got angry.

Jonah said, I didn't want to go here, God, because I knew you were going to do this.

I knew you were going to have compassion on them.

I knew you were going to be gracious to them.

And so Jonah did not want to do the Lord's work because he did not approve of what God wanted to do.

No, we don't ever feel that way, do we?

We want God's grace and God's mercy on us, right?

But we want God to smite those who come against us, don't we?

We don't want to pray for those who come against us to be saved, because we say,

one day they're going to get what's coming to them, and we kind of find some joy in that.

But do we find much joy when we hear that those who have done evil things and who have mistreated us,

do we rejoice when we hear that they've turned their life around,

that they've turned over a new leaf, that they've come to faith in Jesus Christ?

We should rejoice.

Maybe there's a part of us that disapproves of what God does.

So we're not so different than Jonah.

We don't do the things that God calls us to do.

God gives us command after command in His Word that are very simple for us to follow,

and yet we live in sin, and when we do so, what we are doing is we are fleeing from God.

It's said that Jonah went and got in the boat.

He went down to the bottom of the boat, as low as he could get,

as far away from God as he could possibly get, and sailed away, thinking he was sailing away from God.

But you can't escape the presence of God, at least not the wrath of God.

And here Jonah was in this boat, and a great storm came, and Jonah, he wasn't worried about a thing.

He had made his decision. He was fleeing from the presence of God, and Jonah thought,

all is well, I've left God behind.

And all of a sudden this storm came. Everybody on the boat started going crazy.

We're going to die. What are we going to do?

They all started praying to their gods. Nothing was happening.

They come woke Jonah up and said, Jonah, you better get up. What's going on?

Why are you asleep? We're going to die. You better pray to your God.

We need to find out what's going on.

So they cast lots to see who was responsible for the mess they were in, and the lot fell to Jonah.

And Jonah said, look, it's my fault. Throw me overboard.

And the people on the ship, even though they worshiped other gods, they did not throw Jonah overboard.

They rode and they rode and they rode and they tried to get out of the storm,

and they realized they could not get out of the storm.

And they said, even these people with other gods, and listen to this, you know what they said?

They said, God, don't hold this against us. We fit to throw this man over the ship.

Don't let us be guilty of what's going to happen to him.

Now, even these men who worship other gods feared God more than Jonah because if Jonah would have feared God,

he would have listened to what God said and he would have done what God said.

But Jonah had no fear of the Lord and he fled from the Lord.

We don't ever do that, do we?

Perhaps we need to have a little more fear of the Lord in our life.

Perhaps if we feared the Lord and kept his commands, as the book of Ecclesiastes tells us in its conclusion,

perhaps we would find ourselves in a much better situation than we sometimes do.

But maybe one of our biggest problems is we don't fear the Lord.

And if we don't fear the Lord, then we have no desire to keep his commands.

And so here was Jonah disapproved of the ways of God, decided he was going to go his own way.

He was going to leave God. He was going to flee from the presence of God.

And oh boy, did he find out real fast that fleeing from the presence of God was not a good thing.

And we discovered that in our life.

We begin to live in sin. We see the commands of God.

We just don't listen to what they say. We live for ourself. We live in our sin.

And what we are saying is the same thing that Jonah was saying,

as I want to get away from the presence of God, I want to get away from God's commands.

But once we stop listening to the word of God and we stop living by the commands of God,

we find ourself in a bad situation.

And in Jonah chapter 2, he finds himself in a bad situation.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Now it says here that a giant fish, a huge fish, came and swallowed Jonah up.

In the New Testament, when Jesus retells the story in Matthew chapter 12, verse 40,

Matthew 12:40

some of your translations may say whale. Maybe it was a whale. We don't really know what it was.

It was at the very least a big fish and that's all that matters.

Here Jonah is. He's thrown over this boat in the midst of fleeing from God.

He finds himself tossed and turned by the winds and the waves.

And if that's not bad enough, a huge fish comes and eats Jonah. He gobbles him up.

Now, you've got to think about how bad this would have been and we're going to see that as we read through this text.

But this was an eye-opening moment for Jonah.

And perhaps some of us may be in a similar situation to Jonah today.

No, we've not been eaten by a big fish.

But perhaps our sin has drawn us away from the presence and the closeness of God

and the joy of the relationship that we used to have with God

and the peace that comes with the relationship with God.

And perhaps our sin has pulled us away from the presence of God today.

And we are living in the midst of our pain and our sorrow and our sin.

And we are longing for the presence of God.

And the question that we may say is how do we get back to where we were?

Well, Jonah gives us the answer to that in chapter 2, verse 1.

Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from inside the fish.

I called to the Lord in my distress and he answered me. Praise the Lord.

Isn't that good news that in the midst of our distress today?

I don't know what anybody's going through, but I suspect that some of you in here are going through some stuff

and probably some of us in here are going through some stuff that we have brought on ourself because of sinfulness.

But what does Jonah show us to do here is that we need to call out to the Lord in our distress.

And we need to know today that God hears us.

We need to know that when we humbly and truly seek God and call out to Him from the bottom of our heart, He hears us.

Now, sometimes we call out to Him, but we don't really do it from the bottom of our heart.

Sometimes we get in trouble and say, oh, God, help me.

But we just want to continue on in our ways.

But there comes a point sometimes in our life where we find ourselves in the belly of the big fish, so to speak,

in the worst possible place we can be, as low as we can possibly get.

And it's in those times that we need to seek God when our heart really begins to hurt

and our heart really begins to realize the severity of our sins that we need to call to the Lord in our distress.

And you can know today that if you would call to God today, that He will answer you.

He called out to the Lord in His distress. He answered him.

He cried out for help in the belly of Sheol. You heard my voice.

You threw me into the depths, into the heart of the seas, and the current overcame me.

All your breakers and your billows swept over me.

But I said, I have been banished from your sight.

Now, that's a scary, scary thought.

Maybe some of you have felt that feeling. Maybe some of you feel that feeling today.

Jonah wanted to flee from the presence of God, and he got what he wanted.

He wanted to flee from the presence of God. He wanted to get away from God's presence.

He wanted to get away from God's command. He wanted to do his own thing.

And he did what he wanted to do only to find that he had been banished from the presence of God.

He discovered real quick that when he had fled from God, that things got bad real fast.

Maybe some of you have heard the story of the lost son in the New Testament, the parable that Jesus told

about the son who lived with his father and all was well until one day the son said,

hey, give me all my inheritance so that I can go do what I want to do.

And he left the father's house, and he went and lived how he wanted to live

only to discover that when times got hard and he had squandered everything that hold up,

being in the presence of the father was a lot better than I ever recognized.

And then he longed to be back in the presence of the father.

And here God had commanded Jonah what to do, and Jonah had fled the presence of God.

And now he is feeling the agony of that. He is feeling the weight of that.

He is feeling that he has been banished from the presence of God.

And that is a scary place to be when we are so deep in our sin

and we have been so disobedient in God and we feel the weight of that.

And sometimes God has to use those experiences to bring about a fear that's going to turn us to him.

And Jonah didn't have the fear of the Lord at the beginning of this story,

but it sure sounds like he probably had the fear of the Lord here.

We get in those situations sometimes. Oftentimes perhaps we bring them on ourself

and we feel just like Jonah and we say, I have been banished from your sight.

And so what are we going to do? Maybe you come here today and you feel that way.

What are you going to do today if you feel like you've been banished from the sight of God

for your sin, for your actions, for your disobedience?

Well, there is hope in this story, praise God.

Jonah didn't just stop his prayer there and said, I have been banished from the sight of God.

Instead, listen to what Jonah did.

He said, yet I will look once more towards your Holy Temple.

Yet I will look once more. God, I have failed you. I have sinned against you.

I have been separated from you. God, I am in a mess.

Yet once more, one more time, God, I will call out to you as a sinner who has fled from you,

who does not deserve your grace, who does not deserve your mercy,

who doesn't even know if you're going to listen to me.

But God, I'm going to call out to you one more time. I'm going to call out to you again.

Yet once more, Jonah said, I will call out to the Lord.

And perhaps that needs to be our prayer today.

Perhaps that needs to be where we are today.

Maybe today we need to be at that point in our life.

Maybe some of you come in here today and you are broken and you feel the weight of your sin

and you feel the weight of the world and you feel like God has abandoned you

and you feel like you've abandoned God and you feel like you're unlovable

and you feel like you don't deserve the grace of God.

Well, we are unlovable and we don't deserve the grace of God.

But praise the Lord, God loves us anyway.

So do not give up today.

Yet once more, this morning, again, call out to the Lord.

Time and time again, we fail in our sin.

And every time we say the same thing, this is the last time.

This is the last time I'll have this drink.

This is the last time I'll tell this lie.

This is the last time I'll steal.

This is the last time I'm going to be mean to my wife and kids.

This is the last time. This is the last time.

And so often we find ourselves falling into sin.

We fight the temptation and fight the temptation.

And too many times we give in to the temptation.

And we find ourselves just as Jonah did, in a bad place.

Because we have chosen our sin over the commands of God.

And we find ourselves just reeling in pain and torment.

But today we need to be those who call out to the Lord

and say to God, God, yet once more, I call out to you.

God, I call out to you because there is no one else I can call out to.

God, I call out to you because you are my only hope.

God, I call out to you.

I know I'm undeserving, dear Lord.

I know I'm a wretched sinner.

God, I know I've called time and time again.

But God, would your grace be abundant?

Would your grace cover me?

And God is faithful that if we would call out to him

and seek him with all of our heart, if we would repent of our sins

and yet once more call out to him, God would hear us in our distress today.

And Jonah in the worst place he could possibly imagine,

the worst place he had ever been, but yet once more,

he was going to call out to the Lord because there was nothing else he could do.

Verse 5, the waters engulfed me up to the neck.

The watery depths overcame me.

Seaweed was wrapped around my head.

I sank to the foundation of the mountains,

the earth with its prison bars closed behind me forever.

But you raised my life from the pit, Lord my God.

Does it ever feel that way to us that we sink to the lowest depths,

that we sink to a spot where it seems like everything is engulfed us,

that everything is closing up against us forever, that all hope is lost?

Can you imagine what this must have been like,

what this experience must have been like?

How nasty this must have been.

I mean here was Jonah in the belly of this big fish.

This was not a pleasant experience.

This is not like Pinocchio when they get ate by the whale.

Y'all might remember that.

They get ate, him and that old man, I don't know his name,

but they get eaten by the whale and they go in there

and it's like they're in an airplane hanger.

I mean this whale is huge.

And they're sitting there, they're getting ready to make some fish to eat.

I mean they're just, well we're in the whale,

so we'll just have to live out the rest of our life here.

No! That's not what it was like.

You know I looked up the biggest whale in the world, it's the blue whale.

And even the blue whale, do you know how big its belly is?

It says it's about the size of a minivan.

The biggest whale in the world.

So best case scenario, the biggest fish in the world,

best case scenario, here's Jonah in the belly of this thing

that's probably the size of a minivan, along with 40 tons of creel,

that's how much creel the belly can hold.

It's dark, it's nasty, it's stinky, he's being sloshed around.

Can you imagine what it's like to be in the pitch black dark?

If you've ever been in a pitch black dark, it is a scary thing.

I'm going to tell you, it is some kind of scary.

Michelle and I, we went in the cave on a trip a while back,

and we went down in the cave and they said, we're going to turn the lights off.

And they turned the lights off for about four seconds and that was scary.

I mean it was pitch black dark.

Can you imagine how Jonah must have felt in the belly of this big fish

in the pitch black nasty dark?

Well that's what our sin feels like to us.

When we are living in sin and we have fled from the presence of God

and we feel the weight of our sin, we see that there is no hope, that there is no light.

We don't know what we're going to do.

That's how Jonah felt and that's how you and I feel sometimes.

And what in the world was Jonah going to do?

He felt like it was over.

What else was he going to do?

All he could do is pray to God.

And that's all you can do today.

That's all you can do today is seek God.

You can't solve all your problems, you can't right all your wrongs that you've done.

But what you can do today is you can call out to God.

As unworthy as we are to call out to God, God still desires for us to seek him today.

Just as God wanted to save all those people in Nineveh,

he wants to save all of us rotten people today.

And the people of Nineveh had enough sense to call out to him.

And Jonah, even though it took him being in the worst of the worst situations,

he finally came to his senses and knew that he needed to call out to the Lord.

Verse 7, as my life was fading away, I remembered Yahweh.

Isn't that something?

I remembered Yahweh.

Isn't it crazy how we forget God?

You know, all of us forget.

Yeah, we do. We forget God.

We have a knowledge of God, but sometimes life's going good.

We're not having any problems. We're kind of doing our own thing.

We're living our sin. We're pretty good people.

We do a few bad things, but God overlooks that because we're mostly good

and we're kind of going our way and we're living life to the fullest.

And in a sense, we forget about God.

But then what happens as soon as tragedy strikes?

What happens as soon as hardship strikes?

God has a way of helping us to remember who he is.

God has a way of helping us to remember that we are not in control.

God has a way of helping us to remember that things can change in an instant.

And sometimes we may be guilty, just as Jonah was, as forgetting about God.

But Jonah remembered him at just the right time.

Perhaps today some of us have forgotten about God.

Let us remember God.

And he said, as my life was fading away,

and some of you may feel that way today, you may feel as though your life is fading away.

Well, let us follow Jonah's example here and remember God.

As his life was fading away, he remembered God.

My prayer came to you, to your holy temple.

Those who cling to worthless idols forsake faithful love.

That's a beautiful verse, verse 8.

Those who cling to worthless idols forsake faithful love.

Now I'm going to tell you, there's a few things in this world, if anything,

that's more beautiful than feeling love,

than feeling the love of family, of feeling the love of parents,

of feeling the love of children, of feeling the love of your spouse,

of feeling the love of a church body.

There are a few things that are more beautiful in this world, if anything,

that is as beautiful as when you are loved by someone else.

But what does he say here?

He says, those who cling to worthless idols forsake faithful love.

Now there is no greater love than that that God has shown for us.

There is no greater love than that a man would lay down his life for his friends,

and that's exactly what Jesus Christ has done for you and I.

Jesus Christ was nailed to a cross.

He suffered, he bled, and he died.

He gave his life, he shed his blood so that your sins and that my sins could be forgiven,

and that is faithful love.

Knowing the love of Jesus Christ, why in the world would we seek love or seek joy

or seek satisfaction in anything else?

Well, we shouldn't, but we do.

We do exactly what Jonah talks about here sometimes.

We cling to worthless idols.

We cling to things that are worthless.

We begin to seek the things of the world.

We begin to seek wealth.

We begin to seek the attention of other people.

We begin to seek all of these things that we have.

We begin to cling to our worthless idols only to find that our worthless idols are just that.

They are worthless.

Because when the bottom falls out and we find ourselves in the belly of the big fish,

we realize that nothing we have in this world is going to be good enough to do anything for us,

and we need to forsake those worthless idols, and we need to cling to the faithless love of God,

the faithless love, excuse me, the faithful love of God, the faithful love of Jesus Christ.

What are you clinging to today?

In the midst of your pit of despair, are you clinging to the worthless things of this world?

Are you clinging to the faithful love of God?

Jonah says, as my life was fading, I remembered God,

and those who cling to worthless idols forsake faithful love.

Let us not be those who miss the love of Jesus Christ today.

Jonah said in verse 9, But as for me, I will sacrifice to you with a voice of thanksgiving.

I will fulfill what I have vowed.

Salvation is from the Lord.

Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah on to dry land.

What are you going to choose today?

Jonah says, Look, some, they cling to the worthless.

They forsake the faithful love of God.

But Jonah says, Not me, not anymore.

Jonah says, Today, Lord, I call out to you.

But as for me, God, I'm going to live for you.

God asked for me, I abandoned you, I abandoned your commands,

but God, now I'm going to live for you, and I'm going to live for your commands,

because God, I have realized that there is salvation in no other.

And the moment that Jonah came to his senses and recognized that,

he was delivered from his torment.

He was delivered from the belly of this fish because he called out to the Lord.

What about you and I this morning?

Life is hard. Life is tough. It's a struggle.

And sometimes a lot of our struggles are brought on by our own stupid choices,

because we are sinful people who refuse to listen to God.

We flee from the presence of God,

and we get into spots that we feel like we are in the deepest, darkest depths

where there is no hope.

But I want to tell you today, the story of Jonah shows us that there is hope.

There is hope for your life this morning.

There is hope for us in the midst of our sin this morning,

because God loves us.

Let us be those today who remember God.

Let us be those today who call out, yet once more.

One more time, you say, I've called out to God so many times.

I don't know if God wants to hear from me today.

I'm telling you that if God is working on you, if he's convicting you,

if you feel the pain of your sin, that God wants to hear from you today.

Let us be those today who call out to God, yet once more,

and feel his faithful love this morning.

Let's pray.

God, we thank you for your good word.

Dear Lord, I pray that you'd be with us,

because dear Lord, too many times we just do boneheaded stuff.

Too many times, dear Lord, we are more like Jonah than we care to admit.

There are too many times that you give us your commands,

and we just run the other way.

And dear Lord, maybe there are some today that are feeling the pain of that, God,

because dear Lord, when we live in our sin, we experience those consequences.

Dear Lord, when we flee from your presence, when we flee from your instruction,

God, there is no good apart from you.

And dear Lord, we are just left so many times in the pain of our sin.

But God, you are faithful to listen to us, to hear us,

if we would call out to you in our distress this morning.

So God, maybe there are some here today, and they're not so unlike Jonah.

Maybe they've been running the wrong way,

or they've run theirself right into a deep, dark place.

I pray today that they would remember you,

that yet once more they'd call out to you.

Dear Lord, maybe there are some of us in here,

and we've called out to you time and time again for the sin that we commit.

And God, we don't deserve for you to listen to us one more time, but you do.

You're so faithful, dear Lord, to listen to us when we call out to you in our distress.

The blood of Jesus is good enough to cover all of our sins, God.

And they are great, and they are many,

and they are far more than we even want and desire in our life.

But dear Lord, we are just wretched sinners so often.

So God, I pray today that we would remember your love,

that we would remember your grace, God,

that we would know that you're not done with us.

You don't want to cast us aside.

Dear Lord, you don't want us to live in sin,

but you don't want to cast us aside.

Dear Lord, you want to restore us.

And sometimes our life is like Jonah.

You have to allow us to get down to the bottom of the barrel

so that we'll look up to you.

So God, I pray that if there are any who are there this morning,

I pray that they would look up to you,

that they would call out to you in their distress,

that they would seek you, dear Lord,

that they would remember you this morning,

that they would feel your presence,

that they would return to your presence today, dear Lord,

that you would restore the joy of their salvation today, dear Lord,

that you would restore their soul, that you would comfort them,

that you would strengthen them, that you would be with them in their pain,

that you would forgive their sin, God,

that you would let them see a little bit of light

at the end of the tunnel this morning

to know that they are not forgotten, dear Lord,

if they would just call out to you this morning.

And I ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

As we stand and sing, if God has spoken to you today,

maybe there's something on your heart.

Now is your chance to respond to the Lord.

If you need somebody to pray for you,

I'll be glad to pray for you this morning.

But if God has spoken to you today,

if you have been fleeing from the Lord,

if you have been living in sin, repent.

Today is the day that God may be calling you to repent.

Listen to God when He calls and respond to it.

I meet the every outmost gracious Lord,

Who tenderly poised my life and He is my friend.

I meet Thee, O I meet Thee,

Every hour I need Thee,

O bless me now, I say,

I come to Thee.

I meet Thee, every hour,

Stay my dear one,

Temptations disarm my breath,

My heart my heart,

I meet Thee, O I meet Thee,

Every hour I need Thee,

O bless me now, I say,

I come to Thee.

Amen. Thank you all for coming.

Don't forget, St. Bration night,

last one of the year.

So if you want to come, come at five.

We'll eat if you want to bring food.

You can if not, come eat with us anyway.

We'll sing at six. It's going to be a good night.

Hope you all can be back and join us tonight.

Dad, would you close us with a prayer?

Good night. Thank you for a beautiful day today.