May 7, 2023 / Saying Yes to God

Welcome to Walk in the Truth podcast.

This season of messages takes us through some of the great comeback stories in the Bible.

Pastor John Metter of Cross City Church will show us how God can take any situation in

any life and bring hope and victory out of hardship.

These messages will inspire you to trust God in your own challenging seasons.

We are looking at God's Not Done With You.

That's an encouraging title to me, God's Not Done With You.

And today the message title is called Saying Yes to God out of the book of Jonah.

So if you take your Bibles and turn to the book of Jonah today, Jonah chapter 1 beginning

Jonah 1 · chapter mention

in verse 1.

And as you find the book of Jonah, let me just open up by simply saying I have lots

of conversations with people who say no to God instead of saying yes to God.

Sometimes there are things that God has specifically told them to do and they said, you know, I

just don't want to do that in my life.

At other times people that have said no to God talk to me about the fact that they read

something in the Bible that they were to do or not to do and they disobeyed and they found

themselves far outside of God's will.

And either situation when they talk about that moment of disobedience which often turns

into a season of disobedience, they talk with a lot of pain and a lot of heartbreak and

a lot of sadness and regret over saying no to God.

Recently I talked to a woman that I call Angela.

That's not a real name but she is someone that told me about her story.

She told me about being angry with God because of the loss of her husband.

She didn't feel like God intervened to save his life and as a result of that she was angrier

and angrier with him and began to go further and further away from God.

As she walked into the details of her life there was a lot of pain even on her face at

being so far away from God for so long a period of time until finally she came to the place

of saying, okay God, I'm going to have to come back and trust you because being away

from you is worse than being close to you even if I don't understand why what happened

happened.

And her story is one just like Jonah's if it's always best to say yes to God, never

good to say no to God.

So let's stand together and look at Jonah chapter one.

We'll read the first four verses and then we'll come back and look at other chapters

in the book of Jonah as we walk through it.

Jonah chapter one verse one, the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying

arise and go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it for their wickedness has come

up before me.

But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

So he went down to Joppa found a ship which was going to Tarshish paid the fare and went

down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea and there was a great storm on the sea so that

the ship was about to break up.

Now we'll pause there and come back to what happens in that storm in just a few moments.

Let's pray together.

In Jesus name help us see ourselves in Jonah's shoes but also help us see how the story could

be different if we are to say yes instead of no.

Father I pray that this Old Testament prophet will be an incredible example to us of how

not to respond to you.

And Father I thank you that you're a gracious God a loving God in the same way you demonstrated

your compassion for Jonah and for the city of Nineveh.

You show your compassion for us help us to respond to your loving kindness and your tender

mercy and your compassion and I ask this together in Jesus name we pray.

And all God's people said amen.

Please be seated if you would.

Some prophets are known for their message primarily.

Obviously if you walk through the Old Testaments you see the message of Isaiah or Jeremiah,

message of Malachi.

It's very very clear what they're saying.

Jonah's not known best for his message but for his example.

But not a good example.

He's known best for being a bad example for how you respond to God.

I mean his life is a car wreck compared to every other prophet in the New Testament.

In fact in the Old Testament prophets nobody stands out quite like Jonah does when it comes

to how he disobeyed God.

And yet at the same time the Bible gives us this story of Jonah's disobedience in a book

that's filled with compassion and the loving kindness and the mercy of God.

So you've got all these things going on in the book of Jonah.

It says so much to us about how we ought to be responding to God.

Basically if you get to the heart of the book, the heart of this book is specifically about

telling other people about God's love and his redeeming ways.

But also it's about saying yes or no to God.

Today I hope you'll come to the place of seeing where you are compared to Jonah in this saying

yes or no to God.

Now I'm going to approach this a little bit differently today than I normally do.

I'm going to approach this passage by asking the question why should we say yes to God?

Say, all right pastor isn't the theme of the book why say no to God?

And I think you're going to see that yes the theme of the book is why does someone say

no to God and what happens when you say no to God?

But I'm going to approach it from the angle of you ought to be saying yes to God just

like Jonah should have said yes to God.

We often see the blessing side of that and I hope that we can see it just a little bit

today and to see what God is up to in the big picture when we think it's all just about

us.

So for a reason today to say yes to God.

First of all we say yes to God because his direction is always best.

Not good, not better than, but best of all options that are in front of us.

Now we open up with chapter one, verse one, and I read it again.

It says the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying arise, go to Nineveh

the great city and cry against it for their wickedness has come up before me.

Jonah knows exactly what God is doing.

He knows what this is about.

This is about Jonah taking the message of a lie and saying yes to God.

The message of a loving compassionate God to a wicked evil city that desperately needs

the message.

It's really about God's focus on people who are wicked and far from him.

It's really about God's love for people that are so far from him they have no idea how

to get to him and God's compassion is being poured out in that direction.

In fact later on in the book of Jonah he actually says this in chapter four, verse two.

He says Lord I didn't want to go because I know you are a compassionate and a gracious

God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness and basically said to God I don't

like those people and I know that if I went and preached to those people they would repent

and you would rescue them and I didn't want that God.

I didn't want that at all.

Now I wouldn't want to be best friends with Jonah.

I don't know about you but he's not my kind of guy.

He has no compassion.

He has no grace.

He has no love for people that he literally hated.

He hated the Ninevites.

He wanted judgment upon Ninevites.

If you knew something about the Ninevites you might tend to agree with him just a little

bit but at the same time Jonah knew it was God's best for Jonah, for the Ninevites and

for all involved that he obey God.

God had in his mind the hundreds of thousands even millions of people in the city of Ninevites

that needed desperately to hear what the compassion and the loving kindness of God is all about

and if Jonah had of immediately gone and he ultimately did go then they would have found

life and hope and forgiveness and repentance but Jonah didn't want that to happen.

Now if I can make this kind of personal today let me just say that of the hundreds and thousands

of millions of people around you if God is wanting to use you in some way to impact them

positively either by your message or by your example or by your lifestyle or about your

decision wouldn't it be best for you to consider the whole picture instead of just saying no

I don't like them I don't want to go.

Jonah didn't want what God wanted him to do and he ignored it all and that became the

disobedience that caused God's discipline to kick into gear and also that's what disobedience

is for us isn't it?

We know what God wants but we don't want to do that it's not our preference it's not what

we like we're not really thinking about anybody else at the time we're simply thinking about

us and we're saying no to God because we don't want it to happen that way for us.

If I can go through the reasoning that Jonah must have been having in his mind it was all

about the Ninevites or me and he chose Jonah he chose himself and we often do the same

thing my family or me my community or me my workmates or me my neighbors that's what disobedience

is at the heart instead of looking at the whole picture of what God wants to be doing

in our lives we're looking at our lives which is what Jonah was doing and just like Jonah

we're called to bring a redemptive message to the people all around us but instead of

God's plan Jonah did his plan and it wasn't best and we can see later on that it could

have been the best possible plan.

Now I know that you realize just like I do that we live in a wicked world in a wicked

city and we're reminded of that all the time and I think it'd be important for us as the

Church of Jesus Christ as followers of Jesus as conveyors of the gospel that God is always

going to be positioning us so that when we obey him we have opportunity to shine light

in dark places to shine light in dark workplaces to shine light in dark neighborhoods and so

forth and so when God asks us to obey him whatever else it is he may have in mind someone

else besides just us at receiving the benefit of obeying him keep that in mind that's Jonah's

life that's our life to a very large degree we are conveyors of the message of God we're

ambassadors of Jesus Christ just like Jonah was called to be an ambassador of God.

So why should we obey God why should we say yes to God number one we should say yes because

his direction is always best number two we should say yes to God because the detours

are never good the detours are never good.

Have you ever experienced a detour in your life from obeying God and all of a sudden

you realize some days or weeks or months in that the detour is not a good place to be

would you raise your hand if you've had some bad detours in life I hope that you'll remember

some of those in fact I hope you'll feel some of those same feelings and emotions you had

when you were wandering from God and you were on a detour and you were realizing I'm getting

further and further away from God with this detour where did I go wrong well you went

wrong by saying no to a plan God had for your life a direction he had for your life you

see it spelled out in verse three look at what it says about Jonah but Jonah rose up

to flee to Tarsus from the presence of the Lord to me that's the most significant line

there in that verse from the presence of the Lord so he went down to Joppa found a ship

which was going to Tarsus paid the fare went down into it to go with them to Tarsus from

the presence of the Lord it's always like this when we just obey God we always go down

we always pay for it on our own we always go from the presence of the Lord not to the

presence of the Lord what a wreck this is in his life when I was in high school an enterprising

principal found a car that had been totaled because of drunk driving it was a local story

so everyone knew about it and he took that car he towed it left it in front of the front

door of our high school near the office where everyone came in and out during the course

of a day in that high school and we knew the story so it was a vivid reminder of what would

happen if we were drunk drivers and his message was very very clear if you choose to do this

that could be one result of your life and I mean it was unforgettable to see that wreck

and truth is Jonah's life is like that wreck he simply totals his life out in that short

period of time until God finally brings him back to obedience but the detours are awful

it's like one collision after another in his life and the detours are never were running

from God look at what Jonah did in his life first of all it says he ran to Tarshish from

the presence of the Lord that's 2,500 miles opposite where he was supposed to be going

to Nineveh over and over the scripture says he goes down down down never does he go up

and that's the play on words that's just a reminder of how bad of a deal it really was

for him but again the greatest thing as he was running from God's presence from the presence

of the Lord is twice in that verse that line is important and he's lost his mind because

he's trying to run from the presence of the Lord even though he's a prophet and knows

that God is everywhere all at once now you know doctrinally speaking that God is omnipresent

you know what that means don't you it means that there's never a moment in your life where

God is not present somewhere around you he's ever present he's omnipresent he's everywhere

all the time now there's another sense of the presence of God that is more like the

manifest presence where we can realize that he's there we can sense he's there where we

sense his conviction where we understand what he's trying to communicate to us and what

Jonah was running from was that intimate presence of God that allowed him to hear in the first

place rise and go to Nineveh so he knew how God spoke and he was running from that manifest

presence of God trying to get away from that omnipresence of God.

In Psalm 139 we have a great reminder from the psalmist where can I go from your spirit

where can I flee from your presence if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea even there

your hand will lead me and your right hand will take a hold of me.

Let me just remind you that you can never fully get away from the presence of God and

that's a really really good thing in your life.

No one can carry you away from the presence of God you cannot run far enough to be away

from the presence of God but you can be away from the presence that's recognizable the

presence that's communicating with you you can be far far from knowing what he wants

in your life.

You can be in a season of confusion and doubt you can be in the season of silence where

you're not hearing God say anything because you've chosen to move far away from him instead

of running to him.

That's part of the detours that are normal in the life of someone that says no to God.

Had no friend years and years ago who said this you know if you're if you're not walking

with God in his word and obeying him day in and day out after one day you know it after

two days your family knows it after three days everybody knows you're moving away from

the presence of God.

Its point was you're never sensitive to Christ you're never sensitive to the Lord when you're

intentionally walking in the opposite direction.

Another reason we really do that is because we're prideful or we're stubborn prideful

in the sense of saying I think I have a better plan or stubborn in the sense of saying I just

don't want to do that plan God.

I wrote this in my book and I really believe it's true pride and stubbornness are twin

devils they urge each other on.

The pride urges on the stubbornness the stubbornness urges on the pride and for long we find ourselves

moving like Jonah far far away from the presence of God.

When I had the conversation with Angela who told her story I asked her why did you keep

running and she answered the fact that she was so angry so frustrated that she just didn't

want to deal with God.

She didn't want to come back to God because things weren't working out the way she wanted

them to work out.

I've been away from the presence of the Lord like that most of you have been away from

the presence of the Lord like that and the detours that we take when we go through those

times are not worth the destination we're on.

But if you're proud or if you're stubborn you're going to experience detours like this

where you find it hard to hear God and hard to understand what he wants of your life.

You know the old line we've said it before many times sin will take you further than

you want to go keep you longer than you want to stay cost you more than you want to pay

and that's true.

Somebody in the room today would say nope that's what's happened to me.

That's why James in James chapter four verse six says God is opposed to the proud that

gives grace to the humble.

Man I don't want to be in any game where God is supposed to me and I'm opposed to him and

I don't think you do either.

We want to be on God's side.

We want to be following God and doing what he's told us to do.

So here's a good reason for you to say yes to God and that is the detours are never good.

Then number three very close to that is our discipline is always difficult.

Our discipline is always difficult.

Here's what the Bible promises you.

If you are a child of God the promise of scripture is that as a good heavenly father he will

discipline you if you're out of his will.

You say is that a good God?

Oh it's a good God and a good father that disciplines us.

We look around our culture today and we see sometimes we see some lawlessness among the

next generation and we say where are their fathers?

And the implication is those dads ought to step up and help those kids understand right

and wrong and what's good and what's bad and what's wicked and what's good.

We need the fathers to do that.

We have a heavenly father that is always on time and always interested in helping us be

in the right place in life.

And when we run from God the discipline is going to come from God the father and Jonah

is a pretty intimidating picture of how God might discipline our lives.

It might be one of the most detailed set of circumstances of how God disciplines his children

that we can find in the scripture.

And of course you know what the story is.

You know how it unfolds.

So as you jump over to verse four you see first of all that God sent a storm.

What does it say in verse four?

The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea.

Now you can't identify with this at all if you've never been deep sea fishing and never

been deep sea fishing in a storm.

Has anybody ever been deep sea fishing before?

Would you raise your hand if you've been off the coast on a boat somewhere?

Have any of you been in a storm off the coast in a boat?

Would you raise your hands as well?

And has that been one of those situations where hurl is a good word in the context?

The Lord hurled a storm.

I remember an experience I had years ago.

A group of guys who were part of the discipleship ministry we went to off the coast deep sea

fishing, rat snapper fishing.

And there was a boat that was 110 foot long.

There were 90 of us men on that boat.

And most of us lived in the Dallas Fort Worth region which means we'd never been in a wave

bigger than a lake could generate, right?

So we're on this boat.

We're 50 miles off the coast.

We don't see land anywhere.

And all of a sudden a storm comes up and all I could see was sea then sky.

Then sea then sky.

That's all any of us saw for about an hour.

And I'm telling you the word hurl applies to that particular boat at that particular

time.

I mean it was one of those moments where I couldn't wait to get back to land.

And most of us kissed the ground when we got back to land.

Now Jonah's in a storm except this storm.

He's not sure he's going to live or not.

This is a storm that hasn't just sprung up.

God sent this storm.

And the only one who really knew that God sent this storm was Jonah.

He was fully aware that all the discipline that was happening was happening because of

his disobedience.

And what was going on in that boat was so frightening that even the seasoned sailors

were believing that the ship was about to break up and they were wondering what must

we do in order to be rescued.

In fact it's the sailors, it's the godless pagan sailors that are crying out whatever

God they can while Jonah is ignoring what's happening all around him.

The more I read about Jonah the less I like this guy.

I mean he's a bad deal.

So God sent the storm and everyone was suffering.

Let me just say this even though you see it in the text yourself, when we disobey God

others suffer too.

It's not just you that goes through the pain.

It's not just you that goes through the heartbreak and the distance from God.

Often it's those closest to you.

In this case it was just a group of innocent sailors that didn't have any idea who Jonah

was at the moment.

They were going through the difficult time as well.

I like to say it like this disobedience never stays in its own lane.

It wanders and crashes into innocent travelers on a whole other journey.

Why do we think we can do it?

So God sent the storm as a form of discipline for Jonah.

And then the Bible says in verse 17 that God appointed a fish.

God appointed the fish.

I love the word appointment here because the word appointment says a great deal about how

this fish knew where Jonah was and what the fish was supposed to do.

And there's nothing random about the word appointment.

The Old Testament, that original language tells us that God specifically called the

whale to go do the deed of swallowing Jonah.

Now we sometimes will argue about the idea of a fish swallowing a man.

Certainly we don't doubt that a whale is big enough to swallow a man but we don't hear

of it happening often even though there are some historical examples apart from Jonah.

But here we have a prophet who writes the book itself and who from his own perspective

describes what's happening in vivid detail and it gives us authenticity to the whole

story.

So I want you to look in chapter two for a moment and here's what it says about what's

going on with Jonah.

Chapter two begins by saying that Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the

fish.

And he said, and then he gets into first person statements, I called out of my distress to

the Lord.

He answered me and I cried for help from the depth of Sheol.

You heard my voice.

The Jonah is recording this and he's saying this is what I did.

Verse five, water encompassed me to the point of death.

The great deep engulfed me.

Weeds were wrapped around my head.

Again, specifics.

Again, verse seven, while I was fainting way, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to

you into your Holy temple.

What a description of prayer.

At this point you're wondering why did you take so long to remember the Lord?

The theory is remembering the Lord and praying.

And then in verse 10 it says, and the Lord commanded the fish and it vomited Jonah up

onto the dry land.

I just love those sequence of verses because it says so much about how specific Jonah understood

God acting in discipline in his life.

And I suspect you and I know that too.

When you go through discipline, you normally know this is not chance, this is not random,

this is not just some circumstance.

I'm away from God and God is doing something to bring me back.

And maybe you feel like you're sinking and maybe you feel like weeds are wrapped around

your head.

Maybe you wonder why am I waiting so long to call out to God?

But somehow our pride and stubbornness keeps us in that place of that sinking and that

drowning and that being away from the presence of God so long until we finally think there's

no other hope but to reach out to God.

Literally Jonah waited until there was no other hope for him to reach out to God.

And what I'm saying to you today is you don't have to wait that long.

And aren't you glad that at any moment you can turn to God and say, God, I've had enough

now.

I think you're going to win this battle.

I think in the end I'm going to have to say yes anyway.

So I'm going to kind of let go of my pride and I'm going to lay down my stubbornness

and I'm going to call out to you.

And that's a key moment because Jonah is calling out to God.

And when Jonah calls out to God in verse 10 of chapter two, we are reminded that everything

God is doing is not just discipline, but it's also grace.

Please understand that discipline is grace.

Discipline is grace.

When the whale swallowed Jonah, it's certainly discipline, but it's God's grace because God

stops Jonah from going further than he already has.

It's not the worst thing God could have done.

God could have let him die in the depths.

God could have let him run further and further away from the presence of the Lord and prolong

not only Jonah's own reunion with God, whatever reunion that might have been, or cut the Ninevites

from coming to faith through Jonah's ministry.

I mean, God could have let something worse happen, but he didn't.

It's grace because God stops Jonah.

It's also grace because God brings him back, the whale puts him back to the place where

he should have been in the first place.

It's also grace because God is still going to save the Ninevites.

And through that disobedient prophet, God's still going to be able to bring his message

to a group of people that are so lost and so dark, they have no other hope than the

mercy of God.

It's all grace.

Pain is grace.

The whale is grace.

And we rarely see lives, we rarely see in our lives when we see whales or storms, we

rarely see them as grace, but it's all grace to keep us from going further from God.

God may not send a whale for you, but he may do something else to bring you back to him.

You should listen when he does that.

So Jonah responds by getting out of that well and getting on the beach and outwardly obeys

God walking through the city of Nineveh and preaching the message that God wanted him

to preach.

And lo and behold, the Ninevites repent and all of them come to faith in God.

And God spares the judgment on the nation.

Now if you read the whole book, you know, that Jonah is only obeying on the outside,

he's not obeying on the inside.

Anybody that's ever had children know that they know how to obey on the outside but not

the inside, right?

You tell your child to sit down and they sit down, cross their arms and say, no, on the

outside I'm sitting down, but on the inside I'm still standing up.

We do that in life sometimes.

God, I'll do that, but I'm gonna have a chip on my shoulder about it.

All right, God, I'm gonna lay side that's it, but I'm still mad because I want it.

I want it bad.

Okay, God, I'll go where you tell me to go, but I'm gonna be angry the whole time because

I really wanna go in the other direction.

That's what we do with God.

We negotiate with God, we argue with God, we do all these things and we obey on the

outside sometimes and we disobey on the inside, but when Jonah even obeyed on the outside,

when he stopped running from God, everyone around him was blessed.

Remember how everyone went through the pain when he went through the pain?

Now he's obeyed God by bringing the message to the nearby and everyone around him is facing

changed lives because of the message that God gave him, but on the inside he's still

miserable, still angry, still arguing, still unrepentant.

Did you know that 99% obedience is still disobedience?

99% obedience is still disobedience.

We can obey God a little bit of the way, but hold our heart back and still disobedience

and that's why the argument keeps on going between Jonah and God.

So pick it back up at the discipline part, chapter four, the first six verses, the Bible

says, so then God appointed a plant.

Here's what it says in chapter four, verse one, but it greatly displeased Jonah, that

is, that the Ninevites repented and he became angry.

He prayed to the Lord and said, please Lord, was not this what I said was still in my own

country while still in my own country?

Therefore in order to forestall this, I fled to Tarshish for I knew that you were a gracious

and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness and one who relents concerning

calamity.

Therefore, now, oh Lord, please take my life from me for death is better to me than this

life.

I mean, think about this guy.

I mean, we don't want to be best friends with Jonah, right?

I mean, here's a guy that saw the repentance of the whole city and he's angry about it.

He's mad because he doesn't like those people.

The Lord said to him, do you have good reason to be angry?

And Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it.

There he made the shelter for himself and sat under the shade until he could see what

would happen in the city.

So the Lord appointed the plant, there's a guy appointing things again, and it grew up

over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort.

And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant.

Man, I don't like this guy at all.

I'm liking him less as the story goes on and I've read through it several times.

What about the repentance?

Happy about a plant, extremely happy about the plant, excited the fact that he's not

going to have the sun beating down on his head anymore.

He likes the shade the plant provides for him.

And God sent that plant to illustrate that particular thing in his life.

But then God did something else.

God appointed a worm.

That's what the scripture says in chapter four, verse seven, God appointed a worm.

It attacked the plant and it withered.

And then verse eight, God appointed a scorching wind.

It says when the sun came up, God appointed a scorching east wind and the sun beat down

on Jonah's head so that he became faint and begged with all the soul to die saying, death

is better to me than life.

I mean, you're seeing this unfold and you've got to be wondering at this point, how is it

that God can use a storm and a fish and a plant and a worm and even the wind and they

all obey him, but only man disobeys him?

Why is that?

And of course the answer is that God has given us a free will and we exercise it so often

in adversity to God.

We want that free will and that free will is important and yet we have the opportunity

to say yes to God instead of no to God.

We often just get it wrong.

And we even get to the point like Jonah where when things happen to us in disobedience,

we get angry.

We get angry at the storm.

We get angry at the fish.

We get angry at the plant or the worm or the east wind.

And then we get angry at God because all those things happen.

We never seem to get angry at ourselves for being so stubborn, so pride, proud, so far,

far from God.

This is what's happening in Jonah's life.

You know, God may not discipline you the way he did Jonah, but he always has a way of getting

your attention.

I think it's such an important thing in life to recognize that if he's doing that, that

we ought to listen really, really, really well.

Because even the small thoughts we have in life, the attitudes we have, and then the

actual outward acts of disobedience to God are things that are markers in our life that

we're having some discipline that's going to be difficult in the days ahead because

God does love us.

But the fourth reason that we shouldn't say yes to God is because the destination is ultimately

surrender, that in the end, we're going to surrender anyway.

In the end, we're going to surrender anyway.

Now, at the end of the story in the book of Jonah, Jonah's still complaining and he's

still arguing with God.

And as I'm reading this over and over, I'm thinking it would have been so much easier

for Jonah to say yes the first time instead of no the first time.

What would Jonah's life have been like if he had said yes from the beginning?

Whatever else, we might conclude it wouldn't involve fighting with God in any way.

But here's what it says in the last few verses of Jonah chapter four, verses nine through

11.

And God said to Jonah, do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?

And he said, I have good reason to be angry even to death.

The Lord said, you had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did

not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight.

But I have not had compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than

120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right hand and left hand as

well as many animals.

You know, surrender to God is inevitable for all of us sooner or later.

It might not be in this lifetime.

You might run your whole life from God as Jonah may have done.

But at some point you're going to bend the knee and you're going to declare Jesus Christ

as Lord to the glory of God the Father.

That's what Paul said in the book of Philippians.

Paul, who knew what it was to oppose God and God's ways, eventually said these words in

Philippians chapter two, at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess

of those who are in heaven and on earth and underneath yore.

Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

You know what that means?

Every single one of us at some point will get on our knees and we'll say Jesus Christ

is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

It always ends one way or another in surrender, so why not let it happen now?

You see, saying yes to God means that you can be at that moment of surrender while you're

still on the planet to enjoy it.

But until that happens, God peels back the outer layers of our lives, exposing everything

on the inside, so we eventually get the idea, here's the problem right here in my heart.

And when I take my heart and surrender it to God, that's when everything changes.

Have you ever experienced this?

Have you ever experienced that moment of surrender?

Maybe you're all by yourself and you realize that you've got personal and private issues

in your life as you struggle with God and you're far more concerned about your personal

comfort just like Jonah was than you are about the grace of God on the nations or the grace

of God in obedience.

And God is saying to Joseph all the way to the end of the book, I want all of your heart,

I want complete surrender from you.

I want you to be all in in following me, not only with what you do outwardly but also in

your mind and your heart and your attitude and everything you do, I want you to be all

in.

You know I read the book of Jonah and I actually get mad at Jonah, I get mad at him, I get

angry at him.

And then I realize I don't need to be too quick to judge because I'm just like Jonah

sometimes.

There's a lot of Jonah in all of us.

You know the interesting thing about this story that I think is so fascinating is that

it is a non-ending.

You know the book of Jonah doesn't really end in a way that's definitive.

We don't know exactly what Jonah did after God said those words to him.

Should I have not had compassion on all those netabytes?

And so it really is left to us to provide the ending.

Not that you can write scripture but you can stand in Jonah's shoes and say okay if that

happens to me then this is how the ending is going to be in my life.

This is what I'm going to say to God after I've run from God, after I've suffered through

these detours and this discipline and I know his way is always best, always better than

I can possibly come up with.

This is what I'm going to say to God in my life.

And what I'm going to say to God is God you're right.

I'm wrong again and I'm choosing to follow you 100% from this moment forward.

I mean if somebody writes a book about your life you don't want it to end like Jonah's

book did.

You want it to end with the story of you being faithful to the God who is faithful to you.

Saying yes to God is the best possible scenario in your life.

Now overall the theme of Jonah is this and don't miss this point.

God loves and has compassion on all people everywhere he will turn and worship him.

But he wants to use you and I to demonstrate that love to people who don't know him.

I've experienced this every week but isn't this week a vivid reminder of how dark our

world is and how desperate and hopeless they are and how important it is that we like Jonah

to be ambassadors for him in a world that is Christless and hopeless and has no idea

how to deal with issues that Christ does and he's shown us and he's called us.

Saying yes to God is the most important thing in your life.

Just a moment we'll have an invitation.

Our invitation stations will be lit up.

The first time you say yes to God is the yes of salvation.

Yes God I know I can't save myself.

I know I can't do enough to have my sins forgiven.

I'm going to trust what Jesus did on the cross to forgive me and give me the gift of eternal

life.

That's saying yes to God.

It's humbling yourself not being prideful not being stubborn and simply saying I know

I can't earn this but I want to receive it by grace.

If you're in that place today and you're ready to say yes to God we're ready to talk

to you about that decision at our decision station.

That's my first invitation to you.

The second invitation is this I would invite you to come to our guest reception room.

Love to meet you.

Love to talk to you about Cross City Church and its ministry.

And the third invitation is take a card with you and invite others to come with you next

week.

Next week's Mother's Day I'm actually preaching about the life of Abigail next Sunday about

this incredible woman that was in toxic situations as so many are today.

There's a lot of hope in the life of Abigail.

And I want to invite you to invite others to come with you next week.

Would you stand with me as we have this closing word of prayer.

Father I am so thankful for you.

Your work in our lives, the work in the life of Jonah to bring him to that place of obedience

where he could have gone all in with you.

We don't know the answer to that but we know what we will do.

Today Father I pray that each of us will come to the place of saying yes Lord you have my

whole heart, my whole future, you have my attitude, my mindset, you have my obedience

100 percent.

And Lord I know there are those in the room that have never given their lives to you as

Lord and Savior and Lord I pray that will take place right at the conclusion of this

prayer.

But that the rest of us moment by moment, step by step will continually surrender to

you.

We bow our mouths proclaiming Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

We commit this to you today.

Thank you for the life of Jonah that warns us.

And Lord I pray that we will say yes instead in Jesus name.

Amen.