Jonah: A Stable Meta Narrative

So when I was in the sixth grade, my class were in the lunchroom.

We had just finished lunch.

We went by and bought our ice cream for the day.

We lined up on the sidewall to exit the side doors that went out to this little parking lot where we ate our ice cream.

So I'm standing there on the sidewall.

I have my little push-pop, Sherbert Pushpop.

That's what I always got in that one.

And so I was standing there, and there was an eighth grade class at the table right there.

And I knew an eighth grader at that table.

His name was Brandon, his real name.

That was his, I won't tell his last name, but his name was Brandon, who's sitting there.

I knew him through a friend, and I was a lowly sixth grader.

He was a big eighth grader, and I was lined up.

I remember thinking to myself, man, if he would say hi to me, an eighth grader or sixth grader, can you imagine that status?

What could happen for me in that moment?

So I lined up with my Sherbert, and I'm standing there, and I'm not looking at him, but I'm sort of thinking like he could, he could say hi, it's possible.

He called my name out, and then he called me a name that I will not repeat verbally in this setting that was the opposite of the thing I was hoping for.

And everybody laughed, and then I returned a comment or two.

I was creative as well with my words, and so we were both creative individuals at those ages.

And what happened in that moment was Brandon moved for me on my ledger, my inner ledger of accounting.

He was in debt from then on.

This guy was in debt.

He was gonna have to earn his way back out.

And so I held that against Brandon.

Apparently, I still hold that against Brandon right now because I clearly remember his name and the event.

And so any sort of smile from me toward Brandon was always going to have to come after he worked his way to the positive side of the ledger.

And I'd like to say I don't do this anymore, but I do.

I'm just better at it.

I'm better at hiding it.

I say, you know, I have the polite, well, you know, bless you, God bless you, bless his soul, bless her.

But it's so it's a polite, there's a polite religious sort of persona, but still inside, there's still a ledger, just like you probably have a ledger as well.

Now, maybe you also, maybe you grew up with a parent that that did things by ledger.

Meaning, uh, when you were making the grades, things were good.

When you kept the peace, things were good.

You were you were loved, you were welcomed, you were accepted.

And then if you weren't making the grades or you didn't make the team or you weren't keeping the peace, things weren't good.

You were on the negative side of the ledger.

Much less if you failed big time.

So acceptance, perhaps, for some of us, maybe.

We all know that in some relationship, acceptance that was never based in love, but on performance.

And then we have this Jonah story.

Now, here is a guy who has not performed.

I mean, this is not our moral example, let's say that.

And yet we are him.

I mean, he's called to go to Nineveh, and a tough calling.

That was an enemy place, a place of the enemy, people have hurt him and his family and his friends.

That would have been a tough thing to do.

Still, it was God's call on him, and still he said, I don't want to do that.

And he runs the other way.

You've been traveling with us the last four or five weeks.

You've learned and we've seen how he was then thrown into the sea.

Most likely he wanted to be thrown in the sea.

Probably he was just hoping to die.

He experienced a different sort of death because the story talks about how miraculously a fish swallows him, and then he begins to call this the belly of shield.

He's in the belly of death.

He's knowing a death before death.

And yet that's where the freedom is for him.

That's where our freedom is.

We always have to have a death before death.

And it's there finally, we talked about the last two weeks.

Finally, he relents and he prays and he says, all of life is either worthless idols or steadfast love.

It's either worthless idols or the steadfast love of God, and salvation belongs to God.

Steadfast love of God for us.

Now, steadfast love would do away with a ledger, because steadfast implies that it's always there.

And then we get this Jonah 3, verses 1 through 3.

Jonah 3:1–3

Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.

So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord.

Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey and breadth.

So here's point number one.

I have two points.

We have two points for this morning.

Point number one is this.

Now I didn't make that term up.

I stole that from seminary professor Steve Brown.

He talks about how we need a stable meta-narrative for our life.

And if we have a stable meta-narrative for our life and for God, we will have a stable God and a stable, secure self.

Christine, I bought a house in Grant Park years ago.

So this would have been 14, 13 years ago or so.

And we bought this house down in Grant Park by the zoo.

It was a dump of a house.

Let's just be very honest about it.

It was, it needed everything.

The porch was falling off, there was critters in the house, the one shower did not work when we moved in.

I mean, it needed a lot of work.

The worst thing about it was the foundation actually had a problem.

And so fortunately, Christie's dad works in that line of business.

So one of his guys came down and looks at our foundation, and he immediately looks at it and says, Yeah, we're gonna have to stabilize this whole thing.

He says, the entire house, here's what he said, the this entire house is at risk because this foundation wall is not stable.

Now that's my parable.

Jesus tells a parable about building a house on the rock or on the sand.

But the point's the same.

We can get something wrong from the beginning.

And from there, everything else can be off.

And it's easy to do.

Like it's really easy.

It's easy to create a God with a ledger that comes and goes based on how you're doing or even how you're feeling.

Loves you when you perform.

Not quite sure how he feels about you if you're not performing.

Forgives you only if you obey afterward, but then if you don't obey afterward and you mess up again, then you aren't quite sure.

Did he really forgive me or could he forgive me again?

It's easy to create a faith where obedience is because you are able, and it's all sort of like an upward trajectory of success upon success of your Christian life and sanctification.

But then what happens when you fail?

Or like what happens when you get hurt?

What happens when you get sick?

All of a sudden that meta-narrative doesn't work anymore.

You'll be condemned by it.

You'll be exhausted by it.

It's a failing false meta-narrative.

But what we see in Jonah, just in these three verses, and looking, kind of backing up out of this story a little bit and seeing it as a whole, is amidst failure and difficulty, God doesn't go anywhere.

He's still there.

What we see is as we see we're never without God.

And because of his grace toward us, which we know now in Christ, we're never without the acceptance from God.

That's our meta-narrative.

We could word it a different way and say our meta-narrative is creation, fall, redemption, restoration.

Creation, we are created beautiful by the triune God from the beginning.

That's the beginning of the story.

The beginning of the story is not our sin.

The beginning of the story is we are created beautiful.

Fall.

We sinned, we sin, you're not perfect, I'm not perfect.

Redemption in Christ.

God forever pursues us, forever forgives us, and forever deems us righteous.

And then restoration, that there will be a day, one day, there will be a day when all the sad things become untrue.

That's a meta-narrative.

Verse 3 says, Jonah arose and went.

Finally, he obeys.

Finally.

But he is only obedient after being rescued in his inability to be obedient.

And that's really important to realize and see.

He's not obedient out of his own ability to pull up his bootstraps and make it happen.

He's obedient after his death.

Jonah shows us that obedience and life change, and you can use the term spiritual growth, you could say sanctification, you could say transformation, use whatever word you want.

His ability to be obedient to the Lord is not him getting his act together and pulling up his bootstraps by self-effort.

It's actually a death.

A death to the self-effort-fueled faith.

But being fully found by God, being changed by that in the heart.

This means you should absolutely care about transformation and obedience to the Lord.

You should absolutely care about that.

Just don't navelgaze about it too much.

It's not helpful.

That's actually narcissism.

It's actually a religious idolatry in and of itself.

Because it's not faith in Christ, ultimately, then you've shifted it back to faith in yourself.

There's a story in Luke chapter 15, right?

Luke 15 · chapter mention

You know the story, the prodigal son.

We talk about it a lot here.

Just to kind of remember it just a little bit.

The younger son asks for his inheritance early, he runs off, he wastes it all.

He thinks, ah, maybe I can go back to God.

Maybe I go back to the father, his father, representative of God.

So he goes back.

And when he returns, what he discovers is this great part of the story, he was never without the acceptance of his dad.

The father doesn't lecture him, doesn't shame him, just welcomes him back, starts to throw a party.

The father was waiting on the child to accept his own acceptance.

A few questions can usually help us as we start to think about is that where I live and rest day to day?

Do I live and rest in this meta-narrative of how sufficient Christ is for me, or do I have some sort of other life of worthless idols or perhaps a religious idolatry of some sort?

What's my meta-narrative?

A few questions can often help.

Do you live out of self-dependency?

Do you worry a lot?

Are you afraid a lot?

Are you unable to love others?

Unable to love those different than you?

Do you feel anxious day to day in regard to your standing with God?

Do you have apathy toward God?

Is your daily security with God based in your morality or your purity or your performance?

Or is it based in his steadfast love for you in Christ?

A few weeks ago, a billionaire, technology investor Robert Smith, maybe you saw this in the news, he was giving a commencement address at Morehouse College.

Maybe you saw this.

He stands up in front of 400 graduates, he's sitting there, he gives kind of an inspiring commencement address, or everything's flowing like normal at a graduation from a college, and then there in the speech, he stops and he says, On behalf of eight generations of my family, my family commits to pay off all of your school debt.

400 graduates.

Even if you understand forgiveness to be perpetually forgiven, but if that's all it is, you're still poor.

You still have zero the next day.

You still have to get to work, you still got to show up to earn your righteousness before God.

Now, what if Mr.

Smith had said, I will forgive all the debt, I pay for all the debt.

And tomorrow morning when you check your bank account, I am transferring all of my wealth divided up into your account.

I did the math, Forbes told me he's worth$5 billion or$400 students.

That'd be$12.5 million each.

That would be enough.

Should be.

So not only would they be forgiven of their debt, they would be wealthy forever.

Now we have a meta-narrative.

That is a stable meta-narrative of who God is, of our condition of need.

That the first half of the gospel is that you are fully forever forgiven, and the second half of the gospel is that you are fully forever righteous.

And both of these are gifts of God known in Christ on the cross.

Our debt, our sin is put upon him on the cross, and his righteousness is given to us.

Author Jerry Bridges breaks it down this way.

He wrote a great book called The Discipline of Grace.

He said, for many Christians, faith is uh attend church a certain amount, maybe give some money, maybe we'll give a little money.

Maybe take some brownies to your neighbor.

And then maybe you maybe you're a more committed Christian, maybe some more committed Christians.

And it means uh you practice some spiritual disciplines.

Maybe you have an area of ministry, maybe you volunteer, post Bible verses on Instagram as your great witness to the world.

Now, if that's all it means to be a Christian, if that's all it means, you'll inevitably hold judgment to those who don't practice the things you practice.

Because you've deemed those are the ways that you're righteous.

They're not serious enough, those people, not serious enough.

Now, maybe you're very spiritual, and you see you have to go inward.

So you're all about sort of a constant evaluation of your inner self, but there's no freedom.

Because you're constantly evaluating, sort of in this cycle of evaluation of seeing your sin, and you get that, and you see that, but it's creating a deeper and deeper guilt, no freedom, because you don't have the gift of the imputation of Christ on you.

There's no stable narrative of a fully sufficient, fully forgiving, fully righteousness giving God.

Paul writes this in Galatians 2.20.

The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God.

I live by faith in Christ.

So the life I live now is by faith.

So effort's not over.

Effort's inside of faith and inside the grace of God, but earning is over.

Earnings gone.

It's over.

And what Paul was writing about, Paul was writing about connection back to his justification he already had in Christ.

So what he's writing about is a very stable meta-narrative where he can write stuff like, I'm the worst of human beings.

And yet he's not sent into some depression or some shame.

Because what he knows is that he knows he's already accepted and right with God based on Christ.

There's no ledger, no shame, no guilt, no performance left for him or you or me to perform.

Point number two is this.

The Christian life, faith, the Christian life is lived in the accepting of the acceptance from a gracious God.

That's the big challenge.

The big challenge is accepting the acceptance.

So can we go back to the Brandon story, right?

In the lunchroom.

Remember the beginning?

Now, why did I react back?

Because I was hoping for acceptance and I received condemnation.

So of course I reacted with hatred and words.

But imagine, imagine I was just like a little monk of a Christian, you know, sixth grader, and I'm there and I'm one with God, and I have a stable meta-narrative of a sixth grader, and it's active in my heart, and it's holding my heart.

What would be true is that I would know I was always accepted by God.

My justification as a human being and worth and belovedness was already solved.

Ready to go eat my little push-pop, Sherbert, Brandon lets loose with his words to me.

I would have been embarrassed.

Right?

You would have been embarrassed.

But, but, but, but I would have known.

I would have known that I had a value and a worth and a wealth of identity and forgiveness and righteousness and worth.

That Brandon or any person or approval or disapproval or job or no job or romance or no romance or net worth or no net worth can't touch.

My justification was already solved.

See, the life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God.

See how you live now, and this idea of verse 3 of Jonah of like, oh, now he obeys is connected to you understanding how fully justified you are.

That's why Jonah writes about he prays, he prays, it's either worthless idols or steadfast love.

Salvation belongs to the Lord, and then he obeys.

And he goes.

The thing that enables obedience is the steadfast love.

The absurdity of grace is very difficult to grasp.

I do think that.

I think I still have a hard time accepting how absolutely full and sufficient it is.

It is not cheap, it is free, it is much bigger and better than cheap.

It is fully free.

And what it does inside of us is it heals us and it revolutionizes us and it begins to do in our hearts some healing and then outward transformation.

But we'll never accept it until we're at the end of our rope.

We just don't need it until then.

We'll always sort of have some sort of hybrid of a little bit of performance and effort tied with God being a little bit gracious.

And eventually there'll be a day.

And here's just the encouragement.

And I don't say this to say shame on you, I say it to say grace on you.

There'll just be a day when you're exhausted and condemned and you can't do anything else.

And God's still there.

Finally, then we're the prodigal, where we can come back and say, Oh, I don't have anything to offer here.

And God's going, like, I want to throw a party for you.

Like, will you accept, will you accept the party?

Because that would change everything.

And then we can begin to know a little bit of verse 3, obedience to the Lord.

I close with this quote I read this week by Dr.

Stephen Tyne.

He was a rector at St.

George's Episcopal Church in New York City in the 1800s.

And here's what he said.

Wherever you are, tell your precious tidings to someone.

And I think that's poetic 19th century for meta-narrative, I'm not sure.

Your precious tidings to someone.

The message of that which God has done is the offer of that which man may have, complete forgiveness in a Savior's death, everlasting cleansing and the power of a Savior's precious blood, unchangeable acceptance with God and a Savior's perfect obedience for man, eternal life, the gracious gift of God in him.

My brothers and sisters, grace and peace to you.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you for this good word of Jonah, that we can both associate with Jonah and see that wow, we are not perfect people, and that we resist you, we run from your call, we're not perfect, we are sinners in need of your perfect grace, and yet we see in this story what is always true that you are love and you are here and you're with us.

And in Christ we have all we need.

Forgive us for all the ways we try to add to it, complicate things, cause problems.

Forgive us for turning our eyes away from the work of Jesus alone, your love for us, and onto all that which we produce, as if that is going to have standing before you or form our righteousness.

God, I pray that you help all of us get to the end of our rope that we might know how great and deep and wide and beautiful, wonderful, and transformative your grace is.

Help us to see Christ in bigger and bigger and greater and greater ways in our hearts.

That we might live lives that honor you and obey you.

That we might be light to the world.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.