Jonah: God’s Grace in Our Contradictions

[UNKNOWN]: Thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next video.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, good morning, church.

[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Andrew.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't know me, I'm one of the pastors here.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is so good to be together into worship.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our family just spent some time down in Kentucky, visiting the Ark and Counter, which was a really cool experience.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we got to go to Indianapolis and spend some time with Amber's family and worship at the church where Amber and I met.

[SPEAKER_00]: That was really special.

[SPEAKER_00]: but man, it is good to be back here with our church family singing and worshiping together.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is an important and exciting time of year.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's busy, challenging, and exciting all at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Summer starts to wind down.

[SPEAKER_00]: The school year starts to ramp up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's so many exciting things happening here at first free.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so before we jump into the message this morning, I'm going to take a moment and just share a few important church announcements so that you're fully in the loop on everything.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if, like me, you've been traveling lately, you know everything that is going on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Next Sunday, we're going to have an important congregational meeting Adam will be back he's traveling right now with his family and he's going to have a chance to lead us through and share about our really exciting vision to improve our campus.

[SPEAKER_00]: to help us more effectively reach our church community.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that'll be at 1215 in the auditorium right after second service.

[SPEAKER_00]: We will have child care available if that's something that you need, but please be sure to register for that so that we know how many workers that we need.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are so excited for next Sunday and that congregation on meeting members will be able to vote on a couple of items and everyone in the church is invited to come.

[SPEAKER_00]: This fall, we are also doing a really intentional push to invite people to join a small group.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have a group's interest survey that's open for two more weeks.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen a great response on this already.

[SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of people who are excited about joining a small group.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those are going to start up in September.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you've been thinking about a small group for you or your family, this is a great opportunity to take a next step.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted to make sure that you knew

[SPEAKER_00]: And then last but not least, if you were new to first free, Sunday August 30th, we're going to do a meet first free lunch.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll have child care provided if that's something that you need.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is a great chance to have lunch together, meet some of our staff and our pastors, and also meet other families who are new.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're new or new-ish, wanting to connect it, we would love to have you there.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can register for that at efree.org slash events.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know that's a lot of announcements, but just want to make sure that we're all in the loop and kind of move in together.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, before we start our sermon, I'd like for us to spend a few moments as a church and prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: There is a lot going on in our church right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have many families who are walking through some difficult challenges.

[SPEAKER_00]: You may be aware of some of those are probably not all, but

[SPEAKER_00]: We're also, we're walking through a lot right now, and as a church, we're also getting ready to start a new exciting season of ministry.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we want to take a few moments and lift all of those concerns to the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: Pray with me here.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're not going to rush through this or move too quickly.

[SPEAKER_00]: So feel free to bring your own request to God as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: But let's go to the Lord and spend a few moments together and prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: Heavenly Father, we praise you because you are holy, powerful and loving and a way that is bigger, stronger, and wiser than we can ever imagine.

[SPEAKER_00]: We confess that in the business of our lives, we rarely pause to reflect on who you are.

[SPEAKER_00]: We neglect opportunities to draw close to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: We prioritize other pursuits, which are way less important than you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we willfully ignore your call to love others and we miss out on opportunities to hope others know you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, we humbly ask for your forgiveness, please work on our hearts to help all of us to walk closely with you.

[SPEAKER_00]: We lift up all of those in our church family who are hurting right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: We pray for those who are struggling with cancer.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, we boldly ask for your healing touch if that is your will.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we ask for a really special sense of your nearness and your presence for them and

[SPEAKER_00]: We also pray with those with long-term medical diagnoses, those who have been walking a hard road for years and years.

[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we boldly ask for your healing, for your restoration, your renewal, and their lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: May your goodness be with them an tangible way that helps them to trust you and may your grace sustain them to keep walking with you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, we pray for all the ministries of our church.

[SPEAKER_00]: Would you bless our leaders and help them to lead each ministry with wisdom, with humility, with Godliness?

[SPEAKER_00]: We ask you to raise up leaders who aren't currently serving and lead them into a place where they can use their gifts to glorify you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we thank you and praise you for the many leaders who are serving.

[SPEAKER_00]: God, give them energy, give them strength.

[SPEAKER_00]: We pray that each and every single ministry here would help all of those who are involved to hear your word and to really apply it to their lives so that they can honor you with how they live.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lord guide us as we study this passage help us to truly and deeply apply it to our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: We pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's enter into this morning's message.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll be studying Jonah 1, 17 through two chapter 10.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can go ahead and turn there in your Bibles.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah 1, 17 through two, 10, where you can pull that up on you version.

[SPEAKER_00]: Today, we get to study the part where Jonah gets swallowed by the great fish.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's so exciting, it's interesting.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is so relevant to our lives and our struggles.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm excited to study that with you.

[SPEAKER_00]: So before we get there, I want to start with a connection, not to marine biology, the we will talk just a little bit about that later on.

[SPEAKER_00]: I actually want to start with a short anecdote from American history and hang with me here because I promise that this will apply to our message.

[SPEAKER_00]: The summer, I had a chance to read a biography about Thomas Jefferson, was our country's third president who wrote the Declaration of Independence.

[SPEAKER_00]: He lived a fascinating life with many, many impressive accomplishments, but when you really study his life and the way that he lived, both publicly and privately,

[SPEAKER_00]: that emerge.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jefferson, to give one example, believed the president shouldn't be very powerful.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to avoid turning the president into a king, like what they had in England.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in his president, he exercised power in new and even unprecedented ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: He made the Louisiana purchase, which he wasn't even sure he had the constitutional authority or the president to do so.

[SPEAKER_00]: It added 500 million acres of land to our country, and it was an incredible deal.

[SPEAKER_00]: So even though he did it, believe necessarily that he could do it, he decided to take that action anyway.

[SPEAKER_00]: Kind of an interesting dichotomy between what he believed and what he actually did.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's other examples too, Jefferson believed that debt

[SPEAKER_00]: was dangerous, and so his president, he worked tirelessly to bring the national debt down, but then in his own personal life, he continued to add debt to his lifestyle.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when he died, get this, Jefferson owed somewhere in the range of by the modern equivalency two to three million dollars.

[SPEAKER_00]: He believed that was dangerous, but he accumulated massive debt in his own personal life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the most conspicuously Jefferson penned some of our country's most powerful and beloved words about freedom and you know these, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're endowed by their creator.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're certain analinable rights among these are life liberty in the pursuit of happiness.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yet, over the course of his lifetime, Jefferson owned 600 slaves.

[SPEAKER_00]: The biography that I read, and this is where I want us to land on this, used this phrase to describe Jefferson.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was quote comfortable in his contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: Comfortable in his contradictions, isn't that an interesting and memorable phrase?

[SPEAKER_00]: It can be easy to look back in history and identify the contradictions in the lives of the rich, the famous, and the powerful.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's more difficult and even more important for us to accurately identify the contradictions in our own lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where are we?

[SPEAKER_00]: Where are you comfortable in your contradictions?

[SPEAKER_00]: Or we could ask it this way, where are there differences between what you say or believe, what we say and believe, and how we actually live as a church.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where is that true for us as a church?

[SPEAKER_00]: Where is that true for us as individuals?

[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to hold on to that question and to wrestle with the tension that it creates as we walk through this message.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you believe that generosity is important, but you find it difficult to give freely of your money your time and your resources.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you're convinced that your relationship with God should be your number one priority, but when you honestly look at your life, there's something else that holds your heart's greatest attention or affection.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe you know, quote, that there's a habit that's hurtful for you, but you continue to practice it anyway.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe there's a dichotomy between what you believe and how you live.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we might be tempted to shrug these contradictions off.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they're at that big of a deal.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe we'll get around to dealing with them later.

[SPEAKER_00]: We think to ourselves, but we ignore these contradictions at our peril.

[SPEAKER_00]: These are dangerous for us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And with others, I think it's safe to say that our contradictions are some of the most painful areas in our lives in terms of our relationships.

[SPEAKER_00]: So there are really big deal, and we need God's help to address them.

[SPEAKER_00]: all of us struggle with contradictions, but God, in and through His grace, He works in our lives to change us through the power of the Holy Spirit, He works on our contradictions, and He replaces them with consistency.

[SPEAKER_00]: And with character, He brings our hearts and our minds and our lives together to create alignment.

[SPEAKER_00]: This morning, we're going to see three truths about God and how He responds to our contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: The question I want us to wrestle with is how does God respond when there are contradictions in our lives?

[SPEAKER_00]: There's three main sections of the passage that we're gonna look at in Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's Jonah in the great fish.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's Jonah's prayer inside the fish, and then there's Jonah in a new testament connection.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in each of those sections, we're gonna see it take away about God's grace and how he responds to our contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's where we're headed this morning.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin together.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let me briefly set the context so far we have certainly seen some of Jonah's contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah is a prophet of God but he doesn't listen to God.

[SPEAKER_00]: God calls him to go to Nineva.

[SPEAKER_00]: He goes in the opposite direction, boards a ship man by pagan sailors.

[SPEAKER_00]: God sends a terrible storm.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then in an act of desperation Jonah tells the sailors to throw him into the sea.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah did not, and that's where we pick up the story today.

[SPEAKER_00]: So let's start in Jonah 117.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says, now the Lord had arranged for a great fish to swallow Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I might have already lost some of you, I've just the first verse.

[SPEAKER_00]: So let's take a second to address the elephant in the room or as we could say, the whale in the sea.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need to ask the question, was this a real historical event?

[SPEAKER_00]: That may not be a question that you wrestle with is you read the text or for others of you, you may come across this verse and have serious doubts about the Bible based on whether or not this could actually happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: Some have speculated that the impossibility of a human being swallowed by a fish shows that the book of Jonah is more of a metaphor, more of a fable, more of a well-crafted story with true lessons, but not true historical events.

[SPEAKER_00]: Church, I believe that this text describes a real historical event.

[SPEAKER_00]: I also want to acknowledge that there are genuine Christians who, to use the language of our undivided series, would disagree as a matter of preference or conviction, and I respect that viewpoint, and I acknowledge the complexity of the issues that play, but personally for myself and past

[SPEAKER_00]: and the Bible as a whole points to this as a real event.

[SPEAKER_00]: Second King's 1423 through 28 anchors Jonah is a real person, not a fictional character, any prophesied in the eighth century BC.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the book of Jonah itself, records these events as history, not as fable.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus also mentions Jonah multiple times in the gospels, in a way that seems to refer to a real person and real events not merely a metaphor.

[SPEAKER_00]: And furthermore and importantly, this is the way that most Jewish and Christian interpreters throughout church history have understood the text.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think these are good reasons to interpret Jonah and the events that describes as a real-life historical event.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, with regards to the great fish in verse 17, we don't know what kind of fish it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: It could have been a sperm whale, which could swallow a human amongst conservative Bible scholars.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's kind of the leading option, but it also certainly could have been another kind of sea creature.

[SPEAKER_00]: It does require a miracle because based on what we know about sea creatures today, a human couldn't survive that long, inside of a fish due to a lack of oxygen.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the traditional view is that God miraculously led the whale to swallow Jonah, and then also miraculously preserved Jonah's life inside of the great fish.

[SPEAKER_00]: if you look again at the text in verse 17, it says, God arranged.

[SPEAKER_00]: We could also translate that God provided or God appointed.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's clear that God's hand is at work in this an

[SPEAKER_00]: And praise God, right, that we serve and worship a miracle working God.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's Jason said this morning.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's supreme over all creation.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's the Lord of heaven and earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as we sang earlier this morning, there's nothing that can stop our God.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's that powerful, that strong.

[SPEAKER_00]: He can use a whale to rescue Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: We could spend hours probably doing a deep dive, pun intended there, on all the questions and issues connected to this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, no, that was really bad.

[SPEAKER_00]: There are other takeaways that I think are important for us to focus on today.

[SPEAKER_00]: But if this is a question where you struggle and you have serious doubts and kind of get hung up on it, I would love to share some resources with you that I have found helpful.

[SPEAKER_00]: So please feel free to shoot me an email, it amelor at e3.org and I would love to email you, kind of some longer looks at this particular question.

[SPEAKER_00]: As much as we wonder about the fish, and those are good questions to ask, the text itself doesn't really spend a ton of time focused on it or the exact mechanics of what happened.

[SPEAKER_00]: It only mentions the fish twice.

[SPEAKER_00]: and verse 17 and later in two and on chapter 2 verse 10.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the main focus of the text and don't miss this, the main focus of the text is how God graciously and powerfully works in Jonah's story to save him.

[SPEAKER_00]: One commentator puts it like this.

[SPEAKER_00]: The significance of the big fish is that the reader is asked to believe the quote unbelievable.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now what is unbelievable?

[SPEAKER_00]: For many modern reasons, readers, the answer stops with the physical impossibility of the fish swallowing Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: The text, however, offers another answer to that question.

[SPEAKER_00]: The fish demonstrates the astounding lengths to which God will go to reconcile Jonah and the violent Ninevites to himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: The big fish makes a specific point about God's extravagant, unrelenting, pursuing saving love.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it isn't really about the fish, though we do believe that the fish was real.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's really about God's grace.

[SPEAKER_00]: God's rescuing of Jonah in a way that's surprising and unexpected.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this brings us back to the main theme of our message, this idea of contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: How does God respond when, like Jonah, our lives are filled with contradictions?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, in spite of our contradictions, and here's our first takeaway, God provides unexpected deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: God provides unexpected deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Can you imagine, for a moment, for Jonah, how surprising and unexpected this must have been?

[SPEAKER_00]: And can you imagine how frightening and scary this whole ordeal must have been to be thrown into the dark stormy sea to feel yourself being pulled under?

[SPEAKER_00]: to be afraid that you're going to drown and then the horrifying and heroic experience of a whale come a whale or a fish or a secret you're coming and swallowing you alive.

[SPEAKER_00]: It must have been terrifying for Jonah and completely unexpected.

[SPEAKER_00]: But God was at work in a surprising way, saving him, resturing him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's true in Jonah's story, and I think it can also often be true in our lives that God delivers us in unexpected ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amber and I experienced this recently.

[SPEAKER_00]: We had a really specific need for this come-in school year.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so several months ago, we spent a lot of time praying and asking God to provide for us in a very specific way.

[SPEAKER_00]: God's initial answer was no.

[SPEAKER_00]: And while that was hard to hear, we moved on and thought, okay, maybe God has a reason for that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we started to pursue some other options.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then in a really surprising way when we weren't even thinking about it, God reversed that no into a yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that it was so unexpected allowed us to encourage some family members who were going through a tough time, we actually got the news with some family and got to share it with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that it was unexpected also helped us to see God's hand in it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think if it had happened according to our plan, we might have thought maybe our own work in effort brought it about.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, even in the last few days, there's been some complexity and complications, and we like to tell stories and church that have a neat, perfect bow tied on top of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: In Amber and I have realized, sometimes God just takes us through a journey of trusting him, and so we're gonna continue to trust him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Even in the new complexity of the last couple days, with the point,

[SPEAKER_00]: is that God often works in our stories in a way that's unexpected.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this helps us to recognize God's hand.

[SPEAKER_00]: God certainly does it answer our prayers in the way that we always want to.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, I can look back at times in my life in our family's life when a desperate answer to prayer was met with a more permanent note.

[SPEAKER_00]: And while that was confusing,

[SPEAKER_00]: Even in the trial, even in the answer of no to the prayer, there were ways that God was delivering me from things that I didn't even know that I needed to be delivered from.

[SPEAKER_00]: Things like pride, things like self-sufficiency, things like putting something else in a more important position than God.

[SPEAKER_00]: God is always at work in our lives, and I'm not saying that every trial is a form of God's deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Kyle talked about that last week.

[SPEAKER_00]: We live in a broken world.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we simply experience that reality in really difficult ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: But God is faithful to use even the broken parts of our story for His purposes.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think the paramount way that we see this reality of unexpected deliverance is through Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the ultimate example of God's grace providing unexpected deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: No one, no one thought that God would become a man, come to earth and then die a terrible

[SPEAKER_00]: We've heard that so many times that we're familiar with it, that for the people who lived in that time, it was stunning, it was unexpected, it was almost unbelievable that God would go to that great of lengths to show His love and grace for His people.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can trust in the cross today.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's God's unexpected deliverance for us.

[SPEAKER_00]: That saves us from our sins.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we can put our trust in that for the first time.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can continue to trust in that wherever we're at in our journey.

[SPEAKER_00]: So in spite of our contradictions, even when we don't have our lives, I'll put together God provides unexpected deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what we see in the first part of the story.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's move to the second part, Jim and his prayer from inside the fish.

[SPEAKER_00]: Follow along as I read this from chapter two, and this is kind of an intense prayer, so I'm going to try to read it in a way that can vase that.

[SPEAKER_00]: It says, then Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God, from inside the fish.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said, I cried out to the Lord, in my great trouble, and he answered me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I called to you from the land of the dead, and Lord, you heard me.

[SPEAKER_00]: You threw me into the ocean depths.

[SPEAKER_00]: I sank down to the heart of the sea.

[SPEAKER_00]: The mighty waters engulf me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was buried beneath your wild and stormy waves.

[SPEAKER_00]: is in an encouraging that the waves are gods.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're his waves, your waves.

[SPEAKER_00]: They still belong to God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Verse four, to get back to Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then I said, oh Lord, you have driven me from your presence.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yet, I will look once more towards your holy temple.

[SPEAKER_00]: I sank beneath the waves.

[SPEAKER_00]: The waters closed over me.

[SPEAKER_00]: See we'd wrapped itself around my head.

[SPEAKER_00]: I sank down to the very roots of the mountains.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was imprisoned in the earth whose gates walk shut forever.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you, oh Lord, my God, snatched me from the jaws of death, is my wife was slipping away.

[SPEAKER_00]: I remember the Lord, and my earnest prayer went out to you in your holy temple.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those who worship false gods turn their backs on all God's mercies.

[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me, turn their backs on all God's mercies.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lost my voice there for a second.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I will offer sacrifices to you with songs of praise and will fulfill all my vows.

[SPEAKER_00]: For my salvation, my salvation comes from the Lord alone.

[SPEAKER_00]: is a lot going on in this prayer to understand it and apply it to our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need to see it's intensity and it's inconsistency.

[SPEAKER_00]: First, it's intensity.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is an intense prayer, and that makes sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've already talked about how frightened Jonah would have been, how desperately he needed God's deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's this desperate cry.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, save me, please rescue me, help me.

[SPEAKER_00]: God, please, please, please, help.

[SPEAKER_00]: We can bring that kind of intensity to God and our prayers when we need rescue you.

[SPEAKER_00]: If the only thing that we can say is God, help.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's okay, that's a good prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: God can meet us there in that place.

[SPEAKER_00]: This prayer, I think, is also intense in the way that it describes this downward descent away from God.

[SPEAKER_00]: Think about what we've seen in Jonah so far.

[SPEAKER_00]: He goes down to Java,

[SPEAKER_00]: down into the hole of the ship in chapter one, then down into the sea, down into the whale, and then down to the very roots of the mountain and even figuratively down to the realm of the dead.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is the lowest of lows, and this is intentional on the part of the author, because it's describing this painful downward descent when we rebel against God.

[SPEAKER_00]: It ultimately always leads away from life, from joy, from peace, and our rebellion takes us on a path, even on a spiral towards isolation, despair, towards physical and spiritual death.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it may not seem that way from the outside, but internally, the spiral is happening and eventually we see it, it's sad, and it's tragic.

[SPEAKER_00]: For Jonah, and it's tragic when it happens today.

[SPEAKER_00]: The singer-songwriter, Gracie Abrams, you may or may not have heard of her, she is the daughter of the famous producer, Jay Jay Abrams, and you may have seen some of his films.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Gracie Abrams is a successful artist, she's gone on tour with Taylor Swift, she's the pinnacle of success in some ways.

[SPEAKER_00]: But she recently released a song called Look at My Life, and she describes this descent with piercing honest authenticity.

[SPEAKER_00]: She says, Look at my life.

[SPEAKER_00]: I bet you can't tell, but it's kind of a bad time.

[SPEAKER_00]: A new spiral every night, falling my eyes out, but no, I'm so fine.

[SPEAKER_00]: My nightmare actualized.

[SPEAKER_00]: God, what I wanted, it doesn't sit right.

[SPEAKER_00]: What an honest song.

[SPEAKER_00]: On the outside, our lives may look like an ascent, but on the inside where it matters most, life can feel like this downward spiral.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've experienced this in my own life, and maybe you have two, when I was a junior in high school, I spent a year silently rebelling against God.

[SPEAKER_00]: You wouldn't necessarily have been able to tell on the outside,

[SPEAKER_00]: But internally, I was doing everything that I could to keep God at bay, and it led me into the spiral towards shame, towards fear, towards anxiety, towards isolation.

[SPEAKER_00]: I got to a point where I just desperately didn't want to live that way anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that was actually the place where God met me, most powerfully, with his grace and my story.

[SPEAKER_00]: One author said this of Jonah, and I think it's true for us as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: Not until he was all the way down, finally stripped of his own buoyant self-sufficiency was deliverance possible.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's true in our stories.

[SPEAKER_00]: God meets us when we are stripped of our own self-sufficiency.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's faithful in His gracious to meet us and our places of need.

[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't leave us alone there, and Jonah was left all alone in the way all.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've ever been in that place of being left all alone, everything stripped away, everything removed.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's a scary place to be.

[SPEAKER_00]: In addition to this prayer's intensity, I think another thing that's really important at first to see is its inconsistency because this isn't a perfect prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now on the surface, everything Jonah says is true, but when you look at his heart posture and the rest of the story in chapter three and four, it doesn't seem like the truth of this prayer really resonate with Jonah's attitude.

[SPEAKER_00]: He remains prideful.

[SPEAKER_00]: He remains self-righteous and self-focused.

[SPEAKER_00]: The prayer itself contains a lot of language where Jonah is focused on himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: The words I meet or my show up 24 times and just nine verses.

[SPEAKER_00]: One scholar calls this prayer, Jonah's partial and prideful response to grace is a partial and prideful response to grace.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's accurate.

[SPEAKER_00]: At one level, it is a genuine prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where Jonah's cried out,

[SPEAKER_00]: And at another level, it's also a very revealing prayer that shows us some things about Jonah's heart posture.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's possible for both to be true at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those are often true of our prayers as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're far from perfect, but praise God that He still answers them and works in our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah, we get a sense of this in verses 8 and 9.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah does not express any personal, repentance or remorse over his sin.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you look again at the text, he's still kind of focused on those other people who worship false gods.

[SPEAKER_00]: doesn't seem like he says that from a place of compassion or true heart transformation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he even ends the prayer with this incredible declaration by salvation comes from the Lord alone.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is certainly one of the great summary statements of the message of the entire Bible that salvation comes.

[SPEAKER_00]: from the Lord alone.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when we are asking questions or feel insecure, anxious about our own salvation, we can trust the truth of that statement.

[SPEAKER_00]: Salvation comes from God.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not based on anything that we have done.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a gift of the gospel.

[SPEAKER_00]: So here in the Old Testament, we see this amazing gospel declaration.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet Jonah really struggles to apply that to the Ninevites, even when God saves them at the end of chapter four, a bit of a spoiler alert, he's angry that God rescues them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so again, we see this idea of contradictions between what Jonah says and how he actually lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think just like Jonah, there are times when we know and say the right words, but we need to ask God to allow these truths to truly transform us.

[SPEAKER_00]: How does God respond to us when we have these contradictions?

[SPEAKER_00]: Our second truth that we see is that in our contradictions, God reveals hidden inconsistencies.

[SPEAKER_00]: He reveals hidden inconsistencies.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think in a sense, that's kind of the point of the soul, or the prayer, rather, that Jonah shares.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bit of a confusing prayer to read, because it's so true, everything he says is so orthodox.

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet at the end of it, you can just feel the tension of, yeah, but does he really apply this to his life?

[SPEAKER_00]: God's showing us something about Jonah's heart posture,

[SPEAKER_00]: And in that he's asking us to look at our own heart posture.

[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we need to be transformed?

[SPEAKER_00]: Where do we like Jonah and have contradictions between what we say and how we live?

[SPEAKER_00]: One way that we can apply this, and this may seem like a bit of a surprising way, is to spend time and prayer specifically reading through the Psalms.

[SPEAKER_00]: One pastor that I respect, his actually whole application from the book of Jonah, is spend time reading the Psalms, start in Psalm 1, read one Psalm a day till you get to Psalm 150.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then even when you get there start over again and one of the things that I've experienced in my own life is the incredible power of the Psalms to speak to me and to change me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jonah, here in this prayer draws

[SPEAKER_00]: heavily from the Psalms, and if we had more time, I wish we could explore all of the fascinating connections between the different Psalms and how those flow into what Jonah says here.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's clear that Jonah was really familiar with the Psalms, and that God used the Psalms in this prayer for Jonah for

[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, even still, Jonah had a journey of left of transformation to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd encourage you immerse your life in the Psalms.

[SPEAKER_00]: You could do that in the morning, when you wake up, you could do that over five minutes during your lunch break.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have a busy workday, maybe you could do it at night right before you go to bed.

[SPEAKER_00]: But God can use the Psalms in such a powerful way to change us.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've seen God's grace in how he responds to our contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: He provides unexpected deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: He reveals our hidden inconsistencies.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's one more truth that I want us to see, and I want to go to the New Testament, because if you skip ahead about 800 years,

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus references Jonah and this part of the story, it a really important moment in his life and ministry.

[SPEAKER_00]: So look with me at Matthew 12 38 through 41.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll have this up on the screen for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Matthew 12 says this one day, some teachers of religious law and Pharisees came to Jesus and said, teacher, we want you to show us some miraculous sign to prove your authority.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus replied, only an evil adulterous generation would demand a miraculous sign.

[SPEAKER_00]: The only sign I will give them is the sign of Jonah, the prophet, the sign of the prophet, Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: For his Jonah was in the belly of the Great 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.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's that piece on the historicity connected to Jesus' referencing Jonah, and he references it a few other places as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the point in verse 41.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus says, the people of Nineveh will stand up against this generation on judgment day

[SPEAKER_00]: Repented of their sins at the preaching of Jonah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, someone far greater than Jonah is here, but you refuse to repent.

[SPEAKER_00]: For Jesus, a key point of the Jonah story was repentance.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Pharisees want a miraculous sign.

[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus refuses to give them one.

[SPEAKER_00]: He points to the sign of Jonah, and then a way that they would have fully been able to understand at the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: This points forward to the ultimate sign of his death and resurrection, which we'll

[SPEAKER_00]: prove His divinity in His authority in such a powerful way.

[SPEAKER_00]: But what Jesus doing here, He's inviting the Pharisees to repent and to repent in a very specific way.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Pharisees reject Jesus and His authority and they refuse to bring in their lives under Him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus is challenging them, asking them,

[SPEAKER_00]: To repent, he is calling them out on that contradiction and that inconsistency because the Pharisees like Jonah, their lives are full of contradictions, pride, self-righteousness, and Jesus is inviting them to change through repentance.

[SPEAKER_00]: This shows us our last takeaway, and spite of our contradictions, God invites on going repentance.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not familiar with this word repent, it means to have a change of heart that leads to a change of direction.

[SPEAKER_00]: This happens in a really important way at conversion, and then it continues to happen.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's God exposes our sinful thoughts, attitudes, and actions, and He invites us to realign our lives to honor the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Luther famously said, the entire Christian life is one of repentance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Think about that.

[SPEAKER_00]: The entire Christian life is one of repentance.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not just a one-time thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's something that should happen daily, even multiple times a day.

[SPEAKER_00]: Repentance is grace and action.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's grace applied.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's our response to God's grace.

[SPEAKER_00]: And just like Jonah, just like the Pharisees, you and I need to hear God's call to repent.

[SPEAKER_00]: If there's an area of your life where God is challenging you, calling you and inviting you to repent, please don't miss out on that opportunity.

[SPEAKER_00]: We talked earlier about how our contradictions lead to hurt and to pain.

[SPEAKER_00]: And God and His grace can use repentance practically to heal broken relationships.

[SPEAKER_00]: He can use it to,

[SPEAKER_00]: to bandage up and to bind up old wounds in our stories.

[SPEAKER_00]: He can truly use repentance to actually change and transform us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so don't miss that opportunity that God has for you there.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good invitation.

[SPEAKER_00]: He is invited to it because he cares about you in your life.

[SPEAKER_00]: The tragedy, the irony in the inconsistency of Jonah's story, is that this work of repentance seems to be left incomplete.

[SPEAKER_00]: What about you and I?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we respond to God's grace in a way that is prideful and partial like Jonah, or where we let God fully transform us so that we can be people of character, people of compassion, with fully united hearts and minds and lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what God wants for us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as we close here as we get ready to sing a song, I want to bring us back to the question that we asked at the beginning of the message, where are their differences between what we say we believe and how we actually live?

[SPEAKER_00]: Take a few moments here to reflect on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Last week, our family got to spend some time in Indianapolis.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was wrestling with how God was leading me to preach this message and apply it to my own life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I felt like God said to me, Andrew, if you're gonna talk to the church about contradictions, I want you to spend some time looking at the contradictions in your own life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I went to a park, my wife and grandparents watched the kids for a while, which was great.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I spent some time alone with God, and I just asked God, would you show me where there are contradictions in my life?

[SPEAKER_00]: And as scary and as heavy of a question as that is, there were some ways that it was really encouraging where I was able to see ways that God was growing me.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there were also other ways where God brought things to my heart in mind that I wasn't even aware of.

[SPEAKER_00]: Things where God said to me, Andrew, I want you to work on this.

[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to bring this into a deeper and fuller alignment.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so church, let me encourage you to try that this week.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know that's leaning into like a bigger sermon application, but if you could spend some time with the Lord and ask Him, the quiet of your heart, maybe even using Scripture a Psalm as a guide, search me God, like lead me in this, take some time with the Lord, and ask Him where your contradictions.

[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the time, I did feel sense of conviction, yes, but I also felt excited.

[SPEAKER_00]: I felt eager to walk into how God was leading me to bring more alignment into our life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think when we, of how God's grace to work in our stories, it does bring this enjoyment, this joy, this purpose.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's what God has for all of us.

[SPEAKER_00]: The good news is that in spite of our contradictions, God's grace provides unexpected deliverance.

[SPEAKER_00]: He graciously exposes our hidden inconsistencies, and then he invites our ongoing repentance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Each of these is an expression of God's grace.

[SPEAKER_00]: Each of these is a part of the gospel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe for you, there's a chance to trust in the gospel for the first time.

[SPEAKER_00]: It can be as simple as praying and acknowledging in your heart that Jesus died for your sins, to pay for that penalty, and that because of what he did on the cross, you are forgiven.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can say to Jesus, I believe that I accept that.

[SPEAKER_00]: God can do the beautiful, amazing work of the Gospel in your heart, or just trusting it again for the hundredth time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Praise God and thank Him for the Gospel.

[SPEAKER_00]: So which one of these truths do you need to apply to your relationship with God?

[SPEAKER_00]: Which one do you see leading you this week to bring more fully into your life?

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray together.

[SPEAKER_00]: God, thank you so much for including the stories of broken people like Jonah, like the Pharisees, like us, God.

[SPEAKER_00]: We so desperately need your grace to work in us, to help us to walk with you.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I pray that your Holy Spirit would take these words and apply them to our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: Help us to trust in you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Help us to live in new and exciting ways of alignment with you and your purposes.

[SPEAKER_00]: God, help us now to worship and to praise you for your grace.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's in Jesus name that we pray.

[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.