When God’s Plans And My Plans Collide

Come on, spouse.

Um, if you're a student, you're dismissed.

And if you're not a student, you may be seated.

Um welcome to Christ Community Church.

We greet you in the name of our Savior.

We're glad you're here.

Um it has been an unusual seven, eight days, hasn't it?

Um for Memphians.

Sort of offensive to hear on national TV other people malign our city.

I'm not saying what they're saying is not true, but it's sort of like a sharp stick in the eye.

Um but our our city is troubled.

And um Heidi, Zach's daughter, reminded us in our prayer time this morning that she reminded us that God's word is a lamp unto our feet and a light into our path.

And um not only is God's word a lamp and a light, but God wants me and you to be a lamp and a light.

And the darker our days are, the more those around us need a lamp and a light.

And uh so I hope that we'll see this as an opportunity um to shine God's love and God's light into the lives of people and not to hide it under any kind of bushel of you fill in the blank.

Anger, anger, hatred, hatred, yeah, vengeance, um retribution.

Yes.

Yes.

We're gonna start a new series today.

I have been working on, or we've been working on this for I don't know, a while.

But I've been working on it, and working on it, and working on it, and so um we're gonna, I don't know whether we'll spend four weeks, five weeks.

Uh if y'all listened better, I could go faster, but but uh you don't.

So yeah, I don't know exactly how long it'll take, but we're gonna we're gonna study the little book of Jonah.

And um I had been working on this, like I said, maybe for a four, five, six weeks, uh, but it fits so perfectly with what's gone on the last you know few days.

Uh it's crazy how God speaks into our lives just where we are, just when we need it.

And so we're gonna look at the little book of Jonah.

I would encourage you to try once or twice a week to maybe read the book of Jonah.

It's just four chapters, and each chapter takes about two to three minutes.

So 10, 12 minutes tops to read it, and I'd love for you to do that.

Um, try to answer, or that the book of Jonah answers for us, are questions like these.

Um do we wind up in places that we never dreamed possible when we were children or teenagers or young adults, and we were thinking about and dreaming about our futures, where we are today did not wasn't in that group of things.

I never thought this would happen to me.

I never thought I would be in this place.

How did I get here?

It answers questions like, um, would a God of love ask me to do things that I don't want to do?

And what do I do when God would ask me to do something I don't want to do?

The real question that I think Jonah answers for us, or at least the one that stood out to me, is what happens when my vision of happiness collides with God's vision of happiness for me?

When my plans collide with God's plans for my life?

What what what happens?

What should happen?

I guess I should say.

Those are some of the questions that the little book of Jonah is gonna uh address and answer for us.

I I hope, I pray.

Do you want to share something before we get into it?

So um this is kind of funny.

In 41 years of marriage, this long, hard, 41 long years.

Man, it's been um this study of Jonah has driven Larry to do something that he has never done ever, ever.

And that is to buy a book of poetry.

We were gonna take a walk last week.

Poetry.

And uh we walked by the mailbox, and in the mailbox was uh, you know, uh like an Amazon package deal, and she goes, What is that?

And I said, It's a book of poetry, and she goes, You're lying.

That cannot be that cannot be said.

I said, No, I promise it is.

No, she didn't believe me until we opened the book.

Actually, that is not what you said.

You said it is a book of poems.

Oh, yeah, poems.

That's right.

Poems, that's right.

That's what it was.

I'm gonna read to you two poems.

Yeah, that's what it's this little book.

I found this book about it.

I'm showing up.

Yeah.

And some of the poetry is actually pretty good.

Um, so I'm going to read one.

Growing and flourishing.

Um, let me start with.

I have it.

Sorry about that.

Let me start with this one.

It's called Reprimand to an I'm just gonna read two.

Reprimand to a Naive Deity.

He says, I will not advertise this crazy scheme of yours.

God, what a farce that men should sin and find escape.

I mean, of course, not me, but our mutual antagonists.

Dear God, kind God, don't listen to their prayers.

And then this one entitled, they're all very short, entitled Safe at Sea.

I prefer magnificent distances between me and God.

Reserve me a quiet cubicle where my shipmates' screams will be inaudible.

Let them wrestle with rev with revolutions.

I am resolved to sleep soundly.

I love that.

Let other people wrestle with revolutions.

Let my shipmates wrestle with revolutions.

Just let me sleep well tonight.

That's uh that's a that really spoke to me.

Yeah.

You want one more?

Yeah, read one more.

Here's one more.

It's called Let's Play It Cool.

I know a better way to circumvent your silly streak of mixing love with righteous judgment.

All I need to do is take the next flight west beyond your jurisdiction.

This will give me, this will give you time for sober second thoughts.

Swear off this kick of simple-minded kindness.

I'll give you a minute, God, to rethink this silly plan of yours.

Like loving our enemies and stuff like that.

Ridiculous.

We're gonna look at the book of Jonah, and today we're gonna we won't my goal was to finish the first three verses, we won't, but um, we're gonna read them at least.

So if you've got a copy of God's word, you can turn to Jonah chapter one, and we're gonna look at the first three verses.

Um says, Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amitai, saying, Arise and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.

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

He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish, so he paid the fare and went on board to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.

Um I've been intrigued and really uh just uh well, let's just leave it in the trigger with this little book.

It's a very unique little book in that Jonah declares a story that is truly unforgettable.

If you ever read the story of Jonah one dime, you never forget it.

And so it's a story that is unique in the fact that it communicates a story that is unforgettable, and yet it's a story that its point, its meaning, its application is easily missed.

Unforgettable story, message easily missed.

Um I want to remind you what we talked about the last three or four weeks, and that is the book of Jonah, like the other 66 books of the Bible, or other 65 books of the Bible.

What is their primary purpose?

To teach us to be good, make us smart, give us good marriages and good kids and financial security and good health, and no.

Primary purpose of the Bible is to reveal to us who God is.

Every book in the Bible, that's why it was written, to help us understand who God is.

It's not written about you or me.

We think everything's about us, but it's not, it's written about God.

And Jonah, it couldn't be a better example of a book that reveals to us facets of who God is in ways that really no other book of the Bible does.

So it's a very, very wonderful, unique book.

It reveals God's character, God's priorities, his values, and his ways of relating to us.

Jonah is a unique book in the Bible, especially among the prophets, major and minor prophets, in that it's the only prophetic book that all the other prophetic books start the same way.

The word of the Lord came to Habakkuk, the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, the word of the Lord came to Hosea, the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, and then the rest of the book are God's words to other people.

The book of Jonah starts off, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amitai, but then the rest of the book only has one word from God for others, really, only one word of God, and it's five words in Hebrew.

It's eight words in English, but it's five words in Hebrew.

So the vast majority of the book of Jonah is not God's words through the prophet to others.

It's God's words or really God's message or God's dealings with the prophet himself.

This is a book that I'm hoping my bride will help us identify and recognize.

It's full of humor.

It's full of satire, it's full of irony.

Everybody in the book does the opposite of what you would expect, what you would think would happen.

So you're going along reading and you go, well, that's that's not how that's supposed to go.

That's not how it goes normally.

That's the intention of the writer.

And often that makes us laugh.

We have one expectation and something else happens.

It can it can be funny.

And the the audience, the original audience that the writer wrote this down for, they would have laughed regularly at a lot of the things that are mentioned here.

Um it's very significant that everybody in the story sees what's going on.

They can hear what they're supposed to do, and they obey.

Everybody but the man of God, the servant of God, the prophet of God.

The winds obey, the waves obey, the fish obeys, the the um uh sailors obey, the Ninevehes obey, every the plant, the worm, everybody gets on board, everybody cooperates, everybody, especially the the um the sailors, uh in that day, just so you know, on the ladder of society, the two lowest rungs.

You could, there might have been a debate on you had lepers, um, you had prostitutes, you had sailors, and you had shepherds.

They were the, they were unclean.

They did not go to the the temple to worship.

They did not, they were, they, especially sailors.

Um, anytime you see the the idea of the sea, you had for an Israelite, you've got the land, the promised land.

That's where God is on the land.

Um He that's where the people of God that are right with God, they go to the land.

That's where there's stability and abundance and and uh uh you know, all that kind of stuff.

The seas always represent the opposite of that.

That's tumultuous, unstable, thank you.

Chaos.

Um the the yeah, so you see my point.

So sailors lived on the sea.

And so it's very ironic, if you will, almost humorous, that the prophet of God, the man of God, the one that should hear and see and respond first to God's direction, he's asleep in the bottom of the boat.

And these base, vow, lowest rung of society, heathers, they're there, they they can see what's going on.

Man, we're in dire times.

This is a bad deal right here.

We're about to all die.

Prophet of God, he's asleep in the bottom of the boat.

He can't see, he doesn't see what's going on, he doesn't see the cost that's about to be paid.

Same with the Ninevehes.

The one that's blind, I mean, the one that should see is blind, and the one that can see, they should be blind.

It's a very ironic thing.

All those that shouldn't see and listen and obey do.

Jesus talked about that in Matthew in Mark eight, in Mark 8.

You have ears, or you have eyes, but you cannot see.

You have ears, but you cannot hear.

Jesus was talking about this.

The irony, the absurdity of people that you've got the physical organs, they work, but you you're blind, you're deaf to what's really going on.

In fact, just real quickly, the whole gospel is built on paradox.

Yes.

You know, the last should be first.

Uh there's a lot of them, I can't think of the at the moment, but at the least, Christ Himself is a wounded perfection.

Yes.

Well, that's paradox.

How does it how can that be?

A marred perfection.

Yes.

An imperfect perfection, whatever.

Yeah.

So so this paradox happening early on also points towards the message of Christ to come.

Um the very opening statement: the word of the Lord came to the prophet Jonah, the son of Amitai.

The word Jonah means dove.

And Amati, his dad, his name means faithfulness.

So, right off, right out of the gate, if you know the story, God introduces this one that should be a faithful expression of mercy, of grace, of tenderness, of compassion.

That I'm gonna send someone with a message of compassion, of mercy, of grace, of tenderness, and this so much is writing on this message that it's got to be somebody that's faithful.

Good times, bad times, temptations, battles, failures.

Nobody, this, I need a faithful person who is tender and compassionate.

So we're gonna pick Jonah, who reflects none of that.

In fact, what Jonah's life reflects is the opposite: prejudice, hatred, anger, selfishness, hardness.

Don't miss that.

This room is filled with people whose view of God has been impacted by the anger and the hardness and the hatred and the meanness of people that represented God to you.

Don't miss that.

The one that's supposed to be faithfully tender and compassionate lives a life that reflects meanness and anger and hate.

To give Jonah a little bit of a break.

Because he's a bad man.

Okay?

He's a bad person.

And the writer wants us to see that.

He's not misunderstood, he's not, oh, he fell off the no, no, no.

He's a very, but just so we understand and can identify a little bit, Jonah's mentioned one other time in the Old Testament, and it's in 2 Kings chapter 14, where early in Jonah's prophetic ministry, and you know the word prophet doesn't mean you can tell the future.

2 Kings 14 · chapter mention

Some of the prophets of God could declare events that hadn't happened yet, but the word prophet just means somebody that speaks forth the word of God.

Most of the prophets never talked about the future.

Most of the Bible prophets just talked about what was going on, God's message for that day to that people about what was going on on that day.

Um, and so uh, but so this idea that, oh, that when early in Jonah's career as a prophet, the king at that time was a guy named Jeroboam II.

And um he was a character, one of the worst kings in all of Israel.

So God comes to Jonah and says, Jonah, I want you to go and talk to the king of Israel where you live, your king, Jeroboam II, and I want you to give him this message.

I'm gonna bless you, Jeroboam II.

I'm gonna bless you with success.

Everything you do is gonna turn to gold.

Now, these are my words, but this is the message.

Your armies are going to win wars left and right.

You're going to become wealthy and famous and prosperous and powerful.

That's the word of the Lord for you, Jeroboam II.

And that's exactly what happened.

Now, can you think through your Bible history?

What happened to prophets, people of God that spoke the word of God to others when they gave favorable messages to others and they came true?

Think of Joseph.

He gives Pharaoh a favorable message and it comes true.

What happens to Joseph?

Rises to power.

Think of Daniel.

Daniel has a favorable message for Nebuchadnezzar.

What happens to Daniel?

Rises to power.

So it's very, he doesn't say this, but it's very reasonable to believe that Jonah gave this favorable message to Jeroboam, too, and it came true.

And so Jonah probably became very honored, very prominent, very uh he probably was rewarded greatly.

He probably had a reputation among the people of Israel that was very, very positive.

He was known, he was respected, he was successful.

Now we don't know how long that lasted, but one day the Lord comes to Jonah in the midst of his prosperity and success and prominence, and he says, Jonah, I want you to go somewhere else and preach a message.

Where do you want me to go, Lord?

I want you to go to Nineveh.

And we'll talk about them in just a second.

Nineveh was the first true superpower in the history of the world.

They were a, at that time, they were the most powerful nation on the planet.

Um, they were feared by everyone.

They were incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful.

Um, they were they their military strategies are still studied in schools of war to this very day.

They were masters at intimidation, of creating fear.

Basically, what they would do is they would march up to a city with this huge army, surround it, and they would say this anybody that will surrender, you come and we're gonna bless you, we're gonna help you, we're gonna give you a good life somewhere else.

If you don't surrender, we're gonna skin every leader and every man in front of their families.

Skin you alive.

And we know this.

We have writings that show this.

And the the palaces of the wealthy people in Assyria, that's the case where Nineveh was, um, their walls, they dug this up.

Their walls were lined with pictures of them skinning people alive who wouldn't surrender.

And it would terrify everyone.

So, so um uh for God to tell Jonah, I want you to go and give them a message.

You might think Jonah didn't want to go because he was scared.

That's not why that wasn't, he might have been scared, but that's not why he didn't want to go.

He tells us in chapter four why he didn't want to go, and we'll get to that later on.

They were just a very powerful, cruel uh uh nation.

Um the fact that Jonah hated them and wished them evil, wished them destruction, who wouldn't?

They had for generations the Assyrians had been unspeakably cruel toward the Israelites, had killed and destroyed millions of Israelites and destroyed their cities.

They hadn't conquered them yet, but they had made their lives miserable.

It was very understandable and justifiable that Jonah would hate these people and not want them to experience anything good.

Well, just a little compassion for Joe uh for Jonah or empathy.

I I get that.

I mean, I as a human being, to be to be told, you know, go to the worst person around, or the worst group, or whatever, and uh that has hurt you and your people, and give them a message of salvation.

Why don't we take like one 10-second moment to think about somebody that you would not want to go to and offer love and salvation?

As long as it's a people group, we're okay.

Yeah, but put a face on it.

The person that killed your wife or your mom or your child while jogging, put a face on it.

Your ex.

Your ex is lawyer.

Wish them well.

Want something good for them.

All of a sudden, it's not it's not as easy uh when when it's somebody that we we might not use the words hate, but we know down deep we do hate them.

We wish evil on them.

We want them to suffer like they've made us suffer.

I do think it bears saying that there are reasons, logical reasons for hating.

You did this, you did that, you've killed all these people, you've skinned everybody.

There are logical reasons.

But the gospel and the love of God, if it transcends that, it must.

Or it's nothing.

If it doesn't transcend natural feeling of hatred, I'm not doing that, I hate you.

Then what is it?

And what does it mean to be called to it?

Well, and I'll take it a step further.

Are we a part of it?

The gospel and the church are what they are.

One of the messages that we're gonna look at in the book of Jonah is shockingly, frustratingly, offensively, God doesn't check with us before he does things.

He doesn't seek out my wisdom, my opinion, my preferences before he decides what he's gonna do.

And he doesn't check with you.

He tells us clearly how he feels about this.

I draw all men unto me.

Yes.

And so the question the question is not what is the gospel for me.

The question is not what is the gospel or what is Christianity as it relates to very painful, horrible, difficult people, institutions, countries, communities.

The question is, do I want to be a part of that?

Do I want to be affiliated with a group that would show love to that person or that group or that or whatever it is?

Because we know that's what we do that we're not, we're no more confused about what's true than Jonah was.

There was no confusion.

Jonah was not God now.

Now, let me make sure I understand what you want.

No, no, no, there was no questions.

He wasn't asking for clarification, he just didn't agree with it.

And he had reasonable, justifiable, logical reasons for disagreeing with God's plan, just like us.

The question is: am I going to be a part of the gospel?

And am I going to be a part of Christianity?

Or am not?

It's not that, is this forgiveness thing?

Is that really a part of the gospel?

Is that really a part of Christianity?

Is that really part of being a part of the people of God?

No, no, nobody's going, nobody's scratching their head going, is that a part of it?

The question is, do I want to be a part of it?

As you read this little book with me the next four or five weeks, you need to look for certain key words or ideas.

Because the readers, the original readers, would have noticed these.

By example, the word great or big or huge or large, same Hebrew word.

It's written down in this little book fifteen times, and it's alluded to another fifteen times.

So this idea of big, um great, great enemy, Assyrians, great ship, great storm, great fish, great city, Nineveh, great plant.

Um there this big and don't miss this.

The story of Jonah would have been to the early, the its earliest readers, bigger than life.

Everything in the story is over the top, and that's by intentionality of the writer.

So when you notice these, these anything that has to do with something being big, the writer wants us to notice that.

The word down.

Um Jonah went, he was from northern Israel, and he went down to Joppa.

You can still go to Joppa, they call it Japha with an F now, J-A-F-F-A, but it's the oldest seaport in the world.

The oldest seaport in the world, and Jonah went down to Joppa or Japa.

Jaffa is built on the side of a mountain or the side of a cliff.

And so once you even get to Joppa, you have to go down to the water to get in the boat.

They go out into the Mediterranean Sea.

Jonah goes down into the hole of the boat.

Storm comes up, what do the sailors do?

They throw him down into the ocean.

Then a fish, he's swallowed down into a fish.

Um it's it's revealing the trajectory of Jonah's life.

He's going down, down, down, down, down.

I think one of the significant questions is how did he get there?

How did Jonah get into such a bad place?

Well, you know how he got there.

Just like you and I get into bad places.

One small bad decision at a time.

Just no nobody wakes up full of the Holy Spirit singing praise songs, having read half the Bible and done some healing and some miracles and some raising a few dead people, and he walks out and takes a gun and kills somebody.

No, no, no.

No, no, no.

We get into horrible places because we've been on a journey of making horrible little, small, incremental, bad decisions.

And no one is exempt.

And no one is exempt.

No one is exempt.

Look for that word down.

Notice how many times this writer emphasizes the power of a, and we're going to stop with this, the power of a sovereign God.

The writer wants you and I to see that God is sovereignly in control of the waves and the wind.

He's sovereignly in control of a fish.

He's sovereignly in control of those sailors, these ungodly heathen, uh, unbelieving sailors.

They do exactly what he wants them to do.

He's sovereignly in charge of the Ninevehites, even the king of Nineveh.

He does exactly what God wants him to do.

He's sovereignly in charge of a plant growing up.

He's sovereignly in charge of a worm.

The biggest fish, the smallest worm.

I wanted you to look at a few verses, just I wanted to read these just in closing.

Well, I'll use this one first of all.

In Proverbs 1633, the lot, the dice, is cast into the lap, but its decision is holy from the Lord.

Do you know what that means?

That means every dice that lands on a greenfelt table in Las Vegas, it lands exactly on the numbers that God chose.

Every time a drunken gambling knucklehead, and if you're a drunken gambling knucklehead, I love you.

I love you with all my heart, but I stand by my uh my statement.

Um, every time he throws the dice, it lands exactly where God tells it to.

Um Isaiah 40 says, Isaiah 40, 25 and 26, to whom then will you compare me that I should be like him, says the Holy One?

Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these stars?

He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, in the Hebrew there, it's calling them by pet names.

By the greatness of his power, and because of, because he is strong in might, not one of those stars is missing.

The Bible would suggest that every evening, just out of sheer fun, God calls out every what I bet there's seven or eight thousand stars that exist.

What do you think?

At least seven or eight thousand.

Now that we now that we have the James Webb telescope, um, telescope.

It's something crazy in the observable.

I I have this, but I'm not I'm not prepared.

Um it's something crazy like within the observable universe, 200 million billion, some kind of ridiculous thing like that.

And those are the ones they can see.

And so every night the Bible suggests that God calls them out one by one with a pet name that He's given them.

And I bet it's a better name than like MJ12.

I bet that's none of the I bet he doesn't even know.

I bet it's better than that.

No, I think yeah, I think you're right.

Not a star shines in the night that God doesn't place there by his sovereign power.

I could go on, I'll give you one more.

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord, and he turns it wherever he will.

See, I want to make President Biden Moses or the devil.

I want to make President Trump Moses or the devil.

When President Trump was a president of the United States, you know who put him there?

God.

President Biden is a president of the United States.

You know who put him there?

God.

Every decision that President Trump made, every decision that President Biden makes, my Bible says God told him to do that.

Do I speak about those men?

Do I think about those men?

Do I relate to those men in whatever little pipsqueak way that I could do that?

Do I pray for those men as if God put them both there?

I'll mention this again next week, but it's too good not to say today, and we'll end.

You understand that this is my point.

The question's not, well, I don't agree with that, Larry.

I only agree with God being involved when I'm finding$20 bills on the ground, when I'm getting good health reports, when my kids are making good grades, when my wife's being sweet to me and giving me a bunch of loving, when my boss is praising me and giving me good reports and raises.

The God's in that.

But when bad stuff happens, God is not in that.

You don't get to make that.

That's not the offer.

God's not offering you that.

He's not offering me that.

That's what you and I have to decide.

I would just end with this.

If we ever get this, then all of a sudden, one of the key messages of Jonah starts hitting us in the head.

And that is, do you notice, if you've ever read the book of Jonah?

Who's the bad guy in Jonah?

Who's the antagonist?

Who's the who's who's the hindrance to God?

Who's the who's the barrier to God?

Oh, it's those wicked sailors.

Those ungodly, atheist, heathen, drinking, gambling, cussing sailors.

And if we could just get rid of all the drunken, gambling, cussing, ungodly sailors, the world would be good.

Or it's the Ninevites.

They're the ones that are hindering the kingdom of God.

If we could just get rid of the, that's what Jonah was saying.

God, if we can just get rid of these Ninevites, the world will be good.

No, no, no.

I don't see a sailor hindering God.

I don't see a Ninevehite hindering God.

I don't see a king hindering God.

Who's hindering God?

Come on, come on, come on.

Surely you're not going to miss this.

Who's the hindrance?

Who's the barrier?

Who's the problem in the story?

The prophet of God, the one that knew God best, heard God most clearly, understood God's ways in the most clear, powerful ways, the one that represents God, he's the problem.

Who's the problem in Memphis?

If those poor people in Orange Mountain would just get their crap together, if the judicials, I heard somebody say the if the if the lawyers and the judges will just be tougher on crime, if families would be more devoted to each folks, it's not the police, it's not the president, present or former, it's not the laws, it's not the judges, it's not the who's the problem, it's us.

It's us.

Who's the problem in my family?

It's me.

It's me.

It's me.

That's the point.

If until you we read Jonah, oh, it's about this fish, and you know, and chuckle, it vomits out, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle, he vomits out.

Ooh, gross.

And no.

The story of Jonah is God's message.

It's my people who have been called by my name.

The ones that know me and have experienced my grace, if they will humble, doesn't say if the world would humble itself or the devil.

Everybody wants to buy.

I saw this sign down the road about, you know, the devil's defeat in the church.

By definition, that's the most heretical statement that's ever been made.

It's not the devil, it's not the government, it's not society, it's the people of God, starting with me.

And maybe you're