Running Ourselves Ragged | Jonah 1:17-2:10

Would you stay standing as the word is read this morning?

Good morning, Orchard.

Please turn in your Bibles to Jonah chapter one.

We're going to start in verse 17 and read through the end of chapter 2.

You may recall in chapter 1, Jonah was called by God to go to preach against Nineveh.

Jonah had no interest in doing so, so he boarded a ship heading in the opposite direction.

God caused a raging storm on the sea, and the sailors eventually threw Jonah overboard.

And this is where we pick up that story.

Jonah chapter 1, verse 17.

Jonah 1:17

The scripture says, And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me.

Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.

For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me.

All your waves and your billows passed over me.

Then I said, I am driven away from your sight, yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.

The waters closed in over me to take my life.

The deep surrounded me.

Weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains.

I went down into the land, whose bars closed upon me forever.

Yet you brought my life from the pit.

O Lord my God.

When my life was fading away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.

Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.

But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you.

What I have vowed I will pay.

Salvation belongs to the Lord.

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

This is indeed the word of the Lord.

Let us pray.

Father God, just so grateful for this day.

So thankful, Father God, for prayers like the prayer that Jonah prayed.

Just a great example, Lord, of a prayer we can pray when we're struggling, when we feel we're at our wit's end.

We can cry out to you, Lord Jesus, and you will hear us and you will pull us out of the pit that we may be in.

And Father, I know there may be people in this room today who have been running from you.

People, Lord, who may be coming to church every Sunday, but are living a life, Lord Jesus, that is so far from you.

Father God, it's my prayer today that at the end of service, people will run to the prayer banners and ask, what must I do to be saved?

That salvation will come to those individuals today.

In Jesus' name.

And I thank you for that, Father God.

Father, I pray for Pastor Cody as he brings your message today, that he will preach with power and authority, and that your Holy Spirit would move in the hearts of men and women in this room today.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

So Megan and I, we started off as the parents to two little girls, and we thought we were good parents.

Then, as the Bible says, when we were with age, the Lord surprised us by hitting our house with a hurricane named Josiah.

When my little girls were little, they would come and they would say, snuggle me, daddy.

Have a tea party with me, daddy.

Build a fairy house with me, daddy.

Watch a movie with me, daddy.

Josiah came out of the womb saying, I'm gonna tackle you, daddy.

And it was pretty much sums up the difference.

You know, when he was a toddler, uh, Josiah really had two speeds.

He was either asleep or he was running.

And of course, when you have a little toddler running around your house, running leads to crashing, and crashing leads to crying.

And so I remember in the early days, you hold out hope.

You hold out hope that you can teach him, you hold out hope that you can explain it to him, you hold out hope that you can slow him down, but eventually, eventually, you just take a heavy blanket, you lay it over the hearth, and you hope he doesn't kill himself, right?

Because it seems like the only way that our children learn not to run is by crashing.

You know, I think as God's children were very similar to that.

The Lord has told us in his word, he's told us how we can have peace, he's told us how we can flourish, he's told us how we can have joy, and yet we just keep running, don't we?

We just keep running.

And so very often, very often, the only way that we're actually able to learn the truth that God has been communicating to us is for God to allow us to crash, to allow us to fall, to allow us to find ourselves in the position where we cry and well.

Last week we saw the prophet Jonah on the run.

God told him to go north to Nineveh, and you'll remember he went down, down, down to Tarshish.

And this morning, what we're gonna see is we're gonna see that this toddling prophet is going to crash.

And it helps us to know when we're on the run what we can expect.

So that's what I want us to see this morning, what you can expect when you run away from the Lord.

First, you can expect that God exhausts the runner.

God exhausts the runner.

Have you ever looked around at your life and wondered, how in the world did I end up here?

Like maybe as a result of a decision that you've made or a series of decisions that you'd made, your own life becomes essentially unrecognizable to you in a lot of ways.

You feel like you're drowning in debt and your job is miserable and your relationships are a mess, and it feels like there's just no way out.

And so essentially you're there, one way or the other, in a pit, and it's a pit of your own making, a pit as a result of your own decisions.

And when you're in that pit, you find yourself there reflecting on all the decisions, all of the chain of events that ended up leading you there.

That's really where we are here in Jonah chapter two.

If you'll notice in verses two through nine, it may be indented in your Bible.

It's actually a different genre of scripture there.

It's a psalm.

Verses two through nine are a psalm, and psalms are the ways in the scripture in which words are expressed to God, worship is expressed to God, moments are reflected upon in the face of God.

And this is essentially what Jonah is here doing.

But what we're reading here are the reflections of a man who found himself in an unassailable pit, namely, namely, the belly of a fish.

And the point here is that God let his child fall so that his child would learn.

And that's why the deepest pits make the greatest schools.

He says here that he's in the belly of the fish, but he's also recognizing that though he's in the belly of the fish, he ought to be in the belly of Sheol.

That is, he he ought to be sunken and dead.

He ought to be forgotten.

His life ought to be over.

But he's still breathing.

His heart is still beating.

Maybe not as strongly as before, maybe with a lot more anxiety than it was before, maybe with a lot more scars than before, but he's still breathing.

And so he is reflecting here in the psalm as a recognition that since he's still breathing, he's got something to learn.

He needs to go to school.

He needs to make the most of this opportunity.

You know, it's a difficult realization for you to come to, to realize that you are in a pit of your own making.

But when you find yourself in a pit that you've dug, the question becomes: what are you going to do with it?

What are you going to do with it?

Are you going to waste the pit or not?

Are you going to learn from the school or not?

The great pastor, R.T.

Kendall, he once said, the belly of the fish is not a happy place to live, but it is a good place to learn.

I think that's true.

I had a friend, the way he would frame it up is he would say, it's the kind of education that you can't pay a million dollars to obtain, but you wouldn't pay a nickel to ever go back and learn again.

In the pit, in the pit, you come to the end of yourself, don't you?

You come to the end of yourself.

Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son.

You'll remember that.

We're going to come back to the prodigal son, by the way, in the fourth sermon.

I think both sons are represented here in the book of Jonah.

But you'll remember, he goes and he really is offensive toward his father, takes his inheritance, and goes off and he squanders it.

And the first time that he begins thinking about who his dad was isn't until he's bankrupt and longing to eat the pig slop.

And so for the first time, he doesn't just think of his father's kindness.

He's probably known of his father's kindness all of his life.

For the first time, he doesn't just think of his father's kindness.

He actually begins to appreciate it, to long for it, to miss it, to love it, to savor it, to rejoice over it, to hope in it.

You know, uh Josiah, over time, he learned that when he was walking down into the garage, that he ought to look up for a hand to hold because the concrete's hard.

And he learned that because one day he went toppling over the steps onto the hard concrete.

It's true for us too, isn't it?

That very often we have to go and hit our heads on the concrete.

And that's how we learn to reach up our hand for our heavenly Father to ask him to guide us toward safety.

That we go to school in the fish's stomach, and that's why the Lord disciplines us.

He disciplines us because the hardest discipline precedes the greatest mercy.

Now, I understand that a lot of us may have some baggage and some issues when we think about discipline, especially hard discipline.

You may have had a parent that was mean or abusive or really severe and harsh.

That's not at all what I'm talking about.

In fact, when I talk about hard discipline, I'm talking about the hardest discipline.

And the hardest discipline comes from a person that loves you so deeply, they would never want to cause you pain, and they would never want to hurt you, but they're willing to allow a superficial wound to be introduced into your life to be able to preserve you from a long-term, more lasting scar.

That's what we see here with the Lord.

I say that Jonah dug the pit for himself, but it's too much to say that Jonah alone brought this upon himself.

It's too much to say that it's entirely of Jonah that he ends up in the belly of the fish.

Because Jonah certainly doesn't see that way.

That this wasn't just a work of Jonah.

This was actually definitively the discipline of God.

You'll notice this in verse 3.

He says that you cast me into the deep.

All your waves and your billows passed over me.

That in other words, he knew that the 20-foot swells from the storm weren't the natural effect of his cause.

That they were, in fact, the divine discipline of God.

That in other words, God was wearing him down, and God was wearing him down on purpose.

God was allowing Jonah to realize how puny and frail and weak he actually was.

Martin Luther, the great church reformer, he called this merciful wrath.

We don't really think of those words as going together, do we?

Merciful wrath.

In other words, he thought of this as a fatherly type of discipline.

That it's the picture of a father wounding his son in the short term, that he might be able to protect his son from danger and from harm that could come to him in the long term.

That dads have to use disciplines to prepare their son's souls for mercy.

You see, mercy, mercy apart from discipline produces entitlement.

Mercy apart from discipline produces entitlement.

That is, it doesn't teach, it enables.

But merciful wrath, merciful wrath is different.

Merciful wrath is more loving than that.

Merciful wrath is deeper than that.

Merciful wrath is richer than that.

It's it's discipline that teaches us what will kill us and who will heal us.

It's discipline that teaches us what we ought to run from and what and whom we ought to run to.

That is that we need to recognize that God's discipline is so different from the abusive father.

God's discipline actually flows out of his protective nature.

See, one day, you're gonna wake up and you're gonna realize that the pit that you're in is actually a school that might even be today.

And I know that's true because of two things.

First of all, it's it's our nature to run, isn't it?

It's our nature to run.

And just as it is our nature to run, it is God's nature to run after us, to do what it takes for his children to bring them back into the fold.

In Hebrews chapter 12, verse 6, it says this for the Lord disciplines the one he loves, the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.

Hebrews 12:6

Hebrews 12 actually says that one of the indicators, one of the ways that you can know that you are a son or a daughter of the living God is that you experience his discipline in your life.

That if you look around and you never have any discipline in your life, it ain't because you're awesome, it may be because you ain't a son.

Right?

That this is actually an indicator of his divine and sovereign grace and love bestowed upon you.

So when you find yourself in the belly of the fish, when you find yourself in the bottom of the pit, don't let yourself resent the pit.

Don't resent the job that you lost.

Don't resent the debt payments that are filling your mailbox every day.

Don't resent the empty house that you go home to now.

No, learn not to resent the exhaustion you feel stranded in the belly of the fish because God lets us run ourselves ragged.

He lets us find our ways to the bottom of the pit.

He lets us find our way into the school of hard knocks because once we've run ourselves ragged, we're now ready to receive mercy.

You see, God exhausts the runner, that's true.

But it's just as true that God hears the ragged.

He hears the ragged.

You know, if you ever think about it, it's so easy for us to read these old stories that we and feel like we know them so well that we miss what's actually taking place.

But when you really think about it, it must have been incredibly traumatic for Jonah to have to go and as he's writing the psalm and thinking through it, to relive what it was like to go down to the bottom to think, to think that he had come to the end of his life, to think that he was about to die.

That here he is and he's remembering and he's meditating upon remembering.

And so he he remembers the water taking his life.

He remembers the floods of judgment rising over him, just like they rose over Noah.

He remembers what it was like to have his head wrapped in the weeds and what it was like to have the bars, essentially, the prison of death closing around him.

And then on the verge of death, near the point of unconsciousness, he says, then I remembered, I remembered, I remembered the Lord in my prayer.

It came to you, it came into your holy temple, it came into the Holy of Holies, it came into your presence.

I remembered as I was dying, as I was gasping for air, as I was on the verge of drowning, I remembered in the pit, I remembered you.

And I remembered you would listen to me.

I remembered you would hear me.

Falls have a way of jogging your memories, don't they?

They have a way of jogging our memories.

They remind us of how catastrophic our decisions actually are in real life.

They remind us of how weak we really are, how unstable and unsteadied we really are.

And for the child of God, they remind us where our hope is found.

That is when the prodigal is there longing for the pig's food that he begins to remember who his dad is, remember who his father is, and long to be back in his father's house, and so he calls out.

Think about that.

He calls out to the very one that he had forsaken.

When his memory is jogged, he seeks comfort from the very one from whom he had originally fled.

He reminds me of Josiah.

It's interesting.

Josiah runs, and when he runs, he wants me to leave him alone.

Dad's trying to hold him back, right?

And then when he falls, what does he want?

He wants me to come in and scoop him up and bring him comfort.

That's us, isn't it?

That's us.

We run from the Lord, we go our own way, we fall down flat, and we're like, Lord, where are you?

Won't you help me?

But you know every time Josiah screams, no matter how many times I've told him not to run, every time he runs, and every time he falls, and every time he screams, do you know what I do?

I hear him.

No matter what part of the house he's in, I hear him.

And he doesn't have to come to me.

I go to him.

I go to him.

And I pick him up and I pull him close.

That's our Heavenly Father, isn't it?

You see, there is no limit to God's hearing.

There is no limit to God's hearing.

I've told you before, repeatedly, it bears repeating again that Hebrew often emphasizes things by repeating it, and when it repeats it three times, it's emphasizing it to the highest degree.

Notice that three different times he says, he says, I called out to the Lord out of the out of the voice, you heard my voice.

He says, Then my prayer came to you into your holy temple.

That my prayer came to you.

He says, He answered me.

That even though Jonah was in the furthest room of the house, even though Jonah was in the belly of Sheol, even though Jonah was in the belly of the fish, God, God could hear him.

Even though he was in a pit of his own digging, God heard him and God answered him.

Isn't that good news?

Isn't that the gospel?

Isn't that a beautiful picture?

That God hears us even though we don't listen to him.

How good is he?

Like, how good is he?

God hears us even though we refuse to listen to him?

That there is nowhere that you can run, there is nowhere you can fall, that God can't hear you there, or that God is unwilling to listen.

There is nothing that you can do that can cause him to close up his ears to you.

Here's the question, though.

How long will it take you to remember?

How far will you have to fall?

How deep will you have to go before you remember?

John had fought the waves, he had tried to rescue himself until he said he was fainting away.

He was on the verge of dying.

His consciousness was going away.

And then after all the trauma, after all the exhaustion, after all the pain, after gasping for air, then, then he remembers.

How long will it take for you to remember?

See, sometimes I think we read these stories and our minds begin to think, you know, is it really that big a deal?

I mean, if he's gonna receive me back, like if I'm gonna receive mercy, ah, like, is it is it that big a deal if I go out, have a little fun for a little while, if I go my own way, ah, like, is it that big a deal?

That's because we just read these as stories we know already.

Do you hear the trauma on Jonah's voice?

Do you see?

The sooner you turn back, the shallower your scar.

That's the difference.

The sooner you turn back, the shallower your scar.

No person that's actually experienced the trauma of the pit will tell you that the pit was worth it.

Nobody.

They would have told you person after person, testimony after we could probably go around the room this morning.

They would tell you, no, no, no, no, just listen to the Lord.

Just listen to the Lord, his way is better, his way is better than your way.

So the question is, is how long will it take you to realize that you're just wearing yourself out?

How long will you have to keep falling into the pit and reveling in the pit before you will remember his mercy?

How long will you have to thrash against the waves and have yourself worn down before you will remember?

Because if you'll just call out to him, there's no limit to his hearing and there's no boundary to his mercy.

See, it can be difficult.

It can be difficult to have compassion on a child that doesn't listen, can it?

Like, I wish it wasn't, but my impulse is much more, I told you so, then let me help you out.

Like, I wish that wasn't true.

But praise God, that's not his impulse with his children.

That's not how God responds to Jonah.

That's not how God responds to any of us.

Verse 6 is really beautiful if you pay attention.

It says, I went down.

Do you remember we emphasized in chapter one that he says he went down three times?

He went down, down, down to Joppa, down, down, down to Tarshish.

God told him to go northeast, he went southwest.

And so he's remembering, he's remembering in Psalm, he's remembering it accurately.

I did.

I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me.

I went down to the land of death when God called me up toward the land of life.

He says, But listen, yet you brought up my life from the pit.

Do you see the juxtaposition?

Do you see the difference?

Do you hear it?

These are echoes of resurrection, aren't they?

These are echoes of resurrection.

The bars of death are locking him down.

There is no escape.

But the Lord, the Lord turns what ought to be a tomb of eternal death into a womb of new life, a new beginning for him.

This is the echo of the resurrection here in the book of Jonah, isn't it?

In fact, Jesus will quote it.

In the three days Jonah went into the belly of the earth, and then he would be raised, the Son of Man will go into the belly of the earth, and three days later he will rise up.

The echoes of resurrection.

See, Jonah was in the depths of the sea, and God's mercy found him there.

God's mercy found him there.

Jonah was in the belly of the fish, and God's mercy found him there.

Surely, surely, he is teaching Jonah and he is teaching all of Israel that, yeah, Nineveh may have been outside the boundaries of Israel, but Nineveh, though outside the boundaries of Israel, was not outside of the boundaries of God's mercy.

Imagine how this would have hit the original audience.

Do you know who the book of Jonah was originally written for?

It was written years after the actual events took place, and it was written to a group of Israelites that were in exile in Assyria.

Assyria.

Now, what is the major city in ancient Assyria?

It's Nineveh.

So here they are up in Assyria, many of them in Nineveh, and they're sitting here wondering, where is God's mercy?

God's mercy is not going to leave Canaan.

God's mercy is not going to leave the promised land.

God's mercy is not going to leave the temple.

We're all the way up here in Nineveh.

God forsaken Nineveh.

And so what's the lesson of Jonah 2?

God's mercy can make its way all the way into enemy territory.

It knows no boundaries.

It doesn't know the property lines.

You know that's still true this morning.

That's still true this morning.

If you're in a secret relationship, God's mercy can find you there.

If you're stealing from your company and living a double life, God's mercy can find you there.

If you're in the midst of an overwhelming addiction, God's mercy can find you there.

If you're in the deepest, darkest depression that you can have in this life, I want you to hear God's mercy can find you there.

It doesn't matter how deep an enemy territory you are, there is no boundary on God's mercy.

How long?

How long will it take?

How long will you have to be there before you realize it?

This morning, will you call out to him for mercy?

Will you call out to him for mercy?

This morning, will you look up from the bottom of the pits of Sheol?

Will you, will you look up from the bottom of the belly of the fish?

Will you, will you look up from the school of hard knocks and will you call out for mercy and recognize that his intervening mercy has been in pursuit of you all along?

That is why we have the prayer banners, by the way.

That's why we have elders at the end of our services that want to pray.

Our elders have zero interest in judging you for your sin.

Our eltras, our elders have zero interest in knowing the T, the latest T of your life.

Do you know why we do that every week?

Because we recognize that we have a responsibility to administer God's mercy to you.

To administer God's mercy, to be there with you, to be able to pray and to counsel and to walk through repentance.

And I wonder today, I wonder if today that is what needs to take place.

If you need to start, if your step toward God is taking a step toward a brother or a sister to begin opening up about the places that you are so that now, now mercy can come in and invade.

The reason that the Bible calls for us to confess our sins to one another is because it's good for us.

It's good for us.

It is a means by which we get to experience his mercy at the hands of others.

No, God hears the ragged.

God hears the ragged, and he's given us one another to demonstrate his listening ear.

Don't keep sinking to the bottom all by yourself.

Call out for mercy this morning.

Call out for mercy.

See, there's a reason that God exhausts the sinner.

There's a reason that he wants us to get to the place where we're so ragged that we just call out to him.

And it's because he's positioning us all along for rescue.

He's positioning us for rescue, that God rescues the rebel.

You see, the goal of parenting is not just to help your children, it's to transform your children, isn't it?

That we don't just go to them and dust them off and say, all right, well, good luck from here.

No, we work to reach their hearts, and we work to make sure that we have that they know that we have their best interests in mind and that we only want what's good for them, and that we're hopeful that they could become better, wiser people, that that maybe just one fall on the concrete would be sufficient, that they would learn, they could reach up, and we've got them, and that that becomes a metaphor that carries them through all of their lives.

So when I so when I say that God rescues the rebel, I'm certainly pointing to God's saving grace, but I'm pointing even beyond that, not just to his saving grace, but to his sanctifying, transforming grace.

That he doesn't just seek to save Jonah, that's true.

And he doesn't just seek to save us, though that's true.

He seeks to transform Jonah, to sanctify Jonah, to transform you, to transform me, to sanctify us, to make us into somebody new.

That the pit, that the belly of the fish, the lowest moments of your life, are for the purpose of cultivating in you the new person that God has now saved you to be.

That God has both recreated you and is also at the same time in the process of recreating you.

And often, often he uses the pit to bring this about.

That in the pit is where grudges can become gratitude.

This happens between verses eight and nine for Jonah, that Jonah ended up in the belly of the fish because his grudge against Nineveh was stronger than his love for his God.

That he he actually seemed to prefer his prejudice to his mission.

But there, in the belly of the fish, his introspection begins to take him in a new direction.

It begins to change his perspective.

That no longer is he consumed with his hatred for Nineveh.

Though we're gonna see that that doesn't come as far as we would like for it to come.

No, there's a transformation that's taking place in his inner person, in his inner perspective, in his inner attitude.

This is the difference between verses eight and nine.

You'll notice that in verse eight, it talks about those who pay regard to vain idols.

Vain idols, if you translate it literally from the Hebrew, means empty nothings.

Empty nothings.

And he's contrasting that with the hope of God's steadfast love.

This is his Hassed love, his covenant love.

This is the love that is walking in the experience of the knowledge of who God is, the being bound him.

This is a God doesn't love all of creation with a Hesed love.

He loves his people with a Hesed love.

He loves His covenant bearers with a Hassed love.

So this is an experience.

And so here's Jonah, and this is how Jonah's figured out.

He's like, I've realized what I was doing.

When God called me to go up to Nineveh, and I went down, down, down to Tarshish, what I was actually doing, what was actually taking place in my life is I was taking God's covenant love and I was training it for empty nothings.

Empty nothings.

That's what we do, isn't it?

That's what we do.

We abandon God for empty nothings.

Moth food is what Jesus calls them.

That we love money and we love video games and we love promiscuity and we love accolades and we love those things seemingly more than him.

We prefer an extra hour doom strolling to 15 minutes with him.

Empty nothings.

Empty nothings.

But though Jonah had forsaken God, God had not forsaken Jonah.

Instead, God's love proves to be steadfast, doesn't it?

The love that he abandoned, the love that he ran away from, it actually proves to be more steadfast than Jonah could have ever imagined.

That God is determined to save him.

Oh, this is salvation, it has nothing to do with Jonah.

It has everything to do with God.

So in retrospect, he's thankful that God didn't quit on him, even though long ago he had already quit on God.

God has every reason to quit on us, doesn't he?

Every reason.

And we have no reason to quit on him, do we?

But we quit.

And he keeps loving.

And the question that Jonah confronts us with this morning is will you let gratitude touch the bitter roots that are in your heart this morning?

Will you let gratitude penetrate through your prejudices?

Will you let gratitude soften the wall that you've put up between you and everybody in the world that annoys you?

Here's what we can learn from Jonah.

Rejoicing delights more than rebelling.

Rejoicing delights more than rebelling.

Our hearts are starved for the enjoyment of God, but we always seem to think that we can find a better pleasure, a deeper enjoyment.

And that's what we run.

You see, we don't think of ourselves ever, in the moment, at least, as running away from God.

Instead, what we think of ourselves as doing is running toward a greater pleasure.

Every act of rebellion begins with the promise of pleasure, doesn't it?

The secret relationship promises intimacy.

The purchase promises significance.

The grudge promises satisfaction.

The outburst promises relief.

The compromise promises freedom.

And so we run in the moment because sin, sin looks more satisfying than God does.

We wouldn't say it out loud, but it's true.

But the reality is, sin always overpromises and always underdelivers.

It promises delight, but it leaves us drowning with the bars closing around us.

So will we learn from Jonah?

Will we learn from Jonah?

Will we stop rebelling and start rejoicing?

Will we stop thinking of all we want and don't want and don't have?

Or will we start seeing all that we have so long as we have God Himself?

Can you imagine the transformation in your life and in your heart if gratitude began to live where the grudges have always lived?

Well, look up.

Look up.

Maybe you quit on God a long time ago.

Maybe you ran down, down, down to Tarsus a long time ago, but look up, and what you will find is his mercy is in hot pursuit.

See, it's not just in Jonah's spirit that change happens, but it's also in his willingness.

I think that's what verse 9 is meant to point out when it says, What I have vowed I will pay.

What I vowed I will pay.

This is Jonah's way of saying that he's recommitting himself to the Lord.

He's recommitting himself to the direction of the Lord, to the paths of the Lord, to his devotion to the Lord.

That he'll go now where the Lord said he should have gone all along.

And so we see that judgment becomes mercy.

You know, a fish, a fish is a pretty strange way to save someone, isn't it?

I mean, it's a strange and peculiar mercy.

It's mercy, but it stinks.

It's mercy, but it has teeth.

It's mercy, but it leaves you longing for a fuller deliverance.

But it's it is mercy because you're not drowning in the sea, and that's what you deserve.

So it was mercy that stopped Jonah.

And it was mercy that held Jonah, and it was mercy that gave Jonah a place to remember the God that he had fled was better than anything else that he was chasing.

And it's the strange mercy of the fish that reminds us of the bloody mercy of the cross.

Jonah declares, salvation belongs to the Lord.

In Hebrew, salvation is the word Yeshua.

Yeshua is the root word for the name Jesus.

And that is where this story will find its fulfillment.

A fish is a strange way to save one.

A reluctant prophet is a strange way to save a city, but neither of them are as strange as a cross.

See a cross, a fish, a reluctant prophet.

All of them teach us about the depths of judgment.

All of them are mercy with teeth.

All of them are mercy that leave you longing for resurrection.

Both Jonah's fish and Jesus' cross both remind us of all the ways that sin overpromised and under-delivered, and yet they are, at the very same time, inviting us to know very real delight through the enjoyment of God.

So, in the last place that Megan and I lived, our family lived, it was a really, we lived in the foothills of the Appalachians, and so our neighborhood especially was very hilly, and they were quite steep.

We'd made it our habit, me and uh the kids, every day.

Megan was teaching, and so she'd be all doing dinner and all those kinds of things, and so we made it our habit.

I would get them out of the house and we would go on a walk through the neighborhood.

But the again, it was it was really hilly.

And so we got when when Sarah would have, she would by this point would have been, I don't know, five or six years old.

And she began to discover she's a very strategic person.

If you guys have tracked with our puppy contract story on social media, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Very strategic person.

So she began to realize that if she starts running while she's going downhill, that she can really, she can really pick up some speed.

And so I got to where I would notice she would start running, I would go, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, please don't run downhill.

You're gonna fall and it's gonna hurt so bad.

Well, this went on for about a week.

And after about a week, I told Megan, I said, I think, I think I'm gonna have to let her run and fall so that she'll understand.

And so the next day we go, and I told her the same things, but she didn't listen.

And so this time I didn't intervene.

I just let her run down the hill.

Of course, you know what happened.

She fell, she scratched her knee, the world was over, all the wailing happened, all the crying happened.

And so what I did is I went and I picked her up and I pulled her close and I comforted her the whole way home.

You know, I let her fall.

Because I came to believe that it would be better for her to scrape her knees and know that she could trust me in the long term than it would be for me to keep intervening so that she didn't believe me.

Our Heavenly Father will do that too.

Our Heavenly Father will do that too.

He'll let you run down the hill eventually.

And he'll let you fall, and he'll let you scrape your knees.

Because he needs you to know that you can trust him.

And that that is where salvation is found.

And so he lets us fall so that we can learn to really trust that what he's wanted is best for us all along.

Can I pray for us?

Heavenly Father, would you forgive us, Lord, that we chase after empty nothings?

That we look about our lives and we see all the different ways and all the different things, directions that we go, and you you call us up to Nineveh and we go down, down, down to Tarshish.

God, would you forgive us for that?

And Lord, as hard as it is for us to say, and as hard as it is for us to pray, God, we we say thank you for the pit.

Thank you for allowing us to fall into the sea.

Thank you for the belly of the fish.

Thank you for that place where we are in your mercy but struggling with it.

Father, I pray for those that right now are in the midst of merciful wrath, in the midst of your discipline, that they would look up today, that their scar might be shallower, that they might walk and delight in mercy.

God, let them move forward.

God, I pray for those that are completely outside of your will and have never known you, that today, Lord, the kindness of who you are would draw them into salvation.

The good news that they would see no matter where they are, no matter what they've done, no matter what their story is, your mercy.

Your mercy can find them there.

Lord, would you do a great work here among us?

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.