The Miserable Believer

Sermon Transcript

Jonah 2, and I want to do a quick review for some of you that might not have been here a few weeks back when I had the opportunity to do Jonah 1. It is my ambition to try and teach through the book of Jonah here on Wednesday nights when given the opportunity to teach. There might be a few gaps of Wednesdays in between those teaching times, but I would love it if you guys could join me through the book of Jonah on the nights that we will be together.

Tonight, though, we’re in chapter 2, but to give us a running start and for the sake of those of you that were not here in our last session, I want to do a quick review of Jonah 1. Now, this is a story that’s very familiar probably to most of us, at least when we’re talking in terms of Jonah and the whale, but you may not know the background as to why that event even happened. God had spoken to his prophet Jonah saying, “I want you to go to the city of Nineveh, and I want you to preach against them,” because they were a wicked people. The Ninevites, which people of Nineveh, which was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and Assyria was a brutal force back in that time period. They were very cruel, they were dominating over the people that were around them, and they worked by intimidation to subject other nations to themselves. Not only were they vicious, but they were very immoral, and that’s what God wanted Jonah to confront them on, is to go and speak to them about the wickedness that they were committing.

But Jonah didn’t want to go. That wasn’t something that was on his “to-do” list, in fact, he decided he was going to run in the opposite direction. Now, we might on the surface think that he made that choice because he himself was fearful of the Ninevites. If they were so mean to everybody else, what’s going to happen if I show up and say, “Hey, you guys are wrong,” and maybe they’re going to treat me bad. That really was not Jonah’s reason. He was not concerned with how the Ninevites were going to react, he was concerned with how God was going to react because in his mind he thought, These are a wicked people that deserve to be judged, and if they listen to my message and turn away from their wickedness, I know the character of God. God is going to forgive them, and I don’t want God to forgive them. They deserve to be judged. So, he ran from God’s calling on his life because he did not want God to show mercy to these people. Jonah, in chapter 1, ran in the opposite direction, not just to get away from Nineveh, but the passage actually tells us he was trying to escape the presence of the Lord. He wanted to get away from God because God was asking him to do something that he didn’t want to do.

So, God, before He can do any work in the Ninevites, finds Himself in a position where He needs to do a work in His own prophet, in Jonah himself. In chapter 1, as Jonah is running by jumping on a ship that was sailing far, far away, God caused a storm to stir up on the sea so bad that the men on board that ship were sure that they were going to die, and they were bound and determined to find out who was the guilty party on the ship that was causing the storm to take place. They found out that it was Jonah, and Jonah’s solution was, “Throw me overboard. Just toss me into the ocean, and the sea will become calm for you.”

We found out at the end of the chapter that that just was not going to happen. Though they threw him over, Jonah, figuring that he would die in the process, we got to verse 17, the last verse in chapter 1, and I don’t feel like I had adequate time to explain that verse, so I want to begin there—the final verse of chapter 1. It says, “Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.” That is the part of Jonah’s story that just about everybody knows whether they are a believer or not a Christian at all. They’ve heard about Jonah, and they’ve heard about the whale, and many people have a difficult time believing this story has any credibility whatsoever because this is the kind of stuff that’s in fairy tales. It might be appropriate in a cartoon like Pinocchio, but to try and play it off as a real happenstance, something that literally took place, many would say that that is a stretch to say the least.

But we need to ask ourselves as believers in the Bible, “Should we take this story seriously?” I believe so, and I’ll explain that in a minute, but you might not be aware that even in recent years—in fact, in the past five years—there have been two instances recorded of men who found themselves in the mouth of a whale. Back in 2021, this is off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts, there was a man by the name of Michael Packard who was diving when in the midst of his diving expedition he suddenly felt like something had just hit him and then he had a sense of being in total darkness and something completely wrapped around him. He didn’t know exactly what was taking place, all he knew was that something terribly wrong had just happened to him. What had happened is that a humpback whale had swallowed him, at least took him into the whale’s mouth, but he was not in that mouth for more than about 40 seconds before he was spit out, and only then did he realize that he had just been somewhat swallowed by a whale.

A similar instance happened just last year down in South America off the coast of Chile. There was a young man, a 23-year-old man, that was in a kayak with his family member that was literally videotaping this taking place, you can actually see it on YouTube, when a feeding whale, another humpback whale, was coming to the surface to get a gulp of fish, but he gulped this young man instead. He was in the mouth of this whale only for a handful of seconds before the whale realized, This isn’t what I was after, and he spit him out as well.

Now, on both of these situations it happened to be a humpback whale, and a humpback whale has a large enough mouth to envelop a man without any problem. The problem comes in trying to swallow a man. Their esophagus is essentially about the size of a small pipe, and no man is going to go through that pipe, only little fish are going to make it through there, so the whales ended up spitting them out. But even so, we can look at those stories and say, “See, I mean if that can happen now, it can happen back then.” But I don’t really think that these stories actually add any credibility to the story of Jonah, to tell you the truth.

There are some sea creatures that could gulp a human, but for the most part those types of creatures are either completely uninterested in eating a man or unable to actually swallow that man once it is taken into their mouth, so I don’t think that is even something that we need to argue about. The reality is that we oftentimes are trying to come up with some sort of a natural explanation for something that has happened that is supernatural. If God is involved, it is a supernatural happening, and we don’t need to find natural explanations for something that God happens to be doing. If we’re making an attempt to try and justify this story based upon other experiences—stories that we have heard of a man being in the mouth of a whale—I think that we’re missing the whole point.

In verse 17, it actually tells us that “ . . . the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow Jonah.” First of all, I want you to see that it does not say a whale. We often assume it’s a whale because we hear that in other stories or we think that a whale is the only thing large enough in the sea that’s capable of swallowing a man, but the text actually tells us it was “a great fish.” More importantly, it says that God “prepared a great fish.” The fact that God prepared a fish could mean that God actually custom designed one fish that his sole purpose, his sole reason for existence, was to swallow Jonah to get Jonah to where Jonah needed to go; and God is fully capable of doing that. I mean, if He created the heavens and the earth, surely He can create a fish for a single divine purpose, and that might be the solution. As far as we know, we don’t have to come up with a natural way for this to take place, if a supernatural God is involved in it.

By the way, in Matthew 12, Jesus actually makes reference to this story as if it is an absolutely true story. So, if Jesus is good with it, I think we ought to be good with it. Amen? If you can get past Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” everything else is easy after that, right? So, I do think because God is involved and because it’s in His Word and it speaks of this event as a factual event, we don’t have to argue about it any further. This is an event that actually took place.

Let’s dive into Jonah 2 because last message we left off with Jonah being swallowed by this great fish. In Jonah 2:1 it says, “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the fish’s belly. 2 And he said: ‘I cried out to the LORD because of my affliction, and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice. 3 For You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me; all Your billows and Your waves passed over me. 4 Then I said, ‘I have been cast out of Your sight; yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.’ 5 The waters surrounded me, even to my soul; the deep closed around me; weeds were wrapped around my head. 6 I went down to the moorings of the mountains; the earth with its bars closed behind me forever; yet You have brought up my life from the pit, O LORD, my God. 7 When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer went up to You, into Your holy temple. 8 Those who regard worthless idols forsake their own Mercy. 9 But I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay what I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.’ 10 So the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.”

When I was a kid, about 7 years old, my parents would sometimes take me and my sisters to church. It was not a regular thing for us, it was something that if it was a Sunday morning and my parents decided it was a good day to go to church, we would go; and other Sundays we wouldn’t. But I didn’t really have a whole lot of interest in going to church. I was more interested in getting on my bike and going over to my friend’s house and finding something fun to do. I figured at that point in my life I only had two days of the week that were mine, the others I had to be in school, so Saturday was mine and Sunday was mine, and I didn’t want Sunday to be taken away from me by going to church, so I put up a fuss a lot of times when I went.

On one particular Sunday, I was not in a great mood. We were at church, and I was in a classroom with a bunch of other kinds, and I don’t remember a whole lot of the details, but I do remember there was a very, very old lady that watched out over me and the kids that were in that class. She always seemed to be mad at us. I always remember her yelling at us for this, that, or the other—we were running too fast, we were being too rowdy, or whatever it happened to be. There was always a point in the time there that it was snack time. She would get out a box of graham crackers and break these graham crackers and have us in a single-file line. We had to come up to her and one by one she would hold out the graham cracker and wait until the child said, “Can I please have a graham cracker,” and then she would give it, and we were required to say, “Thank you,” afterwards.

I was at the end of the line, and again, not in a very good mood, so when it came to my turn, I walked up, and she held out the graham cracker and said, “What do you say?” I said, “Gimme a graham cracker.” She said, “No, what is the secret word?” I said, “I want a graham cracker.” I didn’t get a graham cracker that day. I was made to sit down, and in my stubbornness, look at all of the other kids eating their graham cracker while I got nothing at all. But there was something inside of me also that had this sense of: I won. She couldn’t make me say it, so it wasn’t so bad not getting the graham cracker out of the sense of victory that I had that she couldn’t make me.

Here in Jonah 2, there is a battle that is going on. It is a battle between Jonah and God. It is a battle between Jonah’s will and God’s will, and what I want us to see in our time together tonight is six rounds to this boxing match between Jonah and God as Jonah is fighting doing God’s will, and God is working on changing the heart of His prophet so that he willingly decides to do the right thing. In round 1 we see Jonah’s stubbornness. We find it in verse 1 when it says, “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the fish’s belly.” There’s no doubt that Jonah was the poster child for the stubborn heart, but I want to ask you this question, when did Jonah start praying because we might assume that as soon as he was swallowed by this fish that his prayer life was reignited because that would’ve been our response, I’m sure. If you were swallowed by a fish, you’d probably start praying right away, “God, get me out of here! I confess anything that I’ve ever done wrong to offend You. Please rescue me.” That would be our response.

I want you to notice that was not Jonah’s response. If you look at the end of Jonah 1, verse 17, and the beginning of Jonah 2:1, putting that together, “And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Then Jonah prayed . . . .” Do you know what that’s telling us? Is that he was in that fish for three days before he chose to pray to God. If that is not stubborn, I don’t know what is. How can you possibly be in the situation that he was in and have such a hard heart that you are not willing to bend or bow. But that is the situation that Jonah was in. God had placed him in the worst situation imaginable, yet it still took him three days before his heart would soften.

We might ask ourselves, how could that even be? How could it be possible that a guy could be in that situation and be so hard-hearted or stubborn that he would wait three days before he would finally cave in? I will give you an answer because Jonah would have rather died than do what God was asking him to do. I say that based upon what had taken place in chapter 1. I think it was verse 12 when Jonah actually is the one that suggested, “Hey, why don’t you throw me overboard, and I’m sure the storm is going to end then because I know it’s because of me and because I’m running from God that this storm has taken place, so throw me into the sea.” Well, what did he think was going to happen when he got thrown into the sea? He was going to drown. He didn’t think that he was going to swim to shore. I mean, at this point, that would’ve been miles and miles and miles away. If the storm still raged, there’s no way in the world he was going to survive, and he was perfectly fine with not surviving because he would rather die than do what God was asking him to do. He probably was thrown into that sea thinking, I win. I’m not going to have to do it because in a few minutes I will breathe my last breath and I’ll never have to go to Nineveh.

But God had another plan, and the fish shows up and swallows Jonah. Jonah, and I’m speculating but I can imagine, probably thought, Well, no big deal. I’ll just die in this fish now. But God would not allow him to die. For three days he would be in that fish while God waited for him to reach the breaking point.

Remember when you were a kid at the dinner table, and mom that night made the exact vegetable that you cannot stand, so you ate everything else but the vegetables were still there. Dad looked over at you and said, “You’re not leaving this table until you eat those vegetables.” And, you’re thinking to yourself, There’s no way in the world I’m eating these vegetables. Does anybody identify with this? Yes. You sat there, and Dad said, getting up from the table, “You’re going to sit at this table until you eat those vegetables,” and went about his business, your brothers and sisters went about their business, mom started cleaning up, and you were there sitting with your plate in front of you. You sat there until it was bedtime, and dad, still angry, came over to you and said, “Go to bed,” and you walked up the stairs thinking, I just won because dad could not make me eat those vegetables.

You went to bed, the next morning you got up and came downstairs ready for breakfast, and that plate of green beans is still sitting on the table. Dad is waiting for you to come down the stairs and said, “I’m glad you’re here. Your breakfast is ready, and you are not going to eat another thing as long as you live until those green beans go down your throat.”

We know the battle that is going on between Jonah and God here right now. Jonah feels like he won for the moment because he has a stubborn heart, but round 2 is about to begin. Round 2 is God’s discipline. To see God’s discipline all we need to do is refer back up to Jonah 1:17 again, the fact that Jonah is in this fish, and he’s going to remain in this fish until he changes his mind. Again, I’m speculating, but I could imagine that if Jonah had repented within an hour, he would’ve only spent an hour in that fish, but if he would have resisted for a month, he would’ve spent a month in that fish because God was going to leave him there, stewing in his juices, until he changed his mind.

God is very persuasive, if you have not found that out because there might be a few stubborn hearts in here. Some of us have been extremely stubborn with God at points in our life, but the Lord has a way of persuading us. One thing that we know for sure is that God will discipline those that He loves. In Proverbs 3:11-12 it says, “My son, do not despise the chastening of the LORD, Nor detest His correction: 12 For whom the LORD loves He corrects, Just as a father the son in whom he delights.” God loves us too much to let us continue in our sins.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but a lot of times an unbeliever, a person that does not know the Lord, they can sin and live a lifestyle that is totally self-willed, and it seems like they suffer very few consequences for the things that they do. Then, you as a believer, stumble and suddenly God’s discipline is upon you—in some way you are suffering the consequences of that bad choice almost immediately—and you begin to scratch your head and wonder, Why is it that my friend who doesn’t love the Lord, doesn’t care about the Lord at all, he’s never read the Bible in his life, he doesn’t give a rip about what the Bible has to say, they can do whatever they want to do and it doesn’t seem like they suffer anything; and I step out of line and WHAM! I tell you it’s because God loves you, and because you’re His kid. God disciplines His own kids and, out of love, He is going to do what He needs to do. If that means bringing a storm in your life, He will bring a storm. If you don’t pay attention to the storm, then the fish is coming because the Lord loves you, and Jonah is now in a situation where he’s not having fun at all.

That leads us to round 3 where we see Jonah’s misery. Jonah was stubborn, so God brought discipline, now Jonah is going to be miserable. We find that in verses 2-6. I’ll go ahead and read it again. It says, “And he said”—this is Jonah speaking—“‘I cried out to the LORD because of my affliction, and He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and You heard my voice”—now, listen to what he has to say—“For You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me; all Your billows and Your waves passed over me.” 4 Then I said, ‘I have been cast out of Your sight; yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.’ 5 The waters surrounded me, even to my soul; the deep closed around me; weeds were wrapped around my head. 6 I went down to the moorings of the mountains; the earth with its bars closed behind me forever.”

Notice in verse 2 that Jonah mentions the word “affliction,” and these verses he is now expressing from inside that fish the affliction that he is feeling. This affliction is on at least a couple levels. The first is the physical affliction that he is experiencing—what he is experiencing on his own body. He mentions in verse 6 that the fish is diving down to the depths of the sea. Now, how would he know that if he is inside this fish, where in the world this fish is? Well, no doubt, if you’ve ever been diving down into the ocean or deeper water or the deep end of a pool even, you notice that the pressure increases when you go deeper, especially if you dive down 10 or 20 feet the pressure on your ears, the pressure on your body. You can feel the difference. Jonah is experiencing the pressure on his body as this fish is diving down. On top of that in verse 5, it mentions seaweed being wrapped around his head, and he has this sense of claustrophobia because in verse 5 he mentions, “The deep closed around me,” so physically he is being afflicted, but the physical affliction was only part of the affliction that he was facing.

Some of the things that Jonah mentions also are more spiritual in nature. I want you to notice in verse 4 that he says, “I have been cast out of Your sight.” Let me tell you, if you know the Lord, you know the greatness of sensing God’s presence in your life. You know the joy and the peace that comes from experiencing the Lord in your life. But you also know the experience of feeling distance from God when you know the choices that you have been making have been the wrong choices; when you know that there’s sin in your life, and you’re not in a place to repent from it yet. You know that distance, and Jonah, no doubt, is feeling that as he feels cast out of God’s sight.

A few other things that he mentions here in this passage, “The waters surrounded me, even to my soul,” which is now a reference to the inner part of who he is, not just his physical part but his spiritual part. Then, in verse 7, he says, “When my soul fainted within me,” this was not just a physical affliction, this was a spiritual affliction that he was experiencing in his life at this particular time. Again, in verse 2, he makes mention of feeling like he was in hell. In verse 2 he says, “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried . . . .”

That word “Sheol” is a Hebrew word which is translated in a few different ways. It can be thought of as the abode of the dead or the grave. It could be thought of as the underworld, but it is also translated hell. In fact, if you have the King James Version Bible, that’s exactly what it says, “I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD . . . out of the belly of hell cried I . . . .” Literally, Jonah is just feeling like his experience is like being in hell.

I will tell you, and by the way, I don’t know if I mentioned this at the beginning of the message or not, the title of this message is, “The Miserable Believer,” because that is what we are looking at here in this passage is a man who knew God, so much so that he is a prophet of God, a spokesman for the Lord, yet he is in misery in the situation that he is in that God has allowed him to be in. I really believe that a believer that is running away from God is the most miserable person on the planet because when they’re in church they can’t enjoy church because there’s too much sin in them, and when they’re out there in the world, they can’t even enjoy that either because the Holy Spirit is in them. So, when they’re in church, they feel guilty, and when they’re in the world, they feel guilty. There’s no place that they can be that they feel good and at peace and in union in the relationship with God because of the guilt that they are harboring. There is no doubt that is exactly what Jonah was feeling at this particular time, and I think herein lies really the difference between a believer and a nonbeliever.

A nonbeliever can sin and not really think about it and can actually enjoy it quite a bit. A believer might have the capacity to indulge in sin for a bit and enjoy it for a short season, but that season will be short because of the guilt and the misery that comes from a person who knows Christ, living contrary to Christ. I would describe it this way. If you were to take a pig out of the mire that he was thoroughly enjoying, bring him in your house, put him in a bathtub, scrub him down, tie a pig bow around his neck, squirt a little perfume on him, as soon as he gets the opportunity, he’s going to run right back out to the pigpen. Why? Because the pigpen is his home. It’s where he feels the most comfortable.

You as a human being, you could jump into a mud pit and it is possible even to enjoy that for a little while, but not for long. You’re going to get to the point where you’re going to say, “Okay, I’m done. I need to get clean. I want this grime off of me.” Where the pig is at home in the mud, you’re not at home in the mud. He can get cleaned up, but he would rather be dirty. The believer might get dirty, but his heart is to be clean.

We’re talking not about a nonbeliever here, we’re talking about a man who knows God that is choosing to not obey God, and he’s now experiencing the misery of that life, much like David did when David committed his sins with Bathsheba and Uriah. You know, for a year he sat on those sins, unconfessed, unacknowledged, and as far as he knew it was in secret and really very few people knew about it at all. As far as he was concerned, he could leave it that way and just go on with his life. But that is really not the truth.

David actually wrote Psalm 32 after he had repented, but he is reflecting upon his experience of sinning and not confessing it. In verses 3 and 4, David said, “ . . . my bones grew old through my groaning all the day long. 4 For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me . . . .” David felt the heavy hand of God upon his life. During that time that he had unconfessed sin, he was making wrong choices. He was trying to hide those wrong choices rather than turn away from them, and the heavy hand of God was upon him creating a miserable king. Though he could go on with his routine day by day, there was something inside of him that was being eaten away because he refused to repent. It was not until he got right with the Lord, he confessed that sin, that he could experience again the joy of his salvation.

There might be somebody in here tonight that is in that place right now. You’ve found yourself here at church, and that’s a good thing, but maybe your heart has been hard because there is sin in your life and you know that it’s wrong, but you don’t want to let it go. I tell you, God will love you enough to place His heavy hand upon you so that your joy dries up. As long as you keep sinning and you don’t repent, you will be miserable. Jonah was miserable.

That brings us to round 4 where God’s Word comes into play. You know, we’ve read the chapter, and maybe some of you noticed this, maybe many of you did not, but much of what Jonah is saying between verses 2 and 9 are quotations from the Bible—either a direct quote or a paraphrase or a response to what Scripture has to say. I want to show you where that is. If you are a person who likes to write in the margins of your Bible, I would encourage you to write down these references as I go through these verses. Off to the side of verse 2 you can write Psalm 120:1 and Lamentations 3:55. Next to verse 3 you can write Psalm 88:6 and Psalm 42:7. Next to verse 4 you can write Psalm 31:22 and 1 Kings 8:37. Next to verse 5 you can write Psalm 69:1-2. Next to verse 6 you can write Psalm 40:2. Next to verse 7 you can write Psalm 18:6. Next to verse 8 you can write Psalm 31:6. And, next to verse 9 you can write Psalm 50:14.

We don’t have the time to look all of those up, I’m just asking you to write them down because you may want to take a look at them later. Every one of those verses that I just gave you, with its corresponding verse here in Jonah 2, is Jonah either quoting the exact verse or paraphrasing that verse or sharing his response to what that particular verse had to say, which means that Jonah really knew the Bible. If he knew the Bible that well, you would’ve thought that he would’ve thought of Psalm 139 first before he ever hopped on that boat because it says, “Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? 8 If I ascend into heaven, You are there; If I make my bed in hell, behold, You are there,”—If I hop on a boat and go to Tarshish, You’re going to be there. He should’ve known that. He knew the Bible well enough. I mean, think about it. Do you think he had a copy of the Scriptures there in the belly of that fish? No, these were Scriptures that he had made himself familiar with already. They were in his mind, and now all of the sudden these verses are coming back to his mind as he is in the belly of this fish. Jonah knew the Word of God.

The problem was Jonah wasn’t obeying it. There is a difference between knowing what the Bible has to say and doing what the Bible has to say. Scripture actually tells us that we are absolutely deceived if we are hearers of the Word but we are not doers of the Word. Sometimes we can think well of ourselves if we are familiar with a handful of verses out of the Bible or we know the Bible stories anytime they come up in a conversation we can contribute to that conversation because we know that story. But if we know it, but we are not living it, we actually are deceiving ourselves. Jesus even calls us a fool to know what the Bible says and then to not do it.

Interesting though that it is the Bible that is coming back to his mind while he is in that fish. Scripture is now flooding his mind as he is there in that fish with a hard heart. All of God’s Word is coming back to him which tells us that it is so important to plant the Word of God in our lives because the day will come when we are going to need to draw on those resources of what God’s Word has to say. The Bible tells us in Hebrews that the Word of God is living and active. You might not have particular verses committed to memory, but the truth of Scripture will be brought back to your mind by the Holy Spirit at opportune times, and it has the capacity because it is alive to melt a hard heart. It can penetrate a rebellious heart and definitely draw back a wandering heart, and that’s what it’s about to do right here. God’s Word is beginning to work in Jonah’s life to draw back his wandering heart.

That brings us to round 5 of this battle, Jonah finally repents. We see that in verses 2 and 7-9. We’ll talk about those in a second, but I want to highlight verse 8 first because he says, “Those who regard worthless idols forsake their own Mercy.” What does that mean? You know, an idol is really anything that you set up in your life that is exalted above God. For many people their chief idol is their own will—to do what they want to do rather than what God wants them to do. They will consider what God wants them to do as long as it doesn’t come into conflict with what they really want to do because if those two come in conflict, they will much more likely choose to do their own thing rather than to do God’s thing. That is establishing actually your will as an idol in your life, and this is what Jonah is saying. He’s saying, “Those who regard”—these types of—“worthless idols forsake their own Mercy.” In other words, you cannot experience the mercy of God when you are steadfastly choosing your own way. God would so be willing to pour out His love, grace, and mercy upon your life, but we need to set aside that idol and allow Jesus to reign as Lord.

Now, listen to Jonah because he’s making that statement to himself at this point realizing that he has placed his will above the will of God which has made his will an idol in his life. He’s going through a process of repenting, and we see it kind of sprinkled throughout his whole dialogue here. Notice what he says in verse 2. He says, “I cried out to the LORD because of my affliction . . . .” In verse 7 he said, “When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer went up to You . . . .” In verse 4 he said, “Yet I will look again toward Your holy temple.” In verse 9 he said, “I will sacrifice to You with the voice of thanksgiving; I will pay what I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.” In each of these statements sprinkled throughout his whole speech here, he is confessing to the Lord, bringing his life before the Lord, “I cried out to the LORD,” “I remembered the LORD,” “I will sacrifice to You . . . I will pay what I have vowed.” This is his way of saying, “Lord, I’m broken now. I’m willing to give up my way to do it Your way. I’m willing to surrender,” which brings us to the final round, which is God’s mercy.

Anytime an individual humbles himself before the Lord, confesses all that they have done that is wrong, turns their life back to Christ, they will be received, they will be forgiven; and God is about to throw down mercy upon His wayward prophet who now is repenting. Listen to what Jonah said that God did. In verse 2 he said, “And He answered me.” At the end of verse 2 he said, “And You heard my voice.” In vers 6 he said, “ . . . You have brought up my life from the pit . . . .” Lord, You heard me and You lifted me out of the pit that I created for myself. As soon as Jonah repented, God forgave. As soon as Jonah said, “God, I will do it Your way,” his submarine ride was over, and in verse 10 it says, “So the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.” Jonah repents, and God immediately delivers.

That’s what God will do for any one of us. I know most of us in here are believers. The Wednesday night crowd, you know the Lord, but that does not mean that we’re always walking in the ways of the Lord, and sometimes there can be an area of our life where we have just hardened our heart and resisted and we feel the heavy hand of God on us. We might feel like Jonah did, not just afflicted but spiritually afflicted. We feel the distance between us and our Savior because we have been unwilling to surrender, to give up, to turn back.

If you can relate to that at all, maybe tonight is the night you can make that happen. Maybe you’re going through a storm and you’re realizing that the storm that you’re facing is actually God trying to get your attention. Just remember how it played out with Jonah. Because he didn’t pay attention to the storm, it got worse—fish was added to the mix. It would’ve gotten worse for him had he not repented when he did. That isn’t because God is angry, it’s because God loves and He is gracious and He just wants to pour out that mercy upon your life, but He’s waiting for you to turn. If that is you tonight, don’t miss out on that opportunity. Make tonight the night that you choose.

There may be some in here that don’t have a relationship with Christ. Maybe you came here specifically because you know that you have not known God, but there are things going on in your life that have made you interested in finding out. How can I turn my life around? I tell you that showing up at church is more than just a band-aid for a wounded heart or a troubled life. Jesus wants to change your life forever. If you’ve never given your life to Christ, tonight can be the night that you can do that. I want you to understand that God so loves you that He gave His only begotten Son to die on a cross so that you could be forgiven.

It’s interesting that Jesus in Matthew 12 drew attention to this Jonah story when He was speaking about what was going to happen to Him. This is what Jesus said. He said, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man”—speaking of Himself—“be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.” Jonah was in the belly of that fish because of his own wicked heart. Jesus would be in the heart of the earth in the grave for those three days and three nights not because of any wrongdoing that He had done but because of all of the wrongdoing that you and I have done. We need His forgiveness, and the only forgiveness that is offered is by those who believe in what Jesus did for them on the cross.

So, believer, I hope the Lord is speaking to you tonight. If you have something to confess, that you would get that right with the Lord. Confess it. He will restore you. If you’re not a believer, tonight you can give your life to Christ, and as we close, I’ll give you an opportunity to do just that.