The God Who Saves in Spite of Us

My name is John Boss. I grew up in Prosper Church, and I've been a member here for 51 years. My wife and I are custodians here. My wife, Bonna and I, are custodians here. I volunteer with our food ministry every other Thursday. Our passage today is from Jonah 2: 1-10, and you will find it on page 920. Starting with verse 1, Then Jonah prayed to the Lord as 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 sea, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and all your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven from your sight. Yet I shall look again upon your holy temple. The waters closed over to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bar is closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God.

When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idol, forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I, with a 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 dry ground. This is the word of the Lord.

I want to tell you a story that you're probably familiar with. It's the story of Israel in the wilderness. The people of Israel had been enslaved for generations in Egypt. This was under brutal oppression from the Egyptians. Hard labor day in and day out. The people cried out to God for someone who would deliver them. And God heard their cry and brought them Moses, who would deliver them out of Egypt into the promised land. As they were making their escape, they became trapped by the Red Sea, and Pharaoh's army was descending descending in on them. Imagine yourself in this situation. Imagine the scene just for a minute. You and all your family, your neighbors, your friends, with all of your possessions, watching Pharaoh's army descend in on you with no hope of being able to defend yourself trapped against a sea that you could not cross on your own. But at that last minute, God split the sea and allowed them to cross so they wouldn't be slaughtered by Pharaoh's army. God had literally saved them from near certain death. As they were on their way, just a few months later, wandering in the desert, on the way to the promised land, they began to run out of food.

Rather than trusting God, knowing that just a couple of months earlier, he had saved them, performed a miracle in front of their eyes. They complained. They complained to Moses saying, Would that we have died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full? For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. God's people, literally just seeing a miracle before their eyes, now believe that God will not provide for them, will not take care of them. After being saved, they don't trust God. This is what we see in the Book of Jonah. Israel forgot God's salvation within weeks of the Red Sea. Jonah does the same within moments, and we do the same every single day. Like Israel, Jonah doesn't just forget God's deliverance. He resists God's heart. This is the question that hovers over this whole book. Do you pursue God's heart, or do we just want his help? That leads us to our big question for today. How quickly do we forget when someone comes through for us, or how quickly do we forget God's faithfulness?

How quickly do we forget God's faithfulness. If you're a parent, you know this. You see this probably every day, how quickly people forget when you came through for them. Your kids don't remember the time that you got them a present or how you pay their cell phone bill or the time that you helped them in a time of need. I mean, as a kid, I know for certain I didn't think about those things. All I thought about when I was a kid was the thing that my parents were actively doing wrong or the thing that frustrated me or annoyed me. This is true about all of us, whether we're a kid or not. We forget. There are studies that back this up. It's called the recency bias. When When you're in crisis, your brain's priority is not to recall past blessings, but to solve the immediate threat. Unless gratitude and faith are continually rehearsed, they will be cognitively displaced. What this means is that unless we actively remember, unless we actively make it part of our life to be thankful, when we get into crisis, we forget the faithfulness of God. We forget his pattern of faithfulness.

This isn't a scientific excuse, but it's a study that shows us our hearts' sinful nature. We are naturally not a grateful people We often forget that God has saved us in order to grumble about bills, about hard times in life, or that it's going to snow later today. I want to ask this question of us. Can we look back at a time in our life and see a moment where God was not faithful to us? For some of us, it's easy when trials come, blinders come on, and we can't see what God has done. These trials in life hit us from all sides, and sometimes they're not even big ones. Sometimes it's the Walmart substitution forgot the wrong thing for our grocery pickup, and we're halfway to atheism. It can be the smallest things. But God provides. But when the next bill comes, we panic. He can answer a prayer one week, and the next week, we're acting like he's never answered a single prayer in our life. This is why we study this book. This is why we look at the Book of Jonah, because in this chapter, we'll see that Jonah recognizes that God saved him and then forget two chapters later.

So let's look at our outline for this morning. We'll see three major movements or sections in this passage. Judgment descends, mercy intervenes, and salvation triumphs. Last week, to give context for this passage, we saw Jonah deliberately flee or run away from God's presence. A huge storm comes that threatens the life of everyone on board, and he's cast overboard. And then God appoints a fish to save him. The point of last week's passage and the message last week was to fear God and run to him. And this week in Jonah 2, God hears Jonah's prayer of distress and graciously delivers him. So let's look at this first passage or this first section, Judgment Descends. Jonah realizes he's not dead, and he knows that this can only be from God. Yet, Jonah is in anguish. And maybe we don't see this right away in this passage. Because this passage is different from Jonah 1, and Jonah 3, and 4. It looks different. If you look at this printed in your Bible, it looks different. It takes a different format. It's no longer telling a story. This isn't historical narrative. We talked about genres the first week. This isn't a historical narrative anymore.

It switches to poetry. The nature of poetry is hyperbolic or it uses imaginative language. Poetry doesn't just tell us what happens. It's not telling us a story. It shows us how the author felt. Jonah isn't giving us a report anymore. He's giving us his heart. Jonah could have written in here, I'm struggling with God. I am thankful that he saved me, but I was in the belly of the fish, and I prayed to God, and it was a weird time for me. This prayer, this poem shows us Jonah's heart. This is why he says in verse 2, he says, Out of the belly of Sheol, I cried, and you heard my voice. This is imaginative language. Jonah is not telling us that he is in Sheol or that he's in Hell. What he's saying is that he feels in utter anguish. Jonah will use a lot of emotion in this prayer. Jonah's emotion isn't random, though. It's revealing. The very God who Jonah is crying out to is the same God he knows has put him in this place. This poetry moves from feeling abandoned to realizing that he's being confronted. And that's why Jonah says, For you cast me into the deep.

Jonah is clear he knows who has put him here. This prayer resembles a lot of prayers in the a lot of distress prayers in the Psalms. A really good example of that is Psalm 18. I've put Jonas 2 in Psalm 18 next to each other here. If you can't read it, that's okay. I want you to see that there are a lot of the same themes This is the same language being used in both of these. These two prayers look nearly synonymous. The words, Jonah's words, echo in this Psalm. The cords of death encompass me. The torrent of destruction assail me. In my distress, I called upon the Lord, and he heard my voice. This is the same language, the same imagery of drowning, sinking, and crying out. Like Jonah, David cries out from the brink of death. And like David, he finds God. He finds that God hears him even from the depths. Here's another parallel between the two. What's strange about this prayer, about both of these prayers, is that they are both laments and prayers of thanksgiving. A lament is a prayer where You bring your discomfort, you bring your grief to God.

You're honest about how you feel. It's a way to cry out to God. The Bible gives us language. Not every prayer has to be, God, thank you for everything that's good, or God, everything is good in my life, or the feeling that we have to be happy and smiling all the time as Christians. The Bible says that we can go through hard things and that we can run to God in those moments. This is a prayer of both lament and thanksgiving. Jonah is thanking God while still being in the belly of the fish. Imagine how disorienting this would be. Jonah is in one minute, he in the water, mentally preparing to die. And the next, he's in the belly of the fish, realizing that he can somehow still breathe. And these seconds of becoming aware that he's not dead yet. Turn into minutes, turn into hours, turning into days where he's feeling smothered, uncomfortable. Yet understanding that he's alive and thanking God, and at the same time frustrated in the midst of this suffering. Jonah is saved, but he's not free. That's how grace often feels. We're delivered, and yet we're still figuring out what deliverance means.

Jonah is wrestling with God. This is a unique prayer. The tone of it is half genuine and half blame shifting. Jonah is saying, God, I cried out to you, and you answered, But you did this to me. Jonah cries out to God, not because he wants to be near to him, but because he wants out of trouble. He's chasing relief, not relationship. It's the same question for us. Are we pursuing God, or do we just want his help? This is the tension that we see in this prayer. Jonah's judgment was deserved, but mercy was already in motion. And that's what we see in this next section as mercy intervenes. Verses 4 through 8. Jonah feels like he's being driven away or banished. And that's what we see in verse 4. He knows what he did was wrong and feels like he's far from God. I think it's easy for us to feel the same way, too. We talk about sin as something that separates us from God. Sin would separate us from God. But the cross, but Jesus Christ, because of the cross, even in our sin, we can be drawn near to God. Oftentimes, I think we approach our sin as a pharisey would.

We say, God, I've sinned, and now I'm far away from you. You're disappointed with me. You're mad at me. And so I'm far away from you. But if we're Christians, if we're people who know the gospel, we know that while sin should separate us from God, it actually brings us closer. You can say to God, God, I know that what I did was wrong, and I should be cast out from your presence. I should be banished. I should be the one driven away from your sight. Yet I know your son took my place, and that's the only way I can have a relationship with you. It seems that Jonah feels far from God, and yet we see him come around halfway through verse 6. Look at verse 6 with me. Jonah says, Yet you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God. We see this glimmer of hope for Jonah that he recognizes, he understands that God's the one in control, that God's the one who saves him. But then he goes back the next verse to try to take credit for what is happening. He says, When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you in your holy temple.

Yes, God, you saved me, but I was the one who did the right thing. I was the one who prayed, and I was the one who followed through. I was the one who remembered you. This is a common way that I think we approach prayer as Christians. We say things like, God, I've been avoiding that sin, that sin that's really been tempting me or that's been a problem in my life. And I've been so good about that. God, why are you making my life this way? Or God, I'm struggling with these feelings things, this mental load. God, why are you giving this to me? I can't see any sin in my life, or I don't understand why you're doing this to me. God, I've been good. This is a common way we try to interact with God. In fact, this is a prevalent way that some churches tell people to interact with God. The Health, Wealth, Prosperity gospel says that this is one way that we should talk to God. Joel Olstein, which I would never quote, except to tell you this is a a bad guy and you got to stay away from him.

I'm using him as a bad example. Don't go get any of his books. He says this in one of his books, When you're in difficult times, don't just pray, God, please help me, but remind him, God, I've been faithful. I've honored you. I've been giving, serving, helping others, and being a blessing. So God, I'm asking for your favor, your healing, your increase. Church, this is a fundamentally broken way to understand God. If this were true, it means that we, as people, could manipulate God, that we somehow would be able to control God. God would no longer be Almighty. He would have to be subservient to my good works, to the things that I've done, to the giving, serving, helping others, and being a blessing. We cannot use our good deeds to twist God's arm into doing what we want. How in the world do we think that we're powerful enough to twist the arm of the Almighty God? We cannot use our religiousness or our good works. We miss the point when our confidence comes from our religiosity and not from God himself. See, God isn't impressed with our good works. Christianity isn't some secret formula where if you do enough good works, God's happy, but if you're disobedient, then God's not happy.

That's not what Christianity is. The heart of who we are is who God's after. The question that we see over and over, do we pursue God? Do we want him? Do we delight in him? And when we do, that leads to good works. That leads to us being obedient, trying to be good and trying to have good works out of self-righteousness is actually an act of rebellion. And that's what we see as Jonah continues in verse 8. Jonah continues in saying true things out of a place of self-righteousness in verse 8. He says, Those who pay regard to vain idol, forsake their hope of steadfast love. While this is true, people who don't worship the true God, who worship idles, won't have steadfast love. Jonah is using as a way to say, God, I'm good. I'm the one who remembered you. Remember those people out there? They're the ones who don't understand it. God, he probably could be talking about the mariners or the Ninevites who he was called to go and minister to. Jonah is still wrestling with God. He's saying, God, I remembered you. I prayed to you. But they don't understand you.

And this is the danger of having and seeing the world through an us versus them mentality. Whenever we have an us versus them mentality, what we're doing is, well, number one, we never put ourselves in the group of people who aren't good. We always put ourselves in the people who are doing good things, who are good, the good guys, right? When we put ourselves in that category, we're the us. We will demonize other people. Rather than seeing people as one collective, one group of people who are equally sinful before God, which is something that we're studying tonight, just a subtle nod to the evening service if you want to come. This is something that we have to break. We can't see the world through an us versus them mentality. This is what Jonas does, and that's why he gets this wrong. He thinks he knows who the us should be, who the good people are, who God should save, and who God should punish. Jonas' words sound right, but his heart is still wrong. God saves him, but Jonah doesn't share his heart. Salvation belongs to the Lord, but sanctification means learning to love who God loves.

And that's what we see in this next section as we see salvation triumphs in verses 9 through 10. In a contrast to those pagan people, Jonah is thankful that God saved him, and he promises to sacrifice to him. But I think it's important to see the location where Jonah is when he's saying these things. He's in the belly of the fish. Let me ask you this question. If someone were to confess to you something that they had done wrong, what means more when they come to you unprompted. Maybe you don't even know that they had done something wrong and they come to you on their own because they feel guilt and they want to rectify the relationship. They want to restore the relationship or when they've been caught, when they have to say sorry. What means more? Obviously, when people come of their own accord. It's easy to say sorry when you've been caught. It's easy to say, I'll do the right thing when you have no other way out. When we look at the whole context of the book, we see that while this is a beautiful prayer, Jonah didn't really mean it. We know this from Jonah 4.

Jonah assaults God with his own words saying, I knew you were going to forgive these people, and I hate you for it. Maybe, maybe, Jonah really meant this prayer, and maybe he didn't. But either way, I'm reminded of this quote from George Whitfield, I must repent of my repentance. How many times, how many times have we in our lives confessed a sin to God, only to run right back to it? How many times have we told God God, this is the last time I do that. Why is it that sin still has a hold on us as Christians, as those who believe in the gospel, who know that we've been saved? Paul talks about this very idea in Romans 7. He says, For I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. Paul's talking about this, this idea of understanding I know what's right, and yet I find myself in sin. The only reason, the only reason as Christians, that sin still has a hold on our life is because we love it. The only reason that sin still has a hold on our life as sanctified, as redeemed people, is because we love it.

But the good news for us as people, as Christians, is that the way to defeat a love is with a greater love. And that's why Paul goes on to say, But thanks be to God that you who once were a slave to sin, you who once loved your own sin, have become obedient from the heart to the standard of the teaching which you were committed. And having been set free from sin, you've become a slave to righteousness, slaves to God, loving what God loves, pursuing his heart, But we don't often do this. We don't often see this. We're often like the Israelis who sit, wandering in the wilderness, going, Why don't we just go back to Egypt, be back in slavery? At least we had meat pots there. As Christians, we can go through trials. We can go through hard seasons of our life and feel like maybe God's way isn't the right way for us. Maybe what God has for us isn't good for us. And maybe running back to sin is okay. But this chapter tells us something different. This chapter tells us, and this is our main idea, that salvation belongs to the Lord even when we don't fully mean it.

Salvation belongs to the Lord even when we don't fully mean it. It's clear that if Jonah was sincere about this prayer, he quickly forgot what he was saying. Like Israel, after crossing the Red Sea, Jonah forgets the salvation he just witnessed. Yet salvation is not in our hands. It's inherently not our own. It's God's. We don't have the ability to hang on to it. Our salvation isn't in the strength of our faith, but in the strength of the object of our faith. We aren't saved because we have a strong faith in God. We are saved because we have faith in Jesus Christ, the Almighty. He who was created, who are he who created us without our help, will save us without our consent. This doesn't erase response, but it reminds us that God's saving grace is always the first mover. A. W. Tozer says this, Salvation is from our side a choice. From the divine side, it is a seizing upon and apprehending a conquest by the most high God. Our accepting and willing are just reactions rather than the action. The right of determination must always remain with God. What this means is that God is the one who acts first.

Our responding to or our choosing to be Christian or choosing to follow God is always a reaction to him, opening our heart to love him. Which one of us, after receiving salvation, then is done sinning, sins no more. Even at our best moments, even at our most pure moments of worship, of repentance, our sin still taint who we are. J. A. Parker has this great quote, There's a tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me. This is the good news of the gospel. Jesus didn't just save us knowing the sins that we did before we were a Christian. He knew every single sin we would commit, all the sins we would commit, even after accepting him. God knew everything that you had already done and all the things you would do after being saved and still went to the cross for you. Jesus died knowing that even after you placed your faith in him, there would be tons of moments where you would act like you have no faith at all. Salvation salvation belongs to the Lord even when we don't fully mean it.

So how then should we live? This leads us into our application. Our first point of application is this. Pray even when our hearts aren't in the right place. One of the most clear things we see in this passage, and that we can learn from this passage, is that we can pray to God in any season. Jonah pray to God with some selfish motives, absolutely. But the main thing is he runs to God. He prays to God. There's a tension here pastorially that I want to tease out just for a minute. I want you to run to God. I want to say that God is big enough to handle you when you're wrong and when you're confused. We still run to him. The other side of this is that we have a Holy God who we worship and that we shouldn't intentionally to have a sinful heart in prayer. It's okay to come to God humbly and say, God, I don't understand this, or God, I want to trust you, but I don't feel like I can, or to say, God, how long will you not respond to my prayer? It's great to pray those things, but it's not okay to assault God with our words, to sinfully and pridefully attack God.

This is part of what it means to fear God and to run to him. This was our main idea from last week. Our prayers of confusion need to be in humility, praying God, Change my heart. I need you to change my heart not to pray to God in hoping to change his. That leads us into our last point of application, which is this: be intentionally grateful. It's easy to forget what God has done for us. It's easy to be focused on the on health issues, on tests, on broken relationships. Our natural state isn't being thankful to God. It's to be grumblers. And so my challenge to you this week is to make every part, every prayer this week that you pray to God, start it with thankfulness. We are so good as a people by requesting things from God. Prayers of supplication, that's our best prayer. We are great at it. Most of the time when we pray, it's, God, I need this. God, this is happening. Please give me this. I'm struggling with this. Help us figure this out. Before we start asking God to give us things, quiet our heart. Start off by thanking God for something that is going well in your life.

Even when life is going horrible, we can still thank God The thing about lamenting, the thing about praying to God, prayers that bring grief, confusion, or distress to him. Biblically, what we see in Psalms is that all of them end with thanksgiving. All of them end while still expressing faith in who he is, in his character, and in his promises. As we come to a close, by what power are we able to still be united to Christ, even as Christians who wander away from him, who choose to do our own things? How are we not abandoned by him? It's by the power of the cross. We are held to God because on the cross, Jesus was expelled from God. He got God's wrath, the thing that we deserved, God's punishment against those who turn away and disobey. That's all of us. That's the story of Jonah. We're the Jonah in this story. We're the disobedient ones. But the good news is that there was another man who went under the waves, not for his sin, but for ours. Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days because he was disobedient. Jesus was in the belly of the earth for three days because he was obedient for us.

Jonah was cast into the deep because God was drawing him back to himself. Jesus was cast into death because God was drawing you back to him. This is why we can sing in our next song, we can sing, Sin and despair like the sea waves cold, threaten the soul with infinite loss. Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold, points to the refuge, the mighty cross. So if you've run, if you've prayed half-hearted prayers, if your repentance feels weak, remember. Remember, prosper. Salvation belongs to the Lord, even when we don't fully mean it. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that we can run to you with our prayer, that you are big enough, you are great enough to take our prayers that are half-hearted, that are confused. God, thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for loving us, even when we When we are so confused that we don't seem to love you back. God, I pray that each and every one of us would be able to respond in worship, that this week we'd be able to respond knowing you and loving you Loving your heart. Help us not to be like Jonah. Help us to love you, the God we see.

God, we love you. We love to do your will. So help us do that. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Just stand with me as we sing our next song.