Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Claim (of the passage) - God brings Jonah near to death so that he, through prayer, gratefully remembers the salvation (grace) of the Lord
Focus (of the sermon) - Despair is God’s mechanism for bringing us back to him in prayer and gratefulness for his salvation.
Function (for the congregation) - to engender an attitude of enormous thanks, through prayer, to God for his grace in salvation.
Chapter 1 - Irony, mockery etc.
Chapter 2 - serious theological teaching.
PRAY
The emotion of ‘despair’ is not generally considered to be a good thing!
But, All sorts of things can lead us there.
A newborn baby who wont let you sleep or rest.
A highly pressurised job.
Loneliness.
Struggling with school work.
Relationship breakdown.
Or, as in Jonah’s case,
physical life ending danger.
If you were with Jonah on the boat last week,
Then you’ll know he was on the run from God.
He found God’s request to go to the city of Nineveh and offer them grace, unacceptable.
But he can’t escape the unescapble God,
and he’s caught in a massive strom at sea as he runs.
The sailors are terrified
that someone would believe in the God of all things,
would think he could run away from God at sea!
Now they are caught in the crossfire.
And so,
the sailors, saying prayers and making sacrifices and vowes to the Lord they have now discovered,
well they cast Jonah overboard,
trusting it is Jonah God wants in judgment, not them.
They are right of course, and as Jonah gets sucked under, the storm ceases.
The sailors are the first people to benefit from the unacceptable grace of God in Jonah.
But before the storm ceases,
The waves crash around Jonah,
he is dragged down deep under the water by the swirling currents v3.
The seaweed is tangling around his head v5
And, as far as Jonah is concerned, he’s pulled as deep as the roots of the mountains v6.
The panic and distress must have been unbearable.
‘Despair’ is probably not strong enough a word to use.
But it communicates the sense of helplessness in a situation.
As hard as he tried to swim, he could do nothing to get back to the surface.
He is finished.
Distressed, desperate, and terrified.
Much like the emotions of the sailors in chapter 1.
Who were also in despair.
terrified, with seemingly no way out.
But what I find interesting about Jonah’s prayer in this chapter, giving thanks for deliverance from his watery grave,
is how he understands the situation he found himself in.
Of course Jonah is all too aware of his rebelion against God.
His running away, his sin.
v4
I said, ‘I have been banished
4 I said, ‘I have been banished
from your sight;
from your sight;
The Holy Bible: New International Version—Anglicised.
(1984).
(electronic edition., ).
London: Hodder & Stoughton.
(to call it banishment is to acknowledge his guilt in the matter that deserves banishment)
v 7
7 “When my life was ebbing away,
I remembered you, LORD,
(To remember implies his acceptance that he had forgotten, or at least deliberately ignored the Lord)
and v9
What I have vowed I will make good.
(The implication being that he realises he has not made good on his vows previously!)
From that perspective Jonah, rightly,
would see the terror of drowning in the depths of the sea as his own doing.
But that is not what is interesting -
becasue that is how we think when our life or emotions are falling apart
and we can see it’s a direct result of our rebelion or disobedience to God’s ways.
And we’d be right, but it’s not the whole picture...
I want to suggest that (unlike last week)
we can actually learn something very important from Jonah in this chapter.
He does not see his despair as a situation only brought about by his sinful actions...
He sees his circumstances that have caused his despair as a direct action of God himself.
Let me say that more simply.
Jonah believes God is responsible for throwing him in the sea to drown.
jon 2
God has orchestrated the terrible and terrifying situations Jonah finds himself in!
But for Jonah,
Of course Jonah deserves it, but God has implemented it.
And Jonah is not alone in his thinking,
Infact his prayer in this chapter picks up all sorts of OT passages.
For all Jonah’s faults, he knows how to pray from Scripture.
How does compare...
-
And now notice the YOU...
psa 88 8
Perhaps in our materialistic,
I have rights,
rights to happiness and health.
It’s not fair culture, that I have drawn the short straw (to make a pun out of last weeks chapter)
I don’t deserve my life to be in despair.
Perhaps, in our culture today, we are more blind to the irony of Jonah’s situation than we realise.
As he realises that despair comes from the Lord,
he thanks God that as a result of it the Lord is able to save!
The Grace of God.
you see, has a tendency to always start with despair.
It is when we are at or lowest,
When we cannot do anything to help ourselves,
When we are mentally, or physically, or spiritually in the lowest pit.
It is then we are left with no other choice but to turn to the unacceptable, undeserved grace of God.
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