Running from God

Misheard Lyrics

Have you ever been found yourself singing the wrong lyrics to a song because you completely misheard the lyrics. To be honest, it doesn’t effect me too much - not because I don’t mishear the lyrics, but because I always forget the words and just make it up anyway.

Now when you see the words written down, it all makes sense, but often we don’t see the words.

Maybe you know the song by the Eurythmics - ‘Sweet Dreams’. Because apparently they think - ‘sweet dreams are made of cheese’.

Or Johhny Nash thinks he’ll see better after Lorraine has gone - you know the one… “I can see clearly now, Lorraine has gone”

But it can happen in church songs as well. We’ve just passed Easter, and in years gone by we might have sung the great Easter Hymn - “Up from the Grave He Arose”.

But you know, the poor child who wasn’t reading the song sheet wonders what in the world is rising from the gravy with powerful toes.

You know… “up from the gravy arose, a mighty power on his toes”

Or one of the greatest hymns ever written ‘Amazing Grace’. But what about the poor child who wasn’t quite listening who wondered what this song is about ‘a maze of grapes, so sweet and round’.

Not listening

But it’s not just song lyrics. The reality is that we so often hear what we want to hear.

Someone can be speaking to you, but the message you receive from them can vary quite a bit from what they said. You can put it down to a hearing problem, but I think quite often it’s actually a lack of paying attention or imposing your own thoughts on the conversation.

The same thing can happen when God speaks to us.

You know, a common complaint from Christians - and these sentiments have come from my mouth too - ‘why can’t God just speak to us more clearly?’

Now sometimes, it might be a case that God just wants you to be a little more patient and so he’s not making it clear what he wants from you, but I can’t help but think that sometimes when we complain that God isn’t speaking clearly, it’s actually because we don’t like what he’s saying.

How God speaks

Now I’m talking about God speaking, so it’s perhaps worth clarifying what I mean by God speaking. You see, God can speak to us in a variety of ways. On occasions, you might hear an audible voice of God. To be honest, this has never been my personal experience. I know people who have - I suspect some of you might be included in that - but it doesn’t happen for everyone.

Sometimes it can be that inner voice where God prompts you to say something to someone, or do something in particular.

But quite often, it’s just God lining up circumstances to make a path for you to clearly follow.

Now in all these things we have to apply discernment.

We have to supply discernment, otherwise we end up with the situation I described before where we hear what we want to hear. We have to avoid the situation where we spin everything in a way that suit us - much like the politician of any persuasion will try to do - particularly like now in an election campaign.

What is God saying

So what might God be saying to you?

Well, sometimes God might be asking for a big change. This is May Mission Month and he might be asking you to uproot yourself and strategically move yourself to where you can really make a difference for the gospel - maybe even a cross cultural change to where there is no or very limited gospel opportunities.

But it might be something smaller - like being involved in a certain ministry, or even starting a new ministry.

It might even be a more immediate action - like go and speak to a certain person because they need comfort.

Now, whether it’s… ‘move to Africa’… or… ‘speak to that hurting person’.... it can often be that God is speaking to us quite clearly, but we just don’t want to listen because we know it’s going to take us out of our comfort zone. We’re very happy doing what we’re doing, and we don’t want anything pushing us into something uncomfortable.

Jonah

Well, it’s here that I’m going to bring our friend Jonah into the picture.

Jonah is one of those really fun Bible stories. It’s one you’ll often find illustrated in Kids Bibles. But it’s actually a deeply challenging story that if we’re honest, I think we can all identify to some degree.

Context

But let’s pause a moment and get some of the background to what’s going on during the time of Jonah.

So we’re at a very interesting time in the history of Israel.

So a very quick history lesson - after King David and his son King Solomon, Israel divided into two - which I’ll just call, the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom.

Both kingdoms stumble along for a few centuries, at times drifting quite far from the One True God.

But something interesting begins to happen. After suffering some heavy defeats from neighbouring countries, things start to turn around and they regain most of their lost territories.

There might still be threats around, but Israel starts prospering.

If you look at 2 Kings 14:23, we’re introduced to a new King - Jeroboam II. Sure he’s described as doing evil, but we’re told he was the one who restored the boundaries of Israel.

But this is where it gets interesting, because if you look at 2 Kings 14:25, we read that this restoration was in accordance with the word of the Lord, spoken through… hes servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.

So there you have it. That is our introduction to Jonah. Spiritually, Israel might be bankrupt, but Jonah gets to give the good news - their land is being restored.

You might be interested to know that Amos was also a prophet during the same time and place, but his message was quite different - he told them that just because their land might be increasing, doesn’t mean their on a good thing - because judgement is coming!

Assyrians looming

You see, while there is this temporary period of things going well, there was actually a new superpower who was growing in strength… the Assyrians.

And the Assyrians did not have a good reputation for playing nicely in battle. They were unrelenting and they used horrific tactics.

The Israelites didn’t know this at the time of Jonah, but it wouldn’t be all that long afterwards that the Assyrians would come down and completely annihilate the Israelites, effectively putting a complete end to the Northern Kingdom.

Now they might have been unaware that the end was near, but they did know of these Assyrians.

Jonah’s Mission

Ok, well, it is with this background that we now come to our story.

Jonah 1:1 starts with a very clear message from God to Jonah.

Jonah is told to go to the great city of Ninevah and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before God.

Now, just in case you haven’t made the connection - Ninevah is none other than the capital of this superpower I was just talking about. This city represented all that wickedness that I’ve just been talking about.

To just put that in perspective, you might be getting somewhere close if you imagine God asking you to go to the Kremlin and tell Putin what God thinks about whats going on.

Well, I spoke before about how some things God asks us might put us out of our comfort zone. Well… I think that would be somewhat of an understatement for our friend Jonah.

Jonah runs

So what does Jonah do? Well, he does what we might often feel like doing - run!

Now, Ninevah is way up to the North-East. So Jonah decides to go South-West and finds himself at the seaport of Joppa.

You see, if you’re going to run away, you may as well do it in style - at least, that seems to be the thinking of Jonah.

So he boards a ship, pays the fare - and that’s that. God might want him preaching in Ninevah, but it’s a bit hard to preach in Ninevah if you’re on the other side of the world.

The problem is, Jonah is ignoring a fact that I think he evidently knows well, and that is that you actually can’t hide from God.

I remember Adam and Eve tried to hide from God after they sinned - well that didn’t go so well for them.

So God sends a storm of this ship - and I’m not talking some run-of-the-mill storm. I’m talking one that threatens to break the entire ship up.

So, you’d think this would get Jonah’s attention. But no. Jonah’s got his head under his pillow - it would seem perhaps quite literally. He’s gone below deck and some how or other managed to fall into a deep sleep.

Well, it might seem that Jonah really is the master of running away, but God hasn’t finished yet.

You see, God can work through anyone or anything. And so he works through the other passengers.

After being woken up by the captain, the sailors decide they’ll figure out who’s to blame by casting lots. And we find that God works through this process to finally get to Jonah.

Now it is important to remember that just because God chooses to work through the cultural practices of a particular people at a particular time, doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s suggesting this is a good practice. In other words, what I’m trying to say is that this isn’t suggesting that casting lots is necessarily a practice we should be adopting.

But on this occasion - God has used this process to put the focus back on Jonah. This poor man who is just trying to run away, can’t even do that despite the great lengths he has gone to.

Now when these sailors start questioning Jonah, we see Jonah betraying the fact that he knows the reason why running is futile. You see, he worships the Lord, Yahweh, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

You see, the vast majority of people at this time in history had a conception of many local gods who tended to have a local patch, so to speak. Not so the Jews. The God the Jews worshipped, was anything but a local deity. He created all. He’s over all. And he’s in all!

This is why you can’t run from him.

In the end, Jonah asks the sailors to throw him overboard.

What’s going through Jonah’s head at this point? Well, it’s hard to tell exactly, but I’m thinking probably that he sees it as a further means of escape. Maybe not suicide per se, but maybe something pretty close.

The sailors don’t want to - but eventually, after pleading with the Lord to spare them from their action, they do finally throw him over.

And it is at that point that the winds die down and they are saved.

To their credit, these pagan sailors acknowledge God and give him the rightful praise for what happened.

The big fish

Well, we keep see God turning things around - Jonah keeps trying to escape, but God’s not someone you can really escape from. And so this time, God turns him around in what I would have to suggest one of the most spectacular ways we ever see. This time its not a storm, it’s not more people, it’s a huge fish.

It’s the part of the story that stands out the most because it is just so unusual.

Now there’s a lot of conjecture over what sort of fish it is. In the kid stories its usually a whale. But others will point out that it never says whale. The reality however is that the actual text does not make it very clear. It was big, and it was in the water. That’s pretty much all we know.

Actually, people can spend a very long time trying to figure this out, and even trying to figure out how realistic it might be, but in the process of doing all of this research, actually misses the big point which this passage is screaming at us - God can use whatever means he wants - including the miraculous - to achieve his purposes.

Chapter 1 ends with Jonah in the big sea creature and over the next few weeks, we’ll continue looking at what happens next, but for now, I just want us to focus on what this first chapter can teach us about listening to that call that God will place on our lives.

Application

Now as I mentioned at the start, when God speaks to us, it’s not always going to be for some big monumental shift in your life - although at times it might be.

You can perhaps breathe easy knowing that God is not about to take you to some murderous regime and tell you to preach against them.

But even if you’re not being asked to preach at the Kremlin, you very well may find God prompting you to have that conversation with your family member who keeps turning away from God. Or to invite your next door neighbour along to church.

And you don’t want to - because in your mind all the possible scenarios race around, and of course, a good number of those scenarios in your head don’t have you coming out looking good.

Now depending on your personality type, this might happen to a greater or lesser degree, but it’s pretty clear that what often happens is those negative scenarios get blown way out of proportion.

Let me give an example. Say you feel God prompting you to talk to a friend about Jesus. When we think rationally about it, we know that the worst that will happen is that your friend will express a mild amount of discomfort and say they’re not interested, and the friendship continues.

But in our minds, that becomes a full on conflict that will potentially breakup the friendship. And so we just avoid the conversation.

So how does Jonah chapter 1 help us to think through this?

Well, it reminds us that God is God and that he’s ways are always best.

You have a choice. You can either work with God and follow his leading, or you can work against it. If you work against it, God will still see his purposes through, but it’s going to be a much rockier path. The much better path is to work with God.

If you ignore a prompt, or fail to follow God into a particular task, you might not have God turning you around in such drastic fashion, but your going to be missing out on walking with God and seeing him work in amazing ways.

We sometimes might ask - why don’t we see God do amazing things? But I wonder if the reason is actually because we’re not following God where he is leading.

Conclusion

God is calling you. He is calling you to step up and be prepared to move outside your comfort zone. Exactly where he is calling you - well, that’s a matter for you to discern for your own situation - it might be a dramatic change, or it might be just to speak to someone, but God wants you to partner with him in his work.

God wants you to be part of his kingdom work. The work to see God’s kingdom here on this earth as it is in heaven.

It’s an amazing privilege to be a part of it. It’s not that he is reliant on you, but rather that he chooses to partner with us.

And so we can work here on this Tilligerry Peninsula. We can work in the regions around us. And we can even work in far flung places of this world.

The question is, are you listening to what God is calling you to do? Are you taking the time to see what God has placed before you, and grabbing it? Or are you doing your best job at ignoring it?

God is calling. Are you listening?

Let me pray...