Sermon Tone Analysis

Internet Welcome

Introduction

John Ortberg, Jr. is an American evangelical Christian author, speaker, and the former senior pastor of the 4,000 member Menlo Church in Menlo Park, California.

By the way, Menlo Park was the home to some of Thomas Edison’s laboratories, and where he invented the phonograph.

Ortberg wrote a six-word summary of Jonah’s life –

1. “No!”

2. Storm.

3. Overboard.

4. Fish.

5. Regurgitated.

6. Yes!”

This past week I came upon a rather unusual depiction of God’s call and the prophet’s refusal.

You may not know this, but John Ortberg is a big Dr.

Seuss fan, and occasionally he likes to speak in Dr. Seuss verse.

For example:

Could you, would you go to preach?

Could you, would you go to reach

The people in Assyria?

For you fit my criteria.

I would not go there in a boat.

I would not go there in a float.

I would not go there in a gale.

I would not go there in a whale.

I do not like the people there.

If they all died, I would not care.

I will not go to that great town,

I’d rather choke.

I’d rather drown.

I will not go by land or sea.

So, stop this talk and let me be!

Pretty creative, don’t you think?

Over the past 3 weeks we’ve looked at Jonah’s refusal of the Lord’s call to go to Nineveh, his booking passage on a ship to Tarshish, and his attempt to run from the Lord.

We also noted God’s pursuing love that would not let the prophet go.

This morning we’ll continue our study, and today we’ll look at what happened in Jonah’s life when the Lord rescued him from the ocean and gave him some time to think and reflect on his life.

I.

A Divine Appointment.

The sailors tossed Jonah overboard, at the encouragement of the prophet, and the Bible tells us that the sea became completely calm.

And then it says the sailors worshipped the Lord and made vows to Him.

Despite Jonah’s reluctance, his evangelistic mission was blessed by God, and people came to know the Lord.

Then at the end of chapter 1 we read,

The text tells us that God “appointed” a great fish to swallow the prophet.

The verb that is used here for “appoint” appears several times in the book of Jonah.

For example, we see it when God appointed a great wind and caused a violent storm to rise up in chapter 1, or later on in chapter 4 when God appointed a plant to grow and then die.

In each case, God orchestrated a circumstance in order to teach Jonah something the prophet desperately needed to realize or to learn.

Look back over your life.

Can you see the fingerprints of God orchestrating the people and events in ways that impacted you?

Often times the most important lessons I’ve learned in my life have been the result of a divine appointment God had for me?

And often these appointments involved some adversity.

Is that true in your life, too?

On many occasions there are events that happen which are difficult or even excruciating at the time, but later on they yield more good than you could have ever imagined.

Many years ago Sheldon Vanauken wrote a book entitled A Severe Mercy.

It’s an autobiographical account that tells the love story of Sheldon’s relationship with his wife, their friendship with C.S. Lewis, his conversion to Christianity, and then the sad and tragic death of Sheldon’s wife who died of strange virus just a few months after diagnosis.

It’s a story of tragedy and triumph and faith.

C.S. Lewis became a good conversation partner for Vanauken because he, too, lost his wife prematurely, and both Lewis and Vanauken talked about this idea of God’s severe mercy.

In a letter C.S. Lewis wrote that he believed Vanauken’s struggles after his wife’s death had their root to some extent in the fact that he had made an idol of love, and it was killing his faith.

Lewis wrote, “You have been treated with a severe mercy.”

It was the death of Vanauken’s wife that eventually led him to a deeper and more vibrant faith, and later on Vanauken himself was able to write concerning his wife’s passing, “That death, so full of suffering for both of us, was yet a severe mercy.

A mercy as severe as death, and a severity as merciful as love.”

The great fish who swallowed Jonah is a perfect example of a severe mercy.

Obviously, God saved Jonah’s life by having the fish rescue him from the ocean, but he was still in the belly of a fish.

He was trapped in a watery prison, and he was far from help and far from hope.

Whenever we reject God and disobey Him, often it takes something radical to get our attention and cause us to change direction.

And without this interruption, without this severe mercy as Lewis called it, we aren’t open to change.

So, God sends a divine appointment our way which is sometimes painful, but in the end it proves to be just what we needed.

All of a sudden God has our attention, and we’re all ears.

Are you experiencing a severe mercy right now yourself?

Do you feel like you’re in the belly of a great fish, so to speak?

What is happening in in your life that is tearing your world apart, and how might God want to use it as a divine appointment to try and get your attention?

Are you listening, and are you open to making a change?

II.

A Prayer of Repentance.

In the case of Jonah the time in the belly of the great fish proved to be just what the prophet needed.

It gave him an opportunity to reflect on his life, his refusal of God, and how he was running away from the Lord.

And in the end the time of confinement led to a profound prayer of repentance.

The text tells us Jonah prayed,

Note that Jonah didn’t pray to God at all prior to his journey, or while he was running from the Lord, until he ended up in the belly of the fish.

But there, after the prophet had gone down, down, down, to place of desperation in a fish in the sea, Jonah voiced a prayer to God.

If you study it closely, the prayer Jonah prayed wasn’t a spontaneous original self-expression.

The words were completely derived from the book of Psalms.

Jonah had been to Hebrew school, and he learned how to pray by reading the Psalms.

Line by line Jonah’s prayer is filled with the vocabulary of the psalm writers in the OT.

We tend to think that prayer is more authentic and genuine when it’s spontaneous and from the heart, but what we learn from Scripture is that the deep people of faith in the Bible have always relied on the written prayers of others to guide them in learning how to pray.

That’s why we pray the Lord’s Prayer so often.

The words of faithful people who have gone before us can serve as a guide in teaching us how to pray.

The truth is Jonah turned to God because he had nowhere else to go.

That’s why he prayed.

In the first chapter Jonah makes plans, he has resources, and he’s going places.

But all that proves to be a disaster.

The storm hits, and Jonah’s life grinds to a halt.

Then in the second chapter of the story, there is no action, just prayer.

Jonah has nowhere to go and no one to turn to other than God.

And that’s when the good stuff starts to happen in his life.

If you feel like you’re coming the end of your rope, take courage, because that’s when God shows up and good things begin to happen a life of faith.

Jonah prayed, and the climax of the prayer comes when he talks about God’s chesdh.

In the English Stanard Version Jonah 2:8 reads:

Chesdh is an important biblical word which is often translated as “steadfast love”or “grace”, and it refers to the covenant love of God.

It takes the whole prayer for Jonah to get there, but when he does he is finally released back into the land of the living.

In his book Knowing God British theologian J.I. Packer observed that many people talk about God’s grace, but they usually do so in an abstract way without any personal experience of its life-changing power.

He says that there are several critical truths in the doctrine of God’s grace which if they are not acknowledged and experienced in one’s heart, genuine faith becomes impossible.

Jonah’s prayer shows him coming to grips with all three of these.