Gospel in Life

Tim Keller: Welcome to Gospel and Life. Where do you turn for reassurance in a crisis? When life feels out of control, we can quickly discover that the things we turn to for our deepest security don't actually have the power to help us. Today, Tim Keller looks at the story of Jonah to explore how life storms reveal what we're really trusting in and how our fears are calmed when we look to Jesus who faced the ultimate storm on our behalf.

Tim Keller: The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up.

All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him and said, how can you sleep? Get up and call on your God. Maybe he will take notice of us and we will not perish. Then the sailors said to each other, come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.

They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you? He answered, I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land. This terrified them, and they asked, what have you done? They knew he was running away from the Lord, because he had already told them so.

Tim Keller: The book of Jonah, which we're going to look at for a number of weeks, is a small but extremely famous. So I can refer to what happens further on down because you know how it ends. But not exactly. You know, you know about the whale, the fish, I mean, but not about there's a whole lot of surprises in the book. But one of the reasons we're looking at it is because it's really one of the best possible places to get an overview of what the Christian message is about.

For example, here in the very beginning, we're given a tremendous introduction to a subject that you just cannot avoid if you want to make any kind of progress in any kind of spiritual journey. You just can't avoid it as much as we'd like to. This passage is about this text, the book, it's about sin.

Now, we really don't like contemporary people really don't like to talk about sin. We don't like to use the word and there's good reasons. And those good reasons are because words like like sinner and heathen and heretic, words like that have been used for centuries to exclude people, to oppress people because they dehumanize and depersonalize groups.

And so a lot of folks just say, let's just stay away from the word and the concept and it's outmoded, but no, you can't. You can't avoid it. Ernest Becker wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, still very, very prominent book. It's called the Denial of Death. And Ernest Becker was a therapist. He was a brilliant man and he was a secular man. He was a self-professed atheist, which which actually makes the statement even more interesting.

Because Ernest Becker was a therapist, and he was a thinker, and he was a scholar. And he looked at the modern society and he said, what is the what is the quintessential problem that modern people seem to have? And this is what he said. He said, the plight of the modern person is this, quote, a modern person is someone who feels like a sinner, but has no word for it.

Feels like a sinner without a word for it. Now, when he says that, what he's really saying is that you can divide people into three possible categories. First of all, you got people who feel like sinners and they've got a word for it. They've got a concept of it, so they can deal with it. I mean, there's lots of forms of it, but for years, centuries, people felt like sinners and they had a concept for it. There was there were sacrifices, there were rituals, there was repentance, there were processes of cleansing and atonement and so on depending on your culture, your religion, and so on.

So you could feel like a sinner and have a word for it. So you could do something about it. Or you could not feel like a sinner at all and therefore have no need of the word or the concept. And Becker is saying in spite of how many contemporary people insist that that's true of them. He says, I've never met a person like that. He says, I've never met people like that.

He says, really, where modern people are is they have a feeling of something wrong. They have a feeling that there's something wrong with me, a feeling of shame or guilt or inadequacy. They have a feeling that they're a sinner, but they have no concept, they have no word for it. You see, that's outmoded. And therefore they have no way of doing anything with it.

And if that's true, and I think it is, even if you doubt it right now, hopefully you'll see some more evidence of that. Then we need this book. We need this book for a couple of reasons. And one of them is because it doesn't ever use the word sin, but not only does it profoundly map out the real nature of sin and it goes deeper than it gives you an understanding of sin that goes deeper than what traditionally you'd think the definition of sin is.

But it also deconstructs the very danger that we're that contemporary people are so afraid of. It shows you not only a concept of sin, but it gives you a concept of sin that you can't use to oppress people once you've grabbed it. You can't use it that way. And if somebody here says, well, you know, I guess I can skip the next four or five weeks because I already believe in sin. I believe in sin.

Well, so did Jonah. But it's one thing to believe in it, it's another thing to understand it. And Jonah clearly there was a magnitude of sin and there was a kind of sin in his heart that in spite of the fact that he was a prophet, he was a preacher, he was a moral, religious leader, it flew under his radar. He didn't see it there until it erupted and his his whole life blew up.

And actually, I think that's one of the reasons why the book of Jonah is written. Because there's an awful lot of us like that. We believe in sin, we understand sin. A lot of us actually know quite a bit about Christianity and the faith and we consider ourselves a, you know, kind of active Christian people and so on. But it's one thing to believe in sin, it's another thing to understand it and understand your own heart.

Jonah's sin was such that it flew under his radar till it blew up. Maybe we can avoid that. So we all need this book. So, number one, what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at four features in the narrative, at least the part that we've read taken out tonight. Four features of the narrative and each one is going to tell us something about sin.

And the four features we see is in verse one, we see the coming word, see? The word of the Lord came. The coming word, verse three, we see the running man. Verse five, we see the deathly sleep. And then lastly, we see the stormy hope. The coming word, the running man, the deathly sleep, the stormy hope. Each one tells us about sin. Number one.

Verse one, the coming word, the word of the Lord came. Now, when it says in the Bible, and it says this quite often, in Daniel, pardon me, in, not Daniel actually, but in, I think it does, but anyway, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Joel, Hosea, whenever you see the term, the word of the Lord came, that is a technical Hebrew phrase to describe the calling and or functioning of a prophet.

And what it means is that the prophets were called by God to preach and speak and communicate his will. And so when Jonah, you see, it says in verse one, when it says, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, verse one. And verse three, but Jonah ran. This is not simply an isolated incident of disobedience. This is a resignation.

It doesn't just say, the Lord asked Jonah to do this and he didn't. That's just a simple, you know, isolated incident or it's it's a particular incident of disobedience. What's happening here is Jonah's life had been, his whole purpose in life was to be a prophet, his calling. See, he was called, his vocation. He was called to be a prophet.

And so everything in his life was oriented toward what God had called him to be. And so he's not just simply disobeying God, he is now saying, I am going to go off and run my life my way. I am no longer going to get my identity, my purpose in life, you see. I'm not going to get my identity anymore from what you say. I'm going to go do what I want to do. I'm going to live my life as I want to live.

And what what he's actually doing then, is he's really saying, I'm no longer going to live my life on the basis of the vocation of God. Now, this isn't just something for prophets. In the book of Genesis, if you notice that everything was everything that was created was created with a word. God didn't snap his fingers and there was light and there was sun and there was moon. He spoke, see, the word of the Lord.

Let God said, be light. Be stars. He calls things into existence with his word. And what does that mean? It means nothing just exists to exist. Everything exists for a purpose. He has called things to be what they are to be. He has a design for everything and you find out what yourself is. You find out who you really are. You find out your true identity only at the feet of God.

The deepest secret of your identity is in the word of God. And Jonah has said, I'm going the other way. I'm going to build an identity without the word of God. I'm going to make myself who I want to be. I'm going to live my life as I want. I'm going to create my own identity. I'm going to decide who and what I want to be about.

I will forge my own identity without God. That's what's going on, not just simply disobedience. And that, the Bible is telling us here, is the very essence of sin. The essence of sin is not just simply breaking the rules, it's to try to build an identity without God. And when you do that, as we can see, nothing but disaster follows. It can't be done.

Now, before I move on, that's the first principle. Let me illustrate this principle with two very famous existentialist figures, Soren Kierkegaard and Bridget Jones. Now, let me explain. I don't think they knew each other, but I can almost guarantee you that Bridget Jones had Soren Kierkegaard on her shelf. But Soren Kierkegaard, some years ago, 1849, to be exact, wrote a book called The Sickness Unto Death.

In fact, the full title is, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. And in the book, he gives a definition of sin. Actually, by the way, as we'll see in a minute, the sickness unto death is the sin, but he says, he gives a definition of sin. And he says, I'm not going to try to describe or catalog all the individual sins, but I want to give a definition that will embrace all forms like a net.

And here it is. Sin is to despair of getting yourself before God and then the despair of seeking to be oneself without God. Do you hear that? What he's saying is, sin is despair, to do exactly what Jonah is doing. Despair of trying to get a self or an identity before God, and then sin is the despair that comes from trying to be yourself without God.

He says, it can't be done. And he says, any person who tries to manufacture his or her own identity without God, quote, gets an identity which is like a king without a country, or a country who has subjects for whom rebellion is legitimate every moment. Now, you didn't really expect to understand Kierkegaard the first time you I read it, did you? No, nobody does. Let me explain. But let me explain Kierkegaard in terms of Bridget Jones.

This summer, I it was in the Barnes & Noble and I bought Bridget Jones's Diary. And my wife, Cathy, looked at me, "Why are you buying Bridget Jones's Diary?" And I said, "Well, because, you know, when it came out four or five years ago, the New York Times kept saying that this was the quintessential postmodern, post-feminist, post-ideological novel."

And you know, when the New York Times uses big words to describe a book, you have to buy it. I had to buy it. And the point of the reviewers was this, all those long words, and here's what their point was. Their point was that the sentiment that I quoted in Becker in the very beginning of the sermon, is passé. See, Becker said, modern people are filled with angst.

They they feel like sinners without a word for it. They feel inadequate. They feel shame. They feel guilt. And they don't know what to do with it. And what the reviewers were saying is, in a in in in a book like Bridget Jones's Diary, there you see that that's just passé. That idea is passé. Yes, Bridget Jones's mother and her grandmother probably did a lot of things that Bridget Jones does without even thinking about, but they felt guilty about it.

Yes, of course, don't forget this is Britain, so it's a little different. But in other words, Bridget Jones runs around doing things that her mother and her grandmother would have her great-grandmother would not have done, and her mother and her grandmother probably did but nobody knew about it. Her mother did openly but felt guilty about it, and now Bridget Jones does and doesn't give a rip. Doesn't even think about it.

And so when you read it, it does seem to, yeah, that's right. Postmodern people don't seem to have this sense of being a sinner. No, look deeper. Look deeper. In fact, she's doing exact she's she is proving what this chapter and Kierkegaard are saying. This is from her New Year's resolutions. I chose these from her New Year's resolutions.

Three of them. Number one, New Year's resolution number one, buy books by unreadable literary authors to put impressively on shelves. You know, so your guests will say, oh, Sickness Unto Death. Interesting. Number resolution number two. Develop inner poise and authority and a sense of self as a woman complete without boyfriend.

Since this is the very best way to obtain boyfriend. And resolution number three, be assured, receptive, responsive woman of substance, knowing my sense of self comes not from other people, but from from my sense of self comes not from other people but from myself. My sense of self comes from myself. Wait, that can't be right.

And that's now look. Bridget has bought the postmodern thing. And what's the postmodern thing? You create yourself. You don't you don't need what other people, nobody else can tell you how you have to be. Nobody else can tell you who you are or what's right or what's wrong. You create your own self. And Bridget is showing what Kierkegaard said and what the book of John is saying and that is, you do not have the power to do that.

You cannot validate yourself. So here she is saying, I am poised. I know who I am. I am secure. I know that I'm valuable. So why do you why do you need somebody to notice the books on your shelf and to at least think you're intellectually sophisticated? Why do you need to have some hot young thing want to date you because it looks like you don't need boyfriends?

In other words, if you desperately need every day to have people showing you, telling you one way or the other that you're okay, doesn't that mean that deep down inside you know you're not? And what Kierkegaard said, that strange cryptic statement that I read at the end, he says, anyone who tries to find a self apart from God, anyone who tries to find a self away from God, gets an identity is like is like a king without subjects, or like a king with subjects who feel like they can rebel all the time.

What does that mean? It means simply this, that your self, your identity is deeply unstable. You get it a compliment today. Get it a compliment tomorrow and it'll say, okay, okay. But if you don't go you go for a while and nobody wants to date you and nobody thinks you're intellectually sophisticated. And your your your ego goes nuts. Your identity goes nuts. Why?

It you need a word from the outside. You cannot validate yourself. You can't just say to yourself, I know I'm all right. You've got to get a word from outside. You've got to get affirmation from outside. There has to be a word. If it's not the word of the Lord, it's got to be a word from you have to have a word from outside. You do not have the power to make yourself a self.

That is the fundamental assumption of your of everybody at college here. It's the fundamental assumption of modern high culture and and popular culture, that you can decide who you are and you can validate yourself. That's ridiculous. If you don't get affirmation from God, Kierkegaard said, you are will be deeply, desperately dependent on all kinds of other words from outside.

You're going to have to get other gods. You're going to have to get you have to make a god of your boyfriend, a god of the of of respectability, a god of something. You're going to have to get something from outside that puts its hands on you and says, well done. You can't do it to yourself. And therefore, if you try to build an identity apart from God, the identity you have will be like a rebellious country.

It will be always saying, more affirmation, more affirmation, more affirmation, and you can never never keep it satisfied. It's like this vacuum cleaner because it's unstable, because it doesn't know who it is, because you don't know that you're valuable. It just isn't true that you can be yourself. You know? My sense of self does not come from others, but from myself. That can't be right. Right.

You need a word from outside. And anyone who tries to build an identity apart from God will experience destruction, will experience a loss of the sense of self. That's the first point. You get that from the opening from the coming word. You need a coming word. You need a word to come. Secondly, the running man. Now, the running man, verse three, Jonah running from God.

Verse 10, Jonah running from God. Here is the second thing we learn about sin. What's that? Who is this guy running from God? Who's the sinner of this book? Who's the bad guy in a sense? Who's the fool? Who's the messed up person? It's not the so-called heathen sailors. Jonah makes them look good. You know, they're terrified when they find out he's running from God.

You know, they're smarter than he is. He makes them look good. He makes the Ninevites, those nasty people with sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the big city. He makes them. He even makes the fish look good. Who's the bad guy? Who's the sinner in this book? It's the religious man. It's the preacher. So the second thing we're taught here, second thing we're taught is that sin is more than just breaking the rules.

It's building an identity apart from God. And it's something you can do underneath all kinds of religiosity and morality. You can be very moral. You can be keeping all the rules. You can be a leader of the church. And you can still be creating this identity that blows up. It blows up. Why? What does it mean to run from God?

Well, now somebody says, how in the world can you run from something that's omni-present? How do you run away from God when he's everywhere? And you know, look at verse nine. He knows he's everywhere. He doesn't have this idea that somehow Yahweh is a is just in Israel. He says, I worship the Lord of heaven and the Lord of earth, and who made the sea and the land. He knows he's everywhere. So what does it mean?

In in the Hebrew, every place it says that Jonah is running from God, from the Lord, literally in the Hebrew it says, from the face of the Lord. I wish the NIV had put it in there, it doesn't, but he's running from the face of the Lord and that's important. The face of the Lord, what is that? Jonah is not running from the spatial presence of God. You can't.

You can't run away spatially from God. He's running away relationally from God. And when Moses met God in the burning bush, when Moses met God face to face, in the future, when Moses wanted to talk to God, did he go back to the bush? No, because God's face is not an experience of spatial presence. It's a relational experience of God's centrality and intimacy.

In other words, when when when Moses met God, meet God face to face, mean God comes into the very center of your attention, the very center of your being. You experience this intimate encounter. That's what Jonah is after is is away from. Running from God means God's not in your center. He's running out of the center. He's running away from the center of God's will, which is Nineveh. He and he's running God out of his own center.

Gospel in Life Announcer: Jonah is one of the most widely known stories in the Bible, but it's so much more than a simple account of a prophet who runs from God and gets swallowed by a great fish. In his book, Rediscovering Jonah, Tim Keller uncovers the deeper message of this familiar story, revealing how Jonah's resistance to God exposes our own reluctance to trust and obey him, and how Jonah's experience ultimately points us to Jesus and his saving work on the cross.

During the month of May, we'll send you a copy of Rediscovering Jonah as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel and Life share the transforming love of Christ with more people. So request your copy today at gospelinlife.com/give. That's gospelinlife.com/give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.

Tim Keller: Now, what this simply means is this, your identity has to come now, right? It can't come from yourself. Your identity does not come from yourself. Your affirmation, your sense of value, who you are, your sense of being distinctive and doesn't come from you. It comes from something else. And whatever that is, if it's not God, that becomes your center. There's something in your center.

Kierkegaard in his book, Sickness Unto Death, puts it like this. He says, in fact, what is called the secular mentality consists simply of such those who, so to speak, mortgage themselves to the world. They use their talents to amass wealth, to carry on enterprises. They try to make a name for themselves, but they them but themselves they have not become. Here.

They try to make a name for themselves, but themselves they have not become. Spiritually speaking, they have no self. No self with which they could venture everything. No self before God, however self-seeking they are otherwise. You know what he's saying? Yeah, typical Kierkegaard, but what he's saying. If you don't have a self before God, you mortgage yourself. You sell yourself to something else.

You sell yourself to your career. You sell yourself to to getting married. You sell yourself to something else. And you say, now, if I have that, then I'll know who I am. Then I have validation. I get a word, you see, from that thing that affirms me, gives me a sense of myself. But then that becomes your center. And really, what that means is, you're sold to it. You're mortgaged to it.

You're enslaved to it. You've got to have it. And here's what's so amazing. The running man tells us that you can do that underneath all the morality, all the churchgoing, all the Bible reading, all the scrupulous following of the moral rules. Underneath it all, you can still forge an identity not based on God, but on something else, which is the essence of what sin is.

Okay, thirdly, and what does that lead to? And how is you know, right away you're saying, well, how did Jonah do that? Well, let me see what that leads to. Number one, we said the coming word says, you is sin is trying to build a self an identity without God and it doesn't work. Number two, you can do it underneath all your religion and morality because the essence of sin is to make something besides God the highest love of your life.

See, Augustine was always saying it, the essence of sin is a disordered love. It's it's it's the wrong wrongly order wrong wrongly ordered loves. It's loving something too much in relationship to God. It's mortgaging yourself to it so that you can get a sense of self, which you desperately need if you don't live before God and you're not getting your affirmation from him.

And therefore, if you do that, something will eventually happen to you. If you build a self not on God, something will happen to you. And you see it here in the deathly sleep. In verse five, we see during his terrible storm, he goes to sleep and he can hardly be awakened. This is not just a simple sleep. This is not simple sorrow. You know, there's escape sleeping, right?

You're so sad, you escape, you just sleep. This is not simple exhaustion because the Hebrew word for sleep here is a word that is hard to translate. It's the word that's used of what God did to Adam in order to take a rib from him. You remember back in Genesis 2? It says, God put Adam into a deep sleep and removed a rib. That's like anesthesia.

You're out. You're out. That's what the word means something like that. And what it means is, something has happened to Jonah that has put him into the deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, almost a trance. And here's what Kierkegaard says. Sin is the sickness unto death. If the essence of sin is to build an identity on something besides God, to get the affirmation from something besides God, when your self-salvation strategy goes wrong, when you lose that thing, when anything comes between you and that thing, you don't just experience distress.

You don't just experience discouragement. You don't just experience probably even what you might call normal normal sort of depression. You experience an identity implosion. You experience the sickness unto death. You experience existential despair. Now, so that sound like Kierkegaard. Now you see what he's talking about. The existential despair, the sickness unto death, the deep identity implosion, the psychological breakdown is what sin is.

And it comes inevitably when you make anything but God the central thing of your life. Now you say, let me give you a quick example. It's kind of a painful one. Here's two parents. They both love their child. They love their child. And then something goes wrong with the child. Something, you know, teenager freaks out, goes delinquent, does nutty things.

And one of the parents gets discouraged, gets distressed, gets very sad. Of course. And the other one experiences the sickness unto death. Not a normal sleep. See, not normal distress. Identity implosion. Why? Because one parent loves the child for herself. Loves the child for the child's self. I I love my daughter because of who she is. I love her for herself. I love her.

The other parent loves the daughter to get an identity. The other one says, the reason I know I'm a good person is I'm a good parent. The reason I know my life means something is I'm living for my daughter. My daughter needs me. The reason I know that I am a worthwhile person is my daughter's turning into a fine young woman. She's happy. And when her daughter starts to go nuts, when her daughter starts to go bad, she doesn't just get sad.

Because her parenting isn't about the daughter. Her parenting is about herself. Her parenting is a way to get an identity. And when she and see what Kierkegaard said is she experiences a deep a death sleep. She goes nuts. She she experiences psychological breakdown because she's experiencing an identity implosion. She's losing herself. And that is going to happen to everybody who doesn't make God not just somebody you obey, not just somebody you read the Bible, not just somebody who gives you kind of inspiration, but the absolute center of your life.

The reason you get up in the morning, the joy of your heart, the reason you know that you're loved and valuable. Now you might say, why was Jonah like that? Now here's where I have to scroll forward. Why do you think Jonah ran away from Nineveh? You know what the natural idea is? If you've only read these first 10 verses and you didn't know anything else, what you would say is, he's scared. Right?

In 1942, if God comes to American minister and says, go to Berlin, go out in the streets in the center square and tell Germany to repent of its violence. A little dangerous, aren't you think? And so of course you know, if you'd think that that's what that's what God's asking Jonah to do. You figure that he's running away because he's afraid that they won't repent.

If he goes and preaches against their violence, he's afraid they won't repent, right? If they don't repent, he's dead. But when you get to chapter four, and we will explore that in great detail when we get there. He says, the reason I ran away to start with was not that I was afraid that they would not repent and I would be killed. I was afraid they would repent.

You know why? Jonah is a successful leader of a successful nation. Second Kings chapter 14:25 tells us that Jeroboam, the king of the Northern Kingdom, Jeroboam the second, the king of Israel, began to do a military expansionist policy. He began to conquer people around him and expand his borders. It says, at the word of Jonah the prophet, the son of Amittai.

Jonah supported the king's expansionist policies with his preaching. The king was happy with Jonah. Jonah was happy with the king. Jonah was a successful leader of a successful nation. And if Assyria, if he went to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, which was the big new overwhelming political and military juggernaut to come, which absolutely was going to probably take Israel out.

Jonah thought that if he went and they repented, pardon me, and they didn't repent, he would die. But he was more afraid if they repented. Why? Because then he would experience psychological death. If Jonah says, I would be more upset about Assyria being spared than if they killed me. He is proving Kierkegaard's point. He is saying, the thing that really gives me my identity, the thing that really gives me a sense of value, is not that I'm pleasing God or that God loves me.

It's that I am a successful leader of a successful nation. And if anything goes wrong with that, I don't have a self left. Listen. Do you know your own heart? Some of you say, I've always gone to church. I've always obeyed the Ten Commandments. I've always been a good person. I've always been a religious person. I live for Jesus. Oh, really?

Do you really? What are you really living for? Do you realize, unless you come to grips with the competitor, there is a competitor in every one of your lives for the centrality of your heart. If you don't know what that competitor is, if you don't see the death struggle in your heart between Jesus and whatever that other alternative, alternative kind of identity, alternative core center, if you don't know what is competing with Jesus Christ as functional savior of your life.

You really don't know your heart. You're looking up here, you're saying, well, I don't commit adultery, and I don't do this, and I don't do this, and I don't do this. You're looking up here. The Bible's saying, here's where sin is. You can have you can be living as Jonah was, a life of horrible sin even though you're keeping all the rules. Do you see that? Do you know that? Do you know your heart?

I've I can't tell you how many people I've met who over the years they were good people, upstanding people. They were going along living this sort of decent Christian sort of life. And then suddenly, they embezzle and now they're in jail. Suddenly, they have an affair and now their family has blown up. Suddenly, they do terrible things and they say, I don't understand it.

I was not raised that way. I was a good person. I don't even know why I did it. Well, because your real savior, your your self-salvation strategy, the real core, your real identity, something began to come between you and it. And you began to experience the dread, the sickness unto death. You began to blow up. You began to do things you never thought you would do because underneath all your morality, underneath all your religiosity, you're living a life of terrible sin, building a self without God.

Now, lastly, do you know yourself? Now, lastly, I can only be brief about this because how does God turn Jonah, not now into a nice person, a better person? You can't make Jonah a better person. What is Jonah supposed to do? Is Jonah supposed to start obeying the Ten Commandments? He doesn't commit adultery, he doesn't lie. He never misses he never misses worship. You see?

He tithes to the poor. He does everything he's supposed to do. What's he supposed to do? He needs to be converted. And he's not going to get converted by cleaning up his life. His life's already clean as a whistle. Well, what's he got to do? He needs a transformation of identity at his core. He needs an experience of the grace of God.

You realize that if if Jonah had gone off to Nineveh without this horrible experience, he would have been utterly ineffective because you can't preach to people about the grace of God if you don't know it yourself. Jonah needs the transformation of identity. He needs to have God be the basis. He needs to have the love of God and the grace of God be the thing that drives his life.

And how God gets him there, not reformation but transformation, not becoming a better, nicer person, but radically converting him. That's what the rest of the book's about. But I can tell you this. You can see right here how God does it. He begins to do it with Jonah. And let me tell you how he begins to do it with all of us. Number one, he sends a storm. He sends a storm.

I don't know hardly anybody that came to realize. Do you know anybody who just sort of walks along the street and says, you know, I suddenly realized that even if I look very stable on the top, underneath I'm actually, you know, unstable. I'm psychologically unstable. You know, I don't have a real sense of self and and actually I could just blow up if two or three bad things happen.

I could just I just, you know, I don't really and you know, I have a wrong ordering of my loves. I love things too much rather than God and God's not really, you know, the real source of affirmation. I need to get converted. No, you need a storm. You almost have to have a storm. And you know, it's funny, when storms come, troubles come, we say, why is God letting this happen?

Why is God letting this happen? Because he wants Jonah. So number one, there's a storm. And number two, in the beginning, Jonah just starts to obey God in the storm. He doesn't know what's going to happen. He doesn't expect much. He just starts to obey. Notice, in verse eight, when the sailors begin to realize what Jonah has done, who he is, they ask him identity questions. You see that?

They ask him identity. They say, who is the one that's who are you? What do you do? Where are you from? They're asking him identity questions. And look, he's starting to get it. He says, I'm a Hebrew, but you know what? I worship the God that sent this storm. That's what he means when he says this God of the sea. Why do you think he mentions the sea?

He's starting to wake up. And here's what eventually he does. I don't have to, you know, this isn't telling you something you don't know. In a few verses, he's going to say, it's not after you. It's not right for you to be in danger. God's after me. So throw me into the water of God's wrath. And you will be saved. The wrath is for me, not for you. So throw me in. What is he doing?

All he's doing is the right thing. And here's what's so interesting about this storm. If he continues to try to run from the storm, that's the only way he'll drown. The only way this storm will drown him is if he continues to run from it. But if he turns and just says, God, I I don't know. This might be suicide, but I'm just going to do the right thing. That's when he's saved.

And that's how it almost always works. The storm comes into your life. You you you begin to experience the sickness unto death. You realize everything's wrong. And what do you do? You don't even know what to do. And it's not you you you don't even know. All you know is you say, I'm going to start to seek God. I'm going to start to do the right thing. I'm just going to start I'm not going to run from him anymore.

And the irony is, your your heart will usually think that's suicide. If you throw yourself into God and just trust him in the midst of the storm. He thought he was going to die, but he didn't. So there's got to be a storm. You've got to just start trusting God in the storm, even though you don't know what in the world that's going to do. And the only way the storm can kill you is if you keep running from it. The only way it won't kill you is if you say, well, if it's going to kill me, it's going to kill me. Then then it won't.

And the last thing, and this is the thing that doesn't really even happen in our text, but we have to look forward to it. You can't get a change of identity just by saying, now I want to be a better person. He's going to have to experience grace. And here's what's wonderful. It's when he does the right thing. And that is he says, in order to save the sailors, he has himself thrown into the wrath of God.

To his shock, there's love beneath the waves. Yeah, there's the fish, right? But think of what that is. God saves him because he's willing to jump into the wrath of God. He's willing to take God's punishment. He's willing to he's willing to face the music. He's willing to say, God, whatever you require of me, I will do. No excuses. That's repentance, by the way. No excuses.

And so he throws himself in, trying to help the sailors. You know, he's doing the right thing. And under the wrath, there's love. And until you discover that under the wrath of God, there's grace, there's love, under the waves, there's love. Until you see yourself as what he sees himself as. And we're going to see him praying in Jonah 2, as the recipient of grace. He's amazed. He's alive. God is God has saved him.

But you know why? Why is it that God can forgive Jonah? Jonah didn't expect to be forgiven. In fact, Jonah probably when he's down in the bottom of the fish, he's still wondering why he was forgiven. Why would God give me a second chance? Why could God forgive me? Well, the answer is, years later, Jesus Christ said to a bunch of people, the Pharisees, he says, the only sign I will give you is the sign of Jonah.

As Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and then came forth, I will be in the belly of. I will die. But behold, a greater than Jonah is here. You know why Jonah was able to throw himself into the wrath of God and be saved? Do you know why you can look at the worst things that are happening in the world and know that underneath God is really trying to help you and love you and care for you and and refine you and not trying to smite you and trying to destroy you?

Because there was a true Jonah. The true Jonah was the one who was thrown into the real ocean of God's wrath, the real storm of God's wrath, and no one caught him. Nothing saved him. He just sank. And he did it. He did it for us. And only when you know he's done that for you, only only when you know that will that begin to transform your identity? You can't transform, you know, identity transformation doesn't happen just by trying to turn over a new leaf.

You've got to see what he's done. That's got to bring your heart out more than anything else your heart's been set on. And Kierkegaard, at the very end, you know, there's a place where Kierkegaard actually says, the sin, under the sin, under the sin, under the sin of all the sins, is that you just don't have the courage to accept how loved you are, that Jesus Christ would die for you.

He says that. The reason why it takes courage is because if you're loved that much that Jesus had to die for you, that's an insult. It means you're a sinner. And also it means if you're loved that much that he had to die for you, you lose control. If he did all that for you, then you just have to live for him. So it takes courage to to accept that kind of love. But that's the sin under all the sins is you don't have the guts to to accept it.

You don't have the guts to really believe it. You don't have the guts. That's what Kierkegaard said. To say, I am loved like that. He would do that for me. I am so sinful that he had to die for me, but I am so valued that he wanted to. And that's the only remedy for the sickness unto death. But what a remedy it is. There's love beneath the waves. The stuff's coming at you right now.

You're saying, why is God doing this to me? There's love beneath the waves. Obey and give yourself to him and he will not smite you. Why? You will not drown in those waves because there is one who drowned for you. And he did it willingly. And it's that very fact that he did that that will save you. That will change you. That will transform you. Will change you forever.

You need to be converted, not just changed. That's the message. Not just changed will, not just changed, you know, volitionally, changed from the inside out. Let's pray. Now, Father, we ask that you'd help us to get a handle on the power of the gospel. And the power of the gospel is not just simply to give us inspiration, not just simply to help us live better lives.

Uh, not just give us a way to uh, help us achieve our goals. Not just protection. It's a whole new agenda. It's a whole new uh, life. It's a whole new uh, psychology. It's a relocation of our dearest hopes and joys. It's and in a sense it's a relocation of our salvation in you and not in other things. Help us to see that some of us who think that we're really good people are living lives of sin and we're on our way to disaster.

And some of us who really thought we tried Christianity never really did. We just tried to live a good life. Help us to apply this through your Holy Spirit because we've come to you through Jesus in his name we pray. Amen.

Gospel in Life Announcer: Thanks for listening to today's teaching. Is our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelinlife.com. There, you can subscribe to the Life in the Gospel Quarterly Journal. When you do, you will also receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other great gospel-centered resources.

Again, it's all at gospelinlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 2001. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.