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Colin Smith: One reason why many people struggle here is that it seems as if God's freedom - "Jacob have I loved and Esau have I hated" - it would seem that that would make God's love less. If God is really loving, shouldn't that mean that he treats everybody the same?

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. Colin, I think that's a big question for some. If God is loving, shouldn't he love us all the same?

Colin Smith: Well, he is love, and there is a very profound sense in which he does love us all the same. God loves the world, and he sent his son into the world. But the Bible speaks about the love of God in different ways. And there is a very profound sense in which the deepest love is not the same to everyone.

When I say, "I love my wife," I mean that I love her in a way that is different. I don't love everyone the same when I say that. And she would not be pleased if she thought that that was what I meant.

Now, we're going to get to how the Bible speaks about God's love laying hold of a person in a very special way. And that is wonderful, and it's a love that is not less; it's a love that is more. And that's the love that Paul speaks about when he says, "the Son of God loved me and he gave himself for me." That is particular, that is personal, and that is very wonderful.

Steve Hiller: Well, we're going to look at this a little further today. But we're going to do so from the book of Jonah in chapter four. So I hope you'll open your Bible and join us there as we continue the message, "Resent God's Providence in Ruling the World."

Colin Smith: God's grace makes some people angry. In fact, I want to suggest to you today that God's grace will do one of two things in your life and that all people who are thinking about God's grace are moving in one of these two directions. Either God's grace will make you angry, or God's grace will make you worship. You will go one of these two ways.

Let's think for a few moments then about how God's grace makes some people angry. If you want to know whether God's grace could possibly make you angry, turn with me to Romans and chapter nine. Would you do that with me today?

Romans and chapter nine. For of all the chapters in the Bible, Romans chapter nine is probably the starkest of all statements of what God's grace actually means. The whole chapter really is devoted to an explanation of what God's grace is really all about. Let me quote to you some examples of why God's grace makes some people angry.

Here is what God's grace looks like: chapter nine and verse 13, one of the most difficult statements in the whole Bible: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated." How many people feel uncomfortable about that already?

There is an instinct in us. We want to say to God, "It's fine for you to love Jacob, but you must do the same for Esau." Paul continues, verse 14, "What shall we say then? Is God unjust? Not at all! For he said to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.'" It's up to me to decide where I exercise mercy and where I exercise compassion. That's what God says.

Read Romans chapter nine and you will begin to see why God's grace makes some people angry. Because grace means that God is free. That is the word. God is free to do whatever he wants in any situation. Beautifully stated in Psalm 115 and verse three: "Our God is in heaven and he does whatever pleases him."

And it is an expression - think about this - is it not an expression of our own utter pride and arrogance that we make so much of our need to be free to accept or reject him, but we do not feel that he should be free to accept or reject us?

Some folks are so locked into the idea that God must treat everybody the same that they think of God simply as opening the door to make salvation possible and then standing back to just wait and see who will come in. But I'm suggesting to you that the Bible speaks of a greater love than that in which God takes the initiative in sending his son into the world.

But more than that, God takes the initiative in breaking into the lives of particular people so that you should be saved, that I should be saved. Let me point you to one more scripture from the Old Testament that just speaks powerfully to this. Turn back to Deuteronomy and chapter seven if you would.

Deuteronomy and chapter seven. This is really one of the great statements in the Old Testament scriptures about God's particular love for his own covenant people. And notice what God says here. He says to Israel, "You are a people holy to the Lord your God." Holy: separate, different, special, unique because of the relationship that God has forged.

And he says, "The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession." We say, "Okay, God has chosen this people out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his special and treasured possession. Why did God love them in this special way?"

Well, verse seven: "The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other people, for you were the fewest of all people." Okay, we're now being told that God didn't set his love on Israel because there was anything special about them, numerical strength or whatever else.

So why now? We're holding our breath. Why is it that God then set his affection on them? We're going to get the answer in verse eight: "It was because the Lord loved you." And kept the oath that he swore to your forefathers, that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery from the power of Pharaoh, King of Egypt.

See what it's saying? Why does God love you? Because he loves you. No other reason. Not your prayers, not your ministry, not your service, not your commitment, not your faith, not your good life. God set his love on you, brother and sister in Christ, for this one and only reason: because he loved you.

And that's why he chose you out of the people on all the face of the earth to be among his treasured possession. And now God extends his love to Nineveh, of all places, the capital of terror and torture. And Jonah is saying, "Why Nineveh?" and it's making him mad.

Of all the cities God could have chosen to send a prophet, why this one? Of all the cities God could have raised a revival, why this one? And you can't get beyond this answer: our God is in heaven and he does whatever pleases him. Nobody tells him what to do and that made Jonah mad. We're more comfortable with a God who is more controlled, who operates within a framework. But that's not the God of the Bible.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called "Resent God's Providence." Stay with us, we'll get back to the message in just a moment. Well, Open the Bible is a listener-supported program and as you give a gift of any amount this month, we want to send you a copy of Martyn Lloyd-Jones' book, *Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure*. Colin, what is this book about?

Colin Smith: Well, it's not about depression in the clinical sense that we use that word today. When Lloyd-Jones speaks about spiritual depression, he's speaking about all of the experiences of darkness, discouragement, and doubt that come to a Christian believer at some point in our journey of faith. And it is a marvelous book.

Steve, this has got to be one of the top three books, I think, in all the books that I have. Over the years, I have gone back to this again and again and I will continue to do so. He just works through chapter after chapter the various experiences of difficulty that we all encounter as Christian believers.

And then he gives to us practical ways forward from the scripture of being able to find our way through these harder passages of life. So for example, his chapter on "Where is Your Faith?" is just one of my favorites. That's in the story of the storm on the lake where Jesus asks this question of the disciples, "Where is your faith?"

And Lloyd-Jones makes the point faith doesn't sort of kick in automatically. It's not like a thermostat. You actually have to apply it to the difficulties of the situation that you're in right now. That has been so helpful to me and that's just one little snippet of so many that run through this wonderful book.

Steve Hiller: Well, we want to send you a copy of this book, *Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure*, as our way of saying thank you for your financial support. You can give online at openthebible.org or when you call 1-877-OPEN-365. That's openthebible.org or 1-877-673-6365. Let's get back to the message. Here's Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: God's grace makes some people angry. Here is the second thing more briefly, more wonderfully: God's grace makes some people worship. Now, let me just say this. Some Christians disagree on how we should understand these things that I've been speaking about and trying to point you to in the Bible as best I understand it.

And if you find yourself saying, "I really don't see what Pastor Colin sees in the Bible," then we can agree to differ. That's okay. Your eternal future doesn't hang on this. You'll be glad to know that. So why am I speaking about it? For this reason: I'm utterly convinced that a great deal of your joy in worship does hang on this.

Because if all that you think is that God is generally beneficent to you in a way that he is to everybody else, then it's difficult to see how your whole heart, soul, mind, and strength is really going to be galvanized in the worship of God. Let God's grace lead you not into anger, my friend, but into worship.

Let me try and point you as to how that might happen for you, how it has happened for me and for thousands and thousands of other Christians. If you are a Christian, ask this question honestly and with wonder and amazement in your heart. Why is it that you believe and someone else in your family, your work, your group of friends does not?

I'm thinking of folks who have exactly the same background as I do and polar opposite lives. Why? Do you think it is because you are wiser than them? Would you say, "Well, I made a better choice"? Well, why did you make a better choice? Is that because you're a better person? See, if that is what you think in your heart of hearts, you just turned God's grace into works.

Here is why you believe if you are a Christian. God set his love on you. God's Holy Spirit awakened you. God drew you to himself. God redeemed you. God gave you life from above. And you did nothing to deserve it, neither did I. That's grace.

Isaac Watts wrote a hymn. It is one of my favorite hymns because it describes the thing I cannot get over in my own life. It's called "How Sweet and Awful is the Place." I hope you'll come to love it. We've sung it in our worship services at different times already. And it just takes up the picture that our Lord Jesus uses of salvation being like a great banquet.

And Watts pictures us as believers coming into this great banquet. And can you imagine this vast, vast banqueting hall, bigger than you have ever seen or ever can imagine? And it is spread with tables as far as the eye can see, and they are laden, prepared for the feast. And now you have come in and all of your brothers and sisters in Christ are coming in and we are seeing the feast.

And Watts writes these words: "While all our hearts and all our songs join to admire the feast, each of us cry with thankful hearts, 'Lord, why was I a guest? Why was I made to hear your voice and enter while there's room, when thousands make a wretched choice and rather starve than come?'"

And here's what he says about that. He says, here's how I came: "'Twas the same love that spread the feast that sweetly drew us in." You see, the Lord who sent his son into the world is the Lord who sent his spirit to work in your mind and your heart and to change you from the rebel you would have been apart from his grace.

"'Twas the same love that spread the feast that sweetly drew us in, or else we had still refused to taste and rather starve than come." My friend, apart from God's grace, you would never have come to Jesus Christ. Apart from the work of the Spirit opening your mind to the truth, changing your heart towards the truth, recreating you as a new person, you would have spent the rest of your life with your own sinful heart taking you away from Christ and so would I.

We would be outside for the rest of our lives still refusing to come. That's what Isaac Watts is convinced of. I'm convinced of it too. I cannot think of any other reason why I love Christ and someone else I know and love who had the same background does not.

So let God's grace lead you to worship. Because once you get a taste of God's grace, you will spend the rest of your life keeping coming back to this question: "Lord, why me?" And you will never get a better answer than this: that he has set his love on you. And that will make you say again, "But why me?"

You'll start to feel with John Newton, another great hymn writer, that God's grace is what? Amazing. Newton said, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see."

If you said to John Newton, "Tell me, John, what is so amazing about grace?" John Newton would say this to you: "Look, I was lost and God found me. I was blind and God gave me sight, he healed me. And why God would do this for me when thousands live their lives and die their deaths still lost and still blind is amazing beyond anything I can imagine or begin to explain."

And when you see God's amazing grace, you will find yourself increasingly lost in wonder, love, and praise. I wish that more of us believed not only that God made it possible for us to be saved, but that God saved us. Because that's what the Bible says: he saved us.

So let this amazing doctrine of God's grace that raises so many questions, let it not take you with the company of those who become angry. You join the company of those who, beholding God's inexplicable grace in our lives, find that it leads us to worship.

And then there is just one more thing that I want to say in the very last moment here, and it's this: that God's grace that makes some people angry and God's grace that makes some people worship is also the same grace that makes some people pray. And the reason I mention this - we'll come back to this another time - but I want just to mention it today for this reason.

The obvious question that comes up when we think about God's grace in our lives as believers is someone will say, "Well, that's all very well for you, but what about the folks who are lost?" And that leads me just to this very last observation. And it's interesting how it comes in Isaac Watts' great hymn that I've introduced here.

Because he marvels at God's grace in his own life. "'Twas the same love that spread the feast that sweetly drew us in," he says, "or else we had still refused to taste and we would rather have starved than come. We would never have come if it wasn't for your grace, Lord; I know that's true of my life."

And then he says this: "Pity the nations, O our God; constrain the earth to come. Send thy victorious word abroad and bring the strangers home." Now, you see the reason that Watts can pray like that and the reason you can pray like that is because Watts believes and understands that God does constrain people to come and God does bring strangers home.

He doesn't just stand by an open door and watch; he actually by his spirit is at work in the world. He finds people, he captures people, he brings people home. He saves people, not just make it possible for them to be saved. That is why I want to end on this note: that God's grace is the greatest incentive I know to pray for the salvation of lost people.

If all God did was simply open the door and then stand back and watch to see who would come, there would be little point in praying for the lost. But when you see in the Bible that God wonderfully, graciously takes the initiative, think of it this way. If God can swoop into my life uninvited to change my mind and my heart so I begin to seek after him, he can do that in the lives of other people as well, including the lives of those who right now are filled with resentment towards him, like someone you're praying for.

Let that sustain your prayers: God's grace. He's free to swoop into that person's life you're bringing that person before him. He can do it in a moment because he's free, because he's God.

God's grace is amazing. No one is so good as to deserve it, no one is so bad as to be beyond it. And either God's grace will make you angry, or it will make you worship, and it will lead you to pray. And we'll come back to the rest of Jonah chapter four, but it's all about this story of how God led very gently a man who was angry about grace to the place of worship and prayer that's expressed in his marvelous song in chapter two that he ends with these words, singing triumphantly, "Salvation comes from the Lord."

Steve Hiller: A great reminder that Pastor Colin has been sharing with us today from God's Word, that God's grace will make some people angry, but for others it will lead us to worship and it will lead us to pray. You're listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called "Resent God's Providence," part of our series on the life of Jonah. And if you ever miss a broadcast in this series, you can listen online at openthebible.org and you can stream the program or download an MP3 for free. You can also listen through the Open the Bible app, which you'll find for free at your app store.

Colin, I think today's message has been really helpful in helping us get our minds around the concept of God's grace.

Colin Smith: It's so much bigger than we initially think. To many people God's grace is that he's kind and loving and for all of us who come to him, he'll forgive us and so forth and so on. And yet the reality is that by nature none of us are going to come to him. If he just sits and waits for us, we will never get there. And the only way that Jonah is redeemed, the only way in which any of us are redeemed is God laying hold of us by the scruff of the neck and dragging us in. And thank God that he does that.

Steve Hiller: Absolutely. And as I've heard you point out a number of times, I think that does a number of things. Number one, it gives us hope for those that we care about that on their own would never begin a personal relationship with Christ.

Colin Smith: It's wonderful. If God is limited to standing passively by and only accepting those who come, then the people you are praying for right now, you know that they don't have it in themselves to come. So thank God that he is free to lay hold of people. He can swoop into a person's life uninvited. And that's a reason for me to pray, "Oh Lord, you don't need her permission, you don't need his permission to lay hold of his life. Go redeem him, grab him, get him." Thank God he has the freedom to do that. That's grace. It means that God has free will.

Steve Hiller: It really does. And the other thing that that does for me is just it gives me an assurance that salvation was nothing of my own doing. I didn't earn it, God gave it to me, and therefore I'm dependent upon him. He's not going to let me go.

Colin Smith: And what a view of God's love. It's not only that he accepted me because I came; it's his love reached out to me and he grabbed hold of me. What kind of love is that that God started a work of grace in my life when I had no interest in him and he redeemed me because his love came to me before I ever even thought about loving him?

Steve Hiller: Well, we're almost out of time here. So Colin, just want to mention that next time we're actually going to dive into a part of the story of Jonah that many of us are not quite as familiar with. We know about the storm, we know about Jonah running, we know about the fish, we know about Nineveh, but then there's the whole worm and the vine and the wind and I'm really looking forward to getting in and diving into that.

Colin Smith: It's one of my favorite parts of the whole story and it's full of lessons for us about God's grace and his kindness and how we are to respond to the difficulties of life in a way that glorifies Christ.

Steve Hiller: Well, I hope you'll join us for that broadcast. For Pastor Colin Smith, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening and I hope you'll join us next time. This program is a listener-supported production of Open the Bible.

Colin Smith: At Open the Bible, we're grateful for like-minded organizations committed to sharing the gospel around the world. And to that end, I'd like to commend the work of Global Fingerprints. You know, in the book of James, God calls us to help orphans in their distress. That's a clear command, but it's not always clear how we should obey it.

And this is where Global Fingerprints comes in. Through Global Fingerprints, you can sponsor a vulnerable child to help meet their physical needs and ensure they hear the gospel of Jesus Christ. I want to commend Global Fingerprints to you. They're focused on equipping the local church to care for children and where there is no church, they help to plant one. If you'd like to help a vulnerable child, you can find more information on Global Fingerprints at our website, openthebible.org/gf. That's openthebible.org/gf.