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Colin Smith: Owning your own sinfulness is the first part of believing the gospel. I am a sinner, a rebel by nature and by practice, and what I deserve from God is eternity in hell. Now, if you don’t honestly believe that about yourself, you do not yet believe the gospel.

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. I’m Steve Hiller, glad you can join us as we continue our series through Jonah. And Colin, I can just imagine a few people bristling at what they just heard. You're telling me I'm a rebel, I'm a sinner, I deserve hell? Wait a minute, I'm a good person.

Colin Smith: Yeah, that’s right, but it’s not us that’s saying that, Steve. It really is the Bible. This is the very heart of the gospel, that we need saving. The question is, saving from what? Is there any reality from which I need to be saved? And the Bible says to us, yes, there is.

There is an awful reality from which every person needs to be saved because the wages of sin is death. What we’re promised on the basis of our lives is not some kind of an abundant life, but it is an eternal death. And Jesus Christ comes into the world to save us from that. So embracing our need is actually the beginning of believing the gospel.

Steve Hiller: One of the things that obviously Jonah needed to be saved from was anger. I mean, he, as you look at the end of the book, he’s angry with God. But obviously he didn't stay there.

Colin Smith: Yeah, he could not have written the book if the last word had been that he was angry with God. And I think the wonderful thing about this book is it's so humble. It’s a confession. Here’s this man who was known as a great prophet, but he’s telling us the inside story of his own life and he’s saying, look, there were things that were going on under the surface with me that God needed to deal with in His grace. And thank God for that grace that takes sinners like us that do deserve the worst and yet He works for us towards the very best.

Steve Hiller: One of the great things is He works through His word. So I hope you'll grab a copy of that. Open your Bible, join us in Jonah chapter two as we take a look at the first nine verses and begin a message, Restrain God’s Praise on the Account of Your Pain. Here’s Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now, last time we left Jonah feeling pretty miserable. You remember he was on his own. He was outside the city of Nineveh. He was in the desert with a vine that had given him shade kind of drooping and lying dead in the sand. He’s angry with God, he was angry with Nineveh, he’s angry about the vine.

And God confronts him, you remember, at the end of chapter four and deals with his selfishness. Jonah, you are concerned about the vine. You’re all wrapped up in your own comfort. You’re all wrapped up in your own life. You are all wrapped up in your own well-being. Jonah, you are concerned about the vine, but God says, I am concerned about the city. 120,000 people and more who are utterly, totally, and completely lost. And that’s where the book ends.

Now, you say, well, we can’t end there. It kind of looks at that point as if Jonah might have slouched off into retirement like a grumpy old man. You know some folks do that. People say time heals. Time heals if a wound is clean, but if a wound is septic, time makes it worse. But thank God, Jonah did not slouch into retirement as a grumpy old man. God's grace triumphed in his life.

You say, well, how do you know that? The reason that we know that is he wrote the book. God brought him to the place where instead of being angry and frustrated as we find him at the end of chapter four, he felt under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit coming freshly to him that he wanted to share where the grace of God had brought him in his life. And that’s why we have this book. And when Jonah wrote it under the inspiration of the Spirit, he put this song of praise in Jonah chapter two right in the center of his own life story.

Now, we’re going to dive into that testimony to God’s grace together. We’ll pick up the story just so we remember what’s happening here back in chapter one and verse 12. Jonah, you remember, had disobeyed God and God intercepted his disobedience when he first refused to go to Nineveh by sending a storm. The storm very clearly was a judgment from God. Jonah knew this, and so verse 12, he says to the ship’s crew, pick me up, throw me into the sea and the sea will become calm for you.

And so chapter one and verse 15, they take Jonah, they throw him overboard, and we’re told there that the raging sea grew calm. Then we have this remarkable statement in chapter one and verse 17. The Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.

Now, this was an amazing miracle and there is no doubt in my own mind that it really happened. You will not be surprised that some writers suggest that this was just a parable or that it was just a story or a fable rather than a historical reality, an event that happened, that it's just a story to teach us something about God. But there is nothing in the story itself that suggests that.

And the biggest reason why I cannot accept that, and I'm wholly convinced that this was an event that actually happened, is that the Lord Jesus clearly regarded this as an event that actually happened. He says in Matthew 12 and verse 40, as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Now, the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ was an event of history. It actually happened, no mere story. And Jesus talks about the story of Jonah in exactly the same way as an event that actually took place. So the story of Jonah then does not belong in the realm of the parables. Where it belongs is in the realm of the miracles.

In fact, there are really three miracles here. First, that God provided the fish at exactly the right time. Second, think about it, that Jonah survived three days and three nights in the belly of the fish. And thirdly, that the fish vomited Jonah, as it says at the end of chapter two, onto dry land safely. Now, it’s good to know that God did an amazing miracle in the life of Jonah, but the important question is: what does this have to do with us?

And I want to suggest to you that Jonah chapter two was written to answer that question. That out of this extraordinary experience by any standards, Jonah writes the second chapter, the song of praise, to tell us how God saves sinners. How He saves sinners like Jonah, how He saves sinners like you, and how He saves sinners like me.

Now, I want to summarize the message today in a very simple sentence that I hope we can get hold of. And it’s just this: that God saves guilty, believing, desperate, repentant sinners. You might like to say that with me. Will you help me along here? Let’s get it in our minds. God saves guilty, believing, desperate, repentant sinners. One more time together. God saves guilty, believing, desperate, repentant sinners. Now, that’s the message of Jonah in chapter two, and let's see that for ourselves together.

First, God saves guilty sinners. I’m looking at verse three. Jonah says, you hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the sea, and the currents swirled about me. All your waves and breakers swept over me. Now, I’m coming to verse three first because it clearly recalls what happened when Jonah first hit the water. I want you to try and use your imagination with me and picture this situation for this man.

He’s thrown overboard, he hits the water, and notice what he says in verse three. All your waves and breakers swept over me. Now, waves and breakers are on the surface of the water, not at the bottom of the water. So he’s talking about what happened the moment he hit the water. Can you picture the situation? He manages, he goes under, he manages to get up for air. He takes a gulp of air, a breath or two, and then another wave comes over him and pushes him down, and he goes under again. He’s bobbing up and down, fighting for his life, fighting for air, trying to keep his head above water.

Later, because verse one says that this recalls what he prayed inside the fish, later he thinks back to what happened in these first moments in the water and he says to himself, God did this. God sent the storm. Verse three, you, God, you hurled me into the deep. Your waves broke over me. Now, I want you to think about this because Jonah could have said the ship’s crew threw me into the deep.

But he’s coming to a distinctively Christian understanding of life here. Behind the human events that happened to him, the crew threw him overboard, he sees the hand of God. Now, think about this. People view their lives in different ways. Some folks see their lives as a series of random chance events, and they feel that they’re either lucky or unlucky, and they talk like that all the time.

Other people see their lives as a series of events controlled by other people. They feel like victims and they talk like that all the time. Other folks see their lives as a series of events controlled by themselves. They feel like heroes and they talk like that about themselves all the time. But Jonah sees his life as a series of events controlled by the sovereign hand of God.

And he knew that behind the crew and beyond the storm, God’s hand was at work. And God was exposing his guilt and God was dealing with his rebellion. He’d suppressed that guilt for a long time. He’d been able even to sleep when he was in the boat despite the raging of the storm. That’s pretty good suppression of guilt to be able to do that. But in the water, he comes to his senses. He owns his own guilt. He embraces as it were his own sin, and he acknowledges that he is under the judgment of God. He says to God, you hurled me into the deep. All your waves swept over me. I am under your judgment and this is what I deserve.

Now, this is the first big thing for us to grasp from Jonah chapter two: that God saves guilty sinners. In other words, God saves us when we come to the place of acknowledging, owning, embracing our own guilt before Him.

Steve Hiller: You’re listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith and a message called Restrain God's Praise. Now, we have to pause here, but we'll get back to the message in just a moment. Well, Open the Bible's 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. And 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, 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, I mean 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 asked 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 thanks 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. Back to the message. Here’s Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Owning our sinfulness means getting beyond this idea that so many people live with: that we deserve something better from God. If you’re going through your life feeling that you deserve something better from God, get that out of your mind. The Bible says that the wages, notice that word, wages are what are due for work done, the wages of sin is—help me. What's the wages of sin? Death. The wages of sin is death.

What I am owed for what I have done by God is not abundant life but eternal death. That’s what I’m owed. That is what I deserve. And you know what? Owning your own sinfulness is the first part of believing the gospel. I am a sinner, a rebel by nature and by practice, and what I deserve from God is eternity in hell.

Now, if you don’t honestly believe that about yourself, you do not yet believe the gospel. You are not yet being saved because God saves guilty sinners. And if you’re not in that category, if you have not seen that and owned that yourself, you're not yet in a position where God is saving you. And Jonah owned his guilt right there in the water, struggling with the waves pouring over him. He said these waves are your waves, I am under your judgment and I deserve to be under your judgment.

God saves guilty sinners. And believing the gospel begins when you own your own guilt by nature and practice before God. Second, God saves believing sinners. Now, let’s look at verse two and verse four either side of where we began. And let’s ask this question: where did Jonah first call upon God? When did he first ask God for help? Was it in the fish or was it in the water? That’s an important distinction.

Notice verse one says from inside the fish, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. But notice that after that, what he said inside the fish is for most of the way up until about verse eight, it’s all in the past tense. He’s looking back to what happened when he was in the water. Past tense: in my distress I called, past tense, to the Lord, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, verse two, and you listened to my cry.

So he’s looking back to what happened before he was in the fish, when he was still there in the water and he says in my distress, the distress was in the water. When he was in the fish, he knew he was safe. But his distress was in the water and he says there I cried to the Lord, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called and you listened to me.

The word that's grave there, translated grave, the depths of the grave in the New International Version, literally means Sheol or the place where dead people in the Old Testament were separated from God. We would say hell. And so what he’s saying there is from the depth of my hell, I cried out to God for help. See, here’s a man who’s been running from God and now he suddenly realizes he’s on the brink of an eternity without God. And he says out of that, I just cried out to God and you listened to me.

Now, friends, it isn’t easy to ask God for help when you are very aware of your own guilt. When you know you have sinned and you are aware that in some particular way you are under His judgment, when you feel your own guilt, it takes courage to ask God for help. And I want you to see what a great struggle that was for Jonah. You’ll never see it more clearly than in verse four of chapter two. He says, notice the first line, I said, I have been banished from your sight.

So Jonah’s heart at this point condemns him completely. God, there’s no hope for me now, he’s saying to himself. I see and I feel the weight of my guilt and my own failure. He came to the conclusion that he was beyond forgiveness. He felt within his heart that God had pulled the rug from him, that there was no future, that there was nothing now that he had by way of hope at all. Some of us may have been there. He came to a point where he really believed that. God doesn’t want me now.

But I want you to notice this amazing thing, what he says in the very next line because it’s a battle that’s going on in his mind and it's a battle that you will experience if you seek to find your way to faith. On the one hand, I said I’ve been banished from your sight, there’s no hope for me, I’m an outsider, I’m gone. Yet I will look again towards your holy temple. It’s a marvelous statement. It comes out of a battle and it’s raging inside Jonah’s own soul right here in the water.

He wants to pray. But as you’ve probably experienced, he feels so far from God he thinks, I can’t possibly pray. God’s not going to listen to me. The flesh tells him God doesn’t want to know you, but somehow something within him rises up and says, no, but I’m going to cry out to God, I’m going to reach out to God, I’m going to put my hope in God.

Friends, don’t expect coming to faith to be easy. Jonah struggled to believe. Your life and your eternity hang on this. So why would you be surprised if it is literally the fight of your life? That’s what it was for Jonah. Easy phrases about just believe, just believe. It’s a battle for him to believe that God will listen to him. And it may be for you too.

Yet I will look to your holy temple. Could you make those words of Jonah your own in the struggle that you have to believe? Even though I have sinned and even though I feel your judgment upon me, I dare to hope in you. Jesus told a story about two men who came to pray. One person came into the temple and told God about all the good things in his life, and then he went home. Another man, Jesus said, came into the temple and told God about his sins. And he said, Oh God, be merciful to me a sinner. And Jesus said that second man, not the first one, went home right with God.

Steve Hiller: Well, unfortunately, we do have to hit the pause button right there, but we'll continue this teaching next time here on Open the Bible. Our message is part of a series called How to Avoid a God-Centered Life as we’re taking a look at the life and the story of Jonah. And if you ever miss a broadcast in this series, come and listen online at openthebible.org.

Well, Colin, as you pointed out early in our broadcast today, we saw that God’s grace did triumph in Jonah’s life in the midst of him really going through some tough struggles.

Colin Smith: Yeah, it’s a marvelous story of hope. And when he was in the water there, he must have felt quite desperate. He sensed that he was banished from God’s sight. And you know, when the Holy Spirit begins to work in your life and you become aware of what you have done wrong and how far you are from God, the greatest danger is that you give up and that you lose hope. And Jonah was nearly there. He said, I’ve been banished from God’s sight, no hope for me. But he didn't end there. He said, yet I’m going to look to your holy temple, and he put his faith in God. And we’re going to see what that struggle for faith looks like and how God in His mercy prevails even when we’ve hit rock bottom.

Steve Hiller: You know, Colin, I think there may be a lot of people, and you, I’m sure you’ve heard this time and time again as you’ve talked with and counseled with people who have said, I do feel like I’m sinking, I do feel like I’m so far and distant from God. But I am such a mess. I’ve done so many bad things. Here Jonah, he was a prophet of God, but I don’t have that resume. Would God take a messed-up person like me?

Colin Smith: Well, of course that’s the great thing about the story of Jonah: that God would take a messed-up person like Jonah. Because whatever he looked like on the outside, he was really messed up on the inside. And actually that’s the position of all of us. And that’s why Jesus says, I’ve not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. And the cross is all about God in His mercy reaching out to you where you are. You don’t have to clean up the mess before you come to Christ. You come to Christ in order that He, the Redeemer, will transform your life. And that’s what grace does.

Steve Hiller: Colin, thanks. By the way, if you want to go back and listen to this message or any previous message in our series, you can do that at our website, openthebible.org. Or you can order a copy of the entire series on CD. Ask about How to Avoid a God-Centered Life when you call 1-877-OPEN-365, or you’ll find ordering information online at openthebible.org. For Pastor Colin Smith, I’m Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening, and I hope you’ll join us next time.

Colin Smith: Everyone has questions about heaven, but the question that matters most is: how do you get there? Many people have the idea that if a person was to get into heaven, they’d get there by living a good enough life. Well, the thief on the cross hadn’t lived a good enough life, and he wasn’t in a position to start living a good life. But Jesus said to him, today you will be with me in paradise. Well, if the thief could get into heaven, so can you.

Heaven, How I Got Here is a compelling 60-minute film in which Stephen Baldwin portrays the thief on the cross in a one-person play. Many have found that this story opens their eyes to the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and to the hope of heaven. You can watch the Heaven, How I Got Here film for free on the Open the Bible website. For more information, visit openthebible.org/heaven. That’s openthebible.org/heaven.