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Colin Smith: 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?

Steve Hiller: Welcome to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. And Colin, we may have some listening today who maybe have just been thinking about what it means to come to God. Maybe they’ve been listening to this program for a little while and they’re in that fight right now. What would you say to them?

Colin Smith: Oh, I’d say to you that as long as you look at yourself, you’re going to find yourself like Jonah, sinking down further and further. And the only way to overcome that is going to be to look at God as he is revealed in Jesus Christ.

If you keep looking at yourself and your failure and how you can’t believe and how your faith isn’t strong enough, you’ll just keep going down and down. You’ve got to get off that, and you’ve got to fight to get off that. You’ve got to look at what God promises to you in Jesus Christ and who he is for you in Jesus Christ.

He’s reaching out to you in love. He’s able to change your heart. He’s able to make you a new creation. He is the one in whom you can put your trust. But you see, you’ve got to get your mind and your heart onto him and off yourself and your own inadequacies and your own failings.

Steve Hiller: Well, we’re going to look at that today, including four life-changing steps. So I hope you’ll stay with us and open your Bible right now to Jonah chapter two as we continue the message, “Restrain God’s Praise.” Here’s Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: Now, I want you to notice this. It’s very important for those who would believe in the Lord Jesus Christ today. What happens when Jonah believes? The answer is, verses five and six, his problems got worse.

Think about that. It’s very important to know. God allowed Jonah to go down to the bottom before he sent the great fish. I’ve never actually thought about that before until I looked at it more closely, but it’s very clear.

Verses five and six describe Jonah’s experience going down. Verse three, remember, he’s on the surface, the waves and the breakers. But look at verses five and six. “The engulfing waters threatened me. The deep surrounded me.” He’s not above the water now. His strength is gone. He’s sinking.

“Seaweed wrapped around my head,” verse five. He’s gone down so deep now that he’s surrounded by weeds that would have been on the ocean floor. “To the roots of the mountains,” he says, “I sank down.” It’s clear he went all the way to the bottom. Remember that the storm had stopped.

If Jonah had managed to stay on the surface, perhaps he could have found a piece of wood, held on, saved himself. But God takes him down to the bottom of the ocean. He’s beyond any hope of being saved from a piece of wood now. He has no way out. He is absolutely hopeless. And then, God sends the fish.

Verse six: “To the roots of the mountains I sank down. The earth beneath barred me in forever. But you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord, my God.” I wonder, did Jonah see the fish coming? I mean, he says, “My life was ebbing away.” Clearly, he had in his mind cried out to God when he was in this most desperate situation and feeling that perhaps it was going to slide away from him after all. Did he even know what was happening when the fish swallowed him? I wonder.

But then, inside the fish, he breathes like a man spluttering back from the very brink of death itself. Now, what this is telling us is something very important: that God saves people who cannot save themselves. That is us.

See, there are thousands of people who have the idea that salvation is basically get your act together and do it by some moral effort, good works, family values, the Ten Commandments, come to church, and oh, by the way, of course you’ve got to believe in Jesus as well.

My friend, if you could save yourself, basically by getting your act together and believing the right things, why would Jesus have to die on the cross? Jesus Christ came into the world because you and I, we need someone to save us. We can’t save ourselves.

God sent the fish because Jonah couldn’t save himself. He’s right at the bottom. And that’s why God sent Jesus for you and for me. One evidence, by the way, of true faith is that you know that apart from Jesus Christ, what he did on the cross and what he still does for you right now as your risen Lord, interceding for you in heaven, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ, you know you would be completely, utterly, and hopelessly lost.

Do you see that? Do you feel that? Is it clear to you? Because if it is, your heart will be full of praise and thanks and worship to him. God saves desperate sinners. And what Jonah teaches us here is that as someone who believes, God may allow you to go right to the bottom in some circumstance of life.

And you may think, does God really care about me at all? And he’s calling you to trust him and to hang on to the grace that is in the Lord Jesus Christ, even right there at the lowest point of your believing life. If you’re not ready for that in Christian experience, you’ll never understand what’s happening to you.

God saves, thank God, desperate sinners. And here’s the fourth: God saves repentant sinners. Now let’s look at verses eight and nine. And notice, by the way, that when we get to verse eight, he moves from the past tense to the present tense. So now this is what Jonah is saying directly in the belly of the fish. Now that he has been taken out of the place of death and he’s now been brought into a place in which God is sustaining his life.

Now I want you to notice how clearly in this chapter we see that salvation from sin involves both faith and repentance. In other words, when God saves Jonah from what looked like certain death, and when the fish brings him to the dry land and vomits him out on the sand, Jonah does not go back to the port in Joppa and get the next ship to Tarshish.

He does not, in other words, continue in the disobedience that got him into this situation in the first place. What does he do? He moves in a whole new direction, obeying the commandment of God and he goes, as we saw, to Nineveh.

In other words, God’s salvation, if you’re really saved, it involves a complete change in the direction of your life. That’s the point of verse eight. Those who are clinging to worthless idols, they forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

You hold on to something else that you put in the place of God, you forfeit, notice that word, you lose out on the grace that God could be giving to you. You cannot receive grace from the hand of God and hold on to an idol that is in his place at the same time.

Now, this total change in direction, this is true even if you lived a very good and moral life before you came to Jesus Christ. See, when he says about the idols, what that’s saying is this: what you live for changes. Or to put it more accurately, who you live for changes.

Steve Hiller: You’re listening to Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith in 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’s book, *Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure*.

Colin, what is this book about? 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.

Colin Smith: 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 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 throughout 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. Back to the message, here’s Pastor Colin.

Colin Smith: When Jesus Christ saves you, you are no longer your own. The New Testament puts it this way: if you belong to Christ, you are bought with a price. And what an amazing price that was. You directly were purchased by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. So you’re not your own. I’m not my own. Can’t live for myself. I belong to Christ. And if you are in him, he by his Spirit is in you. You are a new creation.

Think of this. Here’s a connection with our experience. When Christ saves you, you can read about this in Romans chapter six, you go through a spiritual death and resurrection that is symbolized in what? Baptism. Going, like Jonah, under the water and back up again into a new life. Thank God the baptism doesn’t involve going to the bottom of the ocean.

But you see what baptism is saying: you’re no longer the same person. Like Jonah, who went to the gates of death and then came up into a new life, you are a new person in Jesus Christ. And through death and resurrection in Jesus Christ, you now rise to live a new life. That’s Romans chapter six and verse four.

Now, this repentance has two sides: it involves turning from and turning to. We turn from idols and we turn to the Lord. And notice that in letting go of the idols, in Jonah’s case, the idol was his own comfort. I’ll do whatever is comfortable, God, but nothing else. And he smashes that idol. He says, no Lord, I can’t hold that idol anymore. I’ve got to be yours. I’ve got to be ready to do whatever you call me to do. So he turns from the idol and he turns to the Lord.

Verse nine: “But I, I with a song of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good.” And he says, “Salvation comes from the Lord.” Now, I want you to think about how amazing this is. “I with a song of thanksgiving.” So the man is singing in the belly of the fish. He’s thanking God. He’s worshipping.

I mean, we know about Paul and Silas worshipping in prison in the middle of the night. Think about this: this is Jonah worshipping the Lord in the utter darkness of the belly of the fish. Talk about worship venues, this is the most unusual worship venue of all time. We talk about folks worshipping at Douglas and folks worshipping at the Grove. What about the folks worshipping in the belly of a fish? It’s what Jonah was doing. This is the strangest sanctuary in human history.

And I want you to think about it. It was dark. Can you imagine the smell? You would think that Jonah would be saying, Lord, get me out of this place. But he doesn’t say that. Instead, the highest praise comes from the darkest place and why? Understand this. Why is Jonah so full of gratitude in the fish?

And the answer is that when he was in the water, he was sure he would die. But when he was in the fish, he was sure he would live. Because if God had intervened in his life so graciously and in such a miraculous way as this, what could be more certain than that God would complete what he had begun in this amazing saving work in Jonah’s life?

And friends, there will be times in your believing life when you feel like you are in a dark, stinking place and your natural impulse would be to say, Lord, get me out of here. But I want you to think about Jonah. For even there you can praise and thank him for this reason: that what God begins, he completes.

And however dark your experience in your journey through life as a saved person, remember this: that he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up freely for us all, how will he not also along with him graciously give you all things? And Jonah worships in the belly of the fish because however uncomfortable his experience at that moment in time, he knows that God is saving him. And that is all he needs to know. From inside the fish, he prayed.

And if you’ll just glance over that wonderful chapter with me one more time. He looks back at what God did for him in the water. And he says, oh God, when I was back there in the water, I cried out to you for help and you listened to my cry. You were the one who threw me into the deep. Your waves, they broke over me. I was on the brink of hell. I thought I was gone forever.

But in a great struggle, I came to the place of saying, God, I’m going to look to you, I’m going to ask of you, I’m going to trust in you, even here. And I cried to you for help. Here’s what happened: I sank to rock bottom. And here’s what you did, oh God, you brought my life up from the pit.

What you have done for me is so amazing that with a song of thanksgiving, I want to tell you right here and now, however stinking and terrible this place is at this time in this moment in my life, I want to thank you for your amazing grace, for your saving love that has brought me back from eternal death.

And from this day, I want to say, Lord, my life is yours. What I have vowed I will make good. God saves guilty, believing, desperate, repentant sinners. Now, folks, here’s what that means in this last moment. It means that God is ready and able to save you.

And I’m sure that in our services this weekend there will be a number of folks who have been thinking about the claims of Jesus Christ, but you’re kind of on the edge. And I can think of no better day than today for you to come to saving response to Jesus Christ, who is able to save guilty and believing and desperate and repentant sinners.

So I want simply to invite you in these last moments to make four steps that will be life-changing and eternity-changing for all who make them. I want to ask you, will you, as someone who has perhaps sat on the fringe of Christian things for a while, will you today own your own sinfulness?

Will you confess to God today, I’m a sinner, Lord, I’m a rebel by nature and by practice? What I deserve is not abundant life like I tend to think, but actually eternal death. And I own my guilt, and I own my sinfulness before you. Will you take that step? Will you own your sinfulness before God today?

Second, will you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ today? The Son of God loved you and he gave himself for you when he died on the cross for your sins. He rose from the dead and he is ready and willing to save all who will put their trust in him. So I’m asking you today, will you ask Jesus Christ to save you?

You can come to him as simply as this, and you may find it’s a great struggle and a great battle to get to this place. That’s because of the intensity of the spiritual dynamic that is going on right now. But you can say, Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me from sin, deliver me from death, and deliver me from hell through your shed blood on the cross. You can ask him that today. Will you ask the Lord Jesus Christ to save you?

Third step: will you trust Jesus Christ whatever happens in your life? Jonah trusted God at the bottom of the ocean and in the belly of the fish. And I’m inviting all who believe, those who believe for the first time today and those who’ve believed for a long time today, will you trust Jesus Christ whatever happens in your life?

He has said, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Trust him in that. He has said, I will never leave you, I will never forsake you. Lean on that. He has said, my strength is made perfect in weakness, my grace is sufficient for you. Hang on to that. Trust him whatever happens. That’s what a life of faith is. For those who trust in him, Jesus says will never be put to shame.

And then fourthly, will you commit yourself to a new life of obedience to Jesus as your Savior, Master, and Lord today? Will you turn from all that God says is wrong? Will you pursue all that God says is good with the help of his Spirit? Tell him, this is what I’m going to do, and then ask him for the help of his Spirit to do it.

Christ saves guilty, believing, desperate, repentant sinners. And so if you are taking these steps today, he is saving you.

Steve Hiller: A powerful message today here on Open the Bible with Pastor Colin Smith. And maybe as you’ve been listening today, you realize that you’ve never come to Jesus in this way. You’ve, for whatever reason, kept him at a distance. But you know that he is inviting you to come to him. You’d like to know more about that.

I hope you’ll contact us here at Open the Bible. We have staff members who would love to talk with you about what it means to come to Jesus and to begin a relationship with him. You can reach us by calling 1-877-OPEN-365. That’s 1-877-673-6365.

Colin, I’m sure that there are some listening today who just appreciate the fact that you pointed out the fact that God is saving desperate, repentant sinners, people who really feel like they’re at the end of their rope sometimes.

Yeah, and we’re going to go on and talk about how salvation comes from the Lord. This is the most marvelous truth to me in the Bible. God has done more for us than make salvation possible. He’s done more than kind of open a way and say, well, now let’s wait and see if there’s anyone who chooses to believe in Jesus and anyone who becomes a real Christian.

He’s actually in the business of saving people. And maybe you have a loved one, maybe you have a friend and they’re far from God right now and you wonder what hope is there for them? Well, here’s where there’s hope and we’re going to look at this tomorrow, Steve. Salvation comes not from an individual themselves, but it comes from the Lord. And that’s what Jonah wants to put at the very center of the story.

Well, that is good news indeed, and I hope that you’ll join us for our next broadcast. If you ever miss a program, you can listen 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: Hi, this is Pastor Colin again and I want you to know about *Watch Your Doctrine*. *Watch Your Doctrine* is a six-session course that is geared for leaders, but accessible for every believer. The six sessions will introduce you to six central truths of the Christian faith: how we know God, how God speaks to us, how sin affects us, how God’s Spirit brings new life, how we’re made right with God, and what Jesus accomplished on the cross.

There are questions at the end of each session and you can use them on your own or you can discuss them with a friend. For more information or to begin this free online course, visit openthebible.org/courses. That’s openthebible.org/courses.