Running To Win 15 Minute Version

Announcer: Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfector of our faith.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Some of us feel that our well-being is a constitutional right.

Announcer: Jonah's desert experience with a shady plant teaches us this: there are more important things than how we feel. Today, getting our priorities straight. Stay with us. From The Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line.

Today, Erwin Lutzer continues his series on Brokenness, how God gets us to say yes. Studies in the book of Jonah. As we near the end of our series in Jonah, turn to chapter four as we find our motives unmasked by the piercing gaze of God.

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: By the way, do we deserve our money? You say we earned it. Oh, really, did you? Who gave you the ability, the brains, and the opportunities to be born where you were, to be gifted the way in which you are? You mean to say you have a right to this? Believe me, you and I have no rights to any of this.

But you will notice that the Lord says, "You have pity for the plant for which you did not labor, you did not make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night." Now comes the really big question, "And should not I pity Nineveh?" That great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle. He may be talking here about children, 120,000 children.

If you think about that and you realize that they had parents, you can begin to multiply out how big the city of Nineveh really was. And God says, "You had compassion on the plant, and you have no compassion for people?" What is this? Here you have the clash of personal comfort and desire, the clash of personal comfort and desire with the eternal destiny of human beings and all that you can think of.

Jonah, all that you can think of is whether or not you are comfortable where you are sitting, and your world ends there. Earlier I spoke about narcissism. If I may use one more illustration of a narcissist. The reason I do that is because I am always interested in the causes of human behavior and once you are as old as I am, you have heard a lot of stories.

The fact that I use another woman in no way indicates that women are more narcissistic than men. In fact, the opposite is probably true. There is much more narcissism out there on the part of our male species. But I am reminded of a man married essentially to a narcissist.

He went to the doctor for an exam, and the doctor looked him in the eye and said, "You have got cancer." So he calls his wife and says, "I have cancer." What is the first question out of her mouth? Not the second, not the third, not the fourth, not the fifth, where it may be a legitimate question at some point. What is the first question? Not, "Well, is it the kind of cancer? Do they think they can cure it? Do you think that there is medical treatment?" No, the first question is, "How much insurance do you have?"

That is a true story, you know. Not making this up. What happens is in our lives it is possible for us to be so focused on self, as I mentioned, all of us are born with narcissism and God tries to rid us of it. Where our comforts, our perspective, our standard becomes the benchmark upon which everything else is judged, and there is no compassion, there is no pity, there is no sacrifice, all that matters is me.

And Jonah here wants to create God in his own image, and saying, "God, I hate these people, and I want you to know that I think that if you were right, you would hate them too. Why do not you become like me?"

I met a man one time and I said, "You know, do you want to serve the Lord?" He said, "Oh yeah, yeah, I want to serve the Lord." I said, "How do you want to serve him?" He said, "As an adviser."

And we become angry because God does not become angry with a people that we are angry at. And God does not exercise his justice that we think he should exercise toward people that we believe a just God should. And so we become angry with God because we know that back of these circumstances lies God, and therefore we consider our own point of view, our own little narrow place in this planet the most important thing by which everything else is to be judged, including God.

There are two or three very important applications of this passage. The first is simply this, unless we are broken, we will never be touched. I need to say this slowly, and I am going to say it twice because if you are in the writing mode, you need to write this down.

Unless we are broken, we will never be touched by what breaks the heart of God. Unless we are broken, we will never be touched by what breaks the heart of God. We will not be touched by the 120,000 children in Chicago, and there are a lot more children than that, and their needs.

We will not be able to look beyond our own little world, with our own little comforts, and our own little entertainment centers, and our own little world, and our own little vacations. We will always just be narrowed in. Unless we are broken, we will never be able to weep or to be touched by that which breaks God's heart. And God is compassionate and merciful and full of pity, and we will not be.

Because self is on the throne of our lives and all that we care about is ourselves. We look out for number one. We have so many people in our churches today, and we are all guilty of this. You know, I am preaching this message to myself too. I hope you understand that. I always preach to myself first.

But we have so many people in our churches today who say they love God but have absolutely no concern about those who are precious to God. Talk is cheap.

And so unless we are broken, we will never extend ourselves. You say, "Well, I am concerned about the children in this city, but I do not know what to do about it." Well, one thing you could do is to check the bulletin. We need workers in our children's ministries right here at this church.

God is raising up a marvelous ministry over at Cabrini Green that you have heard about. And we need, we need people of compassion, people who care, we need people of sacrifice, people who have been able to see beyond their own little precious circle of comfort. So that is the first lesson.

There is a second lesson, and that is unless we are broken, we will feel comfortable in our sin and our rebellion. Unless we are broken, we will feel comfortable in our sin and our rebellion. We will have rationalized it. We will have lived in denial. We will not confront.

God takes this mirror, shoves it in our face, through maybe messages, through songs that are sung, through experiences, through people, through events. God takes the mirror and shoves it in our face, and we will not see ourselves, and we will become comfortable in our rebellion and justify our rebellion and look into the face of God like Jonah does and say, "I have every right to be angry even to the point of death."

You see, my friend, what God wants us to do is to allow his mirror to actually show us ourselves so that we can open our lives to God and invite him into every crevice, every closet of our lives, looking in, inviting him everywhere, so that so that he can show us our great, incredible need and at the same time show us his grace, so that we are broken before him, and that our will becomes his will, no matter what it is.

"God, I take your perspective. I do not understand it, but I take your perspective, and I bow humbly before it, and I accept it." George Mueller who had so many various orphanages in England, about eight of them, all run by prayer and faith, said there came a time when George Mueller died. "I died to my own ambitions, I died to my own plans, I died to my own reputation. I died to everything that I had been working for and had only one question, what does God want me to do?" That is brokenness.

Was it not Varley who told D.L. Moody one day, "We have yet to see what God can do through a man who is totally devoted to him." And D.L. Moody said, "By the grace of God, I will be that man." And he began a Sunday school. And is it not interesting that Moody Church was begun with children, and now so many years later, there are so many ministries that God is birthing in this church for children as his vision gets carried out. But that is brokenness, that is yieldedness.

You say, "Well, did God ever get Jonah?" This book ends and you say, "You know, it really does not have an ending. I want to read more. I do not know about your translation. I am reading the English Standard Version, and it ends there and then it has room on the page and I am saying, 'Hey, I want to know more about what happened here. I want to know whether or not Jonah had anything to say after God was finished at this point.'" But we do not.

But you know, I have a suspicion that Jonah did say yes. You know, the theme of this message, this series is brokenness, how God gets us to say yes. And even when I began the series, I was saying to myself, "Well, God worked with Jonah, but he never did say yes," because the pages of scripture just end. I cannot prove this biblically, but I suspect that Jonah did say yes, and I will tell you why.

Every scholar, every rabbi, the scholars throughout the centuries have puzzled as to who the author of Jonah is, because we are not told. And virtually everybody says it must have been written by Jonah, because who else would know all of these details, you know? Now you tell me something. Would a man write a story like this that makes himself look that bad, unless he had been broken by God?

I do not think so because God looks great in this book. Jonah does not. I love that line. God does look great in the book. Jonah does not, and actually, that is our autobiography too, is not it?

Announcer: Today is the second to last day we are making a resource available for you that I believe will bless you, it will challenge you. It may even cause you to weep as you think about the story of a little girl, but the reason that we are making it available is because it is, after all, a story of God's grace.

This abandoned girl who did not know her father eventually found him, and then ended up being rejected by him. But it ends in a graveyard. In this sense, she begins to recognize that she finds her ancestors and knows who she is. But in between, she and her husband become missionaries to New Guinea, opening up the ministry of the gospel to those people. For a gift of any amount, we are making this available for you because you and I know people who need this book in the midst of their hopelessness, their rejection, their abuse. But God is there for those who turn to him in the time of desperation.

You have been hearing Erwin Lutzer with part three of Death to Self-Justification, his final message on Brokenness, how God gets us to say yes. Studies in the book of Jonah. Next time, more on why a person truly broken before God has a heart that is broken by a world in need.

Dory, The Girl Nobody Loved, it is a heartwarming story of how God took a child abandoned in an orphanage and gave her a whole new life. Written by Pastor Lutzer, this book will demonstrate that there is hope even when no hope is visible. Dory, The Girl Nobody Loved, will be sent to you as our gift when you give a gift of any amount to support Running to Win. Call us at 1-800-215-5001. That is 1-800-215-5001. Online, go to offerrtw.com. That is offerrtw.com. Or write to Running to Win, Moody Church, 1635 North La Salle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is a ministry of The Moody Church.