Running To Win

Dave McAllister: Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. When God wants to get the attention of one of his servants, he has many creative options. In the case of Jonah, God took extreme measures. The belly of a great fish is hardly the Holiday Inn, and here, Jonah got the message.

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. Pastor Lutzer, we’ve seen Jonah have to die to his self-will. What has to die next for this disobedient prophet?

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Well, you know, Dave, the words of scripture come to mind where the Apostle Paul says, “I die daily.” Jonah, of course, had to die to self. He had to die to self-reliance. He needed to be wholly owned by God. And so do you and I.

Today, there’s no doubt that there is a great deal of hurt in the world. Of course, it's always been that way, but oftentimes, it comes to our attention. I’m holding in my hands a book entitled *Dory, the Girl Nobody Loved*. I wrote this book as my wife and I got to know Dory and her husband. I heard her story, and I said this needs to be written down.

Imagine all that she has been through, if you can. Rejected, put in an orphanage, not visited by her mother, going from one foster home to the other. And yet, it is a book of hope. At the end of this message, I’m going to be telling you how this book can be yours. And by the way, this is one of the last times we’re making it available for you. For now, I want you to listen.

Was it not C.S. Lewis who said that he came kicking and screaming into the kingdom of heaven? And I know for sure it was Jesus who said, “No man can come to me except the Father which has sent me drag him.” That's what the Greek word means, drag him. You and I are pretty stubborn, especially when it comes to our relationship with God.

And in this series of messages on brokenness, I need to point out that brokenness doesn’t mean that we don’t have a will of our own. It doesn’t mean that we become colorless non-entities. What it means, though, is that we are committed to living our lives for the glory of God, even at great personal cost.

And we are willing to accept the circumstances that he brings into our lives, and we accept those circumstances as the will of God, not always chafing against them and fighting them and constantly in conflict. Yeah, we can improve our lot, but at the end of the day, we believe that what has happened in our lives can be used for good, and we accept it as from his hand.

Jonah is the man that we are talking about, and this is Jonah chapter 2. I hope you will be able to turn there in your own Bibles. It's a difficult book to find because it’s in those minor prophets. Minor meaning shorter prophets. So, you have Jonah, Micah, Nahum. One way to find the book of Jonah is to go to the break between the Old Testament and the New Testament and then just go backwards for a number of pages, and you should find it there.

Last time, we left Jonah in the belly of the fish. And it is there in this creative learning center that God prepared for him that God got his attention. Now just think about the belly of the fish. What can we say about it? Well, first of all, all of the regret in the world can’t change the past.

Jonah could have been there, and all that he could have done is to think about how terrible it was that he did this and say, “Oh, if only I had done differently.” No, there's room for regret, but regret never changes the past. There's no use praying like the teenager did, “Oh God, I pray that this accident might not have happened.” It's a wonderful prayer, but the accident has happened, and you were driving too fast.

Furthermore, in the belly of the fish, Jonah had no future. His future was out of his hands. He couldn’t say, “Well, now what I’d really like to do is to talk about my five-year plan.” In the belly of the sea monster, you don’t talk about that because your future is out of your hands. Catch this. He was not able to call an attorney and say, “I’m going to sue God for doing this on me.”

There was no possibility. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t even enlarge his living space, his Lebensraum, as they say in German. He wasn’t able to expand his living quarters. He was pretty confined there for 72 hours. And while he was there in 72 hours, he composed a poem. In fact, some people think it was made up later because it’s got snatches from the book of Psalms in it.

Well, maybe it’s because Jonah knew the book of Psalms. As a prophet, he should have known it, and so he took some of the ideas and pieced them together. But he did make these ideas his own. And remember, he had lots of time. He probably prayed other things too, but this is a summary of his prayer, and he probably went over it a number of times just to get it right. So, we have, in effect, a psalm birthed in the belly of a sea monster.

Notice the text says, verse 1, “Jonah prayed to the Lord his God.” I love that. He was God's servant, and now suddenly, the man who was running from God, who was saying, “I want to get away from the presence of the Lord,” this man suddenly is now again confronted by God. So he prays to the Lord, it says.

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. He prays to the Lord God saying, “I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.” Some people think that this means that Jonah actually died. Sheol in the Old Testament generally is the region of the netherworld. It is the, what shall we say, that area, that shadowy area where the spirits of the departed went in Old Testament times.

And some people say that this would be a much better example of Jesus, who later on uses this as an example of his own time in the tomb and his resurrection. But it's possible that Jonah didn’t actually die. He's just saying, “I was in the deepest pit that you could possibly imagine. I was in the depths, and I most assuredly thought I was going to die. And yet you preserved me.”

What did Jonah learn about God in the belly of the fish? By the way, most of us don’t like the smell of the outside of a fish. I’ve no idea what the inside of a fish smells like. But here Jonah was confronted with God. What did he learn? First of all, God was listening. I already read it there for you in verse 2. “He answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol when I cried, and you heard my voice.” God is not deaf.

In fact, frequently in the Psalms, it is said that, “Lord, when I cried unto you, you inclined your ear.” Now, God doesn’t have ears like you and I do. But the Psalmist means is that when I cried to you, what happened was you were listening. And you were so fine-tuned that you could even hear the whispers of Sheol. But you most assuredly therefore are able to hear me even though I’m confined, even though I have no future, even in the midst of this dilemma. Oh God, in desperation I cried to you, and you heard my prayer.

God understands all the different languages of the world, so he understands your words. He also understands your heart. He knows what it is that you are thinking. And even in the depths of Sheol, remember Psalm 139? “If I ascend into heaven, thou art there. And if I make my bed in Sheol,” there's the same word again, “behold, thou art there.” Of necessity, God has to be in Sheol. God even has to be in hell. He's not communicating with those who are going to be there, but he needs to be there because he is everywhere.

And so you can’t get away from God. And listen to you today, listen to you in your apartment or in your condo or in your home, in the midst of your grief, in the midst of your puzzled life, you cry to God, God is listening. As a matter of fact, you can contact him and you can call him collect. He has free phone service. Some time ago, I told you about a man who came to the church here and said, “You know, I’ve been trying to reach God, but he's not answering his calls.” You know why? He wasn’t using the right area code. You know, you get the wrong area code, and of course, he doesn’t. He was not using J-E-S-U-S. That's the right area code. When you use that area code, you can call collect. God listens.

Secondly, God was controlling, or we might say directing. God was directing. Notice what the text says. I’m in verse 3 now. “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the floods surrounded me, and your waves and your billows passed over me.” You’ll notice the number of things in the book of Jonah that God controls. God controls the wind. It says in chapter 1, verse 4, “And the Lord hurled a great wind onto the sea.” God spoke, and believe me, it blew and the waves were high.

And then you have God controlling the dice. Some of you say, “Well, does God control the rotation of the dice? Does he control who wins the lottery?” Well, all that I can do is point to the text. Always keep your finger on the text. Chapter 1, verse 7 says, “And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.’ So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.” So God controlled the dice that the sailors were using.

God also controlled the fish. We learned last time that he appointed a fish to swallow Jonah. God controlled the sailors as they made up their mind as to what to do, to throw the cargo into the sea and whatnot. And so God doesn’t have trouble with that. Later on, we’re going to find out that God doesn’t have trouble with a worm and a plant that grows up. But God is having some trouble with a man who will defy him in a way that the wind doesn’t, the dice don’t, and the fish doesn’t. But this man is going to say no to the will of God.

And even when he's there as God is trying to break him down, you’ll still find out, as we’ll learn next time, he was a very reluctant learner. Could I be talking today to somebody who is just plain stubborn? It's possible, but let’s hurry on. We don’t want to get too specific.

So God was controlling. Today, I’m speaking to some of you who, because of your own bad decisions, sinful, disobedient decisions just like Jonah's decisions, you are today in a difficult spot. But it's because of the trail you chose. This is just the natural results of you taking the wrong path and insisting that you’re going to take the wrong path and making one detour in your life after another. I’m speaking to you today, and you say, “Well, can God help me?” Well, did God help Jonah in his distress? And the answer is yes. Wherever you are today, cry to the Lord, and he will listen, and he will control and direct. And the reason that you can pray with confidence is because he is in charge and he can control and he can direct.

That's one of the things that Job had to learn, didn’t he? Where did Job's trial come from, God or the devil? It's a trick question. The answer is both. Immediate cause is Satan, ultimate cause God. That's why Job prays and says, “The Lord gave, the Lord takes away.” How do people die? Immediate cause: cancer, heart attack, all kinds of other creative ways that people die today. Ultimate cause: God. Blessed are those who can accept that and therefore receive God's comfort and know that he does all things well.

So Jonah's theology here is getting very biblical. He understands that it's God who hurled the great wind upon the sea. It's God who cast him there. The water belongs to God. It's “your waves, your billows passed over me.” It's your seaweed that is wrapped around my head, he’ll say later. God is controlling.

God was answering. Here I pick it up at verse 4. “Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight.’” I need to pause there for a moment. Is it not exactly what Jonah wanted? Chapter 1, he flees from the presence of the Lord. And we learned last time what that meant. He was fleeing from God. He was saying, “I’m resigning. I don’t want you in my life. I’m not going to pray.” He didn’t pray in chapter 1 because what I want to do is to put God on the shelf and then put a tag on the shelf that reads, “To be dealt with later. I’m doing my own thing.”

Like one woman said, she got into a car and she squealed the tires and shouted out loud, “God, I’ll see you around town,” as she did her own thing until finally, God got her. God can get people. Now notice that he says, “I am cast away from your presence.” Well, Jonah, you should be very happy about that. That's exactly what you wanted is to be driven away from your sight. That's what my translation says, English Standard Version. It says, “I am driven away from your sight.” Well, Jonah, aren’t you happy?

No, it's not a cause for happiness. There is no person in this world more miserable than someone who experiences the loss of God. The loss of God. No, it's not a cause for happiness. You may say, “Well, I’m going to do my own thing, and I’m not going to relate to God. I’m not going to seek his direction. I’m not going to seek the counsel of godly people who can help me make decisions. I’m not going to seek the Word of God. I know what I want to do and I will do it.” Some of you are on the verge of making a decision that could ultimately end up destroying literally the rest of your life because you may trip a series of dominoes and not know where those dominoes are going to end up.

So here he's saying, “I was driven away from your sight, and now I’m discovering that that is a life of misery.” When he says, “I shall look again upon your temple” in verse 4, it's probably the temple in Jerusalem. He goes on to describe what he's going through. “The waters closed in over me to take my life.” After all, there was a period of time when he was thrown into the water before the fish caught him. “The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.” That's when the fish swallowed him. It's as if now suddenly he was in this confinement that he couldn’t get out of.

And in his dilemma, he was crying to God. But I mentioned to you that God was answering. There it is in verse 4. “Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God.” God answers. And God was showing him that even in a dilemma over which we have no control, when we are finally brought to the end of manipulation, of self-will, of self-reliance, of dependence upon ourselves, of determination that we are going to change a situation, and God kicks all those props out from under us so that suddenly everything that we have been able to control no longer is under our thumb or under our feet, it is then that God meets us and answers us and it is then that God comes through. And so Jonah says that God was answering.

What else was God doing there? He was purifying. Two aspects to this purification. First of all, you’ll notice he says in verse 7 and following. Well, let’s look at verse 8. “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.” Why does he throw that in there? Because his own will and his own desires he recognized to be an idol. You know there are things that we set up, it says in the book of Ezekiel, that this people have set up idols in their own hearts. Our idol can be another person. It can be a vocation. It can be whatever we desire to do. That can be our idol that says, “I want this even above the will and the purposes of God. I want this more than I want the glory of Jesus.” And that's an idol.

You know, even as I hear these words, I have a sense of conviction because isn’t it true that all of us struggle with idols in our hearts? May we be enabled to love God with all our heart, all our soul. and I tell God every day that I do love him, and I hope that you do too. I’m holding in my hands a book entitled *Dory, the Girl Nobody Loved*, and this is one of the last days we’re making it available for you. It’s the story of a girl who experienced a great deal of hardship in her early life. Abandonment, a sense of neglect and rejection, and yet she and her husband ended up being missionaries in New Guinea. What this book does is it helps us to see that our past does not have to define us. It is our future, our hope in God, who can take the most awful story and as a result of it still do something very, very beautiful.

Now, very quickly, here’s what you do. You go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. We’re making this book available to you for a gift of any amount. Let me give you that info again. Go to rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Dave McAllister: It’s time now for another chance for you to ask Pastor Lutzer a question about the Bible or the Christian life. Pastor Lutzer, many people are antagonistic toward the Christian faith because they see Christians who don’t live out what they preach. A listener wrote to us asking how to handle this dilemma. He says, “Recently I had a conversation with a man that was very frustrating. He began saying he had many issues with Christianity. He went on for about three hours criticizing what we believe. One issue was if Christians claim to love and obey the Lord, why don’t they keep the Ten Commandments? I tried to explain that Christians, though forgiven, are still not perfect and we will always struggle against the sin nature. What else can I say to him?”

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: Well, you can say a couple of more things also. If he's the one who says that there are hypocrites in the church, what you need to do is to ask him whether or not there are hypocrites in the world. And then point out that sometimes the difference is that the hypocrites are in the church instead of the world, but that really we are all to some extent flawed.

And so what we need to do is to help him to understand that the purpose of the church is not for these perfect saints, it's for sinners who are trying to make progress in their Christian life. And if we define it that way, most assuredly, I’m sure he can find a reason to come to church as well. But there's a different slant to your question because you said that he asked why Christians don’t keep the Ten Commandments. Maybe he meant something different. We, of course, do not keep the Sabbath commandment the way in which it was commanded to be kept in the Old Testament.

That's a separate issue. I don’t think that that's what he was referring to, but if it was, I suggest that you go to your pastor, go to your local Christian library or bookstore. There are many books that discuss that particular issue. But the bottom line is you are right. Christians are not perfect. They are forgiven. They struggle. Sometimes they do not have a good witness for Christ. But hopefully, they’re on the right path. Encourage him to join you.

Dave McAllister: Thank you, Dr. Lutzer. If you'd like to hear your question answered, go to our website at rtwoffer.com and click on Ask Pastor Lutzer. Or call us at 1-888-218-9337. That's 1-888-218-9337. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Running to Win is all about helping you understand God's roadmap for your race of life.

Have you ever been at the end of your rope? Jonah was when he found himself in the belly of a great fish. God has amazing ways of getting us to say yes. He arranges conditions so that we would choose to do his will. Next time, Pastor Lutzer continues his series on Brokenness: How God Gets Us to Say Yes. We’ll turn again to Jonah chapter 2, learning about the idols we set up to avoid obeying God. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.