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. After Jonah preached, he got angry and depressed. Then God sent a sequence of events to teach the wayward prophet some pointed object lessons. Today, we'll meet a plant, a worm, and a scorching east wind. 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. Pastor Lutzer, how will today's message sum up the life of the prophet Jonah?

Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer: You know, Dave, I remember preaching that message and I loved to preach it, and I'll tell you why. It's because in that sermon I saw myself and I saw others, human nature. We love the comforts that God gives us, but boy do we complain when those comforts are taken away. That's what happened in the life of Jonah.

And you know, one of the ways in which we can achieve stability is by pursuing God and a life of holiness. Now, if you have a reaction to that word, thinking holiness is not for you, if you're a believer, the Bible calls us to holiness. But what is it and what isn't it? I'm holding in my hands a resource that I think will be of tremendous help in answering those questions and birth in your heart a desire to be holy and also a path as to how that can be achieved. At the end of this message, I'm going to be sharing with you an opportunity for you to receive this resource. But for now, let us listen.

And God sends this scorching east wind to Jonah and says, "Well Jonah, how do you like that?" So God appoints our comforts, he appoints our disappointments, our losses, and he also appoints our trials. And Jonah's not handling this trial very well.

Could I say parenthetically and theologically, you'll notice that all are equally appointed by God? Do we have comforts today? You believe that God gives us comforts. We have comforts as human beings in friendships, in love, in opportunity, in clothes and houses, and all of the things that we enjoy. And those comforts are God-given; they are appointed by God.

But so are our losses appointed by God. Our disappointments, those things that we cannot control that just happen, situations over which we have absolutely no control that God brings into our life, probably for the same reason that he brought these things into the life of Jonah.

And then God appoints also those scorching east winds, when we are almost about to die and to see what is in our hearts. Because it's only these events that really show what's in there. It's not all the niceties, all the pleasantries, when everything is going well. It's how do you handle adversity. But each are equally appointed by God.

I'm sure that Jonah was very angry with the worm. I am sure that he had some very choice words for the wind. But actually, no use getting angry at the worm, no use getting angry at the wind, because the worm and the wind are both sent by God. It's God that stands behind these events.

So God again begins a questioning. He picks up the therapy and says, "I wonder if you're willing to listen to my question now." So you'll notice there in verse nine, God continues the dialogue: "But God said to Jonah, 'Do you do well to be angry for the plant?'" And this time he answered God.

You see, the first time God asked the question, it was, "Do you have a right to be angry because the Ninevites repented?" Jonah didn't answer that question. But God says to him now, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" And without even skipping a beat, he said, "Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die."

Now just think for a moment what it is that Jonah is really saying. He's saying, "I have a right to the comforts that God gives me. I have a right to my air conditioner. I have a right to be comfortable and not to be in this heat." But I am denying the compassion of God that brings me those comforts.

I am denying the right of other people to experience that compassion. I deny the rights of the Ninevites' eternal comfort. I would rather see them burn in hell than to have me burn under the sunlight here in a temporary way without a good booth and without a plant and with a scorching east wind. So you can see here that Jonah is in the midst of this dilemma and he does not get the lesson at this point that God is trying to teach him.

So God goes on and he says, "Jonah, that's a lesson in comforts now. What I want to do is to give you a lesson in the whole business of compassion." So God picks it up in verse 10: "And the Lord said to him, 'You pitied the plant for which you did not labor. Did you deserve the plant? Did you create it?'"

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'll 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 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're comfortable where you're 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'm always interested in the causes of human behavior. And once you're as old as I am, you've 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's much more narcissism out there on the part of our male species.

But I am reminded of a man married essentially to a narcissist. And he went to the doctor for an exam and the doctor looked him in the eye and said, "You've 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, "Is it the kind of cancer do you think they can cure it? Do you think that there's medical treatment?" No, the first question is, "How much insurance do you have?"

That's a true story, you know. I'm not making this up. What happens is in our lives it's 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'd hate them too. Why don't you become like me?"

I met a man one time and I said, "Do you want to serve the Lord?" He said, "Oh 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 the 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'm going to say it twice because if you're 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'll not be touched by the 120,000 children in Chicago, and there are a lot more children than that, and their needs. We'll 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 won't 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're all guilty of this. You know I'm 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're broken, we'll never extend ourselves.

You say, "Well, I am concerned about the children in this city but I don't 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've heard about. And 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's the first lesson. There's 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'll have rationalized it, we'll 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 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 don't understand it, but I take your perspective and I bow humbly before it and I accept it."

George Müller, 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 Müller 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. Wasn't it 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'll be that man."

And he began a Sunday school. And isn't it 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's yieldedness.

You say, "Well, did God ever get Jonah?" This book ends and you say, "You know, it really doesn't have an ending. I want to read more. I don't know about your translation. I'm reading the English Standard Version and it ends there and then it has room on the page and I'm 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 don't.

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 can't prove this biblically, but I suspect that Jonah did say yes, and I'll tell you why.

Every scholar, every rabbi, the scholars throughout the centuries have puzzled as to who the author of Jonah is, because we're 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 don't think so, because God looks great in this book. Jonah doesn't.

Because you see, the person who's delivered from his narcissism no longer asks, "How does it make me look?" Now he's asking a different question: "How does God look?" And as you read this book, God looks great. It's Jonah who's narrow-minded, shall I say pig-headed, and very narcissistic. But God comes off wonderfully.

And a man who is broken by God is willing to say, "I am willing to tell the truth as the truth is even though I look bad because at the end of the day, even my reputation in the lives of others is not as important as telling an accurate story and letting people give praise to God." And so he tells the story here without trying to make himself look good. There's no tweaking here.

Some time ago, a rather prominent woman wrote her biography, and I can't prove this but I heard that one library put it in the fiction section. Everything tweaked and worked so that it's my point of view, so that I come out looking a certain way.

A person who's broken by God, even his reputation is left in God's hands and he's not always trying to fix it. Appearance no longer becomes the important thing; reality does. And it seems to me that anyone who'd write a book like this is probably somebody who in the end said yes to God and finally gave up the fiction of his own will and his own desire.

So as I come to the end of the series, I have a question for you today: are you broken? Let me ask you a different question: what would have to happen in your life in order for you to answer yes to that question?

What areas of your life are unyielded, unsubmitted, protected, guarded, rationalized that would have to be given into the presence of the Almighty? What would you have to give up? Who would you have to talk to? What would you have to make right in your life if you were broken? Remember that God especially blesses those who finally say yes. Let's pray.

As children bring their broken toys with tears for us to mend, I brought my broken dreams to God because he was my friend. But then instead of leaving him in peace to work alone, I hung around and tried to help with ways that were my own. At last I snatched them back and cried, "How can you be so slow?" "My child," he said, "what could I do? You never did let go."

How many of you are here today who say, "Pastor Lutzer, today by God's grace I want to let go." Would you raise your hands, please? All throughout the auditorium, many are, and also in the balcony, I can see you there.

You're willing to say, "God, you've got me. You've got me. I'm letting it go, I'm yielding it all, I'm trusting the Holy Spirit of God to grant me the grace to do that." Whatever it is that you need to say to God at this moment, would you say it?

In this message I did not explain that Jesus died on the cross for sinners and that your first step in saying yes is to say yes to him as Savior. So you may be here and you're not connected to God at all. You can say, "Lord Jesus, I say yes to you as Savior." Those of us who know him have to say yes to him on a whole host of other issues.

Father, we've done what we could do. And if the Holy Spirit does nothing, then everything is a failure. But we believe that the blessed Holy Spirit of God has been poured out to change us. So work with us. Work with us, Father.

Grant us that balance between patience and discipline that we need to bring us to yieldedness, to give up the idea that we can transform you into our image. May there be no point in our lives in which we are out of agreement with you, we pray. In Jesus' name we ask, Amen.

My friend, I have to ask you a question: what about you? What do you have to let go? Sometimes we hear the expression "let go and let God," and that's a good expression. But I want to ask this question: what happens when you wake up tomorrow morning and you discover that your heart is not hot for God and you think to yourself, "Well, that was an experience that I had letting go, but what about today and what about tomorrow?"

I'm holding in my hands a book entitled *The Pursuit of Holiness* by Jerry Bridges. This book is going to help you to answer questions just like that. Because when it comes to pursuing holiness, there's God's side, he gives us grace, he gives us strength, but there's also our side. And that is what we can call intentional obedience.

It doesn't happen automatically. But God is there to help us as we pursue the real purpose of life and that is God-likeness. I hope that you have a pen or pencil handy because I'm going to give you some info as to how this resource can be yours. Very quickly, here's what you do: go to rtwoffer.com.

That's rtwoffer.com or you can pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. Could I say to you gently and yet with passion, let go of a mediocre form of Christianity, pursue God, pursue holiness? And here's a pathway by which you can do it. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Remember the title of the book, *The Pursuit of Holiness*. What you can do right now is go to rtwoffer.com or pick up the phone and call us at 1-888-218-9337. Let us all understand holiness and pursue it.

Dave McAllister: 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.

If you know Christ as Savior, your bank deposits are safe, where moth and rust cannot corrupt. Now that bank is not of this world, and as a child of God, neither are you. Next time on Running To Win, we begin a series from Romans chapter eight on the blessings we've been given as children of an awesome God. Plan to join us for Pastor Lutzer's first message, "You Have a Divine Calling." Thanks for listening. For Pastor Erwin Lutzer, this is Dave McAllister. Running To Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.