Episode Transcript
[00:00:18] Well, when I was 16 years old, I experienced just a very difficult, dark, traumatic thing.
[00:00:31] So my grandparents raised me for the majority of my childhood. After my mom passed away when I was 7, I was adopted by my grandparents at 13. Prior to that, lived with my stepdad in a very abusive home in all the conceivable ways. And so When I was 13, I was adopted by my grandparents. Love them, amazing people.
[00:00:50] But when I was 16 years old, on one particular day, I think it was a Saturday, I woke up and things felt a little bit off.
[00:01:00] And not long after that, my grandmother runs into the house frantic. Can't really understand what she's saying, but she hands the phone to me.
[00:01:09] And so I pick up the phone, I put it to my ear and I'm talking to dispatch. So I don't know what's going on, I don't know why I'm talking to dispatch. And here's what they say on the other line.
[00:01:18] What type of gun did he use?
[00:01:21] And so at that moment I realized, like, gosh, my grandfather has taken his life. So this was after years of battling severe mental illness from the passing of my mother on ended in him taking his life. And so I'm sitting there on the phone with dispatch, I'm processing all of these things and I think, what would be a normal 16 year old way to process this?
[00:01:47] I get off the phone, EMTs are on the way, and I look at my grandmother and I say, I have to get out of here, I have to leave.
[00:01:55] And I don't villainize myself for that being my instinctive response. I think that that was a flight thing that was happening in my brain. I just have to leave. I can't be in this dangerous situation anymore. I don't want to think about it, I don't want to see it, I don't want to.
[00:02:12] I can't be here. I have to leave. And I remember my grandmother just pleading with me to stay and buy the grace of God. I stayed. And very, very difficult time in our life.
[00:02:23] And the reason I bring that up to you this morning is because the theme of verse three and the reason that we wanted to do one verse today, okay, we're typically a three to four verse a week kind of a church. Today we're doing one is because here's the reality. All of us, in various ways and at various times, we run the book of Jonah can easily be read if we're not careful as a moral. How to not live your life.
[00:02:57] So we look at the Ninevites, this terrible evil group of people and say, don't be like the Ninevites.
[00:03:04] Or we look at Jonah, this prophet of God, who in a moment of calling runs away, be like Jonah.
[00:03:15] I just don't think that that's the primary theme of the book.
[00:03:19] I don't think that's the thrust of the book.
[00:03:22] I think that the book really, in many ways seeks to answer this question that we're going to talk about today.
[00:03:29] What does God do? And what has God done for those who run?
[00:03:37] What does God do for those who run?
[00:03:41] Whether you fall into the category of irreligious like the Ninevites, and you're here today and you're far from God.
[00:03:49] You're like, I don't even know why I'm here. Honestly, somebody invited me here. I don't know why I'm here. Maybe that's you. Or maybe you're here and you've been around church for a while and you follow Jesus and you love Jesus.
[00:04:00] And we all have this propendency to.
[00:04:03] Propensity to air, maybe on the side of religious, where over time we become a little bit more comfortable on our own righteousness and our own goodness and our own morality. And we're at least we're not like these guys. We're, you know, those. That culture out there, that culture is wicked, that culture is dark. At least we're not like that.
[00:04:21] But in our hearts we find moments by which we too run from God.
[00:04:29] And so what does God do for those who run?
[00:04:36] Verse three again says, but Jonah, let me read verses one and two again, and then I'm gonna get to verse three and we're just gonna go word by word through the verse, okay? Verse one. Jonah, chapter one says, now the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amittai, saying, arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it. For their evil has come up before me.
[00:05:00] But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.
[00:05:06] He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. So let's just look at the first phrase. But Jonah, Verse three. But Jonah, Jonah, as stated last week, if you weren't here, I'm just gonna kind of catch you up a little bit on this person named Jonah, okay? Jonah really lived. He's a historical person. He's not. The book of Jonah is not a parable. It's not an allegory intended to put.
[00:05:38] The Book of Jonah is a historical story, okay? It's something that actually happened, but also simultaneously something. A story that points to an even greater story, which we'll talk about in just a moment that involves you and I and where we are today. 21st century United States and Texas, okay?
[00:05:56] But the book of Jonah involves characters and people, historical people who really lived. So Jonah was a Jewish prophet, meaning that he was called by God to speak on God's behalf to the people of God. And Jewish prophets had primarily two roles. Okay? They were responsible for calling the people of God to repentance.
[00:06:17] The word repentance, metanoia, is the Greek word, just means to change one's mind.
[00:06:21] That's what repentance means. It means to change the way you think from you are God, little G to God is God.
[00:06:31] That's the primary change that must happen in the life of a person to be a Christian is metanoia. It's a gift of God's grace.
[00:06:41] They were called to preach repentance, and they were also called to preach grace.
[00:06:46] So Jonah was a prophet of God. He was called by God. Jonah had seen God do amazing things in the lives of the Israelites. He had seen God show grace to the Israelites by expanding their physical territory in the midst of being surrounded by their enemies, the Assyrians, they had actually.
[00:07:04] And even though Israel at the time had an evil king named Jeroboam, he was evil. He was an idolater. He led the people of God into idolatry. And. And despite all of that, God shows grace on the people of Israel by expanding their territory. And Jonah is the prophet, according to 2 Kings, chapter 14, responsible for extending that message of grace to the Israelites. This is Jonah. He was a recipient of God's grace, and he saw God's grace in miraculous ways. Jonah's name in a humorous, I think, just reality that we get to enjoy, like God is humorous sometimes. Jonah's name means dove, and the word dove means silly and senseless.
[00:07:42] And so, as we talked about last week, this is both a type of the people of Israel and it's a type of us.
[00:07:51] I don't know if that offends you. It would have offended me maybe a few years ago, but I think the older I get, the more I just. I'm like, yeah, I'm pretty silly and senseless sometimes.
[00:08:00] And I think that there's a lot of freedom in that, that you're not impressive.
[00:08:08] I'm not impressive. We're not impressive.
[00:08:11] Anybody Go to the Fort Worth Zoo.
[00:08:14] Yeah.
[00:08:16] Why you guys shy, bracing your hands? Fort Worth Zoo is amazing. Yeah.
[00:08:19] So you go to the Fort Worth Zoo and you observe the sheep for a little while. And then you think about this reality that like often throughout the Bible, God calls his people sheep, says, we're like sheep. Okay, what do sheep do? They're silly and they're senseless and they smell bad and they run into things. Sometimes they need a shepherd.
[00:08:38] We need a shepherd.
[00:08:40] Okay? Jonah needed a shepherd. Jonah's no hero. He's no, you know, great man of faith. Jonah is silly and senseless.
[00:08:51] So this is Jonah. And the word of the Lord comes to Jonah directly from God. And God tells him, hey, I want you to get up, I want you to rise, and I want you to go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it. Their evil has come up before me. So essentially what God is saying to Jonah is he's saying, I want you to go call out against the evil of Nineveh. Their evil has come up before me is a way by which God is saying that if the Ninevites don't turn from their evil, I'm going to destroy them.
[00:09:21] Gonna destroy them.
[00:09:23] Nonveh was a wicked place filled with wicked people. It was the capital of Assyria. They were known around the world for their brutality and cruelty. Like a modern day communist regime or terrorist organization. That's the way that we need to think about Nineveh.
[00:09:39] They didn't just punish their enemies, they did so sadistically. Words are going to be hard. I'm sorry, sadistically. So if you want to read about Nineveh, you can go Google Nineveh and read all sorts of commentary from ancient documents and manuscripts that talk about how cruel and sadistic the Ninevites were.
[00:10:00] And yet, in a life altering moment, the God of Jonah and the God of Nineveh says, their evil has come up before me. Go and call out against it. So what does Jonah do?
[00:10:11] He's given this task. He's given this call from God.
[00:10:15] Go call out against the evil of Nineveh. And Jonah rose to flee.
[00:10:21] He rose to flee. He rises as God commands, but not to follow.
[00:10:27] Jonah rises to flee.
[00:10:29] I want to spend just a moment talking about that word flee.
[00:10:34] The word flee is significant and important for us to understand what's really going on here with Jonah and what might be going on with us. So what does it mean to flee to Fleet?
[00:10:45] The author, which I believe is Jonah. The author uses the word, the Hebrew word nous which means to escape with haste to get to a safe spot. It's like if you can picture in your minds, like a warrior in the midst of battle, running from battle the opposite way. He's running with haste. When I was a kid, we used to call tornadoes twisters. Okay? We were a bit of a hillbilly family, so to speak, and so we'd call them twisters. And we used to get it twisted, quite a few of them.
[00:11:11] And we lived in a trailer house, and so we lived in a trailer house. It's not going to hold up well against a tornado. So we always had this theory that if we can go hit a bridge fast enough, then we'd be safe from the tornado. Or if we couldn't get to a bridge in time, we'd run to our bathtub and we'd throw a twin size mattress over our heads and we'd be safe from the tornado. I say all that to say, when the tornado siren went off, we ran with haste to the bathroom. That's the idea.
[00:11:34] Jonah is running with haste.
[00:11:37] Where?
[00:11:39] Where is he going?
[00:11:41] God calls.
[00:11:43] God commands. And Jonah fled with haste. So where did he run to? He ran to Tarshish.
[00:11:51] We don't know much about this particular historical place, Tarshish, but what we do know, and the point of what's being communicated here by the Holy Spirit, is that Tarshish was in the opposite direction of Nineveh.
[00:12:04] Okay, It'd be like if you told me, hey, Brad, you need to drive to Dallas and I drove to Mineral Wells.
[00:12:11] What would you say? First of all, you'd probably say, praise God, you should go to Mineral Wells because Dallas is terrible. You'd probably say that.
[00:12:21] But secondly, you would say like, you're going in the opposite direction. You shouldn't go to Mineral. Dallas is the opposite way. It's not the way of Mineral Wells. You're going in the opposite direction.
[00:12:30] This is the idea. Jonah flees with haste as far as he could go to get away from the one place God has called him to.
[00:12:40] Why?
[00:12:41] You ever think about that?
[00:12:44] Like, we read through the story and we've heard it. Maybe if we grew up in the church and we know, we know what happened, we know that he fled. But why? Why Jonah flee?
[00:12:53] Well, there's all sorts of speculation. Some people believe that he fled out of fear.
[00:12:59] That because Jonah was afraid of what the Ninevites could do to him. I mean, they were, after all, very cruel and brutal and sadistic people. What might happen if he actually went? Might he be hurt or Killed or maligned or whatever.
[00:13:12] So Jonah fled out of fear. Some people think that. Other people think he fled out of a desire for control.
[00:13:18] Like, going to Nineveh would have put his life very much outside of the realm of his own control.
[00:13:25] Okay, so I'm going to take control into my hands, and I'm going to go the opposite direction. We all do this sometimes. God calls us to something uncomfortable, and we're like, I don't. No, I'm all right. I want to do it. I'd rather stay here, because here, at least I know where the landmines are.
[00:13:41] Right?
[00:13:43] We want control. Some people believe that that could very well be. It could be a combination of all three of these things. But the third thing, and I think the thing that's most clear in Scripture, is that Jonah fled out of hatred.
[00:13:56] Jonah fled out of hatred. And what did he flee from?
[00:14:01] He didn't primarily flee from Nineveh, though. He did that. But there's something darker and more insidious underneath Jonah's fleeing from Nineveh, and it's this.
[00:14:12] Jonah fled from the presence of the Lord.
[00:14:18] Jonah didn't merely want to get away from Nineveh.
[00:14:22] He wanted to get away from God.
[00:14:29] John, chapter one.
[00:14:32] And I love the Bible for so many reasons, but it really is so piercing to our inner being and our heart, isn't it? Doesn't it expose things that we didn't even know were a reality for us?
[00:14:44] John chapter one says this, that our primary problem is that you and I, on our own, love the darkness rather than the light.
[00:14:54] We love it.
[00:14:57] We love our sin.
[00:15:01] We love being our own God or attempting to be.
[00:15:05] We love the freedom to wake up in the morning and do one thing.
[00:15:12] Whatever we want to do, we love it on our own.
[00:15:23] We all do this.
[00:15:24] We've all done this.
[00:15:26] I don't just want to flee from the call.
[00:15:29] I want to flee from the person giving the call.
[00:15:33] Jonah fled from the presence of the Lord. But here's the beautiful reality, friends, that is a consistent theme through the book of Jonah. You cannot flee the presence of God.
[00:15:42] Psalm 139, 7:12 is one of the most comforting passages in all of the Bible.
[00:15:52] Where shall I go from your spirit?
[00:15:55] Or where shall I flee from your presence?
[00:15:59] If I ascend to heaven, you are there.
[00:16:03] If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
[00:16:08] If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there, your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.
[00:16:17] If I say Surely the darkness shall cover me and the light about me be night. Even the darkness is not dark. To you, the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.
[00:16:32] I hope that if you claim the name of Jesus as a follower of Jesus, as a Christian, that's comforting to you and not suffocating.
[00:16:40] I've heard people say that sounds suffocating. I'm like, that's because you don't know the one it's talking about.
[00:16:50] Because in his presence there's fullness of joy.
[00:16:55] I don't want Jesus to leave me.
[00:16:58] I need him everywhere I go.
[00:17:00] I need him in the morning, I need him in the evening. I need him when I lay my head down at night.
[00:17:06] I need him when things are going really well in my life. I need him in moments of suffering. I need him.
[00:17:11] And you do too.
[00:17:13] What a joy that we get to see Matthew 28, this one little nugget of truth by which Jesus says, hey, I will be with you always, even to the end of the age, illustrated in Psalm 139.
[00:17:27] Jonah couldn't escape the presence of God.
[00:17:32] So as we talked about last week, Jonah knew much about God. He knew all the theology, seminary students. Praise God that you're here. I went to seminary. There's value in it.
[00:17:42] But beware.
[00:17:44] I mean, this like, beware that your study of theology does not grow you cold, that the Bible doesn't become to you a textbook to study and pass. And pass.
[00:17:57] I mean, don't let it be.
[00:18:04] Not only did Jonah seek to flee from the presence of God, but in so doing, the text says he went down to Joppa.
[00:18:12] Here's an interesting thing about the Hebrew phrase, he went down. This is the same idea behind the same idea as one going down to the depths of Sheol.
[00:18:25] Same idea.
[00:18:27] Jonah went down to the boat, attempting to flee from the presence of God in disobedience to God.
[00:18:34] And in so doing, where was Jonah going?
[00:18:37] Jonah was going down into death, because that's what life apart from God is. Friends, Jonah went down to death.
[00:18:52] Jonah wasn't just going to experience a small little taste of what life apart from God was like in spiritual death, but Jonah was missing out on life.
[00:19:09] You see, like when Ephesians 2 says that we were dead in sin for those who are in Christ by faith in Jesus, that we were once dead in sin when it talked in that state of being. I don't know if any of you remember, I came to faith at age 21, so I have very clear, vivid memories of what Life before Jesus was like.
[00:19:32] And the vanity of pursuing the things of the world in order to give me the satisfaction that my heart so craved and desired. And just seeing it fall flat time and time and time and time again, I remember that. That's very, very vivid. Doesn't mean I don't forget it sometimes. But I do remember that it wasn't just that I was experiencing spiritual death.
[00:19:52] It's that I was missing out on life, abundant, because that's who God is.
[00:19:58] He is life.
[00:20:00] He is joy.
[00:20:03] You exist, as the Westminster Short Catechism says, I exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever. That's why you and I exist.
[00:20:13] And apart from him, there is no joy, no lasting joy.
[00:20:19] There is no life apart from Him.
[00:20:25] And so Jonah went down and he did it, as we see through the book, we did it. He did it out of hatred.
[00:20:37] Jonah had a lot of legitimate reasons to hate the Ninevites. The Ninevites were terrible, wicked, evil, oppressive people. And specifically, they oppressed the Israelites. And Jonah had experienced that.
[00:20:49] Okay, so just try to consider for a moment if any of you in the room have ever experienced any sort of abuse at the hands of another, the kind of hatred that you feel in your heart, that you're tempted to feel in your heart is probably some of what Jonah was experiencing.
[00:21:05] And so it makes sense that our brother and friend would feel this way toward the Ninevites. In many ways, Jonah had right and justified reason to be very angry with the Ninevites and at the evil of the Ninevites because of how wicked they were.
[00:21:20] But that hatred, because it stayed in Jonah's heart and it kind of built its home in Jonah's heart, led him to this place of not.
[00:21:34] It led him to this place of being so deep and so profound that Jonah was willing to hear the call of God, look at the face of God and run, and the other way out of hatred. So I do want us to consider this question this morning.
[00:21:46] Does hatred for those who are Christians in the room, does hatred toward others reside in your heart?
[00:21:55] Does hatred toward others reside in your heart? And I think what we're going to be tempted to maybe conclude from that question is, no, like, hate's a strong word.
[00:22:05] For a long time, we wouldn't even allow our kids to use the word.
[00:22:09] That's a strong word.
[00:22:10] Don't say you hate green peas.
[00:22:15] Strong word to use.
[00:22:17] But maybe here's a better diagnostic question, and we've talked about this before.
[00:22:22] Unacknowledged frustration toward another person leads to bitterness.
[00:22:29] Unrepentant bitterness leads to contempt.
[00:22:34] Contempt is the fundamental belief that you are better than the other person.
[00:22:42] And unrepentant contempt leads to hatred.
[00:22:47] Well, I don't know if I really hate that person. Do you desire their good?
[00:22:52] Do you desire that person's ultimate good?
[00:22:55] Or is there something in you that kind of wishes it wouldn't happen?
[00:23:03] One author says bitterness is an acid that destroys only its own container.
[00:23:11] It's an acid that destroys only its own container. I would just elaborate a little bit on that and say it doesn't just destroy its own container. It obviously destroys everything around it too.
[00:23:21] It does destroy you. It will destroy you. But it also seeps out beyond you into those in your life that the Lord Jesus has called you to love.
[00:23:32] Jonah was bitter. He was angry.
[00:23:35] His heart was filled with hatred toward these people.
[00:23:38] And so he's going to go the other way.
[00:23:41] I'm not going to go call out their evil against them.
[00:23:45] God know. Jonah knows. Jonah knows God's character. You know, he knows what's God. He. He knows what God's going to do.
[00:23:52] He knows from Exodus 34 that God is a God who's gracious and compassionate and slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God is a saving God.
[00:24:04] This is who he is.
[00:24:07] This is why God reveals your sin to you. And reveals my sin to me is because his desire is to save.
[00:24:16] He doesn't reveal sin in order to condemn. He reveals sin in order to save.
[00:24:21] That's what he does. That's who he is.
[00:24:23] Jonah knows this. He's like, I'm not going.
[00:24:27] And so Jonah flees. He goes down into the depths of a boat port of Joppa, surrounded by a bunch of pagans. Not only do I not want to be around God, Jonah says, I don't want to be around his people.
[00:24:40] Because if I'm around his people, then they might call out my sin and I might be forced to go back to God. I don't want that.
[00:24:48] So he flees. He goes as far as he can go. Joppa, Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
[00:24:57] Jonah ran from God. And so as we seek to land the plane here a little bit.
[00:25:07] Is God calling you to something by his Spirit today and through his word that you find yourself running from.
[00:25:16] Maybe some of you are sensing the spirit wooing you to Jesus for the first time, and your temptation is to resist it.
[00:25:26] Maybe the spirit of God's moving in your heart and warming you to the things of God.
[00:25:31] And you know you know you need help.
[00:25:35] You know you can't make yourself right with God. You know you can't.
[00:25:39] You can't earn the forgiveness of sins that you so desperately need. And you sense God maybe warming your heart to the things of God and causing you to recognize that you're a sinner. And I'm smiling because this is a gift. If this is happening to you and leading you to the Savior, Jesus to put your hope in him alone for the salvation of your soul and the forgiveness of your sins. And you're tempted to resist. You're tempted to run.
[00:26:06] Some of you, some of us are Christians.
[00:26:09] And you're just running from something that God's clearly calling you to. Maybe he's calling you to confess a hidden sin to your trusted friends and community and you just don't want to do it.
[00:26:20] Like, side note, that's not in my notes. I'm never using an iPad again, by the way. This keeps going off, so. But we're doing fine.
[00:26:28] Side note here.
[00:26:31] One of the primary ways that you and I kill indwelling sin by the spirit in our Christian life is in community.
[00:26:38] And so if you're tempted to surround yourself with yes, people, people who are only going to tell you what you want to hear all the time, you should repent of that and go find some friends.
[00:26:48] Like, you should find some friends who love you enough to tell you the truth.
[00:26:54] Because it's not a friend who lets you live in darkness and is okay with it because they want you to like them.
[00:27:01] And I hope that we can be a community like that here.
[00:27:05] Grace and truth all the time. Grace and truth.
[00:27:12] Maybe he's calling you to lovingly and gently confront a brother or sister in order to reconcile. Maybe he's calling you to ask someone for forgiveness for the ways that you've harmed them, whether it be intentional or unintentional. Maybe he's calling you to forgive someone who sinned against you.
[00:27:29] Maybe he's calling you to share Jesus with a co worker or neighbor. Hey, if it's any consolation to you, I got cussed out two weeks ago trying to invite somebody to church. It happens to all of us, okay?
[00:27:40] I hadn't even gotten to the gospel yet. I just walked up with a church card and it was like, boom. And I was like, wow, all right.
[00:27:47] And I stumbled over my words and felt like an idiot and all those things, okay?
[00:27:51] So it happens to all of us. Do it anyways.
[00:27:56] We get to come back here on Sunday and rejoice together over those things.
[00:28:03] Are you Tempted to run?
[00:28:06] How are you running?
[00:28:09] Are you tempted to run?
[00:28:12] Your obedience to Jesus does not save you.
[00:28:16] Jesus alone saves you.
[00:28:18] His obedience on your behalf is what saves you and I. But the Christian life, as led by the Spirit out of love for God and love for neighbor, is obedience to the commands of Jesus.
[00:28:31] Teach them to obey all that I've commanded you.
[00:28:36] And so anytime we want to turn away from the commands of God in Scripture, we are running, doing the same thing Jonah did. We're running.
[00:28:50] So here's how I want us to. I want us to walk away with this.
[00:28:54] What does God do for those who run?
[00:28:57] What has he done?
[00:29:00] What has he done for those who run?
[00:29:05] This is really cool, and one of the great perks of my job to get to just study very deeply some of these things.
[00:29:12] The same word used to describe Jonah fleeing from the presence of God carries the same idea of a phrase used in Isaiah 53. 6 To describe God running toward us in the midst of our sin.
[00:29:30] Isn't that amazing?
[00:29:33] The same idea used to describe Jonah running in disobedience is the same thing that God does in the opposite direction toward those of us who are like Jonah.
[00:29:47] Jonah ran away.
[00:29:49] Jesus ran, too.
[00:29:51] Pastor Matt said that last week, and it's true.
[00:29:55] Jesus gives this amazing story in the book of Luke, chapter 15, and many of you know it. And it's the story of two sons.
[00:30:03] A younger son and an older son and a father. And really the story is about the Father.
[00:30:09] And Jesus tells this story of these two sons. One of them wants to steal all of his dad's things and run away and spend it on wild living.
[00:30:18] And so he does that.
[00:30:19] Give me your stuff. I'm going to go away and I'm going to enjoy my life. You can't tell me what to do anymore. Thank you. He goes and he does it.
[00:30:29] And the older son stays back. I'm going to keep working for dad. I'm going to love dad. I'm going to obey dad. I'm going to do all these kinds of things. And you know what happens. Maybe some of you don't, but at the end of the story, it says that the young man comes to his senses. He recognizes I can't keep living this way anymore. I'm literally eating pig food, and I've got no money and I've got no women. And all the things that he wanted at the time were running dry on him. And so he comes to his senses and he says, I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna plead for my Father's mercy.
[00:31:00] And so he goes back and I want you to picture this in your minds. Jesus is amazing.
[00:31:06] This is what Jesus says. God is like that. The Father sees the boy from a distance. And do you know what he does?
[00:31:12] He runs to him in haste to Him.
[00:31:22] He picks up his robe and he runs.
[00:31:27] Everett's in the service. I'm going to use him as an illustration.
[00:31:30] Everett was having epileptic seizures for about a year and a half. Grand mal seizures. Seven to eight a day. It was hell.
[00:31:38] And I remember a specific memory of us in our old house, standing in the kitchen, him running down the hallway, playing with his brother, dropping and having a seizure. And the haste by which I ran over to that boy and picked him up in my arms and held him while he was seizing is nothing compared to the haste by which God sent His son for you.
[00:32:02] Your sin and all the ugliness that's in your heart and in your mind that you struggle with on a day by day basis that you're guilty of and that I'm guilty of, that didn't repulse God. It led him to you.
[00:32:20] For God so loved the world that in haste he sent his only begotten Son.
[00:32:28] So that not whoever works their way to him or proves their worth, but whoever believes in him would not perish ever, but would have everlasting life and joy in him.
[00:32:40] That's what you have. That's what God's done for those who flee.
[00:32:45] That's the hope that you and I have. Not just when we're tempted to flee. That ought to lead us the other way, but when we have.
[00:32:56] So the story of Jonah isn't just a moral story of what to do and what not to do. The story of Jonah is about Jesus.
[00:33:05] It points us to the better Jonah.
[00:33:08] The one who, in full obedience, the Son of God, took on flesh and became man. Fully God, fully man. Lived a perfect life that you and I could never live. Filled with the Spirit, in perfect obedience to the law of God, goes to a cross and on our behalf he becomes sin. Though he knew no sin, he became sin. So that in him and through faith in him, you and I might become the righteousness of God. That's the good news.
[00:33:37] He ran to you.
[00:33:39] You and I, all like sheep, have gone astray. Paul says in Romans, chapter three, we ran the other way and God ran to you and to me.
[00:33:49] And so what do we do?
[00:33:52] Run to him.
[00:33:53] That's the application.
[00:33:56] Run to him.
[00:33:59] When Jesus says that his flesh, this is entry into communion says that his flesh is food and his blood is drink.
[00:34:10] And anyone who doesn't eat on his flesh and drink of his blood has no life within him.
[00:34:15] And do you know what happens?
[00:34:17] Many flee.
[00:34:20] That's a hard saying.
[00:34:22] So Jesus looks at his 12 hey friends, what are you going to do? You remember what Peter says, Lord, where are we going to go?
[00:34:34] You have the words of eternal life.
[00:34:39] Where are you going to go?
[00:34:41] Where are you going to run? Who are you going to run to?
[00:34:45] Who's ever done better for you than Jesus has?
[00:34:49] Who's ever cared more about your soul than Jesus has?
[00:34:54] Who's ever been more patient with you than Jesus has?
[00:34:58] Who's ever been more kind and compassionate in the midst of your worst moment than Jesus has?
[00:35:06] He died for you.
[00:35:08] He rose for you.
[00:35:10] Run to him, Sam Sa.
