God restores His kids

--- Welcome to our women's Bible study on the book of Jonah called The Call of Compassion. Today, we're going to study Chapter 2. What we've learned already so far is that God has a call of compassion going out to the world. He also wraps his kids into his call of compassion. And he has a heart of compassion for his kids because we don't always get on board right away with what he wants to do. But he knows us. He knows us inside and out. He knows our location. We studied that in some of those Psalms. He knows where we have been. He knows where we are now. He knows who we have been with. God is the original contact tracer. He knows all about us. Sorry. You're just a little slow, though. He knows our condition physically, spiritually, and emotionally. He knows it all. If we seek independence from him by turning aside, he is gracious. He pursues us. He doesn't throw us away. He pursues us. And we love this about him. He's patient, not wanting any, wanting all to come to repentance. Wanting all to be restored. So I want to begin with the verse from Exodus that I had put in our booklet right under the map. Exodus 34. It's something we should focus on probably every day of our life. That tells us that God is merciful. He is gracious. He is slow to anger. He's abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. And we need to just be reminded this is the character of God. We learned last week that God pursues his kids to the highest heavens and the depths of the sea. And the purpose that he pursues us is to restore fellowship. And so today's title is God Restores His Kids. God pursues his kids. God restores his kids. Chapter 2 has two convenient bookends for us. The first bookend is right at the end of chapter 1, where it says that the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And the second bookend is at the end of this chapter, where it says the Lord spoke to the fish and he vomited up Jonah. Kind of raw bookends, but that's what it says. And the narrative tells us that Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. A lot of time for contemplation, I would say. So when we study this chapter, what we're going to do is we are going to peek inside of the soul of this man. We know where he's at physically. The text tells us he was in the depths of the fish. He was in the depths of the sea. And we're going to learn where he was at emotionally and spiritually, in the depths of despair. That's what verse 2 says. He used that word, despair. And so let's review how Jonah got to this place. He got into the depths of despair through a whole string of D words. He went down to Joppa, which created a downward spiral, because he was seeking a diversion from what the Lord had him. A distraction to go on a cruise, which was disobedience for him. And he ended up laying down, really in a depression, in despair. He had despaired even of life. He said, I don't really care what happens to me. Throw me overboard. And now he is in distress. It is not my first choice to teach a lesson on despair and depression and distress, but we go through what comes up in Scripture. And it's good for us to read about these experiences and ask the Lord, put this as a layer over my life. Teach me from this lesson. So we are going to go through. Well, let's start on verse 1. It says, Now, I'm not going to stop at every verse, but I just want to stop after verse 1. And really after the first word, it says, The word then signifies a change. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord. I wonder if this was after the full three days or if this is a process going through. But he prayed to the Lord. Now remember, when someone has turned from the presence of the Lord, or we might say if they are a prodigal or they are backslidden, they can still talk about God, but they haven't talked with him in a long time. We can talk about God long time after we've stopped talking with God. And so this really signifies a change. It says, Almost as if this is the first time he's been talking with God in quite a while. I was thinking about how easy it is for us to become disengaged from talking with God. Everybody in this room knows what that's like. We go through seasons of being disengaged. There's another D word. It's no wonder the devil starts with D, all these D words in here. So engage and disengage made me think of a funny little illustration of engaging the mower blade on your riding mower. A couple years ago, my husband had surgery, and so for eight weeks, I became the lawn mower. He loves to mow lawn. He loves to take care of the grass. I take care of everything else. And when we pull up to the house, our conversation is hysterical. He'll say, look at that lawn. And I'll say, look at those flowers. And we have this, you know, division of labor. But anyway, so I mowed lawn. And I was thinking about, you know, that you engage the blade. Now you can zip around on that little riding lawn mower all day long and use up all of your time and all of your gas doing nothing because you haven't engaged the blade. And your neighbors might not even notice. They're like, oh, man, she's mowing away. She's mowing up a storm. And unless they look closely, they don't know that you haven't engaged that blade. And so I thought that was maybe a good way to think of being engaged with God. How often everything looks the same on the outside, burning up time, burning up gas, but we're not productive in our spiritual life. Okay, what changed that in Jonah's life? The change came with the tempest and the fish. That's what God used to change that, to restore him. Let's keep reading through the passage. Verse 2, Jonah says,

And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. We remember that Jonah's first choice was his most disastrous one, his first choice to go down to Joppa. I like to picture this fish vomiting him up right at that spot where he made his first bad choice. Almost like, here you go. I'll put you back to the starting place. Let's see what you do with it, you know, this time. But the point is that God pursues His kids. God restores His kids. It is His work in His time and His way. But God loves to give people an opportunity in His mercy to see how they will respond. And that is what is happening in this story. Being in the belly of the fish, I don't think we should look at this as parental punishment on God's part. I think we should look at it as the perfect place for Jonah to reflect. The perfect. place. Not everybody needs a tempest, not everybody needs a fish, but we all need a perfect place. As we're raising children and your son does something foolish, you might say, you know what? I think the perfect place for you right now is your bedroom for about an hour to think about foolish things and think about was it a good idea to grab your sister's ankle when she got up to run? No, it wasn't. You go think about that. Mother's create a perfect place and God creates a perfect place too. What he's trying to get at in this perfect place is to get us to the point where we'll do the things that Jonah did. I called out to the Lord, I remembered the Lord and I will sacrifice and pay my vows. We'll kind of go over those in a minute. Just this morning, you know, I'm reading through Jeremiah in my morning time and just this morning, I thought of, I read such a great example of a perfect place that I want to read through the lens of the story of Jonah. It is a super common verse. You have bookmarkers, but I want to read it through this lens. Okay, so it is Jeremiah 29. We're going to start in verse 10.

God restores his kids. We think that verse about a future and a hope is all about how God just wants to make us all prosperous. But look at the context. God created the perfect place for his children and it was their belly of the fish experience. It was just in Babylon, not in a real fish. And he said, but you will call to me and I will restore everything. Anyway, I just thought since I read it this morning, I had to add it here. Have you ever been like Jonah in the depths of despair? We use different words. We use words like depression. You don't say to somebody, how are you today? Well, I'm in despair. We just don't say that. But you might say, how are you today? Well, honestly, I've been feeling a little depressed this week. That is our vocabulary. So I'm going to use that a little bit since that's our vocabulary. And I want to be careful as we move on here to remind us that not every person who suffers from depression does so because of a spiritual problem. Not every person who suffers from depression does so because of disobedience. But all of us will suffer from a depressed spiritual condition at some point in our lives because of these things. So this isn't a one-size-fits-all lesson that's going to scratch every itch in the room, but all of us know what it means to disengage from the Lord. When you disengage, it creates an emotional and a spiritual depressed state in our life. So as I'm handling the word depression, this is what I'm using here. And what I want to do with these verses that we've gone through is I want to ask the question, how does one crawl out of the depths of despair? How does one crawl out of a depression, a spiritual depression? And I want to create four things that we see from Jonah that really I think are great things, great lessons to learn from this. So the first one that we learn is call back to God. Call back to God. This is the first thing that we see that Jonah did. In verse 2, he said, I called out to the Lord. And yes, you're right. That is our word. Cora. Okay. Jonah called out to the Lord. God calls us first and then he waits for us to call back. He's always waiting for us to call back to him. The purpose of God's pursuit in our lives is that so we will turn to him. So we will say, I need you. I want you. You are my only hope out of this situation. I love how in verse 8, Jonah, he said, those who pay regard to vain idols, they forsake their hope of steadfast love. I sort of wonder if in his mind he was thinking of his last previous human interaction, which was all the mariners on the ship. And remember how we said it was a very pagan society. They all had their own gods. They all had their own idols. And they were crying out, calling out to some one of their gods, small g, to save them. But here Jonah adds, boy, those poor men, those who put their hope in small g's that are not really God, you know, like they don't have any hope of steadfast love. He's realizing my hope is so different. God loves me. His love is steadfast toward me. So one thing I've done in the last few years, and I really encourage you to do as you're reading through your Bible, particularly the Psalms and even like in Exodus and Isaiah, when you see the word cry out or I cried to the Lord or I called to the Lord, in your margin, put a capital C right there to mark that. Pretty soon you're going to look through your Bible and go, man, alive, there is a lot of crying out going on. And it reminds us of something. It reminds us that we're not born and we figure out life on our own for 90 years and then we die. It is a series of crying out to the Lord. This is not weakness. This is what God wants from us. He wants to be engaged in our life. He wants us to cry out to him. So as you start seeing all those C's, it's like, oh, yeah. And this saves us from that weird thing that we do that says, well, I got myself into this. I better get myself out. No, we can't. How do you think that would have worked out for Jonah? You know, how do you think he was going to get it? It's like, what if he had said to himself, well, you know, I disobeyed God. He had a work for me to do. I didn't do it. Now I got to get myself out of this fish. How am I going to get that? And then I'll go back to God and serve him. See, it doesn't work out at all. And so it helps remind us that the first step is crying. We have to stop crying and start crying out. OK, if you can remember it that way. Second point is admit your condition. It's OK to say, I'm not good. This is what Jonah did in verse four. He said, I am driven from your sight. This was his assessment of his current condition. It's tragic when there's a wedge driven between one of God's kids and God. And just like we always say, the first step to solving a problem is identifying the problem. So admitting that there is a problem is a really wise thing to do. We need to get to a place of honesty. OK, step number three that we see with Jonah is recognize God's pursuit. Recognize that God is pursuing. This is what Jonah did in verse three. He said, you cast me, your waves and billows passed over me. This isn't blaming God. I don't believe his tone was, well, you cast me into the belly of the fish. That's not what he was saying. It was like. This is your work. He had discerned that God was pursuing him and he saw God's hand at work. That's what I mean by recognize God's pursuit. Recognize that God has put you in a perfect place. Isn't this much easier to see? as we look back on history in our lives. We can look back on times in our lives and we can say, God placed me in the perfect place for me to open up, humble myself and cry out to him. Recognize his pursuit, recognize his involvement in our lives. We don't wanna jump to conclusions. We remember that not every sad thing that happens in our lives is God trying to teach us something or God trying to show us something, okay? And there is an enemy at work in our lives. Not every trial is the hand of the enemy, but some of them are and it requires discernment. So we ask God for discernment. Lord, help me discern, can I recognize your hand at work in my life here? And then point number four is to embrace his deliverance. I love how Jonah ended his prayer with the sentence, salvation belongs to the Lord. My deliverance out of this is owned by God. Again, how in the world was Jonah gonna get himself out of that fix? He did not own his deliverance. Only God owned his deliverance from that situation in his time and in his way. So we can look at ourselves and say, whatever my self-inflicted spiritual prison is right now, salvation belongs to the Lord. And it begins with crying out to him and it ends with a deliverance. We need to, sometimes we just need to talk to our emotions. The psalmist called it talking to his soul. I want you to look at, I think this was in our study guide, Psalm 43, five. Look at how the psalmist says he's talking to his emotions and he's saying,

Sometimes we just got to give ourselves a good talking to. And that's in the Bible. Okay? Why are you so downcast? Put your hope in God. But we have to get to a humble place where we cry out to God, that's engaging the blade. That is not as easy as it sounds. All kinds of barriers. Number one, pride. Number two, well, it's just been a long time. Number three, I don't know if he remembers me. It's been so long. You know, there's all kinds of barriers. So this is easier to study than to do. But you know, we study things with the hopes of doing about 10% each time and then a little bit more the next time and so it's all good. So what I want to end with is, you know, I mentioned last week, this Old Testament study has a New Testament counterpart that I think is their parallels. And it is a parable. It's in Luke chapter 15. Don't turn to it. I'm just going to tell the story. I'm not going to read it anyway. And it's very familiar to you. Jesus told the story of the father who had two sons. And the younger son came to the father and said, could I have my share of the inheritance now? And the father divided his inheritance between the two sons, split it up and said, that's yours and that's yours. Now, the younger son didn't say, I'm going to take off with it, but he did. And that was the beginning of his downward spiral. He went down into a far country. And we know how it goes. He squandered his entire inheritance. I think one of the translations says on riotous living until he finally had nothing. And so he got to the place where he was in despair, distress, probably depressed. And then God was watching over him, created a perfect place for him. He did not use a storm and a fish. He used a famine and pigs. And eventually this young man hired himself out to a farmer. He was out in the field feeding the pigs until finally what the food that was being given to the pigs looked good to him. It says the pods that he was feeding the pigs looked good. And in that perfect place that God had created for him, he came to himself. And it says, he came to himself and he said, I will arise and go to my father. And I will say, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Would you treat me like a hired man? Because he knew that the hired men were in his home were like, at least comfortable. And so verse 20 says that he arose and he came to the father but do you remember the father's position? While the boy was still a long way off, it says, the father arose and ran to meet him. And it uses the word, it says he saw him and he felt compassion. He felt compassion. And of course the reason Jesus was telling this parable was so his listeners would understand the heart of God. That is why we called this study, The Call of Compassion. The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, rich in love. And that's what this father in the story did. He saw him, he's like, he felt compassion and he ran to meet him. And we need to remember that sometimes when something is stopping us from engaging in God and we say, I don't even know if he even remembers me anymore. No, no, no, this is his character. He feels compassion for his kids. He pursues his kids, he wants to restore his kids. He will run to meet us if we will just but cry out. So we need to come back next week for Jonah chapter three, because now that Jonah has another opportunity, this is what allows us to unpause the button on The Call of Compassion to Nineveh. And we're gonna turn our attention back to those people for next week. So father, thank you for this deep lesson on what goes on in our heart, Lord. And I pray that in all kinds of ways, we can learn from Jonah's experience, learn from his emotional state, that there's something to apply to our lives, Lord, that we would learn when we have found ourselves depressed, that the first thing we need to do is talk to our soul and say, hope in God, cry out to God, and that we will reach out to you. And I thank you, Lord God, you've given us this picture of the father running to meet us, running to engage with us. Thank you, Lord God. And I pray that you would bless those that discuss this in Jesus' name, amen. ---