Okay.
Let’s try Hosea 6:3 again as a simple prayer, right?
So let us know;
Let us press on to know the Lord.
His going forth is as certain as the dawn;
And He will come to us like the rain,
Like the spring rain watering the earth.
So let us know;
Let us press on to know the Lord.
His going forth is as certain as the dawn;
And He will come to us like the rain,
Like the spring rain watering the earth.
Oh, pressing on, pressing on. We got that one up there? Okay.
Now, you see, we see Paul pressing on. We have to make this very important point now: the Lord is the One who initiates us to press on, but then we are to respond by pressing on. Our will gets involved in that, because it is a response to grace.
So it is not all passive, right? But it is the Lord who gets us into that position where, by His life, we can press on. It is very important to remember that, by the grace of God, we receive His grace and respond to His grace by pressing on.
Now just think about what we talked about last time with Hosea. Think of all the things that had to be stripped away from Paul before he said, “Forgetting the things that are behind.” Hebrew of Hebrews, tribe of Benjamin, as to righteousness blameless—he had a lot to strip away before he could run after the Lord.
All that was baggage. All that which was gain was loss. So do not think it was easy for Paul. We get the idea that, well, “forgetting what lies behind, reaching out for the things ahead, I press on.” But Paul had to press on by grace.
Forgetting the things behind,
Reaching out for the things ahead,
I press on, I press on by Your grace, my Lord.Running forward and laying hold
Of the calling You laid on me,
I press on by Your grace, my Lord.For I want to be found in You,
With my calling fulfilled and true.
I do not trust in my pride
Or my feelings inside, but You.Resurrection is the power I choose,
And in suffering joined with You,
Drawing me toward the prize of my calling,
I am pressing right into You.
Forgetting the things behind,
Reaching out for the things ahead,
I press on, I press on by Your grace, my Lord.Running forward and laying hold
Of the calling You laid on me,
I press on by Your grace, my Lord.For I want to be found in You,
With my calling fulfilled and true.
I do not trust in my pride
Or my feelings inside, but You.Resurrection is the power I choose,
And in suffering joined with You,
Drawing me toward the prize of my calling,
I am pressing right into You.
For I want to be found in You. So there is only one thing to do: counting everything loss, I take up my cross. I am pressing right into You. Amen.
And as we press on, we press through. So we have a new song tonight. You get that one up? Matthew 11:29.
We did the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible study in Manhattan lately, and I came up with this song.
Come unto Me, all ye that labor,
And I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you,
And learn of Me.For I am meek and lowly in heart,
And ye shall find rest unto your souls,
Rest unto your souls,
Rest unto your souls.For My yoke is easy,
And My burden is light.
Come unto Me, all ye that labor,
And I will give you rest.
Take My yoke upon you,
And learn of Me.For I am meek and lowly in heart,
And ye shall find rest unto your souls,
Rest unto your souls,
Rest unto your souls.For My yoke is easy,
And My burden is light.
Oh, Lord Jesus, how we need rest—rest in our weary souls. We are so thankful that You pull us right through into the land of rest by faith.
So help us tonight as we look at our dear brother Jonah and get an idea of just how You press us through. Even as we saw how You pressed down with Hosea, now we look to press through into the promised land, across the Jordan, into the rest.
Oh, help us lay hold of these precious things, Lord, even as we heard in testimony today, amply given to us through all that was said and spoken in song and testimony. So tonight, Lord, we want to add to it. Please, by Your Spirit, help us to share these things. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Wonderful narrow-fingered guitar. Let’s see if I can get set up here. There we go. Here we go. All right.
Well, we are talking about pressing on, right? Pressing on. How many volunteer to press on? Ah, yes, one in the back. That is good.
Obviously, that person has never been in the army, because in the army you learn: never volunteer. But you volunteered. Now, are you ready to press on? “Oh yeah, I’m good at pressing on.” Well, there you go.
So that is what Jonah said—Jonah, that wonderful prophet. Let’s look at Jonah, a couple of verses in Jonah. I mean, you should know the story of Jonah, right? We have kids; of course we know the story. But here we go.
Jonah 1:2-3:
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before Me.
Verse 3: Oh, faithful, pressing on! But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, no less. He went down to Joppa, found a ship which was going to Tarshish, paid the fare, and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. Oh my goodness.
Jonah 1:12:
Pick me up, and throw me into the sea; then the sea will become calm for you. For I know that on account of me this great storm has come upon you.
Jonah 1:17:
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the stomach of the fish three days and three nights.
Then Jonah 3:1-2:
And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim unto it the proclamation that I am going to tell thee.
So there we are. We are learning about pressing, and I want once again to note that the word “pressing” in the New Testament is the word for persecution. It means there is a violent pressing forward.
All of us have good intentions to press forward. About every New Year’s Eve, we come up with this once again: “Now, this year we are going to be perfect Christians,” right? Okay.
That violence behind it is the violence that Paul experienced when he said, “I am pressing on toward that mark.” Boy, he had to strip away to do that—and the price he paid not to give in to the Judaizers, the price he paid not to compromise.
When Peter did something wrong in Antioch, there were the Judaizers coming in. Peter had been eating McDonald’s with the Gentiles, and then suddenly the Judaizers came in and said, “Don’t eat McDonald’s.” Peter went over there and had a little, you know, whatever—I do not know, hummus—with the good Jewish brethren.
And Paul waddled over there, got up on a chair—because I think Peter was about six feet tall and Paul, well, Paul was a small guy. He had to get up on a chair, look Peter straight in the eye, and say, “Peter, you are doing something wrong. I know you are the chief apostle, but you are doing something wrong, because you are making a separation between these guys and these guys. You know better than that. They do not know better than that. You know better than that.”
I tell you, Paul was pressing on, man. He was pressing on.
“Blessed are they who are persecuted” and press on for My name’s sake. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Well, we found out that actually, in one sense, we have no strength to press on except as the Lord does something in our lives that makes it necessary for us to press on. Then we find, amazingly, that it is His life in us that enables us to press on.
As our brother Dale was saying this afternoon in many different ways and testimonies, the whole thing is to exchange the life and let the Lord’s life press on. Now there is longevity in that, and there is perseverance in that.
It is so important that before we just press on—because, you see, our default is, “I can do it.” Ever since we were little kids, we read that little book, I Think I Can, I Think I Can, and the little choo-choo train is going up the hill—or whatever it is. Maybe it is a tugboat.
That story was written by the devil at the Fall. Everybody believes that: “I can do it. Just tell me what to do, Lord.”
It is like the people standing at the bottom of Mount Sinai. “Listen, Moses, God, when He speaks, He speaks in thunder. We cannot really take it. We do not want to listen to the Lord. You listen to the Lord and tell us what to do, because we can do it.” Within forty days, they had a golden calf erected. They were really, really great saints.
Well, anyway, we learn this wonderful truth in a hymn. I do not know if you guys sing it, but in the Christian Hymns songbook there is a little hymn called “I Take, He Undertakes.” I say, “Lord, I want to set this course. Lord, help me,” and He undertakes that which He has called us to do. It is a wonderful truth, right?
Here again we see that the wonderful strategy of the Lord is this: His hesed—the loving-kindness of God—is going to lay hold of us and press us to the place where we can press on and pursue the Lord.
Sometimes the pressure that we come under is quite severe. Sometimes there are real problems; sometimes there are minor problems. The illustrations in the Bible are sometimes tremendous things, what Paul went through and everything, and they are not intended for all of us.
But we all have times when we come to the end of ourselves, when things undo us and circumstances overwhelm us. As I try to say to the saints, it is possible that the whelming flood will whelm you, but do not let it overwhelm you.
It is a wonderful hymn about the whelming flood. A whelming flood is tough, but it is how we respond to it that makes the difference—whether we are overwhelmed, or whether the Lord helps us find a way of surfing on top of that whelming wave.
No human being is going to avoid being whelmed. But now we have a choice: are we going to try to get over that, or are we going to ask the Lord to help us so that we are not overwhelmed by something?
So, Hosea—we already looked at that. Now we want to look really at Jonah, because Jonah represents yet another further move in this whole matter. As I said, we are looking at three prophets.
Hosea is pressed down until he finds the Holy Spirit with him. That is a pivotal moment. We can say that we are filled with the Holy Spirit, but I know a lot of Christians say, “I believe Christ is in me.” I say, “Have you ever experienced Christ in you?” They say, “Well, not really.” Well, then that is a shame.
Actually knowing the word of Christ within you, sensing the inner nudgings of that Holy Spirit, is so important in our Christian life. He is there to be heard and obeyed. But we have to come to the place where we are desperate enough to really listen to that still, small voice.
Let the earthquake come, let the storm come, and the rain, like Elijah—but no, He is not in there. It is that still, small voice that begins to press us through.
Now we come to Jonah, who illustrates pressing through—pressing through into the promised land, pressing through into that rest, pressing through into what? Into the Lord Himself.
The Holy Spirit is our starting point. Of course, all this happens at once, and I do not want to divide up the Trinity as though all this happens separately. But pressing through is very important, because then we come into a real walk with the Son of God, the Lord Himself.
When we look at the prophecy of Jonah, we realize what the significant point is. For kids, the significant point is the belly of the fish. For adults, they usually say that the point of the story is that God had mercy on the Assyrians in Nineveh, even though Jonah was still narrow-minded.
But actually, we should take our key from Jesus, who says the point of this story is, “He is My sign. I am in the belly for three days and three nights, and I come out again.” So now we are talking about pressing through death and resurrection.
That is the spiritual import of the book of Jonah: how we press through death to resurrection. This involves, again, a stripping.
Jesus said, “That is the only sign I am going to show you: the sign of Jonah.” That is what He said to Israel. And He said that in the time of judgment, Nineveh is going to stand against them in judgment, because they would not believe that He was going down and up. But Nineveh believed.
For Jesus, this was the significant matter. Many Christians have been clearly taught about death and resurrection. They know that Jesus died and that He physically was resurrected on the third day. Wonderful.
Every Christian who is a believer, I hope, knows that because you are saved, even when you die you are going to be raised again with resurrection life. First Corinthians 15—oh wow, what a passage. We look forward to that day.
But not all Christians understand that this principle of death and resurrection is a real spiritual principle applied in our lives daily and through the episodes of our lives. We have to go through a death and resurrection to come through into rest.
Just like the children of Israel wandering through the wilderness: they came up to the Jordan, and there was their promise. But they could not enter because it involved what? Going down into the river and coming back up on the other side.
The testimony was that they put stones in the river and stones on the other side: death, resurrection. They had to go through, and they could not go through on their own.
They said, “You know what? I think we had better remain children.” Like the book of Hebrews says, you should be teachers of righteousness and of the meat of the Word, but instead you are like babes.
When you ask a typical Christian who believes that he has been crucified with Christ—because, as Dale said, that is one of our favorite verses—you say, “Well, do you believe in Galatians 2:20?” “Yeah, yeah, I have been crucified with Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God.” Okay, great.
Now, have you been crucified with Christ? And they say, “I am trying to be.” Wait a minute. I thought you just said, “I have been crucified with Christ.” Now you are saying, “I am trying to be”?
That is actually where most Christians are when you really talk to them. “My flesh gets in the way of this. Everything gets in the way, but I am trying to be crucified.” You have not come through. That is your testimony.
This principle of the cross, obviously, is so important. But so many Christians—I do not know. I think American Christianity has really gotten pretty soft.
So many Christians have this naïve view: “Praise God, He forgave my sins and I am saved. Now I can get a good job, be prosperous forever, never get sick, and make a million dollars, because that is what Christians do.”
Which works for a while, because the Lord is so gracious. He actually gets you a job even though you do not deserve it, and He prospers you and all that kind of stuff. But then stuff starts going wrong. “My children are this, my job is in danger. Lord, wait a minute. I thought the promise was that if I get saved, I have a life of prosperity.”
That is why Christians have to come to a deeper understanding of the matter of death to the self-life. When you take the Apostle Paul, look at the way he handled the Corinthians.
He said, “Dear Corinthians, you are so full of the Spirit. You have every gift in the book. But you are carnal. Until you experience the cross, you are going to have divisions, you are going to tolerate sin in your midst, you are going to have fights at the Lord’s table, and you are going to have competition over the speaking of gifts.”
That is not the life of a resurrected saint living on resurrection ground. First Corinthians, chapter 1: the cross; chapter 2: the cross; chapter 3: the cross; chapter 4: the cross. You read the book of First Corinthians, and Paul is basically applying the cross to their lives. It is just totally natural.
They had the Holy Spirit, but they did not know the way of the cross. Paul says, “This is the word that I want to speak to you.”
For the word of the cross is to them that are perishing foolishness; but unto us who are being saved it is the power of God.
The cross is central to the gospel, but it is also central to our Christian life. The Holy Spirit bases His pressing operations on the basis of the cross and resurrection.
We should never just say “cross,” because it sounds like, “Oh boy, here we go—dive, dive, dive. Going down again. Kong took us down in the submarine, and we are almost dead from the first message. Now he is saying, ‘Dive, dive.’ We are going down even deeper. Wow, we are never going to get up again.”
But when the Bible talks about the cross, it always talks about resurrection—coming up on the other side. These things are real, and we need to look at them.
How does all this apply to Jonah? Jonah is a type of Christ’s death and resurrection, but he is also a type of our death and resurrection. So let’s tell a little bit of the story.
Jonah was a zealous prophet in the northern kingdom under King Jeroboam II—yes, the same situation that Hosea was in. But he was a prophet for the king.
The only other place Jonah is mentioned, besides the book of Jonah itself, is 2 Kings 14:24-25. It is worth looking that up for a second. Jesus mentions him in the New Testament, of course, but this is the only other Old Testament reference.
Jeroboam II:
He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord: he departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, wherewith he made Israel to sin.
He restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath unto the sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which He spake by the hand of His servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was of Gath-hepher.
You see that? Jonah prophesied and encouraged the king to build ramparts and protective cities against the Assyrians, who were just above them. To prevent incursions into northern Israel, the king built some cities up there because Jonah encouraged him, and he was successful in the whole thing.
But look at this. Where is Jonah? He is in the northern kingdom. What do they worship? Well, the Lord, the bulls—the whole thing. It is the same situation. There is something that is not quite square.
Whose prophet is he? The Lord’s prophet? Well, he was a pretty nationalistic prophet, may I say, for King Jeroboam II. There was compromise, worldliness, sin, corruption, and all that stuff.
God’s prophets down in Judah, like Isaiah, were saying, “Northern Israel, because of your sins, you are going to be taken away by the Assyrians very soon.” And indeed, it was very soon.
Yet there was Jonah in his own little world in northern Israel, all patriotic: “God is in our country. God is doing His will, and I am prophesying stuff for God.” But the context was all wrong. God was not going to sustain that whole thing.
The prophets in Judah who were still faithful were saying, “Because you have been unfaithful, northern Israel, you are going to be taken over by those Dagon-worshiping Assyrians”—especially from their capital city of Nineveh.
Here was Jonah just happily going along. He was one of God’s servants, using his gifts, but he was spiritually off somehow. And you know what God wanted to do? God wanted to make Jonah His prophet.
How many of you know you can be a pastor but not be His pastor? You can be a prophet but not His prophet. You can do things and serve God, sort of, for your own ends.
God was going to do something about that. He was going to press Jonah through this experience. His life had to come to an end in order for him to be changed from a man with a gift of prophecy to a prophet of the Lord whose life spoke as a testimony of God’s will.
God, in His wisdom, knew just how to bring Jonah to the end of himself. He put the press on—the hesed press. Here is this guy, man, this super-duper prophet. He is known in the land for his successful prophecy and all this kind of stuff.
God only had to say one thing: “Jonah, go down to Nineveh, that wicked city, and prophesy. Nineveh, soon destruction.”
Jonah, whose name means “the little dove”—I think he was a peaceful prophet. He is the guy who goes around doing personal prophecy, laying hands on everybody, saying, “The Lord is going to bless you. The Lord is going to prosper you. The Lord is going to give you a job. He is going to give you special gifts.” That kind of thing.
Totally positive prophet, speaking peaceful things and all. Then he heard, “You have to go down to that wicked, wicked city and pronounce judgment against it.” Jonah said, “Hmm. What am I going to do about this?”
Oh, I thought he was Jonah the faithful prophet. Suddenly he says, “Hmm, that would probably be a death sentence, going to Nineveh. No, no, no. I like to preserve my life.”
This circumstance happens to people who serve the Lord. Even if you are serving the Lord in school, if you are a favorite, or if you are an elder in a church—wherever you are—the Lord gets you to the end of yourself by asking you to do something that means you are going to have to die to self.
Basically, what the Lord said was, “Jonah, I want you to commit suicide. I want you to go down to Nineveh.” Those people, the Assyrians, were worse than the Babylonians. They were worse than the Egyptians. They were the most wicked, worldly, ungodly kingdom around.
Jonah thought it over and said, “You know what? I think I am going to take a prophetic vacation.” He goes down to the local travel agent, books a boat, and where does he take a boat to? Tarshish—but here is where he took it: away from the presence of the Lord.
First of all, what does that tell you about the size of Jonah’s God? Just think about it. “If I can get out of Israel, God cannot touch me.” My God is small. I am not working for a big God.
Jonah gets down into the bilge, hiding out in the bilge—where the Moravians were singing down there. Well, anyway, he said, “Am I going to serve the Lord? Uh-uh, no way. I am out of here.” And he was gone.
What an unfaithful prophet. He is totally disqualified. How can you be a prophet of God?
Now, before we go accusing him, let me tell you: I think our instincts for survival are about as strong as Jonah’s. “Oh yes, I am going to go to Nineveh, stand up for the Lord, testify as they stone me.”
Well, I have seen pastors leave churches just because they were afraid they might get stoned. The instinct for self-survival is really incredible.
Jonah came to that moment, and I think we all come to this. Here is the deal: that hesed press, that dreaded circumstance, that impossible situation, that self-sacrificing thing, is too much. Too much.
It demands more than just self-denial. It demands the putting to death of our neat little life. Jonah had a prophet’s chamber. He ate prophet’s food. He was blessed. People walked by and said, “There is Jonah the prophet.” Oh boy, he had such a neat life, and he was about to lose the whole thing.
But what was the real thing that he could not let go of? It is the same thing that we have the most trouble letting go of: self-control.
“I am in control of my ministry, of my life, of my situation, of my family, of whatever it might be—of my iPhone.” I have control.
God is going to get us to a place where we do not have control over our circumstances. Under such circumstances, servants of God get tempted. They become weary. They become lonely. They burn out. They become exhausted. They commit ministerial suicide. They run away with the church organist. They do anything, because they are weary. They have been busted.
The final straw that broke Jonah’s back was when he got into the ship, the ship tossed up and down, and the sailors had thrown everything overboard. He realized it was him.
Sometimes, if you are unfaithful enough, you just want to die. “Throw me over into the foam. It was my fault, guys. Just throw me over, and then you will be okay.”
That is the end of his life right there. They threw him over, and of course the wind calmed down immediately. “Throw me into the sea” were his final words. He came to the death of that self-control, that deepest part of our lives which prevents us from pressing through into resurrection life with the Lord.
Oh my goodness, this is a terrible moment, is it not?
When you look at the Old Testament record, and the New Testament for that matter, a lot of those guys came to the end of their self-control.
We heard about Joseph today. He came to the end of himself. He was a kid with dreams, and all those dreams got dashed in jail. Yet he was still in control. Even in jail, he says, “Now look, this is the meaning of this thing. When you get out, remember me.” He still had control of the plan. The guy forgot completely.
Oh, we want to control our lives. Even Jacob wrestled in self-control all that time, until finally God just snapped his hip—like He is going to do for me in a couple of weeks.
You used to walk strong, so full of self-control. You were making deals with Laban, making deals with Esau, making deals with your wives, making deals with your kids. Now you are limping around with no self-control. You are walking with a stupid stick.
Moses was so full of himself—an army sergeant, all that. Forty years later, he was throwing rocks at sheep in the wilderness of Midian, losing his self-power, self-confidence, and self-control.
He had been a great statesman in Egypt, but by the fourth time he says, “I stutter.” He lost all confidence that he could ever speak. He came to the death of himself, right there at the end of his control.
David had to flee into caves. Imagine being anointed king by the prophet, and then having to flee.
The same thing happened to John Mark when he went out on the first missionary journey and only made it halfway. He turned around and went home to Mama. It was over. Mark was over. He had no ministry. He left Barnabas and Paul in their first missionary journey, in a dangerous time. Completely disqualified.
Eventually, he wrote a Gospel. God restores, right?
Read Christian biographies. In the history of the church, there is a grave somewhere where these people came to the end of themselves. It is usually a particularly strong experience—maybe once in a lifetime; maybe, I do not know, it may happen more.
These examples in the Word are not saying we have to be like Paul, Joseph, or Jacob. But we have to come to the end of ourselves, especially that control over our lives. We like to handle everything.
Here is what happens. We start out serving the Lord with our own gifts, our own plans, our own resources, and our own self-strength. Then we run into the perfectly appointed press, when God, as it says in the Bible, appointed a fish for Jonah.
He has appointed a fish for you and me. I do not know when. I do not know if you have been swallowed up already. I do not know if you are about to be thrown into the sea. But He has a perfectly appointed great fish for every one of us.
The Holy Spirit has to press us into that fish, because unless we get there, we will never die, be resurrected, live on resurrection ground, and bear much fruit.
So we come into this terrible moment when we are thrown into the sea and end up being swallowed by a great fish. Oh my goodness.
Now, let me tell you the upside. It was when he was dead in the belly of the fish that he first heard the Lord. That is just precious, because a prophet hears impressions. He heard the Lord in the belly of the fish. Is that not an amazing thing?
Nothing compares to discovering life on resurrection ground. Resurrection ground is experienced while you are still in the belly of the fish. “I have been crucified with Christ.”
It is when your life is a total disaster and a waste, and you have been put on the sideline, that the Lord may really start talking to you. He has some things to say, and you start to listen.
It is the Spirit’s mercy that brings us to the place where we come to the end of ourselves, everybody through unique circumstances. This is a principle, but it has to be applied to our lives.
Let me talk about an increase here for just a moment. We get pressed down until we know the mercy of the Spirit. Now we get pressed through where we meet the grace of the Son of God. Then we get pressed up where we meet the love of the Father.
Mercy and grace are both love words. What is mercy? Mercy is when the Holy Spirit shows you who He is—He is holy—and shows you who you are. What do you realize? Boy, God has mercy.
Why? Because I did not get what I deserved. For my unfaithfulness, I deserved judgment, and yet He did not give it to me. Just like with Hosea: He was merciful to that harlot.
Mercy is when God does not do what we should have deserved. But when we come through to the grace of the Son of God, we find that God does things for us that we do not deserve. It is another level. It is another level of love.
It is a positive level of love, on the resurrection side. We find a new relationship there—not just the Holy Spirit, but now the Son Himself begins to talk and educate our dear Jonah. He begins to hear the voice of the resurrected Son of God.
Look at Jonah 2. Listen to what Jonah says. Now, he is in the belly of the fish. What would you usually say in the belly of a fish? Well, you are dead.
Here you are, dead, and it says in Jonah 2:
Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish’s belly.
Do you think this is a serious prayer? What do you think? Digestive juices flowing all over you, all kinds of stuff, seaweed—and now you are going to pray to the Lord. This is serious stuff.
I called out of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He answered me;
Out of the belly of Sheol cried I, and Thou heardest my voice.
“I am in hell, and You heard my voice.”
For Thou didst cast me into the depth, in the heart of the seas;
And the flood was round about me;
All Thy waves and Thy billows passed over me.
Oh my, my, my. “I thought I was cast into the deep because I was unfaithful. You actually cast me into the deep, and You appointed a fish just for me.”
Oh, God loves to get us in a death grip. “Let Me get you to Sheol, and then I can start to talk to you, because I have some things to tell you.”
But Jonah realized that the sovereign God was not trying to kill him. He had something for him. He was speaking to him.
Nobody knew it except Jonah, but Jonah was like raised from the dead. He was in Sheol, but the Lord was talking to him. So many Christians have come to the total end of despair and the end of themselves, and that is when the Lord began to speak.
For the first time, Jonah began to realize that even running away was part of God’s sovereign plan and foreknowledge. He knew Jonah was going to run away. He said, “Jonah, go down to Nineveh,” and made sure Jonah had an extra twenty bucks in his pocket for the boat trip. The sovereign God knew exactly what was going on.
A revelation of a deeper thing came. For the first time, Jonah discovered something in the Spirit that he had never known before.
“No wonder I have not heard clearly from the Lord before, because God is in His holy temple in Jerusalem. I have never been down to Jerusalem. I do not know that God who is in the ark and speaks out of the ark.”
Listen to what he says in Jonah 2:4:
Then I said, I am cast out from before Thine eyes;
Yet I will look again toward Thy holy temple.
Now I see what the key is here: Your holy temple, Your house. Now that is what You are after. You are not after my success as a prophet.
The first time, he hears something centered in Zion. Verse 7:
When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord;
And my prayer came in unto Thee, into Thy holy temple.
His prayer got pointed in the right direction. No longer in Samaria, no longer praying toward some bull. He was praying toward Jerusalem, toward the ark, toward the holy temple, where God was in His house.
Now Jesus is Head of His church. So much prophesying and ministering and all this kind of stuff is not under the headship of Jesus. It is scattered ministry, self-aggrandizing ministry, ministry with selfish purpose involved.
It comes to the place where a servant of God has to be willing to give up his life for the holy temple. Forget about your ministry. What kind of ministry do you have? You think you are a big shot, huh? How about being a small shot in the house of God? How about being His prophet in the house of God?
These are serious matters. We can mess around in ministry all we want, but the Lord wants something coming out of Zion.
This experience of Jonah is death and resurrection. It is Galatians 2:20, right? Now he is crucified with Christ; nevertheless, he lives.
He starts in the belly of the fish, and yet it is not him. Something is talking to him now. He is hearing a voice that is the initiative in his life, instead of his own voice being the initiative in his life.
He no longer gets to live his life according to the way he wants, but the Lord lives His life, and Jonah trusts the Lord. He lives by the faith of the Son of God.
Part two: Jonah, the servant of God, resurrected under the anointing and power of God.
Jonah gets spit out on the land. Oh boy, he had to wash himself off pretty good after that, do you not think? The old fish spits him out on the ground, and now God says, “Go on, go down, and proclaim My prophecy.”
What did Jonah do? “Okay. I am a dead man. Lord, You want me to do it? I will do it.”
He went down there with such power and anointing. Instead of getting stoned, the whole city repents, starting with the king on down.
Why is that? Because now he is speaking the Word, not just in general. You know how so many people say, “I have a word from the Lord. The Lord says…” Now it is like John the apostle, who says, “I am persecuted for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.”
Now Jonah is bearing the testimony of one who has died and come back to life. That makes your word so much more powerful, because now it is a word that, when you speak, God says, “Amen.”
Jonah used to speak and King Jeroboam said, “Amen.” Now Jonah spoke, and God said, “Yes,” and the people said, “I repent.”
What a change in his life. Unbelievable—such powerful anointing. But it was not him. Do you think Jonah took credit for that? “Ah, now look at the prophet that I am.” No. He was as good as dead and gone.
Yet the Lord moved on the city, as you know. He was in the lion’s den, and his life did not die. He saw that God was being merciful to this city.
Here is the interesting thing. Let’s look at the postscript: Jonah, the servant of God, had been crucified and raised again, but he still had problems with the flesh, did he not?
Did Jonah love Nineveh? No, he still hated it. He still hated it. He did not have the Lord’s heart. He had no heart for those people. He was not merciful.
He let it out with all the vehemence that he had in his body, and God used it. But look at him. He did not like Nineveh. He did not like the people. He did not like the way they did things. He would just as soon not have been there.
But the Lord used him in spite of himself. You know that you are on resurrection ground when the Lord uses you in spite of yourself.
I remember the first time I heard Major Ian Thomas. You know who he is? Major Ian Thomas started Capernwray in England. His message was Christ in you.
I think he worked with Youth for Christ or something. The Lord spoke to him and said, “Look, I live in you.” He was trying to lead a young people’s group, and every week he would preach. The young people ridiculed him, laughed, threw papers around—everything. He was going nowhere.
So the Lord said to him, “Now wait, you are dead. I want to speak to those kids.” He said, “Okay, well, I am not going to speak.” The Lord said, “Okay, I will speak.”
He said, “Well, Lord, You are going to have to speak, because I have nothing to say.” He got up in that pulpit to speak to those fifty young people. They were shouting and hooting, and he said, “I have nothing to say.” The Lord said, “Open your mouth; I will say something.”
He opened his mouth, and the Lord began to speak. Those kids got under conviction, and a number of them got saved. The whole thing happened in spite of himself.
He did not want to do it. He did not want to be there. He did not like the kids. He had nothing to say. But the Lord said, “I have something to say.” You say, “I do not love that person.” The Lord says, “It is okay. I love him.”
A lot of times, you minister where you do not want to be. The Lord says, “I want you to be there, so go on.” You had better say, “Okay.” You will find blessing when you go.
Jonah was still prejudiced, but he went anyway. The Lord began to expand his heart.
I do not know if you guys read T. Austin-Sparks. Pretty deep stuff. One time he did a series, and I will never forget the title because it is so arresting: “Faith unto Enlargement.”
How many of you want to be enlarged? Faith unto enlargement. Anybody know the end of the title of that book?
“Faith unto Enlargement Through Suffering.” Oh.
You want your Christian life to be enlarged? You want to be full of the Holy Spirit? Okay. Then start doing what the Lord tells you to do, even if you do not want to do it. Begin to learn the lessons. Let the Lord reshape your heart, your mind—do all those things He is going to do.
Jonah was crucified with Christ, and now he was living and doing what the Lord wanted him to do. But the Lord still had to deal with him.
He went ahead and preached, and the people repented. What happened? He got mad. “What are you mad about?” He says, “Well, I told them they were going to be destroyed. Now You say they are not going to be destroyed. You make me look like a false prophet. What are You making me look like—chopped liver?”
He got all mad because God seemed to contradict him. His self was all mad. He got into a snit. He got depressed. Then he became preoccupied with this stupid little gourd, this plant. He thought that was the most important thing in life.
Ministers often get preoccupied with stupid stuff, because the Lord has to deal with our smallness. Oh my goodness.
That is okay. “I told you to go; you go.” That is great. Good enough. But he still had self all over the place.
Many of God’s servants—you have no idea how much they wrestle, how much they fight with God, contest God, say, “No. No.” Yet they do.
Many servants of God have had real dealings in their lives. When you read the stories about Charles Spurgeon, you have to remember that at times he was so depressed they feared for his life.
But he said, “The one thing I knew is I could trust the Lord.” He was so depressed he could not speak. We are talking about the orator of England in the nineteenth century—such bouts of depression and agony, wrestling with things, struggling with things, sulking about things.
Jonah was so tiny. “Just put me under a tree. I would rather die than watch these Assyrians get forgiven. I had my little gourd, and then the gourd wilted out. I am so upset about it. My whole garden has gone bad. I am so upset.”
That is exactly what a prophet is like. He is just like you and I—so full of petty stuff, small stuff, selfish stuff. The Lord says, “I am going to change you.”
What does Jonah discover on resurrection ground? This is what I would like to get to: you have no idea how much God loved Jonah. He put up with so much nonsense.
You have no idea how much the Son of God loves you. He puts up with a lot of nonsense. Look at the way He treated the disciples.
How many times would you have whacked the disciples? “Just smack some sense into Peter. You stupid jerk. What are you bragging again?” But He was so patient with those guys.
Old doubting Thomas: “Oh, let us all go die with the Lord.” “Oh, shut up, Thomas. I hate your unbelief.” Did He ever say that? Oh, no, no, no. He puts up with us.
What we find out is that there is nobody more gracious than the Son of God.
The love of God comes down to earth through Jesus as grace, and then through the Holy Spirit as mercy. Jesus is so gracious.
I must say, I am an unprofitable servant. I have been serving the Lord now fifty-five years, I guess it is. I have felt the Lord’s rebuke in a number of different ways, but I never felt like He was unloving.
I felt, just like Jonah, that He understands how stupid I am. Think about this: God’s ways are so much higher than our ways. He has to put up with an awful lot when He gets us on the course of His ways.
They are so much higher that we do not understand them. We misunderstand them half the time. So what does God do? “I know My ways are higher than your ways. Just trust Me on this one, will you?”
God treated Jonah with infinite patience. He had to spiritually expand Jonah’s little, tiny, prejudiced Jewish heart to have love even for the gospel to the Assyrians.
The Holy Spirit engineers our circumstances. We have humiliating moments, moments of self-disappointment, and all this. But we end up knowing the Lord.
Here is the gift: you do not know yourself until you know the Lord. But when you know the Lord, you know yourself.
Let me put it this way. Let me start with the bad news first.
If you walk with the Son of God long enough, you are not going to like yourself as much as you used to.
When you walk with the Lord, you find that you are pretty undependable. Your feelings are often wrong. Your convictions, your strong ideas, are sometimes pretty petty and undependable things.
Even the way you get mad: “I am not going to read my Bible. That is it. I quit. Stupid people. I have been teaching the Bible all these years, and they give me a tough time. I quit.”
The Lord knows all that stuff, and He cares for you. He is gracious to you.
I have never known anybody who respects me as much as the Lord does, and I am unprofitable to the core.
When you meet the Lord, you come to know yourself: pretty undependable rascal. It is like Paul says:
For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing.
Why did he say, “That is, in my flesh”? Because God loves your soul. God created Paul’s soul—his mind, his emotions, his will. God loves Paul.
He does not like the flesh, which is our soul in control of ourselves. But the soul He created, He loves. You cannot love yourself until you see how Jesus loves you—I mean you, not your flesh.
He gets after your flesh. He deals with your flesh. There is the cross on your flesh. But here is the good news.
You will find that He will be gentle and gracious with you. Even correction begins to feel more like a step up than a threat to our ego. I do not know if you understand that.
We come to love and abide in the new man. You are no longer merely you; it is Christ in you. You are hidden in Christ. But you have to rediscover that person.
You are still a sinner. You need to confess your sins. He deals with you, and you have to say when you are wrong. Like Dale says, you have to keep short accounts, man. You are wrong, you have to acknowledge it.
But you know how much He loves you. He created you, He loves you, and He saved you. You have no idea how much He wants you to see that it is no longer you, but Christ living in you.
That is what you can depend on. That is what can initiate your life, and your life comes out on resurrection ground.
No longer are you a person living by psyche, soul-life, because you have given up your soul-life. Now you live by zoe, which is life from God.
It may seem the same, but it is completely different. We can live trying to save our lives. We lose that life—you know, psyche, our soul.
If you try to save your soul, you lose your soul. If you will lose your soul, you gain zoe.
Zoe life is a life of rest. Zoe life is His life channeled through you in the promised land, where there is milk and honey.
There is a lot of work to do in the promised land. There are lands to be conquered, but it is not your conquering. It is that Angel who goes before you and conquers. As you step on each piece of ground, it becomes yours.
It is a whole other kind of life. He initiates it, then you live it. But it is a whole other level.
So many Christians live in psyche life: “I am still in control. I am still trying hard. I am still trying to be crucified.” But no, it comes on this other side.
Of course, the same principles apply that applied before. You make a mistake—what happens now? Christ rules and overrules.
How many times did you make a mistake and the Lord overruled it? Boy, I tell you, one time I moved my whole family from New York to North Carolina.
I did it for one reason: because I had to make money for my wife and kids. I had three kids and a wife, and I was driving a school bus making sixty-five dollars a week, and all the kids I could eat. It was a tough life.
My Jesus band was not exactly the most popular thing on the planet, but souls were being saved and all that kind of stuff. Then I got an offer to go down to North Carolina, and they would actually pay me to be a chaplain in an apartment complex.
What? Pay me? They gave me an apartment. Now my wife and my three kids had room to live, instead of living upstairs in my parents’ house. It was a great deal.
I went down. It was a total mistake. You know what the Lord did? That is where I met my brother Stephen Kong—down there at the wrong place, ministering in the wrong place.
Our ways. You know that prayer: “O Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.” Well, the Lord loves us so much.
We have to decrease, but then the Lord re-increases. We start to worship the great heart of the Lord and the ways of the Lord, even as we decrease and realize that our ways are not so good, but His ways are good.
In the busyness of the new life, we find rest.
The more we let Him have the initiative:
And the life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, Who loved me, and gave Himself up for me.
How the Lord loved Paul. Paul had to go through a lot. He had to go through a total resurrection—a renewal of mind.
The problem with somebody with a big mind—I hope you do not have a big mind—you are in a lot of trouble. By the time He renews your mind, you have unlearned a lot of stuff, especially the control you have over people with your mind.
Paul had to learn that even when the Corinthians were saying—some of those big shots in Corinth, a businessman who thought he was a better apostle than Paul—“We do not need Paul, that little short guy. He writes us letters like he is a big shot, but when he comes here, he has that squeaky little voice and he is short.”
What could Paul say? Oh, Paul wanted to get back at that guy. But all he could say was, “Lord, I trust You. They are Your people. Help me find a way to excite their love, to create their faithfulness to You.”
He says, “There are people opposing me and using their authority to oppose me, and all I can do with my authority is build people up. The Lord will not allow me to tear people down.”
What a place to be in. Believe me, if anybody could tear somebody down, it would be the Apostle Paul. He could yell at them in Hebrew and drive them into the ground, then yell at them in Greek and finish it off.
No more. Paul, meek and mild. Oh, Lord, use him in a powerful way.
If Jonah had been alive in Paul’s day, he would have quoted Galatians 6:14:
But far be it from me to glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world hath been crucified unto me, and I unto the world.
How do we know that Jonah changed? How do we know that he became the Lord’s prophet? Because he wrote this book against himself.
This whole book tells of his foolishness, his obsession with a gourd, his running away from the presence of the Lord. What a foolish thought. There is no way you can run from the Lord.
He told on himself—his foolishness—because he realized there was no good thing in him, and yet the Lord loved him.
Is there any more candid testimony of our folly and the Lord’s grace than you find in Jonah’s life?
“I had no heart for the Assyrians. I hated anybody who was not Jewish.” That is pretty much what Paul admitted too. But the Lord said, “That is okay. I am going to use you anyway.”
Can you imagine Paul preaching at a Gentile house the first couple of times around? He did not like them. They were sitting there eating their pork buns, and he was trying to preach the gospel to them.
He learned to love those Gentiles because the strange thing was, every time he spoke to the Gentiles, people got saved. Every time he spoke to the Jews, he got stoned.
We have friends in Memphis who go over to Romania once in a while. They go there to preach the gospel, hand out tracts, preach the gospel. Not too many Romanians get saved.
The one people the Romanians have a problem with, of course, are Gypsies. Every time they preach the gospel, Gypsies get saved. So now, in their fellowship, half the fellowship is Gypsies, because when they hear the gospel, they get saved.
Those Romanians do not like Gypsies. Well, they learn to love Gypsies. Is that not amazing?
The Lord tells us, “You go and serve Me. I told you to do this. Now go, go, go, and leave the results to Me. I am doing what I want to do.”
If the Lord tells you to love somebody who is unlovable, you go do it, because the Lord will bless you and them.
This whole pressing of the Lord is to press us through into His life, where we stop taking the initiative, let Him take the initiative, and live by His resurrection life.
Jonah learned the great lesson. We are learning that great lesson too, because every one of you, to some extent, has experienced that. As you have turned something over to the Lord, you saw the transformation in the way things happened.
It is really quite amazing, and it is all the Lord’s doing. So what are we going to glory in—ourselves, our ministry?
No, we glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ that did me in and raised Him up. Right?
In the end, Paul will be there glorifying the Lord Jesus, just as he did on earth. There in heaven, we meet Paul, and he will just be glorifying God.
I say, “Paul, man, you did such a great job. I have so many questions about some of those mysteries. Paul, what exactly did you mean?”
Paul says, “Oh, shh, shh. There is Jesus. Let’s worship Him.”
Lord, we just come to You. We are so thankful for this hesed press. You do press us down, Lord, so we can see Your mercy. But then You press us through so that we can know Your grace.
We can say with the Apostle John, “Of His fulness we all received, and grace for grace.” Such love, such care for us, such overruling, such ruling, such teaching, such gentleness.
O gentle Shepherd, come and lead us. We are those dumb sheep we heard talked about today. But we are learning, Lord, to turn it over to You and to find that life coming through.
That is a Zoe life that is fruitful and does things to the glory of God. Help us learn these lessons, Lord, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.