Relentless | Part 2: The God Of Another Chance | Senior Pastor Keith Stewart

RELENTLESS
Part 2 | The God Of Another Chance
Senior Pastor Keith Stewart
July 26, 2026

Have you ever wondered if God still listens when the mess you're in is entirely your own fault? Jonah wasn't running toward God—he was running away. Even after God rescued him, his heart still had a long way to go. Yet God refused to give up on him.
 
This weekend in RELENTLESS: The God Who Won't Give Up on People, we'll look beyond the famous fish to discover the real miracle of Jonah chapter 2. What if God's greatest work isn't simply rescuing us from our circumstances—but patiently transforming us through grace upon grace?
 
If you've ever struggled with failure, self-righteousness, or wondered whether God could still use someone like you, this message is for you.
 
Join us this Sunday at Springcreek Church or watch online. You may discover that you've been living inside Jonah's story longer than you realized.

Discussion Questions 

Have you ever been absolutely convinced you were right, only to discover later that you had completely misunderstood the situation? What happened?
 
Digging Into the Passage
 
1. Read Jonah 2 aloud together. What stands out to you after hearing the sermon that you may never have noticed before?
 
2. Jonah repeatedly thanks God for rescuing him, yet never explicitly confesses his rebellion. Why do you think that omission is significant?
3. Compare Jonah's prayer with Psalm 51 or Psalm 32. What differences do you notice between David's prayers and Jonah's?
 
4. The sermon suggested that Jonah stopped running because he couldn't run anymore—not because his heart had fully changed. Have you ever obeyed God before your heart completely caught up? What did that experience teach you?
 
Applying the Message
 
5. The sermon said: "The greatest miracle in Jonah chapter 2 isn't that a fish keeps a man alive. It's that God keeps loving a prophet who still doesn't love what God loves." How does that statement change the way you think about grace?
 
6. Why do you think it's often easier to recognize other people's sins than our own?
 
7. Jonah could receive grace but struggled to extend it. Why is that such a common struggle for religious people?
 
8. The sermon suggested this progression:
 Repentance → Grace → Transformation (what we expect)
         vs.
         Grace → more Grace → still more Grace → eventually
Transformation

How has your own spiritual journey reflected that second pattern?

Personal Reflection
 
Pastor Keith shared that after nearly fifty years of ministry, he continues to discover how relentless God's grace has been throughout his life. Looking back over your own story, where can you now see God's grace pursuing you—even before you fully understood it?
 
Is there an area of your life where you're more like Jonah than you'd like to admit? What would it look like to pray, "Lord, show me the truth about myself"?
 
Close by sharing one way you've experienced God's grace recently and pray that God would help each person become not only a recipient of grace but also someone through whom that grace "spills over" into the lives of others.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good to see everybody today. You know, a couple things right before I get into the message. Um not everybody comes every week, so not everybody's heard this yet, but over the last five to six weeks, we were able to raise $400,000 toward our new roof, which is really exciting. That means in this next week uh we'll be having a board meeting looking over all of the proposals uh that we've received to try to decide on who will be the best uh contractor to complete the work that needs to be done. So thank God for everybody who has dug deep and given sacrificially. We couldn't have done that without all of you together, just giving out of the abundance of your heart. And I appreciate it very much. Uh I also want to tell you something. I I was having a conversation with one of our regulars uh right before the first service, and I noticed that he had a pad with him, and he already had printed out the message notes for today's message. And he said, You know, Pastor, I'm a teacher and I do this before every service because I want to get as much as I can out of the messages. I said, Well, that's a great practice. He said, but I've never heard you encourage people to do that. So this is my encouragement to you to do that. Um whenever we create something to kind of contain the blessings God has given us, whether we take notes in our phone or whether we actually make notes, when we do that, we number one, the more you interact with the truth, the more better you retain it. But two, uh, when you do that, it's also a message to God saying that, you know, God, your truth doesn't come idly into my life. Uh I want to take these truths, I want to practice them, I want to live them, I want to benefit from them. God, I want more, is what we're saying when we take some time to take notes. So I would encourage you to do that. It's good for your spiritual walk with God. Well, we're in this series about from the book of Jonah that I'm calling Relentless, and today's message is the God of another chance. As we get started, let's pray together. Father, thank you so much for who you are. Thank you for this incredible time of worship that we've just had. I pray right now that you will truly visit in every heart and life as we look at this message. Give us, God, uh, receptive hearts, give us receptive minds. Help us, God, to say yes to you in all the things that you're saying to us today. In Jesus' name, amen. So I'll start off with one of my favorite stories about the book of Jonah. There's this little girl who went to public school and she went to her teacher and was telling her teacher, a public school teacher, about the story of Jonah. But the teacher wasn't having it. She interrupted the girl and she said, It's physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human. Even though it's a huge mammal, it has a throat that's very small. But the little girl insisted, but a whale did swallow Jonah. So the teacher, growing visibly agitated, once more said, a whale could not possibly swallow a human being. It's physically impossible. So the little girl said, Well, when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And the teacher looked at her, smirking, and said, Well, what if Jonah is not there? And the little girl said, Then you can ask him. So there's that. Truth be told, a lot of people have trouble swallowing this story. Some people think it's a tale of a whale, and other people think it's a whale of a tail. So let me just admit, this story sounds weird and it sounds improbable. In all of Scripture, it's the one miracle that most people disbelieve. And because it's so strange, some people have looked for alternative explanations. Like some people think the book of Jonah is just a dream, a dream that Jonah had while he was at sea and he just recorded the entire dream in the book of Jonah. Other people say the book of Jonah is like the Phoenician myth of Hercules and the sea monster. In other words, it's meant as a morality tale and nothing more. So others believe that Jonah was a real character and did take a tip ship from Tarshus, the Tarshus ship wrecked at sea. Then after the shipwreck, Jonah was picked up by another ship that has at his masthead a giant fish, and that's the reason that Jonah's described as being inside a great fish. But I want to go on the record this morning. I believe Jonah's fish was real, and this is an account of a bona fide miracle. And because I believe that, I really don't understand preachers who try to explain this miracle away. In particular, I've heard, and I can't tell you how many sermons like this I've heard, of preachers who describe some 19th-century whaling expedition where a fisherman fell overboard, was actually swallowed by a whale, and lived to tell about it. Now, whether that's true or not, I don't know. But if there's documented cases of people being swallowed by large fish only to be recovered alive, then this story's not a miracle. It's just a strange event that can occur from time to time, but it's not something supernatural. But if it's a miracle, why do we feel a compelling need to explain it? If it's a miracle, then it's a miracle. The God of the Bible, the creator of the universe, has no difficulty suspending natural law to accomplish any of the other miracles we read about in Scripture, including turning water into wine, healing blind eyes, or feeding the 5,000. More importantly, I believe a guy named Jesus rose from the dead. And because I believe that, and God can do that, he most definitely can do something like this too. A big fish swallowing a human being is nothing compared to raising a man from the dead. So in this message, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the great fish, not because I don't believe it, I do believe it. But because the book of Jonah doesn't spend a lot of time talking about it. The great fish is only a minor element in the story of Jonah. Did you know that? Three verses describe that. Only three. But the rest of the chapter, where the emphasis is in Scripture, is on what's being said in chapter two. So last week I told you about the prophet who ran away from God. God hurled a storm at Jonah as he's fleeing to stop his escape. As the fury of the storm intensified, so did Jonah's defiance. We learned that Jonah would rather die than give a message of hope to the Assyrians. So Jonah made the response the sailors responsible for his own execution and told them to throw him overboard. When we last saw Jonah, he was sinking down into Davy Jones' locker. But God had other plans. Rather than leave Jonah to drown, God sends a great fish on a rescue mission. Once he's safe in the belly of the great fish, he prays. That prayer is the subject of Jonah chapter 2. So let's talk about a desperate prayer by a desperate man. I want to read to you his prayer in its entirety, and we'll talk more about it through the message. The scriptures say this. Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the great fish, saying, I called, I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me. All your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight. How will I look upon your holy temple? How will I look again upon your holy temple? The waters closed in over me, the deep surrounded me, the weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever. Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remember the Lord, and my prayer came to my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord. So I want to kind of go through an overview of what happens in the chapter, then we'll look more closely at the prayer. The first thing I will tell you is when God says, Have it your way. Now please understand, Jonah's in a terrible mess, but it's a mess of his own making. When Jonah refused to say to God, your will be done, God looked at Jonah and said, Okay, your will be done. And this is where it got him. And by the way, that's always a choice in life. Which will I choose? Will I surrender my life to the will of God? Or will God have to look at my life and say, Have it your way? Jonah quickly realizes he's as good as dead the moment he gets thrown overboard. And as the waters begin to close in on him, the fear takes over that there's no way for him to make his way back to the surface. At that point, I'm sure Jonah begins to fight for his life. He realizes he doesn't want to die. The cold, dark water of the sea had shocked him back into reality. He's likely asking himself the question why am I doing this? What is this all about? So back in 2004, Harvard Magazine did a study of people who had survived an attempt at suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge. Really interesting story. Interviewed all these people, and what they discovered is the most everybody who ever attempted suicide and lived never attempted suicide again. And one of the people that they asked was a guy named Ken Baldwin. And he said this I realized, I instantly realized that everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable, except for having just jumped. So, I mean, that's the truth. He realizes the moment he attempts to kill himself, wait, I can fix my life. This is not unsolvable. Now, the second thing you're going to notice in this chapter is this God hears our cry for help even when we're guilty. So for at least a period of time, Jonah is conscious in the great fish, long enough for him to realize that God has just saved him from drowning in the sea. And during that time he prays. Now, please remember, Jonah's not on his way to Nineveh when he's thrown overboard. He's running from God. His disobedience is premeditated. He's being willful, he's being stubborn, and yet God still responds to his cry for help. And this is where some people in this room are right now. Whether you've ever let anybody else know this or not, you're in trouble. You're like Jonah. You're in a mess, it's of your own making. And you're wondering, does God even care because I brought this on myself? Aren't I just getting what I deserve? This is one of the reasons why this chapter is such good news, because God heard Jonah's cry, even gave him another chance, even though the situation was entirely of his own making. On top of that, by the way, we'll look at this more closely later. He doesn't even acknowledge that he did wrong in this prayer. So let's talk about this next thing. God answers and delivers us, delivers us from impossible situations. Now it'd be a terrible thing to fall over sea, fall overboard uh when the sea's calm. Have you ever taken a cruise? Uh we did like, oh gosh, uh 26 years ago. The church paid for us to go on a Disney cruise, which was really fun. But one evening, I'm standing on the rail of the ship and I'm looking out at the sea, and it is vast, and I can't see land anywhere. And I just got to thinking, you know, if somebody fell over at this point, unless somebody saw them, they're toast. And this was a calm sea, but there's no place to rest, there's no place to recover. You would just be out there in the middle of all this nothingness. Well, so Jonah, he it's even worse, he's thrown into a raging sea with 20 to 30 foot waves, and he feels utterly powerless to get back to the surface of the water. Like so many of us, when death or disaster strikes, once we've tried everything else, then and only then we pray. And that's what's happening with Jonah. He's at the end of his rope, he's got nowhere else to turn, so he cries out to God. Listen to Max Lucado describe it. He said this look at Jonah in the fish belly. For three days, God has left him there. For three days, Jonah has pondered his choices, and for three days he's come to the same conclusion. He ain't got one. He blew it as a preacher, he was a flop as a fugitive, at best, he's a coward, at worse, a traitor. So Jonah does the only thing he can do, he prays. He doesn't even ask for help, but help is what he gets. Now please understand, God is always with us. You can never outrun God's presence. You'll never be any place where God is not. God is around us, before us and behind us, above us and beneath us. God is always with us. He never has to be badgered or begged to be with us. You know, some churches, when they begin their services, they begin with what they call an invocation. Have you heard that term before? And what that means is they are praying and invoking for God to come and join them. Now you realize that's the opposite of the way things should be. We don't ever have to beg God or ask God to come be with us. God's already here. God's already here right now. Who needs to be invoked? You and me. We need to be invoked to bring ourselves present to God. Because God's already here. God's already at work. God's been at work before the first prayer was ever prayed, before the first song was ever sung, before I got up here to speak. God has been at work. He's here. So God is with Jonah in the deep, and God is with Jonah in his disobedience. And then there's this God arranges our second chance circumstances. So Jonah gets a new opportunity, a new beginning, a second chance. God causes the fish to take Jonah to the shore and vomit him out onto dry land. Now, admittedly, it's not a pretty start to be puked out with all the other partially digested food, but think about it. There's only two ways out of that fish. And this is the lesser of two evils, okay? So, friends, God loves us so much that he's actively involved in our lives even when we're running away from him. He's constantly arranging second chances. Alexander Soltshenitsyn, he was a famous Russian novelist, he said this I've done many things in my life that conflicted with the great aims I had set for myself. And something has always set me on the true path again. That's so true. That's what God's doing here. He's setting Jonah back on the path. Not the path that Jonah's been on, the path that God wants for him. So that's a quick overview of what happens in chapter two. Now I want to talk to you about the real substance of chapter two, which is about this prayer, what people have called Jonah's Psalm. And it's probably one of the most misunderstood chapters in all the Bible. So let me invite your attention to this next idea, the Jonah's Psalm and the superficial way we read it. Now, the best way I can describe Jonah's Psalm or Jonah's prayer, it's like three inches of snow on the city dump. Okay? It looks really pretty when you look at it, but all it takes is a little bit of digging around, and you realize there's a real mess beneath this. So at first glance, Jonah's prayer sounds spiritual. He uses all the right words. But after we do a little bit of probing and reflecting, it starts feeling a lot like religious jargon layered over an unchanged heart. Now, like I say, most Bible preachers call this Jonah's Psalm because Jonah's Psalm employs much of the language of the Psalms. I'll give you a couple of examples. Jonah 2 and Psalm 3. In Jonah 2, Jonah prays, Salvation is from the Lord. Psalm 3.8 says salvation belongs to the Lord. Or how about this, comparing Psalm 18 with Jonah 2? The cords of death entangled me, the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me, the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called to the Lord, I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice, my cry came before him into his ears. That's the Psalms. Now listen to Jonah pray. In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead, I called for help, and you listened to my cry. When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you to your holy temple. Now you can see clearly see there's parallels between the way Jonah is praying and the way the Psalms express these same truths. This is what confuses a lot of Bible teachers and preachers. They see the word or the language of the Psalms. And it was very common in those days, and maybe even you do this to this day, a lot of Jewish people would just pray the Psalms as their prayer. They would find a psalm and say, These are my words, and they would pray that to God. So this is not something uncommon for a Jewish person to do. But if you really compare Jonah's Psalms with the actual Psalms, you'll quickly discover how different Jonah's prayer really is. To show you this, I want to do a few more comparisons. That way, I want you to make up your own mind whether Jonah is faithfully quoting Scripture or whether he's merely appropriating them for his own purposes. A lot of people fail to know these notice these significant differences. Like for one, Jonah's psalm is self-centered. If you take some time this afternoon and you go through and reread Jonah chapter 2, notice who dominates every sentence. It's Jonah. In fact, there's actually been a study done of the pronouns used in the Psalms versus the pronouns, the personal pronouns, you know, I, me, myself, used in Jonah's prayer. And Jonah uses I, me, myself twice as much as David does, and he never uses it in the same way David does. Jonah's always complaining, Jonah is always about himself, where the Psalms, it's confessing, it's adoring God, totally different use. In short, the Psalms are God-centered, while Jonah's prayer is Jonah-centered. Now, the Psalms do describe a lot of situations like what Jonah's going through, desperate circumstances, figuratively drowning in a sea of problems. But if you pay attention, you'll notice how one of the characteristics of the Psalms is how quickly they move from the struggle to the character of God. What the Psalms do is they lift our eyes upward and outward. Jonah's focus remains inward. Let me give you an example. In Psalms it says this the cords of death entangled me. The anguish of the grave came over me. I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord. Lord, save me. The Lord is gracious and righteous. Our God is full of compassion. So throughout the Psalms, you'll notice this trend that when David's in trouble, he calls out to God, but then he starts praising the character of God. You realize Jonah doesn't do this at all. Jonah doesn't even describe the character of God until he prays in Jonah chapter four. And when he describes the character of God, it's not to praise him, it's to indict God. Listen to what he prayed in Jonah chapter 4. He prayed to the Lord, Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarsus. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding to love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it's better for me to die than to live. So Jonah here uses God's character against him. He said, I knew what kind of God you were before I even got on this mission. I knew you'd be compassionate. I knew you'd love the wrong people. I knew you'd relent from sending judgment on these people. That's why I didn't want to go. The Psalms never do that. The character is the basis for their praise and adoration and obedience. Jonah found the character of God an excuse for his disobedience. In fact, in Jonah chapter 2, there's only one reference to the attributes of God, and that is to his sovereignty, that God is in control. Listen to what Jonah says. You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the current swirled about me. All your waves and breakers swept over me. Even as Jonah prays this, you can hear an element of blame in that, can't you? Basically, he's saying, Yes, God, I realize you're in control. You're the reason I'm in this mess right now. But is that what we want to hear, Jonah, pray? No. What we want to hear Jonah pray is, God, I got no one to blame but me for this. The sailors didn't put me here. You didn't put me here. I put me here through my disobedience. He's in a mess of his own making, and we want him to acknowledge that. But Jonah's actual prayer is very disappointing. Here's something else that Jonah's prayer does. Jonah's Psalm reveals his disdain for the Gentiles. Now, last week, if you weren't here, you really need to go and listen to that message. Because in that message, I called attention to the fact of the faith response of the Gentile sailors. Something a lot of commentators just pass over. They actually become worshipers of Yahweh. But in Jonah's Psalm, we find no mention of these sailors, not of their kindness, their desire to do the right thing, of their grace toward God's prophet, or their newly found faith in the God of Israel. Everything that's obvious to you and I, as the reader, Jonah is oblivious to. The one truth that's most essential in this book of Jonah, Jonah doesn't get it. It's the heart of his problem, and this is what it is. People who appear to be far from God might actually be closer than you think. Jonah couldn't see that on board the ship with those Gentile sailors any more than he could see it and he's sworn enemies, the Assyrians. Jonah despises Gentiles. When Jonah praises God for salvation, he only means his own salvation. But he's not praising God for the salvation of the sailors or what God intends to do with the Ninevites. So I guess what I'm saying is, before you assume that chapter 2 is Jonah's deep-seated repentance, remember how the story ends. Because, like I say, this isn't the only place Jonah prays. He prays here, and he prays in Jonah chapter 4. In Jonah chapter 4, Jonah is angry that God has spared thousands of innocent children, as well as those who sincerely repented. So before you go along with the crowd and say Jonah, too, is an example of a man who's really been radically changed, you have to ask yourself, then what happened in chapter 4? Because there's no question, he's right back to where he started. Why is he so furious later on? It's also why it's troubling to read this in verses 8 and 9. When Jonah prays, he says, Those who cling to worthless idols, turn away from God's love for them. But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you. Jonah makes clear I hate idolaters. But let me ask you something. Have we heard anything about idols or false gods in this story so far? Sure we have. In the first chapter. When Jonah sees that the ship is sinking, all those sailors, those Gentile sailors, are calling on their idols. They're calling on their gods to come and save them. So now Jonah is sitting in self-righteous judgment on these very sailors. He's basically saying, those sailors, they're just so stupid. They worship worthless idols that can't save them, but not me. I'm much better than them. Jonah talks about the idolaters forfeiting the grace that could save them. But what has Jonah done? God is being kept alive when he God is keeping him alive when he should be dead. God has been more gracious to Jonah than what he deserved. And yet now he still finds it impossible to be gracious with others. The irony in the book of Jonah, and now hear me saying this: Jonah is given grace upon grace on top of even more grace, but he can't give an ounce of that to other people. If you had been the recipient of the grace of God, how many of you have been the recipient of the grace of God? If you've been the recipient of the grace of God and you knew that was the only thing that could break through your own stubborn, rebellious heart, if you knew that was the only remedy to change and transform our life was to experience the unmerited kindness of God, then why would we ever begrudge giving that to somebody else, knowing that could be the key to their transformation? Why would I become all of a sudden a grace doorkeeper? You know, we're going to keep the riff rat out, riff route out from now from now on. You and I were the riffraff at one time. You and I were the people who were shut out from the presence of God. And it was God's grace that invited us into the family. So Jonah sees himself as superior to the Gentiles. But is that the case? Well, here's what we learned last week. The heathen prayed. Jonah didn't. The heathen wanted to do the right thing. Jonah didn't. The heathen had compassion on Jonah. Jonah doesn't show an ounce of compassion toward them. By virtually any standard you could imagine, the Gentile sailors were superior to Jonah in every way. Yet now, of all times when Jonah should be most humble, after he's blown it in such a big way, he still unabashedly tells God that he's superior to the heathen. Sometimes Christians have this same attitude toward their neighbors, toward members of their own family, toward people they work with, or society in general. They feel superior because they're Christians and their co-workers are not. They offer their critique on how horrible the world is, but they do it in such a smug way that no one in the world would ever want to be a Christian if it meant being like them. It's a horrible attitude because the only reason we're Christians is because of the grace of God. Amen? It's got nothing to do with deserving it. This is what God is trying to get through to his servant Jonah. I'm giving you grace. I'm giving you grace through the kindness of the sailors. You were blind to it. I sent a great fish to save you, your own personal submarine, so that you wouldn't drown, an act of grace to save you from your own stupidity. But even though God has been pouring copious amounts of grace into his rebellious prophet, Jonah lacks the ability to translate that grace into a new way of seeing outsiders, especially those outside the faith. Friends, if we treat outsiders like garbage, why would they ever want to be like us? That's the question we have to ask. And this last point is undebatable. Every scholar agrees on this last point. Jonah's Psalm contains no repentance and no confession of sin. Now, we learned last week the one thing Jonah needed more than anything else was to repent. All these adverse circumstances are of his own doing. So far in this story, the only character that we have met who is totally messed up is Jonah. Jonah has a lot of things he needs to own up to, but he confesses nothing. Now, in contrast to Jonah's prayer, listen to the Psalms and how they deal with confession. David wrote, Then I acknowledge my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin. Or Psalm 51, have mercy on me, O God. According to your unfailing love, according to your great compassion, blot out my transgressions, wash away all my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin, for I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight. So you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. There's nothing even remotely similar to that in Jonah's prayer. As far as I can tell, the only thing that's changing Jonah is he stopped running. And the only reason he stopped running is he can't run inside that fish, right? But there's not a word of, I'm sorry for what I've done. You were right, I was wrong. God, wash away my sin. I want to do it your way. Nothing in this prayer sounds like repentance. And again, all Bible scholars agree on this. In fact, I came across a commentary by Daniel Timmer and he pointed out Jonah, although he is unquestionably in dire straits, because of his own disobedience, does not even recognize his sin and so utters not a word of confession. So what do we find in the place of confession? We find Jonah condemning the idolatry of the Gentiles, but he refuses to acknowledge that his own disobedience is as offensive to God as idolatry. And by the way, that's the truth. In case you didn't know that, this is what Samuel said to King Saul. This is in 1 Samuel 15, 22-23. Does the Lord delight in birth offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed better than the fat of rams. For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you've rejected the word of the Lord, he has rejected you as king. Explicitly, it's better to obey than sacrifice. That's what the Bible says. Jonah offers to make a sacrifice in prayer. Is that what God wants? He wants Jonah's obedience. That's what he wants. Not Jonah's sacrifice. But there's something else Samuel told Saul. He said, rebellion is like the sin of idolatry. In God's book, arrogance and rebellion are the core issues that are at the heart of idolatry. Now let me remind you of something. God doesn't look at sin the same way we do. We focus on fruit. God looks at the roots. We look at the external manifestation, God is looking at the internal motivation. We look on the outside, God's looking on the inside. So according to God's word, Jonah is no better than the idolaters he condemns because he's guilty of the same sin. His rebellion is the seed form of idolatry because all rebellion leads to idolatry. In idolatry, you need to understand the Bible, it's never about having little statues in your house. That's not idolatry. Idolatry is me wanting what I want over what God wants. That's at the heart of the problem. And I can craft an image of that, or I can just live a life characterized by that, but that is idolatry, pure and simple. And that's what's gripped Jonah's heart. Idolatry. He wants what he wants more than he wants what God wants. So after spending some time analyzing Jonah's prayer and seeing how it falls short, the question becomes why? Why does God deliver Jonah? If God's prophet still needs an attitude adjustment, why does God save him? Why not give him a few more days in the fish? Maybe things need to get worse. Maybe he does need to pass out the other side of the fish to get his lesson. Why does God answer Jonah's cry for help when his prayer lacks so much honesty, lacks self-awareness, lacks brokenness over sin? Why does God answer Jonah's prayer? The first reason? God answers Jonah's prayer because grace is for the undeserving. God is showing the same grace to Jonah that he wants to show to the Ninevites. You see, Jonah doesn't get, Jonah doesn't deserve grace. And that's the point. No one deserves the grace of God. You get it because you need it. The Ninevehes don't deserve God's grace. In the words of the great theologian Clint Eastwood, deserves got nothing to do with it. I mean, literally. This man who recoils at the thought of God giving mercy to his enemy is now in a situation where if God extends mercy to him, if God doesn't extend mercy to him, there's no future for him. If Jonah understood that, he would have understood why God wanted to save the Assyrians. God still gives grace to people who don't understand grace. But isn't that the way it always is? God is always giving grace to us, regardless of who we are and what we've done. Which means, listen, the greatest miracle in Jonah chapter 2 isn't that a fish keeps a man alive. It's that God keeps loving a prophet who still doesn't love what God loves. Now here's the second answer that Jonah's prayer that's less than stellar gets answered by God. God answers Jonah's prayer to give Jonah what he lacks. Let me tell you a fundamental truth about human beings. You cannot give what you do not have. Period. End of story, end of discussion. If you didn't receive it, you can't give it to others. If you don't know what it's like to be loved, how will you ever be able to give love? If you've never known what it's like to be the recipient of the undeserved kindness of God, how will you ever be gracious with other people? The fact that God gives grace to Jonah, even though his prayer stinks, frankly, and falls short of what God longs to hear, all that really does is underscore how graceful God actually is. Jonah needs to experience more grace in order to be transformed into a grace giver. So God keeps giving grace in our life until it takes hold. Amen? He keeps pouring grace into all of our life until we really begin to live and to love and to experience grace on an ongoing daily basis, until we give up this insane idea that certain people are more deserving of grace than others. And that leads to this question: why do so many Bible teachers and preachers get this chapter wrong? In other words, why do so many people think that Jonah has this amazing epiphany in chapter 2 when he doesn't say anything even remotely like that? Number one is because we want Jonah to repent. We can't stand the thought of God using a stubborn, rebellious, self-centered, unrepentant sinner, but get over it because he does that all the time. He uses you and me, doesn't he? Because if God could only use people who are not stubborn, always cooperative, always obedient, never rebellious, always focused on others and never self-centered, he wouldn't have anybody left to use. You see, we want the story to have a happy ending. We want the warm, fuzzy feeling. But this book wasn't written to comfort us. It was written to convict us, to reveal our hearts. It's not a book that was written to make us feel good. It's meant to leave us feeling unsettled. This book was written to show us some unpleasant truth about ourselves that we don't want to face. The other reason so many people get this chapter wrong is because we base judgment on external appearances. Jonah's Psalm is a perfect example of superficial spirituality. This is why we misread the chapter. Superficial spirituality looks good on the surface. It mimics what is genuine. It has the vocabulary, not the reality. It talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk. It's oriented toward the self, not toward God. It's insensitive to the needs of others. It points out the sins of other people while minimizing one's own. It frequently judges other people and only gives love to people who mirror back their same hate. So God saves Jonah anyway. Which means if God will listen to the self-righteous ramblings of a disobedient prophet, he'll listen to your prayers and mine no matter how imperfect they are, too. If God will save a stubborn fool, blind to his own faults, he'll save you no matter what you've done or no matter what you've said, whether you deserve it or not, he'll save you even when you can't see the real problems you. If God will take the time to repeatedly visit Jonah and keep calling him back to the mission, each time giving him more and more grace, then he's going to keep on teaching us, and he's not going to fail to see the potential of life change in all of us. All of us are works in progress. Now, if Jonah himself wrote this book, which most scholars do agree he wrote it, because who else would know what he prayed inside that great fish but Jonah, right? If Jonah wrote this book, what that means is in the end, finally Jonah did get it. How do I know that? Because he uses this book to expose his heart, not protect his reputation. Jonah decided to get real, gut level, honest, stop trying to make himself look good. He's just telling it the way it happened. And that's what makes this short story all the more powerful and far more powerful than the way most preachers preach it. You see, this book is not really about a big fish or a runaway prophet. That's just a surface reading of the book. The actual book of Jonah is even bigger than exposing Jonah's distorted thinking. This is a book about God, a God who relentlessly demonstrates grace to the undeserving. You see, now I say that and we think, oh, yeah, God gave grace to the undeserving sailors in the first chapter. Well, that's true. In chapter three, he gives grace to Nineveh. That's true too. And you know, but with the sailors and the Ninevehes, the book of Jonah makes clear their conversion to grace was easy. It was a piece of cake. They were ripe fruit, ready to fall off the vine. No, the saving that needed to happen was God's prophet. Because the outsiders were saved with very little effort. The biggest conversion that needed to happen, the one person in the story who most needed grace was God's prophet. His conversion was the hardest of them all. Like I said last week, God's biggest obstacle is not the sinner out there, it's the saint in here. Now, the way the book of Jonah is written is again to show us the relentlessness of God to finish what he started in each and every one of us. What we assume progress looks like is this. We have this chart and we say, repentance, grace, transformation. It looks good, sounds good, looks good on an org chart. This is what we're trying to do with all of our people. But Jonah's life doesn't look like that at all. If you want to know what real transformation looks like, here's what real transformation looks like: Grace, more grace, still even more grace, and then eventually transformation. That's what real transformation looks like. That's unsettling because it means that God continues working in people and through people long before they become what he wants them to become. This pattern isn't unique to Jonah. Think about Peter's entire time with Jesus. While they're together three and a half years doing ministry alongside each other. I mean, Peter putting his foot in his mouth one time after another, when it all counts at the end of Jesus' life before he's crucified and resurrected, he betrays his Lord. He said, Well, you know, it was Pentecost. After he got filled with the Holy Ghost, then Peter was a different man. Well, yeah, there was some substantial change that happened, but all you have to do is read in Galatians 2 where God still had to rebuke him for attitudes that were unbecoming a Christ follower. Because you see, Peter's transformation looked like Jonah's. It's grace, it's more grace, it's still even more grace, and then eventually we're transformed. God keeps pouring grace into our life because that's what we need. I think about my own life. That God has used me ever is an act of pure grace. He called me as a kid, 15 years of age. This December marks 50 years I've been preaching. I got my start in religious fundamentalism. Turner Byrne. All the rules. We knew him well. We didn't live them, but we knew him well and preached them to everybody. The damage I did as a young Christian, I can't even imagine. Then in college and starting Spring Creek, I began to wake up to grace. And I thought, man, this is amazing. God's grace and loving us and accepting us where we are and as we are. And you know, a couple years into this church, I began to realize that what I said and how I lived were two totally different things. And the way I was treating my wife was horrible. And she was ready to lead me. She was ready to divorce. And I don't blame her. And God took us through this healing process that involved 12-step recovery and therapy and getting involved in a spiritual direction group. And over the years, God began to really work and heal my life and heal my relationships through him and through a lot of people that God brought into my life. Then 20 years ago, I take my first trip to Africa. I get this stunning realization that the poor are an important part of the story God's been telling for all time. And we did nothing for the poor. And God was saying, You gotta wake up, you gotta understand this gospel's big. It's about transforming the world. And because I was so affected by it, he even wrote a book that's a confession that says we were wrong. Yet God's still moving, God was moving in me and working in me and doing all these things. And it was all grace. I spent 50 years discovering that God's grace has been far more relentless than I ever imagined. It seems as there's not a day that goes by that I'm not reminded that I am who I am and I am where I am, because God has continued to pour grace into a fallen, finite, fouled-up human being called Keith Stewart. Maybe a little of that grace over the years has spilled out of me and into your life those who call me your pastor. So when I say God's greatest obstacle is not the world out there, it's the saint in here, I'm not aiming that at you. I aim that at me. I see everything that he's put up with in me and still use me. He keeps giving me grace, more grace, and still more grace until that work is complete in me. So I'm not standing above Jonah today. If you heard this message in that way, you heard it wrong. I'm standing beside him. I've been living inside the Jonah story longer than I realized, and maybe you can relate to that. And if you can, here's the good news The God who didn't give up on Jonah hasn't given up on you either. God's going to keep pouring grace in your life. Because grace is literally the only power in the universe capable of transforming a human life. It's the only power. And the only way that grace is going to get expressed and find a home in people's heart is because he pours it into you and it spills out of you. You know, sometimes I think we think, you know, God, the greatest work that's going to happen through my life is going to be something God does through me. And I gotta tell you, I think the greatest work God's gonna do in your life is gonna happen to you. It's what he wants to do in your life. Because when we become those sort of people, we just kind of get put out of the way. And we just know it's all about God and God's grace, and that grace that flows into me flows out to other people, and then real transformation begins to happen. So that's my prayer for you today. I hope you find yourself like I find myself in the book of Jonah. I hope you realize this is not a story about a great fish or a runaway prophet. This is a story about a God who relentlessly pursues us all in all of our imperfection with his unchanging grace. You don't get grace because you deserve it. You don't earn this. It's not because you're better than other people, but you get grace because you need grace, and grace will change your life. Let's pray. Father, thanks so much for this time we've had together. Thank you for the message of the book of Jonah. God, how this message speaks to me. I can't apply it to other people unless I let it find a home in my own heart and my own imperfections and all the ways that you've used me in all of my imperfection. God, I just thank you that your grace continues to be showered upon my life. And hopefully, I pray that the overflow of that grace has touched many other lives as well. But Lord, what I know is this is the work you want to do in through me is not near as important as the work you want to do in me. That we all sign up for this deal, that we all realize that what you long to do is love us into being the people you meant for us to be. So, God, I pray that as we experience more and more of your grace and we go out into a broken world, that we won't go out there with judgment. We won't go out there with condemnation, that we will go out there with grace, believing that's the only thing that can set people free. In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. God bless y'all.