SPEAKER_01: I'm going to read for us Jonah chapter one.
SPEAKER_01: Now the word of Yahweh came to Jonah the son of Amitai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: He went down to Jaffa and found a ship going to Tarshish.
SPEAKER_01: So he paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish away from Yahweh's presence.
SPEAKER_01: But Yahweh hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up.
SPEAKER_01: The mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his God, and they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea and lightened it for him.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship, and in laying down, was fast asleep.
SPEAKER_01: So the captain came to him and said, What do you mean, you sleeper?
SPEAKER_01: Arise and call out to your God.
SPEAKER_01: Perhaps the God will give a thought to us that we may not perish.
SPEAKER_01: And they said to one another, Come, let us cast lots that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.
SPEAKER_01: So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: They said to him, Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us.
SPEAKER_01: What is your occupation?
SPEAKER_01: Where do you come from?
SPEAKER_01: What's your country?
SPEAKER_01: What people are you?
SPEAKER_01: And he said to them, I'm a Hebrew, and I fear Yahweh, the God of heaven, who made the sea in the dry lands.
SPEAKER_01: And the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, What is this you have done?
SPEAKER_01: For the men knew that he was fleeing from Yahweh's presence, because he told them.
SPEAKER_01: They said to him, What shall we do to you that the sea may quiet down for us?
SPEAKER_01: For the sea grew more and more tempestuous, and he said to them, Pick me up and hurl me into the sea, then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it's because of me this great tempest has come upon you.
SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore they called out to Yahweh, O Yahweh, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Yahweh, have done as it pleased you.
SPEAKER_01: So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging.
SPEAKER_01: Then the men feared Yahweh exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to Yahweh, and made vows.
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.
SPEAKER_01: We will save verse 17 next week.
SPEAKER_01: I'll spend all of next Lord's Day, Lord willing, on verse 17.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but this morning I want to look specifically at a couple things.
SPEAKER_01: I want to begin with just this question: why is Jonah in the Bible?
SPEAKER_01: This is a question that somebody asked me last Sunday after third hour, and uh it was more of an answer that I wanted to give right there with my kids all over and everything, and it just wasn't the right time to explain why Jonah is in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: But this is the right time this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Why is Jonah in the Bible?
SPEAKER_01: And really, uh, there's a lot of reasons, but I wanted to highlight just three for you this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah's in the Bible to provide a picture for God's sovereignty.
SPEAKER_01: You know, often the Bible teaches theological themes and it teaches them didactically, but then it reiterates them in different ways.
SPEAKER_01: So the Bible makes it clear that God is sovereign, that he reigns over the heavens and the earth.
SPEAKER_01: He spoke the universe into existence.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible teaches that all things hold together through him in Colossians 1.
SPEAKER_01: Everything has its existence because of God's sovereign will.
SPEAKER_01: There are no molecules out of place, there's no rebel particles in the universe.
SPEAKER_01: Everything is under his sovereign control and direction.
SPEAKER_01: Even sin, even suffering and evil, although God is never morally responsible for evil, he remains his sovereign over it.
SPEAKER_01: And this is what the Bible teaches.
SPEAKER_01: It teaches that that didactically, it celebrates that through psalms that are about it.
SPEAKER_01: Yahweh is in heaven and he does whatever it pleases him.
SPEAKER_01: He owns the cattle and all the hills, is a couple examples that come to mind.
SPEAKER_01: But then the scripture teaches these truths through narrative.
SPEAKER_01: It will then teach something didactically and then sing about it in Psalms and then portray it for you in narrative fashion.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's one thing to say that God is sovereign over the universe, but it's a it's another to watch what how does that play out?
SPEAKER_01: How does God's sovereignty play out with people who are volitional creatures?
SPEAKER_01: We make decisions, we we have our own will and inclinations, and we do things.
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes the things we do are in rebellion against God.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we run away from God.
SPEAKER_01: The world is filled with those who don't know Yahweh, who don't know the covenant God of Israel, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, who don't know the Lagos, the word that became flesh and made its dwelling among us.
SPEAKER_01: The world is filled with those people who've never heard of him.
SPEAKER_01: What does God's sovereignty look like when it encounters people who don't know who God is?
SPEAKER_01: And Jonah provides you with a picture of that.
SPEAKER_01: And I love the full color way Jonah provides that picture because you see what happens to a boat that intersects with God's sovereignty, with pagan sailors that intersect with God's sovereignty, with a renegade prophet who encounters God's sovereignty, with a whole pagan city that encounters God's sovereignty, and then ultimately with a wind and a worm and a weed and all that.
SPEAKER_01: You get a picture of what God's sovereignty looks like played out on the natural level and on the saving level.
SPEAKER_01: It's remarkable in the book of Jonah the things that God uses to demonstrate this point that He is the ruler of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: You see that God uses wind, waves, boats, sailors, sheep, fish, a weed, a wind, and a worm to all make that point.
SPEAKER_01: And of course, the main point the book is making that you see in this is that God saves whom he wants to save, when he wants to save, and how he wants to save them.
SPEAKER_01: He wants to save a people in Nineveh, he sends them to Nineveh.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't send Jonah to Babylon, he doesn't send Jonah to Persia, he doesn't send Jonah to Damascus, he doesn't send Jonah to Rome.
SPEAKER_01: He has, God in his mind, has selected one city, one city for this prophet to go to.
SPEAKER_01: Among all the pagan cities in the world, God has sovereignly chosen these people in Nineveh, and we'll encounter them in a few weeks.
SPEAKER_01: And tangentially, another lovely picture of God's sovereignty over salvation here.
SPEAKER_01: We find the sailors, and we'll look more at them in a few moments.
SPEAKER_01: The second reason Jonah's in the Bible is to reveal God's heart for the world.
SPEAKER_01: To reveal God's heart for the world.
SPEAKER_01: This is a obviously a central point in the book of Jonah, that one of Israel's prophets has been sent to another nation.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this in and of itself is not unusual.
SPEAKER_01: Jeremiah has prophecies against the nations, Isaiah has prophecies against the nations, others as well.
SPEAKER_01: Nahum comes to mind.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah is unique in that he was called to pack up and go.
SPEAKER_01: Head out to these people that don't know Yahweh and bring to them the news of Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, Jonah was told to go and preach their destruction, but even Jonah, we find out in chapter four, understood what was going to happen in chapter three.
SPEAKER_01: Even Jonah knew that the act of God sending a messenger certainly entailed at the very least a hope of salvation.
SPEAKER_01: And with God, a hope of salvation that depends upon his will and initiative is seen played out.
SPEAKER_01: And Jonah understands that.
SPEAKER_01: And that's why Jonah doesn't want to go.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, he says, I knew you would do this.
SPEAKER_01: Ah, God.
SPEAKER_01: Of course you would go saving people left and right that I didn't sign off on.
SPEAKER_01: The takeaway lesson from Jonah's encounter with the sailors in the boat, with the Nineveh, is that God has always had a desire to save people around the world.
SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously, Yahweh is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of David, Solomon, of Asa and Hezekiah.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the line of David that reigned in Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of Jesus, the king of Israel, whose kingdom will be established on the Mount of Olives when he returns a second time.
SPEAKER_01: But he is also the God of Melchizedek.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the priest that came not from the loins of Abraham, not from the line of Levi.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of Ruth.
SPEAKER_01: Of course, the Moabitus who came and ends up in the line of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the Queen of Sheba.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of Naaman the leper, the Syrian military leader.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the widow of Zarepath.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the Persian wise men who you encounter in Matthew chapter 2.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the Roman centurion, you find in Matthew 8.
SPEAKER_01: He's the God of the Syrophoenician mother who begged Jesus to heal her daughter.
SPEAKER_01: So he's not only the God of Israel, he's the God of the world.
SPEAKER_01: And you encounter this claim in Jonah, of course, on the on the global scope, when Jonah declares that his is the God, not the God of some province, not the God of some nation like the sailors had, but when Jonah declares that his is the God who made the heavens, who made the earth, and who made the ocean.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, Yahweh is not a provincial God.
SPEAKER_01: He reigns over all things.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah goes deeper than that.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah's not satisfied in declaring that God is the God of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: He wants to particularly declare that God is the God who wants to save people from all over the world.
SPEAKER_01: It's not simply about God's sovereignty, it's about God's heart to save the nations.
SPEAKER_01: This book has a powerful point in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: You know, Israel has always been designed in the Old Testament to stay in Israel and attract the nations to itself.
SPEAKER_01: The nations were supposed to hear of what was happening in Israel.
SPEAKER_01: This is what's described in Deuteronomy 4.
SPEAKER_01: They were supposed to hear of the justice in Israel.
SPEAKER_01: They were supposed to hear about Yahweh's glory, and they were supposed to come to Israel and encounter Yahweh and be saved.
SPEAKER_01: And that never happened, other than the Queen of Sheba, really.
SPEAKER_01: And once Solomon marries all of his women, that mode of missions closes.
SPEAKER_01: No longer are the nations drawn towards Israel to encounter Yahweh and be saved.
SPEAKER_01: From that point on, the nations are drawn to Israel to conquer Israel.
SPEAKER_01: To rise up against them.
SPEAKER_01: And then in the New Testament, God changes that by not telling the church to stay and transform, but rather to go into the world.
SPEAKER_01: The church is not supposed to simply gather, but we gather in order to send.
SPEAKER_01: We gather in order to go.
SPEAKER_01: Now that's a radical change from the way salvation expanded around the world in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: And so you encounter that in the New Testament and you're tempted to say, is this new?
SPEAKER_01: Is this idea that Jesus wants the world to come to faith?
SPEAKER_01: Is that a brand new thing in the New Testament?
SPEAKER_01: And the answer, of course, is no.
SPEAKER_01: And there's all kinds of examples in the Old Testament about individuals encountered here and there, but this becomes a prefigure, almost a type of the kind of missions you'll see in the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: There will be somebody who will be sent to a pagan land.
SPEAKER_01: In that pagan land, they will hear about Yahweh and they will come to faith.
SPEAKER_01: This lets you know that God's heart for the nations did not begin with the incarnation.
SPEAKER_01: It did not begin in Matthew 28 with the Great Commission.
SPEAKER_01: It didn't begin in Acts 10 with the Gentile Pentecost.
SPEAKER_01: It has always been there.
SPEAKER_01: It goes back to creation.
SPEAKER_01: It goes back to the days of Peleg when God separated the nations.
SPEAKER_01: God has always let the nations go their own way, Paul says in Acts 17.
SPEAKER_01: God designed to let the nations go their own way so that they would be looking for him, and then he'll send people after them.
SPEAKER_01: The book of Jonah teaches that.
SPEAKER_01: Right smack dab in the middle of the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: That's what I love about it.
SPEAKER_01: It's right here.
SPEAKER_01: And then thirdly, the book of Jonah is in the Bible to teach the necessity of conversion.
SPEAKER_01: You know, in the Israelite world, they're circumcised.
SPEAKER_01: They keep the feast, they keep the festive calendar, they practice the holidays, they keep the Torah.
SPEAKER_01: And it's very easy to see salvation then, or God's saving work as something really external, something that you earn by practicing.
SPEAKER_01: And maybe you don't like the word earn, so swap out the word earn with salvation is something you experience by practicing the Old Testament law, or salvation is something that you appropriate, you make it yours by how you keep the different feasts that are described in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: And you go through the rituals, and some of them happen to you, of course, like circumcision.
SPEAKER_01: Some of them you do to others, you teach your kids the way of the truth, Deuteronomy says, as you walk along the way in life, and they won't depart from it later on.
SPEAKER_01: But it's this practice thing, and so it's very easy if you just had the Old Testament minus encounters like you see in the book of Jonah, to view that your relationship with God is achieved and maintained through practice.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah teaches something that is taught elsewhere in the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: It's taught prophetically when Jeremiah says you don't need a circumcision of the flesh, but a circumcision of the heart, and for one example.
SPEAKER_01: But you get the clearest window into the doctrine of conversion in the Old Testament through Jonah, don't you?
SPEAKER_01: Here you have a whole city that is going to be compelled to convert.
SPEAKER_01: And what does the conversion look like?
SPEAKER_01: It looks like their repentance and their trust in Yahweh and God removing his wrath from them.
SPEAKER_01: And then you have these sailors here.
SPEAKER_01: These are not, we're just going to look at a few verses this morning if we ever get to them.
SPEAKER_01: But these are not just throwaway verses.
SPEAKER_01: This isn't just some tidbit that's sprinkled on top of a nice fish story, these sailors here that get converted.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they are kind of the point of Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: They're underlining the point.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, don't get sidetracked by the Ninevites here.
SPEAKER_01: There's something else going on.
SPEAKER_01: God saves all kinds of people.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is a surreal book.
SPEAKER_01: When you end this book, it's okay for you to ask, man, is Jonah even converted?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: At the end of the book, God asks, is it okay for me to have mercy on the Ninevehes and on their little babies that don't even know they're left from their right?
SPEAKER_01: Is that okay with you, Jonah?
SPEAKER_01: And Jonah can't answer the question.
SPEAKER_01: And you end the book going, has Jonah even been converted?
SPEAKER_01: Now just look at the powerful work that this book does on the reader, that you end it confident of a sailor's conversion, confident of the Ninevehite's conversion, and genuinely questioning if the Israelite prophet has experienced the same conversion.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is a remarkable work this book does.
SPEAKER_01: Behind all that is it's just giving you this basic principle that to be in a right relationship with God, you can be circumcised, you can have all the practice on the outside.
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't matter unless you are personally, individually converted.
SPEAKER_01: A U-turn from your life, a U-turn to God.
SPEAKER_01: Now, all three of these themes, the picture of God's sovereignty, revealing God's heart for the world, and the necessity of conversion, all three of these themes are captured so perfectly in the story of these sailors.
SPEAKER_01: And so I want to look at that this morning.
SPEAKER_01: And these specifically verses 13, 14-ish through verse 16, the story of the sailors.
SPEAKER_01: And I have an outline.
SPEAKER_01: This is that was the fake outline.
SPEAKER_01: This is the real outline for you.
SPEAKER_01: How to swear like a saved sailor.
SPEAKER_01: And Tom Joyce already neuthetically confronted me this week.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, how come you don't say how to swear like an airman?
SPEAKER_01: And I said, because it's a book about sailors.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, Find a new book.
SPEAKER_01: I'll be on the lookout.
SPEAKER_01: But here, there's a word that's tucked in this.
SPEAKER_01: It's translated in the ESV, the last word of verse 16.
SPEAKER_01: They made vows, but it's a it's a word that's repeated twice in the Hebrew.
SPEAKER_01: They vowed vows, and it literally means they swore swears.
SPEAKER_01: They took oaths, in other words.
SPEAKER_01: And so I want to take that phrase because it's repeated twice here in verse 16 and make it our outline.
SPEAKER_01: How to swear like a saved sailor.
SPEAKER_01: And what this is going to do is it's going to drill down on that third point.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take the overarching umbrella of God's sovereignty.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take the idea that God has a heart to see the nations come to faith.
SPEAKER_01: And it's going to go a little bit deeper and say, in order to do that, people need to be converted.
SPEAKER_01: And what does that look like?
SPEAKER_01: What does conversion look like then?
SPEAKER_01: And we see a picture of that in these three, or in these group of sailors.
SPEAKER_01: Well, first, the first way to swear like a saved sailor is turn from self-effort.
SPEAKER_01: Turn from self-effort.
SPEAKER_01: So notice Jonah is on the boat with them.
SPEAKER_01: They are idolatrous, these sailors are.
SPEAKER_01: They worship their own idols, they worship their own gods, their own gods are unable to help them.
SPEAKER_01: They pray to their own gods earlier in the verse or earlier in the chapter.
SPEAKER_01: And their gods cannot help them.
SPEAKER_01: This is up in verse 5.
SPEAKER_01: The mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his own God.
SPEAKER_01: So these mariners have appealed to their gods.
SPEAKER_01: Their gods are not the gods who created the heavens, their gods are not the gods who created the earth or the sea.
SPEAKER_01: Their gods don't have jurisdiction on the ocean.
SPEAKER_01: But they're appealing to them nevertheless.
SPEAKER_01: And their gods are unable to help.
SPEAKER_01: Now they encounter Jonah, and Jonah tells them about the real God.
SPEAKER_01: And this is something that's it's latent in all kinds of polytheistic societies.
SPEAKER_01: There's this latent idea that there might be a God who's above their gods.
SPEAKER_01: That's not unusual.
SPEAKER_01: Even in the Greek pantheon, there's this idea that one God's got to be above the others, and of course, even the Greek gods fight for that privilege and that identity.
SPEAKER_01: The Roman world had the same kind of concept.
SPEAKER_01: Caesar was a god, but there were even gods that could be above him.
SPEAKER_01: The Mayans and the Central American religions have the same concept.
SPEAKER_01: They have different gods, but there's always this concept of an unknown God that could be above all their gods.
SPEAKER_01: You see this in the book of Acts, too.
SPEAKER_01: Paul talks about that on Mars Hill, that even you would grant that there's an unknown God.
SPEAKER_01: And so the sailors here are trusting in their God.
SPEAKER_01: Their gods are not helpful.
SPEAKER_01: They encountered Jonah, who tells them about the unknown God, the Yahweh who created the heavens and the earth and the sea.
SPEAKER_01: And before they trust in them, though, they throw their own idols overboard, right?
SPEAKER_01: They quit calling out to their God.
SPEAKER_01: That hasn't helped.
SPEAKER_01: And you notice what they do next in verse 13.
SPEAKER_01: The men tried hard to row back to dry land.
SPEAKER_01: The men worked their hardest to get back to the land.
SPEAKER_01: Rather than calling out to God for help, rather, they've just heard about Yahweh.
SPEAKER_01: Rather than calling to Yahweh for help, look at what their go-to move is.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, we know our gods aren't helping.
SPEAKER_01: We know that Jonah says there's a God that's put us into this problem.
SPEAKER_01: And it's, I have no problem believing the sailors believed that at this point, that Yahweh is real and Yahweh is hitting them with this hurricane.
SPEAKER_01: This is not a normal storm.
SPEAKER_01: They haven't experienced this before.
SPEAKER_01: They're panicking in an unusual way.
SPEAKER_01: So I have no problem believing they believe the truth about Yahweh, that he is the one who is causing this storm.
SPEAKER_01: But their gut response, their go-to response to that, is not to submit to Yahweh, but to fight him.
SPEAKER_01: To go against him.
SPEAKER_01: God is pulling them one way, and their gut response is, forget you, I want to go this way, God.
SPEAKER_01: I am going to row my hardest to get away from you.
SPEAKER_01: And that's more than a nautical flourish here.
SPEAKER_01: Is that not the basic desire that is in all of our hearts?
SPEAKER_01: This is why we need conversion, because we trust either in false gods and false religions that we were taught when we were young, or we trust in our own self-effort.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there is an idea deep inside of the human soul that we can do it on our own.
SPEAKER_01: That's the idea behind the person who says, when I die, I'll be okay, I'll go to heaven when I die, because God will know that I'm basically a good person.
SPEAKER_01: If God exists, he'll know I tried hard.
SPEAKER_01: That's this idea.
SPEAKER_01: And if you ever encounter that in your own mind, if you ever think that God is going to be satisfied with me because he knows I have tried my hardest, I want you to conjure up the picture of these sailors in your minds.
SPEAKER_01: Picture them going after those oars.
SPEAKER_01: Picture them trying their hardest to get away from God.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they know what God wants.
SPEAKER_01: They're going to find out pretty clearly in a second, at least.
SPEAKER_01: But they want to do it on their own.
SPEAKER_01: They are determined that they can outmuscle the Savior.
SPEAKER_01: They're determined that they can have that their strength will be effective in going toe-to-toe against the God who created them.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, rowing in this instance is just plain silly.
SPEAKER_01: And it's designed to be a little bit humorous.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the boat is trying to break up, and here these guys are trying to corral the boat to go against God.
SPEAKER_01: It's just not going to work.
SPEAKER_01: But behind that is a picture of your own self-effort, your own desire to be good enough before God.
SPEAKER_01: Your own desire to think that I can stand before God, because frankly, I have tried really hard to.
SPEAKER_01: Certainly, God has taken note of my effort.
SPEAKER_01: But if you trust your own effort, you cannot be converted.
SPEAKER_01: Because what conversion looks like in this narrative is what it looks like in each human being's life.
SPEAKER_01: What conversion looks like in this narrative is they have to set down their oars.
SPEAKER_01: They have to stop.
SPEAKER_01: They have to stop fighting.
SPEAKER_01: They have to stop striving against God.
SPEAKER_01: They have to stop trying to flee his sovereignty.
SPEAKER_01: They have to lay down their oars.
SPEAKER_01: And just trust the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And that is so hard for people to do because people so badly want to trust themselves.
SPEAKER_01: So badly.
SPEAKER_01: What repentance looks like here?
SPEAKER_01: Getting rid of the idols.
SPEAKER_01: False religion, you can't keep the idols on board.
SPEAKER_01: These guys can't trust Yahweh while still having their you know fish god up on their the deck of their ship.
SPEAKER_01: No, the fish god is overboard.
SPEAKER_01: And they can't trust Yahweh by replacing the fish god with their own self effort.
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: Salvation looks like laying down your oars, trusting God, not your own sense of self-worth.
SPEAKER_01: Your worth cannot work your way to God.
SPEAKER_01: Listen, your worth, you do have self-worth.
SPEAKER_01: There is value inherent in every human being, but it does not come from your own distinctiveness.
SPEAKER_01: It does not come from your own effort.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't come from your own goodness.
SPEAKER_01: Every human being's self-worth comes from the fact that they're made in the image of God, and so they have an inherent value and dignity and honor because they represent God's nature, God's image.
SPEAKER_01: Adding to that by working hard to be pleasing to God is not effective.
SPEAKER_01: And it is at cross-purposes to conversion.
SPEAKER_01: So step one, to swear like a sailor, turn from self-effort.
SPEAKER_01: Stop trying to be good enough.
SPEAKER_01: Hard for a sailor to do.
SPEAKER_01: Step two, trust in the doctrine of propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: Trust in the doctrine of propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: Now, propitiation is a word I love.
SPEAKER_01: It's a biblical word.
SPEAKER_01: In many Bibles.
SPEAKER_01: Some translations have cut it out because it's not, you know, it's not common in English, and so they get rid of it from the Bible, which just makes my skin crawl.
SPEAKER_01: The word propitiation, you'll find it in 1 John, for example, that he is the propitiation for our sins.
SPEAKER_01: Not just for our sins only, but for the sins of the world.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, not just the propitiation of sins for the Jews, but for people all around the world, including pagan sailors.
SPEAKER_01: God is the propitiation of their sins.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ is.
SPEAKER_01: Well, propitiation means, if you look it up in a dictionary, propitiation means to make an appeal to a God so that he won't be angry with you anymore.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, God's angry at you, so you have to offer him a sacrifice so he stops being angry with you.
SPEAKER_01: That's the definition of propitiation or another definition, to win or regain favor of a God.
SPEAKER_01: The idea of regaining favor is that God's angry at you, so you need to win his favor back.
SPEAKER_01: But in the Bible, it means something even more specific than that.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't simply mean to win God's favor back.
SPEAKER_01: And there's an order to this, right?
SPEAKER_01: If you trust in self-effort, propitiation takes on a whole different flavor.
SPEAKER_01: If you trust in self-effort, propitiation means you're working hard enough for God to be impressed with you.
SPEAKER_01: That's not the way biblical propitiation works.
SPEAKER_01: It's not that you work hard enough to get God to not be angry with you.
SPEAKER_01: Of course not, because that skips over point one.
SPEAKER_01: In the Bible, propitiation means, like 1 John 4, for example, means to assuage God's anger, to do something that calms or covers God's anger.
SPEAKER_01: God's wrath towards sin is building, it's growing, and it's gonna rain down on mankind.
SPEAKER_01: Propitiation is a shield that blocks it.
SPEAKER_01: It's a shield that doesn't more than blocks it, actually, it stops it.
SPEAKER_01: You know, the dam of God's wrath is breaking, and God's wrath is gonna pour out in the world, and you see it break through in flashes.
SPEAKER_01: When Uzzah grabs the ark, for example, and God immediately strikes him dead.
SPEAKER_01: That's one example that comes to mind.
SPEAKER_01: You see it break forth with the flood where God destroys the whole world.
SPEAKER_01: You see God's wrath breaking forth in flashes here and there.
SPEAKER_01: Nothing at all like we deserve, nothing at all like the fire of hell, which is still future and will be eternal.
SPEAKER_01: And the point of hell being eternal is to let you know that God's wrath is never exhausted.
SPEAKER_01: Propitiation just holds it back.
SPEAKER_01: So you picture a dam with a leak in it and you plug the dam.
SPEAKER_01: That's propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: You're stopping up the flood from coming down.
SPEAKER_01: That's propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: Now the Bible teaches that the death of Christ is our propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: That the death of Christ forever takes away God's wrath.
SPEAKER_01: So it does more than plugs the dam, it diverts the stream.
SPEAKER_01: It takes it somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01: That's propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: As I mentioned, God's anger is infinite and will ultimately come out in hell, but it's not raining down on the earth right now.
SPEAKER_01: So why isn't God's anger raining down on the earth right now?
SPEAKER_01: And in a sense, it is when we sin, but that's natural consequences of sin being in the world, it produces death, that's the curse.
SPEAKER_01: But God's personal, direct wrath will be unveiled.
SPEAKER_01: You get a picture of this in Revelation 5 and 6.
SPEAKER_01: 5 speaking of His holiness, 6 being of the seals unleash, and you start to see God's wrath coming down on earth, and that's nothing.
SPEAKER_01: The seals increase in intensity until finally you end up in hell at the end of the book of Revelation, where the fires are eternal.
SPEAKER_01: That's the idea of God's wrath being infinite and eternal, and yet it's held back right now by the work of Christ temporarily, and it's held back forever and permanently on God's children.
SPEAKER_01: That's the biblical concept of propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: So, what makes propitiation?
SPEAKER_01: Let me give you a little a recipe for propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to call it a formula because it's a recipe.
SPEAKER_01: Trust and propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: Here's your recipe for propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: You need to take imputation.
SPEAKER_01: Imputation is where God transfers sin from one person to another.
SPEAKER_01: And you're seeing this in the boat right here.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah is the sinner here.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah has come onto the boat to run from God.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah's sin is imputed to the sailors when they start running from God also.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see how the sin spreads?
SPEAKER_01: And if that's too ethereal for you, go to Adam.
SPEAKER_01: Adam and Eve's sin goes down to all of mankind, but it's Adam's sin that is imputed to us.
SPEAKER_01: Adam's sin becomes your sin.
SPEAKER_01: You are a sinner even before you sin.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know this?
SPEAKER_01: This is what David means when you knit together by God, but in iniquity.
SPEAKER_01: You're a sinner before you have ever sinned.
SPEAKER_01: Why are you a sinner if you haven't yet sinned?
SPEAKER_01: Because you're in, you have Adam's sin imputed to you.
SPEAKER_01: God credits you Adam's sin.
SPEAKER_01: God treats you as if you had done Adam's sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's the nature of the fall.
SPEAKER_01: Adam was your representative in the garden, he sinned, and God's wrath is given to us through him.
SPEAKER_01: That's imputation.
SPEAKER_01: You weren't in the garden.
SPEAKER_01: And you can't be that offended by imputation, by the way, because if you were in the garden, you would have done it too.
SPEAKER_01: But that's the first part.
SPEAKER_01: Imputation.
SPEAKER_01: That Adam's sin becomes yours, or Jonah's sin becomes a sailor.
SPEAKER_01: Second part, substitution.
SPEAKER_01: Substitution.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah says, you've got to throw me overboard.
SPEAKER_01: And so Jonah is now going to go overboard instead of the sailors.
SPEAKER_01: Right now they're all going overboard, but they're going to put forward a substitute, and Jonah will go over instead of them, in their place.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this is the basic concept of all the sacrifices in the Old Testament, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: That you deserve to die, but you send a scapegoat forward.
SPEAKER_01: The scapegoat, one will die and one will run away.
SPEAKER_01: Or the Passover lamb, the Passover lamb dies in your place.
SPEAKER_01: That was the whole point of the Passover.
SPEAKER_01: The family would gather around, the lamb's throat would be slit, his blood would be let out, the blood would be put over on the doorpost, and the father would teach the kids the lamb dies so that we don't.
SPEAKER_01: The lamb dies in our place.
SPEAKER_01: He is our substitute.
SPEAKER_01: And of course, you see this in the gospel, where Jesus becomes our substitute.
SPEAKER_01: This is what John the Baptist means when he says, Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
SPEAKER_01: He becomes our substitute.
SPEAKER_01: He goes to the cross instead of us.
SPEAKER_01: We deserve that death, but he becomes our substitute.
SPEAKER_01: He takes our place.
SPEAKER_01: You add imputation, you add substitution, you add to that imputation again.
SPEAKER_01: Like one of those recipes where you put things in twice.
SPEAKER_01: You add imputation again.
SPEAKER_01: This time, imputation is the sailor's sins go to Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: Remember earlier Jonah's sins went to them.
SPEAKER_01: Now the sailors' sins are going to Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: When Jonah is their substitute, he will be dying not just for Jonah's own sin, but for the sins of the whole boat.
SPEAKER_01: In other words, Jonah's death has their sins imputed to him.
SPEAKER_01: He can be, this is what makes substitution effective, by the way.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah can be a real substitute because the sin is really imputed to him.
SPEAKER_01: Absent imputation, substitution does not work.
SPEAKER_01: And you could try this at a criminal trial.
SPEAKER_01: Or even, you don't even have to go that dramatic.
SPEAKER_01: A speeding ticket.
SPEAKER_01: You get a speeding ticket.
SPEAKER_01: Send your spouse or your brother or your son or your dad to court for you and see what happens.
SPEAKER_01: Like, were you the one driving?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm here in his place and I plead guilty.
SPEAKER_01: You can give me the fine.
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't work.
SPEAKER_01: Why doesn't it work though?
SPEAKER_01: And do something more dramatic.
SPEAKER_01: You know, if if somebody assaults someone or robs someone or steals a car and they get arrested, can you show up at their trial and say, I would like to plead guilty on their behalf?
SPEAKER_01: I'll go to jail instead of them.
SPEAKER_01: No, that doesn't, that's not carrying out justice.
SPEAKER_01: Why not?
SPEAKER_01: Because the second imputation is missing.
SPEAKER_01: Because the guilt of the person can't be transferred to you.
SPEAKER_01: The punishment can, but not the guilt.
SPEAKER_01: And unless the guilt can be transferred, it's not a valid substitution.
SPEAKER_01: You need this.
SPEAKER_01: For Jonah's death off the boat to effectually save the sailors, their guilt has to go upon him.
SPEAKER_01: Or again, if you're having a hard time with the Jonah Sailor analogy, go to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Could Jesus have flung himself off the top of the temple and gone down to his death and died as our substitute?
SPEAKER_01: The answer is no.
SPEAKER_01: Could he have died at age two in Herod's purge of the babies and been your substitute?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: Could he have died in Egypt and been your substitute?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: Could he have died at the beginning of his ministry and been your substitute?
SPEAKER_01: No.
SPEAKER_01: His death only becomes effective after his righteousness becomes ours and our sin becomes his.
SPEAKER_01: At that moment that our sin is transferred to him, that's the point where his death as a substitute is effective.
SPEAKER_01: He needs his own righteousness, which can become ours, and we need our sin to go to him for his death to be in our place.
SPEAKER_01: That's what makes the second imputation is what makes substitution effective.
SPEAKER_01: This, by the way, is why the Bible calls Jesus a second Adam.
SPEAKER_01: Because his righteousness can become ours.
SPEAKER_01: The first Adam's sin became ours, is Romans 5, but the second Adam's righteousness becomes ours as he takes our sin.
SPEAKER_01: This is what Adam could not do.
SPEAKER_01: Adam was only a bad substitute, huh?
SPEAKER_01: We just get sin from him.
SPEAKER_01: We don't get any of the good things he did.
SPEAKER_01: We don't get his pre-fallen perfection.
SPEAKER_01: That would be nice.
SPEAKER_01: We'd lose it again, of course, but it'd be nice to have just for a moment.
SPEAKER_01: No, we only get his sin.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus is a better Adam.
SPEAKER_01: He gives us his righteousness and he takes from us our sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's what makes substitution effective.
SPEAKER_01: If you have all of this together, add one more thing.
SPEAKER_01: Add sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: Once you have sacrifice, added to the double imputation, added to substitution, now you get propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: The scapegoat, the one of the two goats will die.
SPEAKER_01: The Passover lamb will die.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ will die.
SPEAKER_01: This was the devil's point.
SPEAKER_01: Throw yourself off the temple.
SPEAKER_01: Let the angels catch you.
SPEAKER_01: After all, they would do that, right?
SPEAKER_01: But if the angels did that, he's not a propitiation for wrath because he was not sacrificed.
SPEAKER_01: He has to actually die to be our sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: And sacrifice, by the way, only works if you have the rest of this.
SPEAKER_01: This is why Christian propitiation is so different than non-Christian propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: You look at the other religions of the world that, you know, offer virgins into volcanoes, so to speak, and they're sacrificing idols to appease the rain god or sacrificing livestock to appease the rain god.
SPEAKER_01: That kind of religion is shallow because that religion is starting from the position of we have worth and value and we need to win over God.
SPEAKER_01: Notice that biblical propitiation is reversed.
SPEAKER_01: We have sin, not something of value to offer God.
SPEAKER_01: We have need, and we providing a sacrifice, and our sacrifices that we provide can't even do the trick, honestly.
SPEAKER_01: God Himself has to provide the sacrifice that takes our sin.
SPEAKER_01: So when people compare the cross to the kind of, you know, throw a version into volcano sacrifices in pagan religions, they're really, they're going the wrong way down a one-way street.
SPEAKER_01: Those religions say we have something of value.
SPEAKER_01: God needs our valuable item to keep back his wrath.
SPEAKER_01: Biblical propitiation goes the other way.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have anything of value.
SPEAKER_01: But God provides a substitute who takes our sin.
SPEAKER_01: We get his righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: And that substitute can go and suffer in our place.
SPEAKER_01: That's the point of propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: That's what's needed here.
SPEAKER_01: Taking all together, you have propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what the sailors find.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah says in verse 12, pick me up, throw me into the sea.
SPEAKER_01: Then it will quiet down for you.
SPEAKER_01: I know it's because of me this great tempest has come upon you.
SPEAKER_01: Nevertheless, the men, of course, row, and here's where they're making their own sin their own.
SPEAKER_01: They're fighting against God.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 14, they call to Yahweh, Yahweh, let us not perish for this man's life.
SPEAKER_01: Lay not on us innocent blood.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see that point?
SPEAKER_01: Don't charge us with this.
SPEAKER_01: We're charging our sin to him.
SPEAKER_01: We're giving it to him, and we're giving him to you.
SPEAKER_01: And even notice the end of verse 14, this is an incredible point.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going off script here, but notice the end of verse 14.
SPEAKER_01: Even these sailors recognize God's sovereignty over all things.
SPEAKER_01: Do you see this?
SPEAKER_01: At the end of this, they say to God, Nevertheless, you have done as it pleased you.
SPEAKER_01: What a picture of God's sovereignty, huh?
SPEAKER_01: Sailors on a boat, pagan sailors on a boat in a storm from a covenant God they know not of, and they submit themselves to Him, saying, We're ceasing from our self-effort, we're trusting propitiation in your substitute here.
SPEAKER_01: After all, you do whatever you want to.
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's the second step here, propitiation.
SPEAKER_01: Thirdly, tell your new faith to the world.
SPEAKER_01: Turn from self-effort, trust in propitiation, and thirdly, tell your new faith to the world.
SPEAKER_01: And that's verse 16.
SPEAKER_01: Well, you see the substitute accepted in verse 15.
SPEAKER_01: The sea ceased from its raging.
SPEAKER_01: By the way, the sailors don't know that Jonah's gonna get swallowed by a fish.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah doesn't know that he's gonna get swallowed by the fish.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah's off to a watery grave.
SPEAKER_01: The sailors wave bye-bye to him and tell God, don't charge his death to us.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, nobody is expecting resurrection here.
SPEAKER_01: They're only expecting death.
SPEAKER_01: But verse 16 brings all this together.
SPEAKER_01: The men feared Yahweh exceedingly.
SPEAKER_01: They offered a sacrifice to Yahweh and they made vows.
SPEAKER_01: Now it's not so clear in the English, but in Hebrew this is a triple double?
SPEAKER_01: Is that something in a sport somewhere?
SPEAKER_01: I think so, a triple double.
SPEAKER_01: Some sport somewhere has that.
SPEAKER_01: Well, here you get it in Hebrew.
SPEAKER_01: This is the only place in the Old Testament where this exists.
SPEAKER_01: It's the same word repeated twice, three times.
SPEAKER_01: Let me show you what I mean.
SPEAKER_01: Literally in Hebrew it says, the men feared with fear.
SPEAKER_01: Then they in the middle part of verse 16, sacrificed with sacrifices.
SPEAKER_01: And then again they vowed with vows.
SPEAKER_01: It's doubling up three times.
SPEAKER_01: It's letting you know that these guys, these sailors didn't just get saved.
SPEAKER_01: They got saved.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they are undone.
SPEAKER_01: They're fearing God with great fear.
SPEAKER_01: They're sacrificing great sacrifices, they're vowing great vows.
SPEAKER_01: Now, an obvious question that comes to my mind anyway is what sacrifices do they have?
SPEAKER_01: What do they have left?
SPEAKER_01: They hurled over their cargo.
SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they had a couple animals they kept for food, they sacrificed them.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they caught some seagulls and sacrificed them.
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe it's Psalm 51, verse 17 style.
SPEAKER_01: The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.
SPEAKER_01: Oh God, you will not despise these.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's those kinds of sacrifices.
SPEAKER_01: Their hearts have been thoroughly changed.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't say.
SPEAKER_01: And that would be an interesting dig at the Jews right here who read this, wondering, how can these people sacrifice sacrifices?
SPEAKER_01: What's left for them?
SPEAKER_01: Who knows?
SPEAKER_01: Jonah doesn't tell you, just leaves it there.
SPEAKER_01: Now, for the sake of time, I just want to speed up here.
SPEAKER_01: How does this apply to us?
SPEAKER_01: How do we proclaim our faith to a fallen world?
SPEAKER_01: Well, the New Testament gives us some specific ways.
SPEAKER_01: The idea of vows, as I've taught on before, you see them all over the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_01: They disappear in the New Testament twice in the book of Acts, where Paul is speaking to Jews, that he has people with him who made vows to redeem in the temple, kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01: It's never given as a New Testament pattern for the church.
SPEAKER_01: I think the equivalent of this in the New Testament is baptism, the public profession of your faith, that you come to faith, you've turned from trusting in yourself, you've trusting instead and propitiation, and you trust in the death of Christ instead of your own work, your own effort.
SPEAKER_01: You've ceased from trusting in your own goodness and you place your entire faith in the death of Jesus on the cross in your place, and his resurrection from the grave, of course, which we'll talk about next week.
SPEAKER_01: What do you do now?
SPEAKER_01: You proclaim that faith to the world.
SPEAKER_01: That's what baptism does.
SPEAKER_01: Baptism is you going under to your watery grave and you coming up to newness of life.
SPEAKER_01: It's you declaring to the world that you are dying to your trust in self and want to live to trust in Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That's what baptism is.
SPEAKER_01: You're turning, you're trusting, you're telling.
SPEAKER_01: Turning from your sin, trusting in Christ, and telling the world about it.
SPEAKER_01: That's the point.
SPEAKER_01: Believe me, sailors would have been fine with water baptism.
SPEAKER_01: So you need to ask yourself have you turned from sin?
SPEAKER_01: Have you trusted in the death of Christ as your propitiation?
SPEAKER_01: And have you been baptized to proclaim that to the world?
SPEAKER_01: You know, last week I told you the Jews read Jonah at Yom Kippur.
SPEAKER_01: Yom Kippur's five gatherings throughout the day.
SPEAKER_01: They read Jonah at the mid-afternoon one, two o'clock in the afternoon.
SPEAKER_01: They'll gather in the synagogue.
SPEAKER_01: It's the Yom Kippur's day of fasting.
SPEAKER_01: It's the day of atonement, a day of fasting, and they fast all day long until the Shafar blows in the evening, where the fast is broken.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah's read at two in the afternoon.
SPEAKER_01: Now they read Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: It's the only complete book they read all day.
SPEAKER_01: Earlier in the morning, they'll read parts of Leviticus because Yom Kippur's about atonement.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah's the only complete book they read, which is fascinating when you think about it.
SPEAKER_01: And they read it for different reasons.
SPEAKER_01: One of the reasons is by two in the afternoon of a day of fasting, you feel like Jonah in Jonah chapter 4.
SPEAKER_01: You feel like you're in the wilderness and you're being beat down.
SPEAKER_01: That's one reason they read it.
SPEAKER_01: The main reason they read it is one that probably wouldn't occur to you if you're not Jewish.
SPEAKER_01: But Jonah finds himself as a Hebrew in the middle of a fallen world, surrounded by pagan sailors who are yelling at him about his God.
SPEAKER_01: They've turned on him while he's in the world, and the first words out of his mouth are, I am a Hebrew.
SPEAKER_01: And so in Yom Kippur, the Jews read this book and they all end it by saying, We are Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: After the book is read, all of the Jews stand up and say, We are Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: And they do that because it's sympathetic resonance.
SPEAKER_01: Jonah was on a boat and declared that he was a Hebrew, so it's the least they can do to declare that they are Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: They're connected to him.
SPEAKER_01: Now, obviously, part of this is about Yom Kippur, the idea that there is forgiveness for sins.
SPEAKER_01: But there's another very real reason the Jews read Jonah, because Jonah's them is a book of mystery.
SPEAKER_01: It's a book of mystery.
SPEAKER_01: Why would God send a prophet to the Assyrians?
SPEAKER_01: The Assyrians did the first Holocaust.
SPEAKER_01: The Assyrians are the ones that captured Israel, took them out, destroyed their capital, exiled them, destroyed their nation, and yet God sends their prophet to them and forgives them.
SPEAKER_01: And the book ends with a question.
SPEAKER_01: It ends with a question.
SPEAKER_01: And if you're a Jew, how would you answer that question?
SPEAKER_01: God asking Jonah, Should I not have mercy on the Assyrians?
SPEAKER_01: And if you're Jonah, how do you even begin to answer that question?
SPEAKER_01: And so Jews read this book to let them know they are Jonah and they are under a God of mystery.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot figure out God.
SPEAKER_01: The best you can do is submit yourself to Him and offer Him sacrifices like Yom Kippur.
SPEAKER_01: That's the point of reading Jonah on Yom Kippur.
SPEAKER_01: Well, there's more truth in that than they know.
SPEAKER_01: We are all Jonah.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's worth asking yourself, are you Jonah and how?
SPEAKER_01: Are you rowing against God?
SPEAKER_01: Are you striving against him?
SPEAKER_01: Then repent.
SPEAKER_01: Are you hindering your testimony by your selfishness to others?
SPEAKER_01: Are you like Jonah where you have to tell people that you believe in Yahweh and you're embarrassed about it and they're like, whoa, and they're angry at you for it?
SPEAKER_01: Then repent.
SPEAKER_01: Are you reluctant in evangelism like Jonah was?
SPEAKER_01: Do you have to have evangelism drawn out of you?
SPEAKER_01: Do your neighbors know about Christ?
SPEAKER_01: Do your coworkers know about Christ?
SPEAKER_01: Are you like Jonah, just minding your own business in your bed, minding your own business at work?
SPEAKER_01: Are you like Jonah and that you're concerned God will save the wrong people?
SPEAKER_01: Then repent.
SPEAKER_01: In this sense, it's not that we're all Jonah's, but I pray that we are all the sailors here.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we're thankful for your gospel that goes to the world and teaches us to turn from our sin, trust in you as our Savior, and to proclaim it to the world.
SPEAKER_01: I pray if there's anyone here this morning that has never trusted you, that they would do so this morning.
SPEAKER_01: They never put your faith in your death on the cross, that they would do so this morning.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being with us today.
SPEAKER_00: And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.
SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuel Bible.church.
SPEAKER_01: If you're not a member of the local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_01: area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.
SPEAKER_01: I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.
SPEAKER_01: But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.
SPEAKER_01: Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.