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I just want to make a confession to you guys. I, for some unknown reason, I can't quite figure it out. I like to watch uh police chases. Anyone else like to do that? Anybody willing to admit that? Like when I turn on the TV, there's something weird in me, and if I see a police chase, I'm just kind of like mesmerized by it. I start watching it, and I'm just like locked in as these cars are driving down the road and these people were chasing them. And um and for me, maybe for some of you that's too close to home, I don't know. Um but uh but you know, here's the truth. Like it's kind of this funny thing, it's this weird part of us, it's like we're watching these cars be chased, and we're and we're like, okay, yeah, yeah. And and there's this weird part of me. I just go a little step further. There's sometimes I'm actually cheering for the guy who's being chased. I'm like, okay, man, go faster, but don't hurt anybody. You know, it's like, but and and so maybe that's just me and how messed up I am. I I don't know. Um, but but I know eventually they're gonna get caught, you know, and they get the choppers involved and they get the the other police cars involved, and they're chasing this guy or this gal or whoever they are. And and usually there's some sort of influence involved, there's some drugs or something going on, so they're not quite thinking straight. Because I mean, let's be honest, like we know they're gonna get caught, right? We know it's just a matter of time. They're they're either gonna wreck their car, they're gonna jump out and run and get tackled by policemen, and we say, Thank you, policemen, for protecting us, and you know, all that. But but here's the thing like we know they're gonna get caught eventually, and and yet they in their minds for some reason think, well, I can run. I had some friends when I was in high school, and they thought, hey, we we're we're we can run from the cops. And so they were playing this game one night. I think actually they were they were toilet paper in people's houses, and the cops got called on them. Uh-huh. See, so uh so some it can be serious, you know, teens. And uh and and then they take off running, think it's no big deal, and they're in their car and they get caught, and of course, mom and dad was they were not so happy uh about that. I wasn't a part of that. Um but uh there's there's moments where stuff like that has happened. Uh, you know, and here's the thing like again, in those stories, those situations, those circumstances, there's there's this weird part of us that is mesmerizing if you're that like the chase, that like the thrill of the running and the chasing process. But what I've noticed in us as I was preparing for this message series that we start today, it's over the next four weeks on the book of Jonah, is that in the heart of humanity, there's a tendency for us to run. And specifically, there's a tendency for uh in us to run from God. Uh when I read the book of Jonah, I see myself. I see a lot of things that remind me of how I can be with God. Uh, if you don't know the story of Jonah, you're gonna get to know the story over the next four weeks, and I encourage you to be a part each week, and I encourage you actually to join a life group over the next four weeks as we talk about what this looks like. Life groups are simply our small groups that meet in homes during the week, and you can do that by again going to the connection point or talking to us after the service, where we actually talk about how do we apply what we're hearing on Sunday and learn to live that out in community. But here's what I know to be true is that all of us have a tendency to run. But here's the cool thing: not only do we have a tendency to run, but God has a tendency to chase, to chase after us. God has a tendency to come after us when we're running. And some of us are not so excited about that, but when we understand the deeper thing that's going on, I think it's quite compelling to recognize just how incredible it is that God would come after us. How incredible it is that He would chase after us. So we have a tendency to run. God has a tendency to chase. I want to read from Jonah chapter one, and I'm gonna read the whole chapter, so hang with me because I want us to really hear this story. And I encourage you this week, even if you have time, to go and read the story of Jonah. Uh the book's not real long, it's four chapters. We're gonna unpack a chapter each week, and maybe you can read it for yourself over the next month a few times, and ask God to show you some things in it about yourself and about him. Here's what it says in verse one in chapter Jonah, in Jonah chapter one. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amitai. Get up, go to the great city of Nineveh, and preach against it, because their wickedness has confronted me. However, Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the pro the Lord's presence. He went down to Joppa, and he found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare, and he went down into it, not uh into to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord's presence. Couple things you notice there, obviously, in those first three verses, repetition of Tarshish, repetition of down, and repetition of away from the Lord's presence. Then the Lord hurled a violent wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose on the sea that the ship threatened to break apart, which I think is kind of funny. It's like the storm so bad the ship's saying, Hey, I'm gonna break break apart here. Okay? It's like the ship's talking to him. The sailors were afraid, and they each cried out to his God, and they threw the ship's cargo into the sea to lighten the load. Meanwhile, Jonah had gone down to the lowest part of the vessel, and had stretched out and fallen into a deep sleep. The captain approached him and said, What are you doing, sound of sleep? Get up, call to your God. Maybe this God will consider us, and we won't perish. Come on, the sailors said to each other, let's cast lots. Then we'll know who is to blame for this trouble we're in. So they cast lots, and they and they the lot singled out Jonah. So they kind of threw these dice and it pointed to Jonah. And they said to Jonah, Tell us who is to blame for this trouble we're in. What is your business, and where are you from, and what is your country, and what people are you from? He answered them, I am a Hebrew, I worship Yahweh, the God of heavens, who made the sea in the dry land. Then the men were even more afraid, and they said to him, What is this you've done? The men knew he was fleeing from the Lord's presence because he had told them. So it wasn't like he was just kind of fleeing. He had already told them what he was doing. So they said to him, What should we do to calm the sea that's against us? For the sea was getting worse and worse. And he answered them, Pick me up and throw me into the sea, so it may quiet down for you. For I know that I am to blame for this violent storm that is against you. Nevertheless, the men rode hard to get back to dry land, but they couldn't, because the sea was raging against them more and more. So they called out to the Lord, Please, Yahweh, don't let us perish because of this man's life, and don't charge us with innocent blood. For you, Yahweh, have done just as you pleased. Then they picked up Jonah and they threw him into the sea, and the sea stopped its raging. The men feared the Lord even more, and they offered sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. Now the Lord had appointed a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the fish for three days and three nights. Now, if you've been in church at all, you've heard the story of Jonah. If you haven't been in church, then maybe you don't know the story. And I want us to be familiar with that by the end of the series. But I'll just real quick recap of what we read. That in the story of Jonah, you get God, uh, you hear from God speaking out to this prophet named Jonah, and we know that Jonah was a prophet of God, meaning that he he heard from God and would speak on behalf of God to the people. Now he was from Galilee. We know 2 Kings 14 uh tells us that he was uh a prophet during the reign of Jeroboam, which means that the people were oppressed, they were under uh opposition, they had been, they'd been uh missed uh they'd been transplanted from their place where they lived to a new place. And what's interesting about prophet uh Jonah being a prophet from Galilee is that in the New Testament, when this comes up and Jesus shows up on the scene, uh they actually said, Jesus from Galilee, nothing good comes out of Galilee, there's no prophets from Galilee. Meaning that clearly, like Jonah didn't make the the uh the honor roll for prophets. He wasn't exactly the best prophet. You tracking? And so uh here's Jesus now who shows up on the scene in the New Testament, and he's from Galilee, and they're like literally discrediting it because Jonah was such a bad prophet. But we know he's a prophet, and we know that he had been speaking on behalf of God to the people. We don't know a lot about what he said, we don't know a lot about what he did in that. But God says to him, Get up, Jonah, and go to Nineveh. Get up and go to Nineveh. Uh God gives him a specific instruction. Now, you guys are thinking, well, what's the big deal about getting up and going to Nineveh? Isn't this just another group of people? Let me give you a modern-day equivalent to try to help you understand what he's being asked to do. It would be as if you woke up in the morning and God said, Uh, Nick, I want you to get up and I want you to go be a missionary to ISIS. That's what it would feel like. It would be like, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna be a missionary to people who are beheading Christians and who are uh just completely in opposition to God and wicked. That's that's kind of what you're talking about. Uh, for those of you who have little kids and have watched Veggie Tales and Nineveh, we're gonna talk more about Nineveh in a couple weeks. And you know about the fish slappers, you know what I'm talking about? Some of you are like, yes, some of you are like, I have no idea what you're talking about. It's okay. Uh it was a lot worse than fish slapping, okay? They try to tame it down for kids. They were, these were wicked, evil, horrific people. And they were doing evil things. And so when Jonah hears this, he's like, I'm not going there. In fact, here's a map to tell you exactly what Jonah did. Nineveh, he's in Joppa, it says, Nineveh's 550 miles over here. Where's Tarshish? 2,500 miles that way. I don't think he was going where God told him. In fact, it's pretty obvious he was going the opposite direction from where God told him. And so in the story, we see how Jonah doesn't get up and go to the Nineveh, but he goes or attempts to go to Tarshish. And it says Tarshus three times. Tarshus was a place that was on the really considered the the edge of the world, the edge of the known world. It was a port that had a lot of ships coming through it. They had a lot of gold and silver. In fact, the word Tarsus really means uh smelting pot, and they had a lot of wealth and comfort there. Uh it was it was a great place to live if you were trying to get away from Nineveh. It would be a great place to go and to escape as a refuge. And it was as far away as possible in the known world from Nineveh. So you get the point. He's not going the right direction. That's what Jonah did is he ran the opposite direction. And notice that when he runs, by the way, that each of these progressions we see in the book is that he goes down. He goes down to Joppa. He goes down into the ship, right? And the idea throughout the pattern of this book is that when you run away from God, you are not going up, you are going down. Life is not going to get better for you, it's going to get worse for you. It's going to get harder for you. Now, some of you may not believe that. Others of you are like, yes, I do understand exactly what you're talking about. When you run from God, there are consequences, and we'll talk about that in just a minute. But in this passage, clearly we see that Jonah is a runner. Just like you and I are runners, that we run away from God's plan. And one of the biggest things that we need to understand if we're going to grow as Christians, as Christ's followers, is we need to understand how and where we run, or where and how we tend to run. One of the things you can do is to be self-aware about how you tend to run from God in your life. Now I'm just going to list a few things that I see when I interact with other people, and I also just think about my own life. Here's some things that I tend to see people run to when they're running away from God. One of them is substance. Just in the last couple weeks, I've had several men acknowledge and admit to me that they run to alcohol and they run to drugs whenever they're trying to escape the plan of God and even just the pain of life. And so they run to that thing. It's trying to numb it and to cope with what's going on in their hearts and in their lives. Maybe that's where you are. Maybe that's what you run to. Maybe you run to some sort of substance. Some people even just run to food in general. If I could just eat more, I'll feel better. And we know that doesn't work, does it? But we can find things that kind of try to substitute for what God is asking us to do. And so we run away from God and we run to something else. Another thing that we can run to sometimes is the approval of others. Some of us just we have to have the approval of others. Maybe it's approval of our spouse, maybe it's the approval of our parents, maybe it's the approval of our coworkers. But we we live and we die based on what people think about us, how they feel about us. And when you're in a room full of people, you have to have attention. You have to have people paying attention to you, and and you have to be the one talking, and you have to be the one who's the center of the world in that moment. Because for you, that's maybe how you run away from God and to these other things. For some of you, it's materialism. Uh you think, well, I'm gonna go this way, and if I could just block out God, and I'll just buy enough stuff, I'll feel good about myself. And for some, it's buying the right car or buying the right house or buying the right item to make myself feel better in my pain and in my suffering and my hardship. For some, it's work. And by the way, just let me note: some of these things are not bad in and of themselves, but we make them bad when we substitute them for God. Right? Because running away from God is not going to go well for you. And so some people work, they they find themselves captured in their work. God's saying, go home and take care of your family, lead your family, and and we say, No, God, we've got work to do. Don't you know I'm a hard worker, and don't you know I've got stuff to do? What we're really trying to do sometimes is hide behind that thing we're running after. Maybe it's accomplishments through our work or through our lives. Maybe it's through our hobbies. Uh maybe it's through our kids' performance on a soccer field or or through the classroom. Maybe it's we we we find our identity in that and we pursue other things. Maybe it's catch this, maybe we run from God through religion. Now I know for some of you are like, what? What did he just say? Isn't aren't aren't isn't this religion like what we're doing right here? How can you run from God in religion? Well, because Jesus reminds us, even in the Sermon on the Mount, that what God is after is not our behavior but our hearts. He doesn't just want us to conform to a set of behaviors to be good people. He wants us to love him. He wants our hearts to be fully engaged in him. And sometimes we say things like, God, I know you want me to do that, but I'm gonna do the things that I want to do over here, and maybe my good stuff will make up for the fact that I'm disobeying you in this area. You know what I'm talking about? If you're honest, have you ever been there? I have. There's been times in my life where I've seen myself try to do enough good things to make up for the fact that I'm ignoring God on something very important that he keeps pressing in on. Point being this is that we all tend to run, and these are just some of the things that we can run too. And here's the thing you need to know: there is always a ship available and ready, waiting to take you to where you want to go, away from God's plan. There's always a ship, and there's a price fare to pay for that ship. There was a guy who used to preach back in the 1800s, and he's a great, great preacher, and he he kind of spoke on this exact point, and he said it's interesting he knew a man who was angry, and he just struggled with anger in his home all the time. And when he would get angry, he would start throwing things. That was just how he dealt with his anger, just start picking stuff up and throwing it. And he said what was fascinating to him was not so much that the man got angry. It was not even the fact that the man threw things, it was the fact that every time he went to throw something, there was something there for him to throw. Are you with me? Because here's the thing: sin is always waiting. There's always an opportunity to do the wrong thing. In fact, there's always someone who will agree with you when you're wrong and will tell you what you want to hear. There's always somebody, man or woman, who says, get out of that marriage. Yeah, exactly. You shouldn't love, you shouldn't be pursuing that marriage anymore. You should do what you want to do. Do what's best for you. Follow your plan, follow your agenda, right? Or don't, yeah, don't, don't, don't, don't say that God doesn't want you to have that thing. Go get it. It's it's for you. It's your money. Go go get it. There's always a ship. There's always someone, there's always something ready to take you away from God's plan and agenda in your life and in my life. That hurts a little bit, doesn't it? But it's always there, it's always available. But notice that there's a price to pay when we do it. There's always a price. There's a fare that we're gonna pay. Maybe we don't see it at the front end, but if you run from God, there is a price to pay. I realize that this message is not real popular in our world because we're Americans. And so Americans are like, isn't God just for me? Doesn't he just want me to be good and happy and all this stuff? He does want you to be happy, but how you get there is different than what you think. You get it from running to him, not from him. And so in our lives, we have to realize that God loves us. And because he loves us, he loves us enough to send storms directly into our lives. He loves us enough to send storms into our lives. 1 Peter 4.14 tells us that people suffer for two primary reasons. They suffer and they struggle. For two primary reasons. The first one is for doing the right thing. So when Peter was writing to his audience in the New Testament, what he was basically saying to a group of people who were suffering, who were being persecuted is, I know you're doing the right thing and you're still suffering, but stay the course, persevere, because Jesus suffered, so you also are gonna suffer like Jesus suffered. Maybe not in the exact same way. Maybe you aren't gonna be condemned to hang on a cross and die. But he basically says to those people, he says, You're gonna suffer because following Christ is suffering. I know that again, that's not a popular message in the United States. We say, if I follow Jesus, doesn't my life get easier, more comfortable? Doesn't that like give me a pass to get out of suffering? Actually, no, the Bible doesn't say that at all. It says if you follow Jesus, you will suffer. You will go through hardship, you will go through difficulty. But the other reason 1 Peter 4 tells us that we'll suffer is for doing the wrong thing. That when we do the wrong thing, we'll suffer. When we sin, when we blow it, when we dis when we ignore God, we disobey him, we'll suffer. I mean, this is a little more easy, a little easier for me to understand because as a parent, when I tell my kids, don't do this and they do it, then I bring discipline. Because I love them, right? I want to discipline them. And because God loves us, when we run from him, when we run to our stuff, when any of those things that I mentioned earlier, maybe it's something completely different for you, but when you run away from God's plan, when you get on that ship and you say, I'm going to the job, I'm going to Tarsus God, you said go to Nineveh, I'm going this way. When you do that, you need to understand God is going to pursue you. He's going to send a storm because he loves you too much. If you're his child. Now, if you're doing whatever you want, by the way, and you you don't ever feel like God's pursuing you, and you don't ever feel like God really cares about you, like the question is have you ever put your trust in God to save you? Are you his child? But if you're his child, he disciplines. In fact, Hebrews says it this way that if our earthly fathers discipline us, how much more would our heavenly father discipline us because of his great love for us? Now I tell my kids fairly often, I love you and therefore I'm going to discipline you right now. And do my kids always believe me? No. They're like, you don't love me. You hate me, you're angry, you're mad at me, you just want to hurt me. You don't want to help me. And I'm like, no, I I would be a bad dad. In fact, scripture says that if I love you, I will discipline you because I want to protect you from where the path that you're on that eventually is going to lead you to death and destruction and pain. And God does the same thing to us. It doesn't stop adults. God is our heavenly Father, He loves us, and when we pursue our own agenda, God comes after us because He loves us. He sends storms. And there's two primary ways that God sends storms into our life. One way He does it is He withholds what we want. Now we don't like this. Sometimes there's something we're chasing after, and God says, Nope, not gonna let you have it. And that's what happens in the story of Jonah. Jonah's on this boat, he's headed to Tarshus, and literally in the text, it says this storm comes up, and it talks about it being a violent storm. On several times, several times in the text it says it's a violent storm. And the words in the Hebrew literally means there was a wall of water around them. That it was like they were encased in a wall of water and they couldn't get through the wall, that they were trapped because God was saying, I'm gonna hold you right here until you wake up, Jonah. And by the way, where is Jonah? Where is Jonah in this storm? He's sleeping away. He's snoozing. Now there's two things that you can think here why Jonah is sleeping. Either one, he's so smug and prideful that he thinks, I got this. God doesn't really know what's going on. I'm gonna go to Tarshus and my plan's gonna succeed and everything's gonna be great, right? So there's one sense that he's maybe just that prideful, that arrogant. I actually think that Jonah, this is just my personal opinion, okay? He doesn't say it in the text here. My personal opinion is that Jonah is in depression. That Jonah is actually emotionally, spiritually at his bankrupt point because he has run from God and he is overwhelmed by grief and shame and guilt because he's a prophet and here's from God. He told the guys exactly what he was doing. I'm gonna run away from God. I am running from the Lord's presence, which by the way, Psalm 139 tells us we can never run from God's presence, in case you needed that. But we see him running, and here I think he's down the bottom of the boat, like curled up in the fetal position, basically saying, Man, my life, I just I just want to be done. It's over. I'm in depression. And some of you today literally are dealing with depression because you've been running for God for this from God for so long, and your heart is crippled, your life is shriveled. And you need to know today that God is waiting for you to stop running. He sent a storm into your life. Sometimes he withholds things from us, but other times he gives us exactly what we want. Other times he gives us exactly what we want. And so, in in Jeremiah, I've been reading through the book of Jeremiah personally, in my reading lately, my wife and I read through the Bible together, and and uh it's a very depressing book. Can I just say that? It's a very depressing book. Jeremiah is called The Weeping Prophet. And in the book of Jeremiah, you see God speak through Jeremiah to the people, and he says things like, uh, God is gonna he's gonna crush you, he's gonna take you out because you are not you are not listening. And what do they do? They ignore him. They just Keep ignoring him. I mean, Jeremiah's at one point he says, God, you keep putting this word in me like a fire. It's shut up in my bones. I can't keep it in. And yet every time I say something, no one listens to me. They ignore. Sounds kind of like the United States in some ways. Where we hear God's word, but we just like shut it up. We want to push it away. We filter out and we accept what we want to hear. We don't accept what we don't want to hear. And so Jeremiah's doing that. And it says in there, in the first part of Jeremiah, it says that you people have dug wells, cisterns that cannot hold water. Literally, you've tried to pursue other things, other idols, other gods. And you know what God says sometimes? Because He's so loving, because He's so gracious? Sometimes this is what God says to us when we have decided we're going to go chase after something. He says, you know what? Go get it. Go get it. You think you want to run from God? You think you can hide from me? You think you can start over and get a fresh thing over here and do your thing? And God says, go do it. And you know what you find? That wherever you go, there you are. Wherever you go, there you are. That's profound, isn't it? That you don't run away from God's presence and that wherever you go, you're still in rebellion, you're still walking away from God. And that God is pursuing us, but He's waiting. He's waiting until we come to that breaking point. And actually next week, Harley's going to give us a message from Jonah chapter 2, which is Jonah basically reflecting on being at the rock bottom point. Being at the place where he has finally hit that rock bottom. Parents, have you ever had to let your kids just pursue their thing until they finally just like hit the rock bottom? Spouse, have you ever had to let your other your spouse, have you ever had to let them just like go and do their thing until they hit rock bottom? And guess what? Sadly, there's a lot of sailors, like in this story, there's a lot of people who are impacted by our sin and our running. These sailors didn't do anything. They just took the guy who's the prophet of God and gets on their boat, and now they're in the middle of a storm and they think they're gonna die. And there's a lot of people that are along for the ride in our sin. There's homes that are going through hell, that are going through hardship, that are dealing with all kinds of crud. Because someone has said, I'm gonna run away from God. I'm gonna drag everybody with me. I'm gonna keep pursuing my addiction, I'm gonna keep pursuing my my selfishness, my pride, my way. That's sad, isn't it? It's hard. And so sometimes God gives us what we want and we realize it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. It was a mirage. We thought it was freedom and it was slavery. We thought it was gonna be good for us and it was terrible for us. We thought if we could only get that thing, it would satisfy and it doesn't satisfy. We thought if we could only get to Tarsus, everything would be good. But the storm is raging. So how do we actually turn to God? How do we actually stop running? First thing is we do is turn to God. I just said. Verse 6. Notice what happens. It's interesting to me that these pagan sailors, God uses one of these pagan sailors to wake up Jonah. Like, I think this is not just, in a sense, physical waking him up. He is spiritually saying, Jonah, wake up, brother. Get up, you're snoozing, we're dying. And go and talk to your God. I don't know what you did, but go talk to your God. And so it says that in verse 6. Get up, which is parallel with what God says in the very beginning, right, of the book of Jonah in verse 1. God says, Get up, Jonah, and go. Now God's saying, through a sailor, through a pagan, you won't listen to me, God. Uh you won't listen to me, Jonah. Uh, this pagan sailor says, get up and go to your God. Make this right. And Jonah is snoozing away. He finally gets up. Sailors are trying to figure out what they're gonna do. They cast the lots and figure out Jonah's the one who's causing the problems. But the first thing we have to do in our life, if we're gonna stop running, is we have to turn to God. We've got to face him. We've got to come to God. The second thing that we've got to do if we're going to stop running from God is we've got to acknowledge our true identity. Acknowledge our true identity. Verse nine. Jonah, when they ask him who he is and where he's from and all those things, he says this in verse 9. He answered them, I am a Hebrew. I worship Yahweh, the God of the heavens, who made the sea and the dry land. And they're like, no wonder we're having problems. You say you worship the God who made the sea. And here we are on the sea, and we're having issues. He acknowledged his true identity. This is really, really important for us as we, as Christ followers. We admit, God, here's where we are. We're going to turn to you. Right? And we acknowledge, God, we're your children. We are your son or we are your daughter. And God, we don't want to run from you because you love us. We acknowledge, as Jonah did, he said, I'm a Hebrew, meaning I am one of your people, God. And I'm a worshiper of you, right? He's telling these guys this. He's acknowledging his true identity. When we aren't, when we are running from God, we are not living out our true identity. But when we we recognize our true identity, our activity will follow in accordance. We will start to follow God, follow the one that we say we worship. And so we need to first turn to God. We need to acknowledge our true identity. We need to admit what we've done. Verse 12. He says, Pick me up and throw me into the sea so it may quiet down, but at the end of that, he says, For I know I'm to blame for this violent storm that is against you. Most of us as human beings would rather blame somebody else for our issues. We're great at it. Oh, it's my spouse's fault, it's my boss's fault, it's my kid's fault that I'm angry, mean, bitter person. Now I'm not saying that there are not moments when people around you have done things to you, they've wounded you, they've hurt you, but I am telling you this we have to personally own our issues, our junk. We have to own our junk drawer. We have to own the fact that in our lives there's issues that are there that we need God to help us from, resolve. And so Jonah admits that. He says, I'm the one to blame. And then what does he do? Finally, he surrenders to God's will. He says, Throw me in. I'm the one who's causing the problems. Throw me in. So that you will be safe, so that the storm will stop. It will calm down. Now, what did the men do as soon as he says, throw me in? Do you know? We would think they would just pick him up and launch him in. Like, walk the plank, buddy. Get in the water as fast as you possibly can. But you know what they do? They actually start rowing harder. They start trying harder to get to the shore. And so they're rowing even harder. They're working harder against the storm, which is silly because God is the God who oversees the seas, right? And so, in this, what I'm reminded of is that there's always worldly people who will try to fix your problems with worldly ways. There's always worldly people who say, Oh, you know, again, they're gonna tell you what you want to hear, they're gonna try to help you get out of the situation, the circumstance. But just know this that the only thing that's gonna fix this problem is God. The only thing that's gonna fix the storm going on in your life is God. And so, even though these men rode harder, they could not do it because as I said a while ago, there was literally a wall of water that God was using to constrain them, keep them there. And finally they say, okay, whatever. God, don't hold this against us, we're throwing him in. Launch him into the ocean, to the sea. And what happens when he's launched in? Well, a big fish comes and swallows him up. Pretty interesting thought. We won't even get into all that. But he gets swallowed by a fish, and he's there for how long? Three days and three nights. Now here's the thing. As I was studying this this week, I came across some interesting thoughts on uh on Jonah. And one of the most things, the things that was most interesting to me about Jonah, uh, aside from all these things we've talked about, is that some people don't believe that this that Jonah was actually his name. Uh they actually think that this was his nickname and that he just embraced it. And you're like, well, why? Well, Jonah, the word Jonah, the name Jonah, actually means dove. And some of you are like, well, that's not bad. What's wrong with dove? Well, dove, the word dove or the name dove was not considered to exactly be glamorous. In fact, it was pointing to the idea that being silly, uh, being crazy, uh, being a little bit out of control. And so this dove was kind of this term of being foolish or silly. And so Jonah, who clearly is running away from God's presence, and that seems pretty silly to us looking at the story now, knowing what God does, he's basically being like a dove. He's being flighty, he's being silly, he's being stupid. And and and in this story, there's there's commentators that say that he literally embraced this, and here's why. Because from this point forward in the Jewish people's history, on the day of atonement, it's the day that uh people gather and the people of Israel gather and they actually have sacrifices and they sacrifice animals in in accordance with God's plan and his will. Uh they would do this back in the time when the temple existed. Uh they don't have the sacrifices now, but they still celebrate the Day of Atonement, even today. And part of the Day of Atonement is they say, God, we confess our sin and God, we receive your forgiveness. We confess our sin and we receive your forgiveness. And part of the confession time, they actually get the book of Jonah out and they read it together. They read the entire book of Jonah together as a group of people. And as they get to the end of the book of Jonah and they close it and they say, all out loud, all the people, they say, I am Jonah. This is what the Jewish people today still, Orthodox Jews still today, they say, I am Jonah. I am a dove that is this flighty, crazy bird doing my thing, going my own way. And they make that confession out loud. That's probably a good confession for us to make, isn't it? That God, there's so many places and ways that we try to run from you. We're silly, we're goofy, we're foolish. In fact, we're even crazy. Chasing after things that we think will satisfy us and never do. But the story of Jonah is not ultimately about a man who is reluctant to obey God. The story of Jonah is ultimately about a God who is relentless in his pursuit of us. And that's the whole Bible, by the way. The Bible's ultimately not about us. Did y'all know that? Did you guys know that? Just making sure. The Bible, we aren't the central figure of the Bible. Human beings are not the central character of the Bible. You know who's the center of the Bible? God. Jesus, right? He's the center. And in this story, even Jonah and this guy who gets thrown overboard and gets swallowed by a fish and gets lives to tell the tale. He's actually not the center of the story. The center of the story is the God who relentlessly pursues him in his disobedience, in his rebellion. And here's the thing: some of you guys today have wanted to shut this message out because you know you're running. And I want you to know that God loves you enough to pursue you. He wants you to hear it. And he wants you to know that he's not going to stop pursuing you. Because he loves you too much. See, when Jonah went into the ocean, what happened to him? When he went to the sea, he got swallowed by a fish. Was God trying to kill Jonah? No, God actually already had a plan in motion. It even says he appointed a fish. This fish wasn't just happened to be swimming by, you know, it's like, throw him in. Oh, wait, there's a fish. Throwing by the fish. Boop, you know. No, it was like he literally, God appointed a fish to swallow Jonah and to protect him and to save him, to rescue him. And he was there again for how long? Three days and three nights. Matthew 12, verse 40 says it this way. For as Jonah was in the belly of the huge fish three days and three nights. So the Son of Man, who's that? Jesus, will be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. Before you and I decided to run and do our flighty dove thing, before we decided to chase after luxury and comfort in this life or silly things, idols, before we tried to run away from God, God had already provided a plan because he knew we were going to be like Jonah. He knew before you were even born that you were going to pursue your own thing. That I was going to pursue my own thing. And he provided a way. Even in our crazy, God comes after us. Because he's awesome. He's good. He's gracious. That's why, as a group of people here, we don't have to say, oh, we've got it all together, we've got it all figured out. We don't. The Bible tells us plainly, in his truth, that we are sinners, that we are rebellious, that in fact, if left to ourselves, we would kick God in the face, we'd run away from him, we'd hide from him, just like Adam and Eve just rebelled against him. And it's in our hearts. That's how we are. But God is so good. He is so good. He is so gracious. Let's pray.