Will you Surrender? | Jonah 1:17-2:10 | Conor Osepchuk

Well, good afternoon. Welcome to King's Church. If this is your first time with us, my name's Connor, I'm one of the pastors here. We're so glad that you have joined us. I'm gonna kick us off with a brief story.

On September 2, 1945, the Japanese formally surrendered to the Allied forces and formally ended World War II. At that same time, Second Lieutenant Hiro Onada, he was a soldier in the Japanese military. And he was on a mission in one of the island in the Philippines. And it was kind of like an undercover mission where he was deep in the wilderness. And when the Japanese surrendered, they tried to make contact with second Lieutenant Hiro.

They did a lot of different things to try to contact him. One of those things was they took an airplane, they flew it over his position and dropped leaflets of paper all over the mountain he was on. And the paper read in Japanese it said the war ended on August 15, come down from the mountains. Each time communication was made with second Lieutenant Hiro, he just assumed that it was Allied propaganda, right? Because he thought, hey, there is no way that Japan would surrender.

And so he kept fighting. He kept on with his mission. He successfully evaded Filipino and American forces that tried to find him on the mountains. He survived on bananas, coconuts, stolen rice and stolen cattle. He even gotten a few shootout with the local police in the area.

But the whole time he was able to remain hidden. And listen to this. Hero successfully hid out for 28 years, six months and eight days after Japan's surrender. When they finally found him. When Japan finally found him, they had to fly in his commanding officer from 30 years prior in order to convince him to surrender.

Second Lieutenant Hero, he surrendered from World War II on March 10, 1974. He was 51 years old. Okay, we hear a story like this and it's a tragedy, right? Because Second Lieutenant Hero wasted 29 years of his life because even because the war was already won, but he refused to surrender, right? It would have been better for Lieutenant Hero to go ahead and just surrender, right?

To offer himself up. And here's the deal. We are looking at Jonah 2 tonight and it is the story about Jonah's surrender to God. And the main point of our time this afternoon is going to be the same thing. It's going to be this surrender.

It will go better for you if you go ahead and surrender to God. And surrender isn't like a one time thing in the Christian life, but it is a daily practice for the Christian. Like think about Jonah. He is like every sense of the Word. He's a church guy.

Jonah was a prophet. He was zealous for God's people. He knew the Bible. He had great theology, and he communicated directly with God. And yet he is our case study for what it looks like to get to this place of surrender.

And so here's what I mean by surrender. It is you giving control of your life to God, right? It's where we declare, hey, God, you are lord over everything in my life. I no longer call the shots in my own life because I now belong to you. So we stop doing things our way, and we start doing things God's way.

We take everything in our life, our time, our treasure, and our talents, and we offer it up to God. It shapes our dreams, it shapes our desires, it shapes our plans. Because once we surrender to God, it means all of those things exist in our life in order to serve him. This is why one of our values as a church is that we worship Jesus with all we've got. We're saying, hey, nothing is off limits for Jesus.

We want to be a church that is known for this because that's the kind of Christian that the Bible is trying to create. It's total surrender. And we do that. Like, we surrender when we first give our lives to Jesus. Like, when we first come to God.

We say, God, you are Lord of my life now. But also, what you find if you've been a Christian for any amount of time is that as you're walking with him daily, you find little lieutenant heroes hiding out in your heart. And you have to find him, you have to track him down, and you have to take him and surrender him to God. That's what the Christian life is. Hey, what part of my life is not right now surrendered to God, and how can I move it into a place of surrender?

And so this afternoon, that's where we're going. We're gonna talk about how we get to this place of surrender. So here's where we're at in our story. If you were here last week, we saw that Jonah was on a boat to Tarshish. And God sends a Gian storm to hit this boat.

After a series of events, they find out that the reason the storm is hitting the boat is because Jonah is running from God. And so what the sailors do is they take Jonah and they throw him overboard. And then we kind of ended last week with Jonah drowning. He's in the ocean and he's drowning. And I know you've been holding your breath all week being like, oh, what is Gonna happen to Jonah.

And so that's right where we're gonna pick up the. This is Jonah 1:17. Here's what it says. It says, and the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

So if you're at all familiar with the Book of Jonah, this is no surprise to you, right? This is the verse in Jonah that gets all the attention. In fact, this is one of the most well known verses in the whole Bible. And so I wanna get into what this means for us. But first, let's start with the elephant in the room.

Okay? At first glance, this can be pretty hard to believe if we're honest. Like, it just seems a little fantastical. And maybe you're in here and you're, like, dipping your toe back into church. Like, you come back maybe for the first time in some years, and you come in here and you hear a verse like this, and you're just like, man, see, this is why I can't believe the Bible.

Like, it just seems like a collection of children's stories. And so let's talk. If you pick up your Bible and you start reading about all the different miracles in the Bible, this one wouldn't even make the top 10 list, okay? And in fact, there are examples in real life, like historical examples that we know of of people who are getting swallowed by a fish. In 1981, a guy by the name of James Bartley was swallowed by a sperm whale after falling off his boat.

He was in the belly of the fish for two days. In 2021, like a few years ago, Michael Packard was lobster diving when he was swallowed by a humpback whale. Both of these men were swallowed, spent time in the belly of the fish, and ended up surviving, right? So this kind of thing can happen even naturally, with no divine intervention. And so it's not even that crazy.

But in the Bible, we get story after story after story of a God who is supernatural, meaning he is above nature, meaning he is able to cause things to happen that are outside of the normal pattern of how we would expect them to happen. And so compare this fish to some of the other miracles in the Bible, and what you realize is this fish, Jonah's fish, is light work for God. Some of the other examples in the Exodus story, God parts the Red Sea as the Israelites are being chased by the Egyptians. In the Gospels, Jesus raises someone who died from the dead. In Genesis 1:1, this might be the craziest one.

In Genesis 1:1, it says that God spoke in the entire earth came into existence. And here's just the reality. If Genesis 1:1 is true, if God created everything with just his words, then this should be no surprise that God could cause a fish to come and swallow Jonah. Right? If it can happen by accident in 20, surely it can happen by the hand of the sovereign creator God in the story of Jonah.

And some people say that Jonah is a parable. And I think there are major literary problems with reading Jonah that way. It's just not written like a parable would have been written at that time. It has real people with real places with real details and real events. Like all of these things.

You have Jonah, son of Amitti. He's a real prophet in Israel. We read about him in 2nd Kings 14. It's like cross examine. He is a real guy that was kind of revered in Israel as being a prophet.

And so it just makes it so hard. It makes it extremely unlikely that this would be a parable because they're pulling in all of these real things. That wasn't how parables in this time would have been told. And maybe even most significantly, you have Jesus. And Jesus references the story of Jonah three times, and each time he refers to it as a sign.

And we're gonna talk about this a little bit later about what that means, but for the purposes of this conversation, like, here's what you need to know. Every time Jesus talks about a sign, what he's talking about is a real supernatural event that points to him, right? And so probably the most compelling reason to believe that Jonah actually happened historically is because Jesus believes that it happened historically. And so that's good enough for me, because Jesus rose from the dead if he believed it. Amen.

Now, let's talk about what the fish means in the context of this story. Because for the whole story up to this point, all Jonah is doing is running from God. And last week we learned that running from God always leads us into drowning. And so Jonah is drowning, and it says the Lord appoints or causes a great fish to swallow him. So first and foremost for Jonah, the fish is salvation.

I mean, we're about to get in the content of Jonah's prayer. But what's really clear is that when Jonah was in the ocean, he thought he was gonna die. Like he came really close to drowning. And it was then that he was swallowed by this fish. And so here's what you need to understand the shocking part of this story.

Story isn't a hungry fish. It's a gracious God. Right. Jonah is not a story about a hungry fish who just decided to eat Jonah. It's a story about God sending a fish to provide salvation for Jonah.

A few weeks ago, Jonah is. A few verses ago, Jonah is ready to die. He's in full acceptance mode. He's like, hey, just go ahead and throw me overboard. I know what I did in the whole point of the faith is that God has grace for runners.

That's the whole point. Because even when Jonah was receiving exactly what he deserved, God chooses to rescue him. Like God gives him a second chance. God says, hey, even though you might be done with me, I am not done with you. And so this is a picture of extravagant grace.

And you just need to understand, like, this is what God is like. I feel like for so long before I became a Christian, one of the things I always thought about God, I always thought God was just looking down at my life, shaking his head in disapproval, just angry with me, right? And so it really prevented me from returning to God because I was like, I don't want to go back to that. Like, there's no shot. I have no shot before God.

I knew that about myself. And so maybe that's where you are this afternoon. But what we see in the story of Jonah is that God loves to show extravagant grace to those who have been running. Now, why does Jonah choose to use a fish or God choose to use a fish to rescue Jonah? Right?

He could have just sent a miraculous life raft to kind of scoop him up. But here's what I think the answer is. If you think about Jonah's real experience for three days and three nights in the belly of the fish, Let me describe it to you. It's pitch black. It's really hot.

Like most people think, between 108 and 115 degrees. That's what my research showed. It would smell like the rot of half digested fish. The muscles of the stomach of whatever kind of fish he is in would be squeezing him so that he basically wouldn't be able to move at all. And it's almost as if God has just taken Jonah and pinned him down.

Like there's no way to run. There's no distraction, there's no way out. It's a place where it's just Jonah and God, no one and nothing else. And it's here that this is what it says that Jonah does. This is the first thing he does.

The first verse, we're told after he's swallowed by the fish, it says this, the first verse, chapter two. It Says then Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God, from the belly of the fish. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but up until this point in the book of Jonah, all Jonah has been doing is running from God. He has not prayed a single time, which is pretty interesting for a prophet. He's been ignoring God.

He's been trying to just not pay attention to God. And the place of salvation for Jonah is the place where he has to deal with God. And in these next nine verses of Jonah's prayer from the belly of this fish, it essentially reads like his diary, where Jonah just gets really honest before God. And where he's gonna land is in this place of surrender. But he comes to, like, multiple different realizations throughout the course of this prayer.

So we're gonna read the prayer, and then I'm gonna share some of these realizations, and we'll talk through them. So let's go ahead and read it. This is Jonah 2. Starting in verse 2, I'm gonna read the entire prayer. Here's what it says.

I called out to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me. Out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me. All your breakers and your waves passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight.

Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple. The waters closed in over me to take my life. The deep surrounded me. Weeds were wrapped about my head to 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. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed.

I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. So let me give you three realizations that lead us to surrender. This is true for Jonah.

And I think at some level, these are the three realizations that we need to have if we are going to come to a place of surrender. Just like Jonah. Here is the first one. I'm in the pit. First thing Jonah realizes is I'm in the pit for the first seven verses of Jonah's prayer, All he is doing is acknowledging and lamenting where he's ended up.

He Says, I'm in Sheol. The floods are surrounding me. The waters are closing in. My life is fainting away. Jonah is brought to the realization that my life is not what I want it to be.

I don't like where I'm at. I am hopeless apart from God. I'm drowning. I'm in the pit. And, guys, in the Bible, the pit is always talking about the place of despair.

And it's in this place where you finally have to deal with God because you come to the end of yourself and you realize that without God, my life is a mess. I have no meaning or direction. Like, you realize, I'm not in control. I'm not sufficient to do this thing on my own. I need something or something from outside of myself.

And here's why I think the pit is so important. If we never come to this place before God, then we'll never have any reason to turn to God, right? If we always feel like, man, things are going pretty well for me, then here's what we start to believe. We start to believe I don't really need God. Like, I can kind of do this on my own.

I can kind of control things and live a pretty good life. And guys, listen, that's where Jonah was like, a few verses ago. Jonah is on a boat to Tarshish, which is modern day Spain. Like, he's just dreaming about tapas and wine in the Spanish countryside when this happens. And it's important to realize this is an important point if you are running from God, it may seem great for a season.

The whole reason sin is enticing is because it is enjoyable for a season. But the problem is that no matter how well you feel like you're insulating yourself, you will eventually come to the pit. I talked to a lot of my peers, like, kind of in their 30s, and, man, they spent their college days and their 20s really just partying and having a good time. And there maybe even was like an awesome year or two in there where they're like, man, I just really loved that. But now they've come to the pit.

And so for some, it's an affair. For some it's an addiction. For some it's a season of depression. But here's what they realize. They realize I don't like where my sin has taken me.

Like, I don't like what my life has been built on. And even though it seemed fun for a year or two, 10 years later, my life is a wreck. I'm in the pit. And one thing that Jonah's story teaches us about the pit is that the pit isn't God's judgment as much as it is God's mercy, right? It doesn't mean it's easy.

Like, this is a severe mercy that Jonah finds himself in. But when God brings you to the pit, he is giving you an opportunity to surrender, right? That's the lesson of the pit. It's you need to surrender. And so listen, I hear this a lot, but the pit is not evidence that God has abandoned you.

Like, all the time. When people are walking through really hard seasons of their life, they'll say things like, man, like, all of these hard things, like, God's just allowing them to happen. He must not care about me. But the truth is that biblically, the pit is evidence that God is pursuing you. Because in the pit, like, God pins us down and he says, wake up.

Like, come back to me. I love you. And God always pursues those he loves. And oftentimes when we're like Jonah, like when we're hard headed and stubborn, God pursues us by allowing us to go to the pit. I think about it.

How else could God have gotten through to Jonah? Like, Jonah had all the information he needed to do everything God said to do, right? He had perfect theology. In chapter one, Jonah says this. He says, I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

Pretty much whatever theological question you have, that's the right answer. Like, Jonah gets it right. He's like, hey, man, that's the right answer. He understands who God is. He understands who he is in relation to, to God.

But then the problem is pretty much right after that, Jonah enters into open rebellion against God. Like, he literally, he literally says, God is Lord of the seas, and then he runs from God on the seas. Like, it's like a crazy thing where it's like, Jonah's biggest problem is not that he didn't have right theology like he did. He knew the right answers. But the problem is every decision he made in his life seemed to be out of step with the thing he said.

He believed his heart belief, and his head belief, they just didn't line up. And so here is the principle for us. The pit is what God uses when our theology doesn't work. The pit is what God uses when our theology doesn't work. Like, sometimes the theology in our head doesn't make it down to our hearts.

And so we end up with this gap between our stated belief and our real lives. And so just like Jonah, right, we say we believe something and then we Live lives as if we don't. And so for Jonah, it was, I know what God says about Nineveh, but. And we often say the same thing to God. I know what God says about forgiveness, but I know what God says about my sex life, but I know what God says about my finances.

And the strategy of God is the same as a loving parent to their children. It's to lovingly discipline. That's a clear biblical category for why God might bring hardship into our lives. It's not the only reason we experience hardship, but we need to have this category of God's discipline. Because, listen, I discipline my kids because I love them and I want what's best for them.

I don't enjoy it one bit. Like, it's not fun for me. But I know if I don't discipline them, they will become the worst and no one will like them. Right. You might think, oh, that seems a little bit extreme.

But if I never discipline my son Jack, he would be downstairs in King's kids right now biting your kids. I promise you. Okay, so side note, parents discipline your kids. Okay, another sermon for another time, but anytime. Okay, anytime.

Me or Kelsey discipline our kids. We always ask the same question afterwards. And it's this, do you know why I discipline you? And we've taught them the same. They say this every single time.

Anna does. Jack kind of mumbles, he's still figuring out, but they always answer this, because you love me. The whole reason, like, the whole reason we discipline is to teach them, or we teach them to say that is because we want them to know any pain we cause them is ultimately for their good. Right? It's because we want what's best for them.

And you need to know that God does the same thing with you. He may lead you into the pit, but do you know why he leads you into the pit? Because he loves you. He wants what's best for you. He's saying, hey, stop running.

That's not what's best for you. And so surrender always begins with the realization that you are in the pit. It's when Jonah wraps his mind around that that he gets to the second realization for surrender. So up to this point, he spends seven verses talking about his circumstances. It's all about the pit, until we get to verse eight.

And there's a shift from what's going on in Jonah's life to what's going on in his heart. And here's what he says. He says, those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast Love. So here's the second realization we need to have for surrender. And it's this.

My idols are worthless. My idols are worthless. It's in the pit that Jonah begins to realize the root of his sin before God is idolatry in his heart, Right? And this can be confusing because we tend to think of idolatry as like, worshiping little golden statues. But that wasn't what Jonah was doing.

The Bible's definition of idolatry is this. It is anything you look to. To give you what only God can give you. That's what an idol is. Anything you look to.

To give you what only God can give you. It might even be a good thing. John Piper. He says it this way. He says, what is an idol?

Well, it is the thing. It is the thing loved or the person loved more than God, wanted more than God, desired more than God, treasured more than God, enjoyed more than God. It could be a girlfriend. It could be good grades. It could be approval of other people.

It could be success in business. It could be sexual stimulation. It is the thing that you feel like you can't live without, right? It's what you look to. To give you what only God can give you.

And I think this is really helpful, because if you're anything like me, when you read the story of Jonah, like, you have this thought. You have this thought of, like, this is Jonah an idiot. Like, honestly, like, it's just like, God gives him a direct command. And his strategy that he formulates in his mind is, hey, I'm gonna run away from God. I'm like, jonah, how do you think this is gonna go for you?

Like, what are you thinking? But here's what I realized. The problem is I didn't understand Jonah's idol. Jonah's idol was this. It was national identity.

He's a Hebrew of Hebrews, a prophet to God's chosen people and a sworn enemy to the Assyrians. And what God was telling Jonah to do would be similar to telling a Jew to walk into downtown Berlin with a megaphone during World War II to proclaim repentance to the Germans. And so it probably wasn't even that. Jonah was like, I can get away from God. But it was likely that what Jonah was actually thinking was, I'd rather be dead than give up my national identity and befriend the Ninevites.

Like, that's probably what Jonah was thinking. And just, here's the truth about all humans. We're all just like Jonah. Like, we all make dumb, sinful decisions in our Lives that reveal the idols in our hearts, Right? And it's so important that we identify our idols, because the Bible says our biggest problem is not our actions, it's our hearts.

Jesus says it's from the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks, meaning all of our actions are connected to something that's going on in our hearts. If we're functionally working something in our hearts, it's going to lead to sinful actions. The things that you worship in your heart controls what you do in your life. Long before you ever do a sinful action, you worship a false idol. And there's this thought of what it means to follow Jesus.

You may have heard this before. Don't drink, smoke, or chew or go with girls who do. Your grandma might have told you that. Where it's like, it's kind of good advice. But here's the deal.

The problem with it, it's like, hey, what Christianity is, is, hey, you're a Christian if you don't do X, Y and Z. And so we strategize on, okay, here's kind of how you change your behavior. And every time I talk to someone like this, I'm just, like, thinking. I'm like, jesus isn't a police officer who came to stop you from doing illegal activity. Like, that wasn't Jesus primary purpose.

Jesus was God who came to crush your idols and capture your heart. And so Christians are changed from the inside out. Jesus changes our hearts, and then our hearts change our actions. And so at the root of every sin we do is an idol. St. Augustine, he said, our sinful actions are like smoke from a fire.

He says if you trace the smoke down, you will find in your heart a fire at the altar of your idol. So here are some questions that are really helpful to identify what idols in our hearts might be. What do you feel like you can't live without? Like, what's the thing that you really believe? I need this to be happy?

Or what do I stay up late at night worrying about?

Or if you're in Jonah's situation, hey, what am I willing to sin to get right? It's a clear picture of idolatry because you're putting whatever that thing is, you're willing to disobey God to get it. And maybe it's your career, right? If I can just get the right job title with the right income, then I'll be fulfilled. Or maybe it's romance.

If I can just meet Mr. Right, he'll sweep me off my feet, and then we'll live Happily ever after. Maybe it's your kids. If I can perfectly engineer my children's upbringing, I can make sure they have my version of what I think the good life is for them. And that will give me meaning and purpose.

It might be the number in your bank account. It might be the stuff you have. It might be the body you want. It might be your comfort. It might be gaining approval or influence or respect.

It might even be your self righteousness of thinking that you're the godliest person in your own friend group. But whatever it is, here is how idolatry always plays out. You put the meaning of your life into something so fleeting that you will be wracked with anxiety and insecurity around that thing, right? And you will lash out at people who you think are threatening your idol, and so you'll never have relational peace, right? And you'll also freak out anytime you think you might lose your idol, and so you'll never have peace in your heart.

And then what happens is everything else in your life begins to suffer because of your pursuit of. Of this one thing. And then whenever you do come to the pit like Jonah, everything comes crashing down. Like, there's not one idol I just listed off that could not be completely wrecked by one phone call right now. And here's the scary part.

That's not even the worst thing that could happen.

The worst thing that could happen is you spend your entire life serving this idol, and then you get to the end and realize how meaningless it was. There was an interview with a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He's just like the picture of success. Wealthy. He just, like, had it all.

And he's in this interview and he said something that was so chilling. But here's what he said. He said, I spent my whole life climbing the corporate ladder just to find out that when I got to the top, it was leaning against the wrong building. I remember watching this interview, and it was like in real time. He just figured out that his idol that he gave his life to was actually worthless to him because of God's mercy.

Jonah is sitting in this fish processing everything that has happened. And he comes to this realization that he's been worshiping a worthless idol. And it led him away from God and it led him into the pit. And these first two realizations lead right into the last realization. We need to have to get to a place of surrender.

And it's this. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Jonah ends his prayer with this confession. He says, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed, I will pay salvation belonging to the Lord. And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.

So this verse is the crux of the entire book of Jonah. Like, everything hinges on Jonah realizing that salvation belongs to the Lord. It's the central teaching of the book of Jonah. And to be honest with you, it's the central teaching of the entire Bible. Like, this is the Christian message.

Salvation belongs to the Lord. Almost all religions teach the opposite. Almost every religion teaches that salvation belongs to you. And so this is what I mean. Depending on your religion, you have some God who has a list of things that you need to do.

And then your salvation is based on how well you live up to that list. So Islam has the Five Pillars, Judaism has the Law, Hinduism has Karma, Buddhism has the Eightfold Path. And the central message of each each is that if you obey well enough, then you will achieve salvation. And so the message is that salvation belongs to you. But what's so significant about the image of Jonah in this fish is that he cannot move, he cannot see, he cannot control anything about his circumstances.

He is completely and utterly stuck, unable to do anything for himself. Right? It wasn't that he needed help saving himself. It's that he was completely and utterly incapacitated to do anything. He was completely at the mercy of God.

And he stumbles upon this theological conclusion that goes way beyond the book of Jonah. And it's that salvation belongs to the Lord. He is the only one who can do the saving. And so Christianity isn't about trying harder or doing better or cleaning yourself up, but it's about throwing yourself before our gracious God and saying, I surrender. Please save me.

The Bible takes this idea from Jonah and applies it to all of us. Matthew, chapter 12. Jesus has this interaction where he ends up teaching on the book of Jonah. My sermon's pretty good. Jesus is a little better.

So let's look at it. Matthew 12, verse 38, it says. Then some of the scribes and Pharisees told Jesus, teacher, we want to see a sign from you. All right? So religious leaders skeptical of Jesus, saying, hey, Jesus, show us you're legit by doing something crazy.

And it continues. Jesus replies. He says, an evil and adulterous generation craves a sign, yet no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. All right? So he brings up Jonah.

He's talking about the sign of Jonah. So what's that? Keep reading. Because just as Jonah was in the stomach of the sea, Creature for three days and three nights. So the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.

So why was Jonah in the belly of the fish for such a specific amount of time? Well, Jesus says, hey, the reason it was three days and three nights is because really, Jonah is just telling the story about me. It's meant to point to me. He continues. He says, the men of Nineveh who we'll look at next week will stand up at the judgment and condemn the people living today because they repented at the preaching of Jonah.

Spoiler alert, we're gonna get there next week. But then Jesus says, but look, something greater than Jonah is here. The story of Jonah was a sign of what was to come. And so you need to understand this as we're walking through this book together. The whole story is meant to point us to Jesus.

Because while Jonah ran from God's will and entered the storm of judgment for his own sin, Jesus obeyed God's will and entered the storm of judgment for our sin. Right? And then Jonah was in the pit for three days and three nights as a consequence for his rebellion against God. But Jesus went to the pit for three days and three nights because of our consequence of our rebellion before God. And then after that, Jonah was rescued from certain death to save his own life when But Jesus conquered death to save your life and my life.

And then Jonah was sent to preach the message of grace and repentance to the nations. And Jesus, when he comes back, he tells his disciples to go preach the same message to the nations and the messages. This message that Jonah confessed in this verse, that salvation belongs to the Lord. And that's the exact message that Jesus came to accomplish. He is the salvation of the Lord.

Like that's the gospel. It's that Jesus has won the war against darkness. The power of sin was defeated on the cross. The sting of death, death was taken away in the resurrection. Jesus is victorious and it is finished.

And he freely offers you salvation if you surrender.

Too many of us are like second lieutenant Hiro Onada, who refused to surrender in a war that had already been won. And some of you in here, like, if I'm just being honest, you're just casually affiliated with Jesus and you've never actually surrendered your life to him. You're still in the driver's seat. And here's the reality. Jesus didn't go all in on the cross so that you might be loosely affiliated.

Like, Jesus didn't go to the cross to purchase half hearted disciples. He didn't go to the cross so that you would pick and choose which of his teaching you want to obey. Jesus requires full surrender. Like, he could not be more clear in his teaching. He says, if you want to follow me, take up your cross and die to yourself.

If you want Jesus as Savior, then he must also be your Lord. Like, that's what Jesus taught is he's either Lord and Savior or he is neither. And you don't have to listen to what Jesus taught, but just know it just means you're not a Christian. And I just wanna be really honest about that because this matters way too much to not be clear. Like C.S.

lewis, he puts it this way. He said, christ said, give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work. I want you.

Jesus wants you. He's saying, come and surrender. Because no matter how far and how fast you've been running, if you surrender, he will save you. No matter how broken your life is, if you surrender, he will save you. No matter how big of a mess you've made, if you surrender, he will save you.

And when you surrender, God pours out grace on you. He gives you a second chance. Like he takes your life out of the pit and he gives you fullness of life in Jesus forever and ever and ever. There's this verse in Revelation, and it gives us this picture of what eternity is going to look like. And around the throne is all the people who have ever surrendered to Jesus and they're worshiping him.

And here's what it says. Let me read it to you. It says, after this I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice, listen, do you know what we're gonna be crying out for all of eternity? Like, we're gonna be around the throne and we're just gonna be worshiping God. And here's what we're going to be saying.

We'll be saying, this salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.

And when you come to these realizations, there's only one response that makes any sense. And it's this surrender. It's coming before God. And just like Jonah's saying, I'm done running. I'm done trusting in idols.

I'm done trying to save myself. And so my question for you tonight is, where in Your life. Do you need to surrender church? Here's what I want us to do this week. I want us to start with walking in.

Just a daily practice of surrender, where every morning we're just getting before Jesus and saying, jesus, I open my hands before you. It all belongs to you. Everything in my life belongs to you. There's probably places you'll come across in your heart where it's like, man, that's actually been off limits to Jesus.

Amen. We just need to daily be bringing those things before the Lord and saying, jesus, I surrender. I don't want to withhold anything from you anymore. I don't withhold my comfort. I don't want to withhold my ambition.

It's all yours. Whatever it is, it's all yours. The Christian life means you are continuing to identify those things in your heart and surrendering them to God. Maybe you're in here and you've never surrendered your life to Jesus. You've been just checking out this whole church thing.

And maybe you've been loosely affiliated with Jesus, but if you're honest, he has never been the Lord of your life. Like, there's never been a moment of surrender. Let me just say, like, it's not an accident that you're here tonight. Like, the sign of Jonah was given so that people who are running from God would see it and look to Jesus and know that salvation is only found in him. So the invitation for you is to stop running and surrender.

If you would just bow your heads with me.

The way that Jonah surrendered to God was through a desperate prayer. And so I'm about to voice a prayer for all of us. And then we're going to stand together. And as we stand, we're going to have members of our prayer team down front. Guys, listen.

The reason we do this every single week is because we believe that God's word demands a response. So I just want to challenge you. Like, if there's something you need to surrender to God, or maybe there's. There's something even like, someone else. You just want to pray for someone, surrender in their life, then come down.

Like, let's not miss this opportunity to cry out to the Lord in prayer like, Jonah. It's what surrender looks like. So come down and pray with someone. We stand. Let me pray, Father.

We surrender. God, we trust that you know better than us, God. We see the beauty of Jesus and of what you've done for us. God and I pray that would shape everything about our lives. We have a savior who went all in.

God. I pray you would make us a people who are all in Father, we love you. We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. Would you stand and would you come?