Thanks for listening to Foundry Cast. This sermon is from our series, Whopper, living a big life in the book of Jonah. Foundry meets every Sunday at 10 a.m. at Starlington High School.
And we would love to see you there. But this week, we're on our second week of our series called Whopper, it's about finding big life in the book of Jonah. And we're gonna talk this morning about, probably the one thing that most of us don't like to talk about, we don't like to admit to it. We don't like to think about it being in our lives.
But I just wanna just kind of, we'll just go out and straighten and ask, when was the last time that you failed? Nobody likes to talk about failure. Does anybody actually celebrate failure? There's ways, some of us, we become like significantly energized when we think about failure.
And we say that our desire to not fail causes us to move forward and do all sorts of things. It motivates us and it might make us hustle a little bit more, but nobody likes failure. Sometimes for some of us, we just accept it as inevitable that we just don't know what to do with it. We don't know how to handle it.
And we just allow it to consume us. For others, we see failure as a place to grow. And we try to take it as spin positive. But the fact of the matter is, when you're at that place, a failure, you're not happy.
Nobody's happy when they get to that spot. What's especially unnerving us, we're gonna talk about this Sunday, is when we realize that we have failed and that we had something to do with it. It's easy for us to kind of throw that off or cast the blame or say, we know that really wouldn't mean that was something else. But we're gonna read a story this morning about Jonah and failure, and what happens when somebody realizes that they have put themselves in a situation of failure.
And so that's the place we find that story. On the backside of this, what we're gonna realize is that no matter where we are, when we hit that, when we hit bottom, that we realize that deep does not mean done. And so whatever place we find, we get to ourselves there. What does it mean to pull ourselves out of it?
So we're just gonna jump straight into the story of Jonah. We're gonna finish with the last verse of chapter one, where we left off last week. We're gonna read all of chapter two. But just on the screen behind me, you can use your Bible, if you brought it, you can use your phone.
And if your phone, if you're in a picture of Instagram, at least check in at Foundry if you're gonna do it. So we've all done it, come on, don't lie. Jonah 117. Now the Lord had arranged for a great fish to swallow Jonah.
And Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights. And the Lord prayed to the Lord, the Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God from inside the fish. And he said, I cried out to the Lord in my great trouble. And he answered me.
I called out to you from the land of the dead. And Lord, you heard me. You threw me into the ocean depths. And I sank down to the heart of the sea.
The mighty waters engulfed me. And I was buried beneath your wildest stormy waves. And I said, oh Lord, you've driven me from your presence. And I will look once more towards your holy temple.
I sank beneath the waves and the waters closed over me. See we'd wrapped itself around my head. I sank down to the very roots of the mountains. I was imprisoned in the earth, who's gates, locked shut forever.
But you, oh Lord, my God snatched me from the jaws of death. And as my life was slipping away, I remembered the Lord. And my earnest prayer went out to you and your holy temple. Those who worship false gods turn their backs on all of God's mercies.
But I will offer sacrifices to you with songs to praise. And I will fulfill my vows for my salvation comes from the Lord alone. And then the Lord ordered the fish to spit Jonah out onto the beach. So a little bit of housekeeping first before we get going.
How many of you came this morning? Because you wanted to hear Chad talk about the fish. I had like, OK, we're not going to talk about the fish this morning. But because the fish conversation is a fun conversation.
It's a great conversation. It's a different conversation. But the fish conversation will pop up on the podcast feed this week. And so we're going to have a conversation about the fish.
Because I think there's something that's significantly more important to us this chapter than the fish. But the fish plays into this. And before you start thinking, his idea is like, Chad doesn't believe in the fish. All I'm going to tell you is a Matthew.
Jesus started talking about the fish. And if you call yourself a Christian, that means you believe that God became man. He came to this earth. He died three days later.
He rose from the dead and 40 days after that. He ascended into heaven. And his disciples watched it happen. If you believe in that, the fish thing isn't too far of a jump.
We're going to talk about the fish. What I want to talk about today, though, is all of those verses in the middle of the fish. One word shows up multiple times throughout chapter two. It actually shows up in chapter one as well.
And it says Jonah sank. Three times in chapter two, Jonah sank. I sank to the bottom of the seas. I sank to the foundations of the earth.
In chapter one, he actually, the exact same word shows up. Three times, but they translated it down. So Jonah went down to Japa. That he went down into the belly of the ship.
And that he was thrown down into the ocean. This is a really interesting word that helps us find ourselves in this story. That this idea of sinking is the idea of a directional term. It's like whenever we go down to New Orleans, we go down to New Orleans.
There's a specific direction that we're headed. We're going up to Little Rock. There's a place of intention with that. We say we're going down or up to this place.
That's not just this vague idea of what's going on. But that's saying I'm going to a specific place for a specific reason. So the three times, Jonah says, I sank. He's saying I'm going to a specific place for a specific reason.
There's also this really interesting thing that this word is used more often than not to talk about someone moving between worlds. Now you're looking at me saying, OK, Chad, this is kind of crazy. It's like some Star Wars stuff we're about to do now. And so we're about to have a little bit of a weird history lesson, but there's no way.
And I spent all week long trying to figure out how to talk about this because so much of Jonah is wrapped up in what people thousands of years ago believe to be how the world was created and how the world was ordered and how the world was ran. The fancy $100 word for this is cosmology, not cosmetology, but cosmology. But the only way that I could begin to try explain this is what I refer to as the hamburger of chaos. So the next slide is going to show you a drawing of a hamburger.
This is my whiteboard at the house. Does it look like a hamburger to y'all? You see what I'm talking about? Can you hear me trying to chat?
Where on earth is this hamburger going to fit into the story of Jonah? You can think that. It's all right. This is the only way I could begin to think about this, though.
So this is what's going on. In the world view of the Old Testament, this was not just for the Jewish people, but this was that whole ancient Near East that they believed that the world was separated into three parts. So the next slide is going to draw those up. If you can read my handwriting, I have a prize for you today.
So the top bone of the hamburger is the heavens, or heaven. It's the realm of God. That's where God lives. That's where God belongs.
That's where God's supposed to be. For the non-Jewish people who do not believe in the Lord, they still function inside this idea of the hamburger of chaos. They would say that's where the gods live. So if you're familiar with Greek mythology, we're still thinking top bone here.
Then the hamburger patty is the realm of humans. It's for men and for women. It's where we belong. It's where we live and where we go.
And there's a specific distance between the top bone and the meat. It's like for those people who have the theory that you have a layer of condiment on the top bone to separate the vegetables from getting soggy, making the bread soggy. There's a distinct separation between this. But the bottom bone belonged to the realm of the dead.
And Hebrew, they refer to this as shio. That this is the place of the dead. This is very distinct from heaven. And that shio was not the place you wanted to be, because shio was absent from the presence of God or the presence of the gods.
Like I said, this is a whole world kind of function in this viewpoint. What you see at the very top of the top bone, it manifests itself as absolute peace. The bottom bone manifests itself as absolute chaos. So when Jonah begins talking about, I sank to the realm of the dead.
I sank down to the very roots of the mountains. We read that he was in the fish for three days and for three nights. And this whole big model that I call the hamburger of chaos, the journey between the hamburger patty and the bottom button took three days and three nights. That's what people thousands of years ago in ancient Near East believe.
So Jonah's in here talking about the fact that I left the realm of humans, the realm of the place where I belong and where I make sense. And while I'm inside of this fish, that I sink down to the land of the dead to a place absent from the presence of God, to a place where there is no peace, to a place where there is only chaos. It tells us this three times. We can actually kind of segment out Jonah chapter two with every time he talks about sink.
But this is this place where we kind of can narrate our own journey through failure, our own journey to this idea that deep does not mean done. The first thing is this. This is where Jonah gets himself to verse two. He says, my actions have brought me into the home of chaos.
He threw me to the ocean depths. And I sink down to the heart of the sea. The mighty waters engulfed me. And I was buried beneath your wild and stormy waves.
Think back to in Genesis chapter one, beginning of God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void. And the spirit hovered over the waters. Inside of their belief system, the sea was a very dangerous place.
The sea was a place where people just don't belong. Back then, the fact that Jonah and these men are even beyond the view of the shore was entering into dangerous territories. So Jonah had willingly thrown himself into this place of chaos. His actions, his own decisions to run away from the presence of God put him into the home of chaos.
And he said, I have decided to go from the hamburger meat to the bottom bun. And that was my decision. When we think about this in Romans, one of the things that God talks about is this idea of sin. And when people desire sinful things that I had a preacher friend tell me one time, he said, we don't really need to devil that much, because every one of us has enough hell inside to hold on fire.
And he's not talking about the fact that the devil doesn't exist, but we're fully capable of what really bad things on our own. And if all we want are bad things, if all we want to chase after are bad things, it's not God allowing those into our lives. It's God saying, if that's what you really want, I'll let you check this out. Try it on for size.
Jonah, all chapter one, it's him running away from the presence of God. Him saying, I've got to get away from the presence of God. Well, if you want to get away from the presence of God, all right, let's go down to that bottom bun. See what happens when you enter into the realm of chaos.
And he put himself in there. The second time that we read about this, and Jonah says that I sank beneath the waves and the waters closed over me and seaweed wrapped itself around my head. He's realizing out of this chaos has overtaken him. The seaweed has wrapped itself.
I am now bound by the things that belong in the deep. I am now tied up. I am now unable to move because of the things that belong to the world and the realm of chaos. Jonah's realizing that he's an imprisonment of his own making.
That he is tied up and that he got himself into that position. This last sinking, verse six, I sank down to the very roots of the mountains. And I was imprisoned in the earth whose gates locked shut forever. I've gone to the very bottom.
Think about the times in our lives when we've been at the very bottom. Now, sometimes we got ourselves there and we realize it. Sometimes we weren't responsible for that. Sometimes other circumstances got us to that place.
But every one of us knows what the bottom is like. We know what the bottom feels like under our feet. It's a feeling that we don't like. It's a feeling that we don't want to be comfortable with.
It's a feeling that we realize it's coming again. We get really nervous because we don't want to repeat what happened the last time. Jonah is freaking out because he realized that he has absolutely lost the presence of God. And that's exactly what he wanted.
It's scaring him. I've gone to the very roots of the mountains. He's realized that he is not only traverse from the hamburger patty, the bottom bun, but he has hit the baking sheet that the bottom of the bun came off of. That he is metaphysically as far away from God as is humanly possible.
He's reached the end of the line. But deep doesn't mean done. He doesn't leave off there. That's not the end of our story this morning.
Verse seven is that my life was slipping away. I remember the Lord. My earnest prayer went out to you and you're holy temple. That Jonah from as far away as he can get, we talked about last week.
That repentance just means turn. These first two chapters are all about direction. It's a silly little detail that most time we pass up. Jonah realizes all he has to do is he has to look to where he knows the presence of God is.
It's the first two chapters is a map about Jonah going west. This is the moment where he turns and faces himself east back towards to where God's people and where God is. He makes that conscious turn. Remember how there's a specific direction with this idea of sank and sink?
That I'm going specifically to this place. Jonah says I remembered the Lord. I remembered him. I remembered who he had been to me before in the past.
I remembered what grace felt like. I remember what God sounds like. I remember what God's presence feels like. I remembered it might be something that somebody told me a long time ago that I placed hope and trust in because I needed that hope and that trust to come from this direction.
He says I remembered the Lord. Right where I am. Right where I'm at. I remembered God for who he is.
We see repentance kind of trotted out a little bit more here. The first thing Jonah shows is just awareness. He's aware of his circumstances. He's aware of the fact that he got himself into that pickle.
That he had his direction and appointed in that direction. He got exactly what he wanted. He wanted separation from God and he felt exactly what separation from God was like. But he also entered into a point of confession in which his human resources for strength were just absolutely exhausted.
To come to the point in time where he says, I just can't do this anymore. I've tried to do this myself. I've tried every single thing. I can't do this anymore.
I can't handle this. Deep doesn't mean done. But Jonah was, he was in the belly of this fish for three days and for three nights. And so I had this idea of cosmology and the hamburger of chaos, this journey between life and death takes three days.
All throughout scripture, there's more stories of three days and of three days and of three days. And probably the biggest story of three days is the story of the time that Jesus spent dead. Spent in the tomb. You remember this three days is in their belief function.
That's how much time it takes to go to the very bottom of the realm of the dead. To think about it, that Jesus, to the complete depths of human experience, the one experience that you and I really don't want to go through in life. That Jesus went there completely. That we say this a lot, that Jesus has been through the full range of human experiences.
Now we say Jesus is big enough because he is big enough. Because whatever emotion we have when we're at the very bottom or when we're at the very top that he's been there, he's been through that, that he knows what we are like. And wherever we get to where we got to, that puts us at that bottom, that our way out is realizing that somebody has been there before for us. This is not always helpful to realize that somebody has done something before that you're having problems with.
Think about when you don't know what to do, we always have that person we call, right? You have that person who knows how to do certain things, that person who has to do everything, we call them. We call them because they've done it before. That no matter how we get to the bottom, when we get to the bottom, sometimes it's by our own fault, sometimes we pull a Jonah.
And it's like, all right, you're really one of that. You have it. It's like the meme that you see on Facebook, that sometimes it's not bad luck, it's just your own stupid decision making. You all seen that one before?
I love that one, because it's so true. And after my myself I've got it all the time. But wherever our bottom's like, we know someone's been there before for us. It's like we get to that place that we don't think anyone has ever been to before and we get there and we find someone else's name on the wall.
And that name's Jesus. He's been there for us. I'll tell you about my bottom. Now I've talked about this some, some of y'all know about this, but my bottom happened when I was 22 years old.
And my bottom consisted of a situation of circumstances. Of my fault and some involvement with others. Where I locked myself in my bedroom, in my house and college. I maxed out a $5,000 credit card buying two things.
Domino's pizza delivered and black label Southern comfort. And I drank myself to sleep for three months straight, because of my bottom. I wore a pizza because I didn't want to get out of the house and the domino's guy would deliver like right to the door of my rent house because I had been at a garage at one point in time. And so that was the easiest thing to do.
And I got the point where I could get him to go to the liquor store for me too. I got to a really bad place when you can get the domino's delivery guy to do that for you. And what finally got me out of that was other people coming and saying, he's been there before for you. That we might feel like the seaweed is wrapped around our head choking us.
We might feel like the circumstances that are part of our life are wrapped around our head choking us. Have us tied up in bound that we are unable to move and that we are sinking further and further and further and further. And out with the world tells us, when we fail that we are done. How many times have we been terrified at work that something bad's gonna happen or we might have made a bad decision or something beyond our control?
Got messed up. And the next thing you know, we think we're about to lose every single thing we have. And we get ourselves to that place where we start worrying and we stop sleeping. We start creating these scenarios in our head that thinking that one mistake has the possibility to derail our entire life.
I know what that feels like. Do you know what that feels like? Deep does not mean done. And if any story in scripture should help us understand that, it's these first two chapters of Jonah.
Of someone who literally dug their own grave and got swallowed up by fish. The fully realized, what does it mean to be aware that Jesus is always there with us? And not only are we not done, but that Jesus is not done with us yet. That wherever we are, wherever we're living, that he's still working in our hearts.
Even when things are great and are fantastic, we don't have to worry about any fish eating us up anytime soon. He's working in our hearts and he's perfecting us. Not making us perfect, but us having hearts that are made perfect and holy love. Closer to him, deep does not mean done.
That's not just when we mess up. That's for the other side. What if we realize, it's a trick that somebody taught me one time. I've thought about this, I'll be quan.
How many of y'all hate it when a hamburger is too messy? How many of y'all have restaurants? Thank you, because it'll be honest. Yeah, how many of y'all have restaurants you won't get a hamburger from?
Because you know how messy it's gonna be. Okay, I'll tell you right now, favorite hamburger, too messy to eat. Fieldhouse, Windy City, on a pretzel bun. Whoever put green cheese on a hamburger is a genius.
Okay, but you can never eat that thing, because it's just so messy in that bottom pretzel. No, Jackie, when you're on the pretzel bun, I'm getting like this, I'm fully aware of this. It just gets too gnarly to eat, but I've learned a trick. Let me tell you, you want the fat guy to teach you a trick about you in a hamburger better?
You know what the trick is when that bottom bun just gets too gnarly to live? Pick your hamburger up, and you flip it over. Deep doesn't mean done. Jesus wants to flip our hamburger over for us.
No matter where we are in that hamburger of chaos, he wants to flip that over for us, to fix it, to be big enough, from how to where we are. He's been there first, and he's done written his name down so we know it when we get there. And all we have to do is just be aware to see it written right in front of us. Let's pray.
Just we thank you for being there first. It might be aggravating to realize, but we can't create a situation in life where you haven't been yet. And for those of us who get caught up in fear, caught up in being done, we realize that there's not a such thing in your eyes. No matter where we are, we know that we are loved, and we know that you are there with us, and forgive us sometimes, and we are so hard-headed, we won't turn around and notice that you're walking right behind us, or where we're so frustrated and so worried that we're just walking on our feet and that we run into you and don't realize that that's you right there.
Help us to see that failure is a completely different thing in your eyes, and that what you want to do with us is significantly larger than we can ever. So in your name we pray, amen.