You're listening to Mountain View Church Audio, Christ-centered teaching from the Wilderness City Whitehorse UConn. Here's this week's message. All right, so to start things off, I want to talk about this device. It's called an InReach. Probably many of you have it are a Garmin. Now, I've been carrying this around on camping trips, hunting trips, fishing trips for maybe almost 10 years. For sure, eight, I think. I don't know what version this is. But it sits in my jacket or it sits in my pack.
And it's connected to my phone, and I get navigation. I get communication with it. I can check in with Nicole or friends or if someone else is in a different location. It's pretty handy device. Now, at the bottom of this, there is a function that I've never used before, even after a decade. There's this little switch right here. And if I switch that over, and you're going to see a little...
red marker there. You want to pull down the audio just a bit on my voice? Thanks, bud. I'm going to be loud today, probably. Herbert was here last week. He's quiet. Mike's up for Herbert. Now it's back to Jeremy. Okay. And then there's this SOS function. And I've never used that. And they put this little switch so that, well, obvious, people like me don't accidentally, you know, bring in the choppa. What are you doing, huh? Just hunting moose. Nice to see you. Okay. So you have that little switch to make sure, you know, you've got to pull that over and hit that switch. I've never used it. But it's an amazing option.
in case I was injured, I was lost, broke down somewhere, and I needed help. And that'd be great. Now, what I want to talk about today is prayer. And prayer can be like this in-reach device. We have full access to God for navigation and communication through this life, but we can be tempted to do it on our own. We can be tempted to just shove this in the backpack of life and just go on our own way, make our own decisions, don't seek his advice for the navigation through life, and just go our own way.
And we start navigating life on our own without any sort of check-ins back home to who knows what's going on. But then the day comes in life, and this happens to everyone, every walk of life all over the world. There comes a time when you're broken, you're hurt, everything is falling apart, everything is lost. And you realize, I need to pray. It's interesting to me that even in our culture, when everything is falling apart and everything's crazy, people will automatically pray, or at least they'll yell, oh my God, or sometimes even they'll yell, Jesus Christ. It's like, who taught you how to do that? How did you somehow know that when everything's awful, you broke down, you're in tears, you're wounded, you've gone on your own path as far as you can go, and now you're looking back and you're realizing that your own decisions got you there, and you cry out to God.
But sometimes you might look at that little SOS function and you know you can, or there's something knit inside human nature that tells you you can do that. You can cry out to God when all is lost. But then sometimes there's this, it's a whisper sometimes. Sometimes it's loud. It says, am I worthy to be rescued?
You know, I chose my own path and I ignored God. You know, will he still help me after everything I've done? After all my disobedience, after all my rebellion, after all my seeking my own way, you know, will he still save me? Will he still save me after disobeying him and rejecting him and just choosing my path? And now I'm lost. But human nature, thanks be to God, will still bring us to the point where we flip that switch and we hit SOS because we don't have any other option.
Now, today we're in our second week of Jonah. And big thanks to Herber who took last week's message and launched the series. A little bit of apology. It was miscommunication. We didn't actually get his message recorded for the podcast. So apologies on that. But last week we left Jonah in the belly of a fish or the belly of a whale. And there's lots of different discussion on what does fish in Hebrew mean? Does it mean breathing air? I don't know. It's big. It's got a big belly. Jonah's in it. That's where we're going in there. And he's there. And that's where we leave in chapter one at the end.
God put a call in his life and gave him instructions for life, and he ran, and he hid, and he disobeyed, and God was gracious enough to chase him down. And now he realizes, I'm going to die in here. And so he's faced the full kind of weight of his consequences. And so that's what we're gonna pick up. If you have a Bible, let's open to Jonah 1, or Jonah 2, sorry. And if you're, there is Bibles under the seats in front of you. If you're new to looking stuff up in the Bible, you can go to the very front and there's a table of contents. And you just need to go in the Old Testament. You're gonna go to what's considered the minor prophets, which are the short prophets near the end. And you're gonna look for Jonah and you're gonna find a page number there. So go ahead and get there. If you have a phone, you can look it up on a mobile device. Look it up at bible.com or download an app. I'm getting there as well, so, okay.
Bookmark in there. There we go. So right at the top of chapter two there, we read this. Verse one, it says, then Jonah prayed to the Lord, his God, from the belly of the fish. And I want you to notice the word then. Then.
This then represents a massive human nature problem. He knew what he was supposed to do, he knew where he was supposed to go, but he disobeyed and he ran. And this is actually an age-old problem. Yeah, we're talking about a prophet who's in the belly of a fish out of disobedience and consequence, but this is really a great metaphor for our lives. That when we run from God, or when we try to do things our own way, and we will eventually, God allows us to face the consequences of our own actions.
And there's actually an age-old saying in Christian history, and it says, sin will take you farther than you ever want to go, and sin will cost you more than you ever want to pay. Sin will take you farther than you ever want to go, and it will cost you more than you ever want to pay. And it's not until you get to that end that you realize, and you look back, why did I do that? Why am I here? And so Jonah finds out this the hard way. And yet he's a prophet. He knows, he knows God is merciful and faithful to those he's called. And he knows that grace is available, or at least it might be available. And even after his disobedience and rebellion, he knows that the turning point, the turning point for God to answer his prayer is something called surrender. You have to surrender your will to God. You have to fully say, my way is no longer the best way. I give in, I give up, I submit, I surrender. And this is actually what we see. And if you jump down to verse seven, look at this. Verse seven, he says,
When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. And we see three movements here. When he's fainting away, he remembers, okay, his life is fainting away, you know, or fading away, then he remembers, and then he prays. And this three movements, I would suggest to you that this three movements, either for the first time someone comes to know God and comes to meet Jesus, or for the 5,000th time of when we've walked our own way and we've ended up in the consequences of our actions, this is like, I don't want to call it a recipe, but this happens. And this happens over and over. And the quicker we do this, the better off we are. The earlier on we do this, the better our life will be. When life, when we face trouble, when we're struggling, when things are going south, we remember God, we remember that he's faithful, and then we pray. And so let's break this down. So first movement.
He says, my life was fainting away. Again, verse seven. This literally means when your life is kind of growing faint or you're weary. In the Hebrew, it can mean actually like when my breath is getting short, when air supply is being choked out or my vitality, my life is weakening. I'm fading away. But it can also be used in the realm of like mentally and spiritually. When I've got to the end of myself, when I'm so under pressure, when I can't take it anymore. So this is the idea. And this is when we face the consequences of sin.
A few kind of modern contexts here. Here's some of the times when as a pastor, when I've realized, when people have described their stories, when they've called me and said, you know, I've come to the end of myself. You know, really they're Jonah in the fish moment when they're like, I'm done. You know, it can be someone who's sitting in a vehicle in the driveway and they're unable to walk inside their house and face their spouse or their family and they're feeling the full weight of what they've done. and this can happen through adultery, this can happen through gambling, theft, like all sorts of situations. They left the house that day, and they did not anticipate the actions that they would make, although it was a slow drip over a long time, and now they're back in the driveway, and they can't believe they're like, what have I done? And they're sitting there. It can look like someone at a kitchen table, and they're looking over the credit card bills, and they're overwhelmed at the debt, and they're looking at all the item lines, and they're looking at their foolish, foolish decisions with no other options or no other excuses.
It can be, I've had situations where it can be pacing up and down a hospital corridor or sitting in a waiting room and they're waiting for test results. And this can be from a single bad decision or a hundred bad decisions. You know, it can be a hundred bad decisions of just not taking care of the body that God given you. And now you're waiting for test results to realize like, you know, your life may be totally changed. You may die earlier because of those hundred decisions. But it can also be, it's been situations where one night stand and now they're facing a test results to find out whether their life will be changed forever.
because of that one moment of pleasure. So this happens in life. These are real life situations where people have, they are fainting away. They are feeling like their life is over. But then we move to moment two, movement two. Movement two, Jonah shows us that is the moment. Now, hopefully we remember the Lord and we remember God's goodness and grace and mercy. The goal is here, folks. We want to remember it way earlier on. And yet.
And yet he's still faithful in the end. And that's what we're talking about today in the end. So you get to this point for him. He says, he says, I remember the Lord. And this is a common statement throughout the old Testament. This, this, these words actually in Hebrew, I remembered the Lord.
And we see this throughout scripture either personally like prophets saying or single people at the end of themselves and the consequences. And they say, I remember the Lord. I remember his grace. I remember his faithfulness. And it's always followed by a turn of action. These words are also used with the people of Israel in the covenant of Israel where Israel like walks away and they do their own thing. And then we remember the Lord. Our prophet says, I remember the Lord. And then the nation turns back to God and his faithfulness and goodness returns on them for following his ways. But it's always like the rock bottom place. It's the rock where we're forced to remember.
And so for us, you know, I try my best and I'm trying my best now to say, I don't know what your situation, you may be on your way to a rock bottom place today where you've been there or you're there right now. And maybe this week you were in the driveway, you were in the waiting room, walking the corridors of the hall, maybe you're sitting at the kitchen table, whatever your situation is, please, please understand you are never too far away for God's grace. And it may seem, because in human terms, the human mind says you did this to yourself. You're gonna have to pull up your bootstraps and get yourself out of it. And in human nature, we even, especially in conservative circles, we love this idea of like, you walked down this road, now you need to own your pain. You did this to yourself, and we like that. And really, depending on your church background, you may have grown up in a church where that's the message. It's not the message of Jesus, but this message is like, if you made poor decisions, you have to live with it. Suck it up, get yourself out of it. But that's not the message of really the whole Old Testament leading into the New Testament. It is always, and surely, like a good father, God is always saying, yes, I want it better for you. I gave you opportunities to make better choices.
But you chose poorly. Over and over again, you chose poorly. But even now, I'll even take you now, even in rock bottom. For Jonah, even as the air supply is running out and you are in the belly of a giant fish or whale and the life is being sucked out of you because you did not follow me. Even then, Jonah knows. He knows even in here, I deserve to die and yet I can pray to God and I will turn to him. And look at this. The next part, he prays. The third movement. He remembers God and then his movement is to pray. He says, my prayer came to you.
He's prayed. And he knows that surrender, surrendering in prayer, that's just the movement of Israel, it's the movement of all the prophets. And look at this, he says, he knows his prayer is gonna reach God's ears. And he says this term here, look at this, into your holy temple. Now, if you're new to church and new to Christianity, you're like, okay, his holy temple, like what?
Why is he praying and all of a sudden there's a temple involved in all this? Well, this is Old Covenant as part of the Old Testament. So the Bible is made up of the Old and New Testament. And Jesus kind of separates the two areas of scriptures. The first two thirds is the Old Testament speaking to the covenant of Israel and the journey towards the promised Messiah, which would be God's son, Jesus. Afterwards is when Jesus comes and then after and then prophetic of when Jesus is gonna return. And so Jonah is in this Old Covenant, Old Testament system. And he knows that at the Old Covenant, God is not on earth.
But in the old covenant system, God's spirit would rest and his presence would be in the temple and specifically in something called the Holy of Holies. So as you walked into the temple, there was these stages towards holiness and only the high priest was allowed to go into the Holies of Holies separated by a giant thick curtain and God's presence would be there and there would be an offering given for the people. And only the high priest, the high Levitical priest was allowed. And so when he says into your holy temple, he's saying, I am in the pit of despair. in the belly of a fish, about to have my last breath. But I remember the Lord and I know that I can pray to you. And even in here at the bottom of the ocean, my prayer will go up.
and it will go all the way back to Jerusalem, and it will go into your temple, and it will go into the Holy of Holies, and you will hear me even from the depths. And it's hard for us to understand, because we live in a post-covenant system, and because we live 2,000 years after Jesus came, there's almost an assumption. I can talk to someone who has no faith in Jesus whatsoever, and I could ask them, do you believe God hears you? And they'll be like, oh yeah, he hears me. And that is actually a reverberation of Christianity in the culture, in a post-Christian culture. They have this culture understanding that God would hear me.
But you have to kind of take that away and go back in time. And if you can understand it from an old covenant system and how powerful Jonah's words would feel to someone, you know, if they can't get to Jerusalem, if they can't make a sacrifice, because he can't make a sacrifice in the whale. He can't. He can't make an actual animal sacrifice for his sin. And yet he's like, I know, I can't, but I know my prayer hits the temple. He knew enough. And of course, Jonah, jump down to verse nine. Verse nine, he says this. He says, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed, I will pay. Again, this is old covenant sacrificial system. He can't make the sacrifice, but even in his prayer, he's saying, I will. And then he adds, salvation belongs to the Lord. He doesn't have an altar or a lamb. He can't offer any sort of sacrifice, and yet he offers a vow. And God, looking down at Jonah, we can only assume from the end of the story that God believed him.
that God knew that in that moment when he was almost gonna die, he submitted and he said, no, I will make a sacrifice. I vow that I will follow you. And so there's this movement towards obedience because immediately in the last verse of chapter two, we read this. And the Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land. The spoke to the fish thing, just so you know, I went down a rabbit hole. It's a fun rabbit hole. Like, you can let him go now. Like, I don't know, like he spoke to the fish. You know, I meant, there's like this communication. Okay, we're doing this. Like, I don't know, you know. And then I think like everything we know about whales and how smart they are. And anyway, I'm not, it's just a whole thing.
Super fun little deep dive on what that means. If you're a little bit of a Bible nerd, go into verse 10. It's a fun ride, okay? So how God, but it says specifically God spoke to the fish. Well, we don't know the big aquatic animal. Speaks to the fish and the fish goes towards the shoreline and vomits Jonah out. And I can only assume that in that moment, Jonah was extremely, extremely thankful. But somehow he knew that God would save him. Now in our modern time, we're under the new covenant.
Jonah, as part of the prophets, is pointing towards the coming Messiah. And eventually, as you walk through the Old Testament scripture and the prophets, the journey of Israel and the exile and back and all these things, and they're waiting for the coming Messiah. And Israel assumed that the Messiah would be this military political king that would overthrow and that they would reign on earth. This was their assumption. God sends his son, Jesus, to be Messiah, and he is very different than what most expected.
Jesus becomes the final sacrifice to end the sacrificial system. And on the cross, as Jesus has now been whipped, beaten, mocked, nailed to the cross, he has become the final sacrifice for all people, not just for the Jew, but for the Gentile or non-Jewish people, for all people. And he was fully God and fully human. So instead of animal sacrifices, this is a human and divine sacrifice. And all sin, not just temporary sin for animal sacrifices, all sin lands on Jesus, falls on him.
and he takes the weight of it all. For all people before and after, you and I, the sin we have, any of those moments, sitting in the driveway, sitting in the kitchen table, sitting in the waiting room, all those decisions that we've made to lead us to those terrible moments, in that moment 2,000 years ago, they fall on Jesus. And not only does he take the payment for sin, he also accepts, there's two theological words, expiation and propitiation. And these two theological words are for taking on the sin. Jesus took on the sin, the final sacrifice. But he also, what's not talked about often in church, is that he took on the wrath of God. Instead of the wrath of God falling on us, that it would fall on Jesus and he would die. And in the moment before he dies, he says these words, he yells these words, it's recorded. He says, it is finished.
And in that moment, when he says it is finished, the sky goes dark, the earth quakes. There's an earthquake, and this is recorded outside of biblical text as well as the biblical text. And the Holy of Holies in the temple, that giant thick curtain, it splits in two from top to bottom in that moment when he says it is finished, recorded in the Bible and extra biblical documents. And Jesus breathes his last and he dies, and he's buried. And in that moment with that Holy of Holies, that idea that Jonah said where he talks about, and my prayer from the depths will reach you in your temple. The temple changes.
On the third day, Jesus rises from the dead, miraculously appears to hundreds of people, gives his commission, his great mission to his disciples that would go on to all disciples, including you and I, for those of us who believe in Jesus, then moving to a time of Pentecost where the Holy Spirit falls on the disciples and falls on all people. And here's what changes. In the new covenant system, anyone who chooses to follow Jesus believes that he is Lord and King, eternal, and believes that God raised him from the dead. We receive the Holy Spirit and the temple is now in us. We become the temple.
The spirit of God resides in us. And this is so good for us because what Jonah is talking about in chapter two of the prophet Jonah is in a way, it's a pointer to what we have access to now. No matter how bad it's got, no matter how deep, neck deep in your own sin and rebellion, even then, it's crazy to think about if you've given your life to Jesus, you are still, you are still the temple of the Holy Spirit. And that's such a mind bender because you're like, well, how can I, I'm, I've walked away from God again and I didn't want you and I'm doing these things I don't want to do. How could I possibly be his temple? It's because that sin that you're currently in was paid for in advance.
It's not the old covenant system where you are in the depths and you have to make a sacrifice or vow to make a sacrifice. And then the sacrifice would pay for that sin because 2000 years ago, Jesus died for that sin. Even as you're sitting now, this is the beauty. I hope you understand being born that you were born in the new covenant is such a gift. You and I could have been born before Jesus. But for whatever reason, God saw fit that we existed in the post Jesus death and resurrection life. Because for most of us here, we may not have Hebrew roots. We would have just been Gentiles living elsewhere. But for some reason here and now he's chosen that you're here.
And so maybe it's like, well, then how does it work now? How does it work when I've wandered from God? Well, it can be complex in some ways to fully understand the spiritual way. But I think the best way to describe this for us today is to think about a parable that Jesus said, that Jesus told about a parable of two sons. One son who was dutiful and stayed with the father and one that wandered. Of course, his father wanted his son to stay with him. But his son was like, no, I want my inheritance. I want to go on an adventure. And so he, the father submits and lets him go his own way. And this is a good father. The father's like, I don't know if this is the best choice, but.
You want to do it. So sure enough, the son goes off and the scripture tells us Jesus' parable. He says that the son spends all his father's inheritance and goes far away on a journey on wild living to the point where he's living. He's been hired or the farmer has allowed him to live with pigs and eat what the pigs are eating. And he's in the pig slop after spending all the inheritance being at the very bottom. In a way, like he's in the pig pen. And this is like, really, it's like a new metaphor of being in the gut of a whale. Like it's over. You're lost. And he thinks to himself, you know what? Even my father's servants live better than this. I'm going to go back to my father and
I'm gonna beg him to take me back as a servant and I will serve him. And then I'll be in a better standing than sitting in the slot. And in Luke 15, verses 17 to 20, we read about it. Jesus says, but when he, the son, came to himself, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have more than enough bread? But I perish here with hunger. I will arise and go to my father and I will say to him, father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants. And he arose and he came to his father. And this is it. This is crucial.
This is the single most important verse in this entire parable. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion and ran and embraced him and kissed him. You see, old covenant system, the father waits in a way, and it's like you make the sacrifice, you repent, and then the father responds. But you see, in Jonah, he understood. He's like, God is gracious. He's merciful. I know I will vow and he will accept my vow. He will hear me in the temple. And it's a foreshadowing of what we have now.
And for those of us who have given our lives to Jesus, the moment we're in the pit, when we have rebelled and we've done things we shouldn't have done, there can be this whisper. And it's a whisper of Satan that says, you went too far this time. He's not gonna take it. He's not gonna accept you. You did it this time. You went too far and it'll push you. And you may not be sitting anymore, but now you're in this weird thing where you're afraid to open your Bible. You're afraid to pray. You walk around with this weight on you. Like, I did too much this time. I pushed the limit.
And there are, there's repentance and confession that needs to happen in the people that we've heard. That's a whole other side. But the first stop is when you're fainting away, when you think all is lost, you remember the Lord. And then immediately after you remember God's faithfulness and goodness, you pray to him. And this picture, this is what you need to get in your mind, is before you've even prayed, because of Jesus' sacrifice, God is already running towards you. Forgiveness is assumed. His compassion for you because of what his son did on the cross is overwhelming. He sees you in the perfection of Jesus because of what his son did for you. And you see yourself as worthless and dirty, but he doesn't see you like that.
And so for you, when you're coming back from your moment of filth, he already sees you as if you're just coming back from a journey that you did nothing wrong. And actually the next few verses tell us that actually the father throws a party for him and pulls out the fattened calf and they have this big buffet and he gives them royal clothes and it's crazy. So don't ever, I get it. Maybe some of you, you've been far away from God for a long time or you just had a week where you just ignored him. It's not too far. It's never too far. You have to remember his grace and faithfulness. You have to learn a lesson. You submit, I messed up, but you turn and he's already running.
And so we surrender. When we surrender, God's grace is available. If you pray to receive Jesus today or would like to connect with our church community, visit mountainview.church and click the connect link. If this podcast and radio ministry has been a blessing to you, please consider partnering with us or making a tax-deductible donation at mountainview.church. Thanks for listening to Mountain View Church Audio. Join us next week for more Christ-centered teaching from the wilderness city of Whitehorse UConn.