Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Love Beneath the Waves

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

Until you admit that you run from God, you can’t know him or find him. You’re not just a troubled person. You’re not just a hurting person. You’re not a self-sufficient person. Primarily, you���re running.  Every one of us has unique, habitual ways of hiding and running away from God. Until you know what yours are, until you see them, you can’t really grow as a Christian. And that’s what the book of Jonah is about: it’s about Jonah running and God chasing. Let’s look at 1) the storm God sent and 2) Jonah’s response to the storm. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on July 29, 1990. Series: Jonah. Scripture: Jonah 1:1-17. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. The book of Jonah can appear at first glance like a simple fable with an implausible high point. A great fish swallows a rebellious prophet. But the story is about so much more. It touches on racial prejudice, toxic nationalism, and the struggles believers have when it comes to obeying and trusting God. Today on Gospel in Life, Tim Keller continues exploring the fascinating story of Jonah,

the prodigal prophet. That's our scripture reading this morning. Jonah chapter 1 verses 1 to 17. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, Because its wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Then the Lord sent

a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. All the sailors were afraid, and each cried out to his own God. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him and said, How can you sleep? Get up and call on your God. Maybe he will take notice of us and we will not perish. Then the sailors said to each other, Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity. They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, Tell us who is responsible for making all this trouble for us. What do you

do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?' And he answered, I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the land. This terrified them and they asked, what have you done? They knew he was running away from the Lord because he had already told them so. The sea was getting rougher and rougher, so they asked him, what should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us? Pick me up and throw me into the sea, he replied, and I will be... and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you. Instead, the men did their best to row back to land,

but they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before. And then they cried to the Lord, O Lord, please do not let us die for taking this man's life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man. For you, O Lord, have done as you pleased. Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they made an offering of a sacrifice to the Lord, and made vows to him. But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights." This is the Lord's word.

Now, last week we began looking at this book and we're spending the last half of the summer looking at the story of Jonah and we saw and we reiterate that the the subject of the book of Jonah is sin and grace. Sin and grace. And even though there's many places in the Bible that talk about those topics very theologically, the great thing about the book of Jonah is it presents those things concretely. Sin is running away from God, and grace is God chasing us down, hunting us down in love, and intercepting our self-destructive behavior.

Sin is running away from God, and grace is being hunted down by God so he can intercept our self-destructive behavior. And the other thing we said last week, which we should repeat, is until you know that you do run from God, you can't know Him or find Him. That's the first step in knowing or finding God personally, is to admit that you do run from Him. That you're not just a troubled person, you're not just a hurting person, you're not a self-sufficient person, but primarily and essentially, and first of all, you're a fugitive. Until you acknowledge that you do run from him, you can't find him.

And I, listen, I challenge anybody here who doesn't think like that to begin thinking like that, because it may be the main reason that God is just a word to you and just an idea to you and just a concept to you and not a person. Not only do you have to know that you run from him in order to find him, but I'll say to all of us that you have to know how we run from him if you're ever going to grow personally. Every one of us has unique ways of hiding from God, unique habitual ways of running away.

And until you know what yours are, until you see them, you can't really grow as a Christian, as a person. So that's what it's about. It's about running and chasing. That's what it's about. And last week we saw, initially, why Jonah ran. God had said to Jonah, who lived here in Israel, go to Assyria, go to Nineveh, the ascendant political power of the day, and preach to the capital city of Nineveh

about their violence and their evil so that they make turn to God. Instead of Jonah going from Israel to Assyria, which was due east, he got a ticket to Tarshish, which is due west, it's in Spain, and he literally decided to get as far away from God as he possibly could, so he got a one-way trip ticket to the ends of the earth at that time. But God sent a

storm we saw last week, and so the plot thickens. Now, verse 4 is where we left off, and we see what God does is, then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm that the ship threatened to break up. Now that's where we left off, that's where we got to begin because today, the rest of this passage, this chapter is about the storm God sent

and about, excuse me, wrong guy, Jonah's response to the storm. The storm... Jonah's response to the storm. The storm and Jonah's response to the storm. I know all we do is we put up an umbrella, but this is a different kind of storm. The storm was sent and Jonah's response to it. Now look, God sends a hurricane to save Jonah.

God sends a killer storm to save his life. And here again we see that God is not a tame God, that God doesn't do things the way we predict, that God doesn't do the expected. Why in the world would God send a killer storm to save his life? The answer is this. Jonah has been commissioned to preach sin and grace to a city, and yet he knows nothing about sin and grace at all. Jonah has been asked to go do something that he's not equipped to do. Why?

The essence, now here's a little bit of review anyway, again. The essence of the biblical religion is that you are welcomed into God's family and completely accepted the very moment, not after years of trying to be good and devout life, but the very moment you make Christ your Savior and you stop trusting in your own record, efforts and performance for your self-acceptance. And therefore, we can say that God saves us because Jesus Christ paid the debt we had before God, He paid it for us out of sheer mercy and grace. The word sheer is great. Sheer means nothing else. A sheer cliff means nothing but cliff, no place to stand. And sheer mercy says there's nothing you have

done to earn it, but it's sheer grace and sheer mercy, complete acceptance. That's the essence of biblical religion. The fact is, we saw last week that Jonah ran from the Assyrians not just because he was scared, but because he hated them, because he felt superior to them, because he didn't want to help them in any way or deal with them at all. And it's his superiority that shows he doesn't understand sin and grace because to the degree that you feel superior over other people, to that degree you think your standing with God was a standing that you earned out of your own merit. If you see everything you've got is a free gift, you can feel superior

to no one. And we saw that Jonah's racism, his racial superiority over the, his sense of that superiority over the Assyrians showed that he believed that his standing with God was one of his own, either came from his own religious record or his racial pedigree or something like that. And therefore, Jonah did not understand the message he was called to give. Or let's put it another way. God called Jonah to do something that he knew he would fail at. God called Jonah to do something. God called Jonah to fail.

God set Jonah up for failure. God put him in a situation where he had to fail. And the only possible explanation for that is that God knew it was the only way that he could show Jonah the major structural flaws in his soul. Now, the application to our lives is a little bit scary, and it's as scary as it is comforting. You know that great verse that a lot of you have heard quoted, Romans chapter 8 verse 28, says,

all things work together for good for those that love God. And that's a very comforting verse that people quote, but it takes you all of your life to unpack it. And here's one place where you can look inside and see what's there. God has actually called Jonah to fail. You know why? Because Jonah would not be competent to be a preacher until he failed at it. God knew that Jonah would not be any good at what he was calling Jonah to do until he failed at it utterly. Because until Jonah failed and saw how weak he was and saw how stupid he was, until he

saw how he was a dependent creature on God, until he saw the idols of his life, like his racial superiority and his spiritual pride, until he saw the idols that he was really worshipping that were driving his life, until he saw that he was not competent to speak on sin and grace. And until, therefore, he failed, he wasn't competent to be a preacher. The application to us is even broader than that. You know, I'm the... I mean, if I was talking to a whole congregation full of people who are aspiring to preach the Bible,

I would go off in a slightly different direction at this point. But I can take this and apply it more broadly. The Bible teaches that until you see you are not competent to run your life, you are not competent to run your life. Did you hear that? You are not competent to run your life till you see you're not competent. This is an intervention of God. Now you know, we're fortunate that the word intervention, which used to always be talked

about in terms of divine intervention, has been adopted and used by the alcoholics anonymous people and in a very effective way. What is an intervention? A lot of you know. It's where a bunch of friends get an alcoholic in a corner, surround him in love, and confront him with the fact that he is weak, that he's really out of control of his life no matter what he says, that he's got this tragic flaw

and he has a choice. He can either admit it or he can die. That's an intervention. What do you think God's doing to Jonah? He's surrounding him in the same way. And he's saying, until you see you are out of control of your own life, you are not the big shot you think you are. You are not as competent as you think you are.

Until you see that, you are incompetent. God's intervention often has, therefore, usually has, therefore, the form of a storm. The only way God can come into every one of our lives and do the same thing that those friends have to do of an alcoholic is say, you're not in control of your life, you need help, admit your weakness or die. God comes into all of our lives and he usually comes with a storm, just like he came with Jonah. He comes to you and he goes at with a storm, just like he came with Jonah. He comes to you, and he goes at it like this. In some of our cases, it's gone like this.

We have built our lives on a goal, and we said, if I can get this in life, then my life will be satisfied. But we don't get it, and we're devastated. And God uses the frustration to show you yes you are weak and dependent creature and you do need him until you see that you're not competent you don't understand life as it is but on the other hand is another kind of intervention is a little subtle and some of you gotta be careful because it might be happening to you now

and you don't really know it you don't see it as a storm sometimes God lets you get the desire of your heart. Sometimes God lets you get the success that you want or he lets you get the love that you want or he lets you get the thing you want and you're empty. And what God is whispering to you at that point is simply this, look, you still don't understand what life is about. You still aren't competent at running your own life because my life, God is saying, the life that I created is mine. Your life is mine. Until you center it on me, you don't understand

life. When the storms come into our lives, how do we act? We usually act like the alcoholic. Some of you right now are in the middle of storms and you're saying, how do we act? We usually act like the alcoholic. Some of you right now are in the middle of storms and you're saying, I don't need this, God. I don't need this. Enough already. Well, that's the way an alcoholic talks. Hey, I know what's going on. I've learned my lesson. You don't have to tell me. And yet, it takes sometimes a lot to finally break through. You say, this is unfair God, but that's the way very often an alcoholic will talk to his friends who are backing him into a corner and breathing on his glasses. This is unfair. You don't look at, you don't really care about me. Your

criticisms are unfair and yet all the criticisms are there in love. Listen, even men and women who are very wise, who are not necessarily Christians, who are not relying on the wisdom of Scripture, but are just relying on their own limited perspectives, even they often see that continual success breeds shallowness, and that the greatest men and women in the history of the world were people that faced tremendous failure and frustration. Storms. Now listen, you did not hear me say that storms inevitably create people of depth and wisdom. Oh no. And here's why. Because you see, it's not the storm that can turn you into a wise, deep person. Instead, it's your response to

the storm. There's people here in the room that probably would admit, yes, I'm a bitter person, but it's because so-and-so treated me like this. My friends, so-and-so is the occasion for your bitterness, but not the cause. It's your lack of forgiveness that's the cause. It's your response to the storm that will make or break you, that will make you much harder or much softer and wiser and deeper. The storm comes to Jonah. It's an intervention. It's God's way of saying, until you see you're incompetent,

you're not competent to run your life. And how does Jonah respond? This time, he's beginning to do your life. And how does Jonah respond? This time, he's beginning to do it right. The Jonah verses 1, 2, and 3, and 4 we looked at last week, we ridiculed him, we put him down, but now we can start to learn from him. Because the Jonah verses 10 and 11 to 17, we begin to see that Jonah begins to stand up

and figure out how he should respond. And now we can begin to look at his example, and here's what he does. First of all, the sailors, you notice, are trying to find who is responsible for this storm. Jonah stands up and says, I am responsible for the storm. Very, very clearly, very openly, no excuses. Pick me up and throw me into the sea and it will become calm. I know it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you." Now we learn a couple things from this and boy, there's a lot of things we can learn, but we have to be quick.

First of all, we notice something that well, a lot of us know, but we have to deal with biblically. Jonah's storm has endangered everybody in the boat. Jonah's sin is endangering the lives not just of all the sailors in the boat, but any other sailors in any other boats nearby. The fact is that a lot of us have had the storm of somebody else's sin break on us. Somebody else, through their wickedness, has hurt us or even ruined us. Just like Jonah admits, the storm that's out to get me is going to also possibly kill you.

Is that fair? You know, some years ago there was a very, very famous book written about this very phenomenon. It was called Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Remember that book? And that book, in its very title, committed the logical fallacy of, it's called Begging the Question. The logical fallacy of Begging the Question is to assume the very premise that you say you're going to prove.

And in the very title, it assumes that life is unfair because some of us deserve a wonderful life. Chances are you've heard some version of the story of Jonah, the rebellious prophet who defied God and was swallowed by a great fish. In his book, Rediscovering Jonah, Tim Keller reveals hidden depths within the story, making the case that Jonah's rebellion also provides one of the most insightful explorations into the secret of God's mercy. As you learn what the book of Jonah teaches about prejudice, justice, mercy, self-righteousness,

and much more, you'll gain fresh insight into how to become a bridge builder in today's culture, how to foster reconciliation across lines of division, and with God's help bring peace where there is conflict. This month when you give to Gospel in Life, we'll send you Dr. Keller's book, Rediscovering Jonah, as our thanks for your gift. Just visit Gospelinlife.com slash give. That's Gospelinlife.com slash give. Now, years ago, a bunch of disciples came, Jesus, why did the Tower of Siloam fall on those people? Were they worse sinners than others that the Tower of Siloam fell on those people?

Now, we know nothing else about that problem. We don't have any of the newspapers clippings from that disaster. It's the sort of thing we read about a lot. Major tragedy. And they came to Jesus and said, is the reason that the tower fell on those people because they were worse sinners than others? And Jesus said, no, but repent lest ye likewise perish. And in that pregnant little nomic utterance, Jesus says this, My dear friends, He says, please do not be so arrogant to assume that people who have

more tragedy in their lives, therefore, must be worse people than you. My dear friends, nobody gets what they deserve. Look, here's God and He has given you all of your life. He's created you and He supports your life every moment. And you owe Him every ounce of your love and every bit of your allegiance and glory, and yet look how you live toward Him. You may acknowledge Him in a rather perfunctory way, but the actual day-to-day way in which you go about running your own lives is that you run your own lives. You don't give Him Lordship, you don't give Him that much love, if at all. Instead, what you do is you make all the decisions of your life hinge on your own joy, your own

satisfaction, your own pleasure, and your own glory. And if God gave us what we deserve for the way we treated him and each other, we'd be wiped out in an eye blink. But praise God, He's not like that. God is a merciful God. God will never give you what you deserve. He never gives anyone what they deserve. He always gives them better.

Jesus says, therefore, repent lest ye likewise perish. Look, Job understood this. Job had gotten this truth down in his heart. And when his family and his wealth all were wiped out in a storm, he did not repress his grief in an unhealthy way. He did not repress the expression of his grief, instead he tore his clothes and he fell on the ground, he poured ashes on his head, and he worshipped. He worshipped.

He said, the Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Do you see how practical this is? Yes. Things happen to us that we don't deserve in the short run. But in the long run, nobody, nobody gets what we deserve. You see, the real question, the real problem is is in light of how we treat God and how we treat others Not why does God allow so much suffering in the world? But why does God give us so much beauty and so much life and so much light and so many good things to enjoy That's the real logical problem and the real logical problem is solve and we say it's because he's a merciful God. And until you get your own understanding of this, life will be, the world will be, an incredibly disappointing place.

Because you see, if like Job you say, if something comes into your life that's very bad, Jesus is saying this to you. He's saying, my dear friends, a tower has fallen on you. Is he punishing you for your sins? Is that the reason why? Are you worse than other people that this thing has happened to you? No! God doesn't do that. If God punished you for your sins, we'd all be gone. Instead, the tower has fallen on you and the pain is in your life because he's got a purpose for it. Trust him. Go to him and you will grow. But do not demand a wonderful life. Praise God, God will never give you what you deserve.

See, until you understand that, like Job did, Job handled his problems because he realized God was merciful and he realized that he had no cause to complain. Sarah Edwards in the great Jonathan Edwards when he died and in his mid-50s, Sarah Edwards wrote her daughter as soon as her husband died and said this, my dear child what shall I say? A holy and good God has covered us with a dark cloud. Oh, that we might kiss the rod he lays on our back and not complain. The Lord has done it. God has helped me adore his goodness that we had your father for so long.

But my God lives and he has my heart." What's she doing? You know what she's doing? Where'd she get such strength? Where'd she get such positive force of character? Where'd she get such a sweetness at a time like that? She knew who she was. There was a humility there. She knew she was a creature and not a creator. Do you think that repentance turns you into an emotional cripple? Do you think it's mentally unhealthy?

Do you see that when Sarah Edwards was able to say, hey, I don't deserve the good things I've got, and I know God's got a purpose in the storms that he sends, and therefore my God lives, and he has my heart, because of her repentance, because of her humility, there was a sweetness, there was a positive force there of character, there was a sweet, deep, wise spirit, not shallow, not bitter.

Have you got that? Can you handle your storms that way? Do you really think the repentance is unhealthy for you? Think again. And until you get this down in your own heart, these truths, the world will be an awful place. Admit your sin and you'll see God's grace everywhere. Hold on to an unrealistic notion of your rights and you'll live a hard and bitter life. Jonah says, it's my fault. And he stands up and he takes responsibility. And at this point, we begin to see what real repentance is. And it's fairly simple. If

you look and see what Jonah does, he doesn't talk about himself at all. He gets up and says, I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the land. He doesn't talk that much about himself at all. and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the land." He doesn't talk that much about himself at all. See, real repentance has that approach. In real repentance, you're different than the sailors. The sailors are obsessed with one thing only. How do I get out of this mess?

See, what the sailors say, when they think about repentance, all they say is this, what should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us, for us? What do we do to get out of this mess? They're willing to go to God, they're willing to do anything. They're completely wrong-headed though. There may be somebody here in this auditorium right now who's looking toward God, looking toward religion, because you're in a mess. And you say, what can I do to get out of this mess?

It's the wrong approach, utterly, totally. The first thing is not to worry so much about your mess, or even about yourself. Repentance in the end is a very simple thing. Look what Jonah does. He lifts his eyes to God and begins talking about God. He gets his mind off of his problems. He gets his mind off of his troubles. He gets his mind even off of his sins, in a sense, and begins to look at God. There's an interesting parallel between Jonah and the story of Achan in Joshua chapter 7.

Earlier in the Old Testament we see that when the Israelites were going into Canaan trying to conquer the land under their captain Joshua, God told the Israelites, never in a battle take personal plunder. Don't take things and use them for your own wealth. And a man named Achan did that, took personal plunder, buried it under his floor, and the next time the Israelites went out to battle, they were demolished. People were killed. They were in disarray. And God showed Joshua that he had removed himself. He stopped helping the Israelites because of the sin of Achan. There's an amazing parallel here.

Achan's one sin had brought a storm cloud of God's anger and endangered all of Israel. Jonah in the ship, Achan in the camp. And when Joshua goes to Achan, look at how he leads Achan out of the problem. He says, my son, give God glory and confess to him. You see how different Joshua is in the sailors? Look, Joshua doesn't go like this. Achan, you've brought us to the brink. Because of you, all of our lives are in danger. Because of you, many sweet

little babies have no fathers tonight. Because of you, many young brides have no husbands tonight. Because of you, the people's hearts been turned to water and my leadership has lost all its credibility and we're all in danger of being devastated as a nation. But that doesn't matter. That's not the main thing, Joshua says. The main thing is you have robbed God of his glory. You have refused to give God his glory. You've robbed him of his glory. You've taken him lightly, that means. You haven't given him the center of your life. You haven't given him priority. And he says, therefore that's the only thing you should worry about. Not what you've done to us. That's not the problem. The problem is, look at God.

Begin to see who He is. Recognize what your sin is to God. That's what repentance is. Look at what Jonah does. Jonah immediately begins to think about God. He says, my God is the God of heaven and earth. He's beginning to think about God's greatness. He's saying, how could I have been so stupid as to think I could get away from the Creator of the heavens

and the earth? And how could I have been so ungrateful to the one who's given me every aspect of my being? And then he thinks, I'm a Hebrew. I'm one of those people who's been removed from captivity. I was enslaved and I've been removed from captivity to represent God before the nations and I've thrown a veil over His excellencies and His virtues. You know what Jonah's doing? He's finally, blessedly getting his mind off of himself. Do you know what repentance is? It's finally to begin to think about something bigger than you. It's finally to begin to think about something bigger than you. It's finally to begin to think about something bigger than your problems. If I read a piece of text like this,

if I stick this right up to my eye and try to read it, I'm going to have a lot of trouble. You know why? I can only see two letters, sort of, part of. It's not until I get it away from my eye and I see the letters as what they're supposed to be, small things, one thing in a larger whole, and it's not until I get it away and the letters get smaller that they become coherent. And it's not until you begin to see that your problems, your reputation, your goals, your agenda, your hurts, and your feelings are not the main thing. But the main thing is, what have you been doing for Him?

Every time I take a look at God, and I begin to see what He sees, and love what He loves, and hate what He hates, and burn for what he burns for just a bit. I begin to laugh at myself. And whenever I've seen people in real repentance, I always see that their sense of humor comes back. Your sense of humor is gone when you're taking yourself too seriously. And when you start to say, Oh, my word, you thought you were so great.

You thought you were so important. You thought you were so wrong. You thought you were such hot stuff, you're saying to yourself. But what was really important was, how could I have done this to my Savior? How could I have done this to my Father? How could I have indulged myself like this? It's not until your needs and your problems and your hurt feelings take on their true proportion, that you begin to see reality, that things begin to return to coherency. And that is what Jonah did. Things began to get small again because God began to get big again to him. And when that happened, everything worked

out. Do you think repentance is unimportant? Friends, listen. Hobart Maurer, influential psychiatrist for years at the University of Illinois, I just read this quote the other day from him. Just so long as a person lives under the shadow of real unacknowledged or unexpiated guilt, he cannot accept himself. He will continue to hate himself but the moment he begins to accept his guilt the possibility of a new freedom of self-respect and peace opens up. Remember? A storm comes. What are you going to do? Storms can shipwreck some people or they can give them a tremendous buoyancy of spirit,

a sweetness, a wisdom and a depth. The ones who repent, the ones who kneel down, the ones who do not demand their rights, the ones who put their eyes on Him, the ones who say, I've got to give you preeminence, they're the ones who the storm boils up. They're the ones that repentance leads into new freedom. Now lastly, when Jonah does this, very quickly and very suddenly, and he says, the only way in which I am going to get you guys out of this danger is if you throw me into the ocean itself. You see, Jonah has stopped making any excuses.

He has stopped any defense mechanisms. He has stopped any defense mechanisms. He's stopped any rationalizations. He says, this is what I deserve. This is my sin. Look at the calm. Look at the courage. His rationality is coming back to him because repentance always clears your mind up. And when they throw him in, without even knowing it, what Jonah is doing

is he's finding grace. Because underneath the water, there's love. God put in the heart of the storm a provision for saving Jonah. And it wasn't until Jonah finally said, yes, I give myself utterly and completely for you and to you. And he said, do whatever is fair, do whatever is right. You know what happens? Just like always, whenever you obey God in dark times, listen, whenever you obey God, and it looks like to obey Him will lead nowhere and will lead to a dead end and will lead even to the end of your life like with Jonah. We will find underneath the waves a gracious provision.

It happened with Jesus. When Jesus gave himself up to be destroyed he triumphed and we're back to it again. What are we back to in the Christian life? The way up is down. The way to live is to die to yourself. The way to find yourself is to stop trying to find yourself, but trying to find Him. The way to rule is to submit. The way to freedom is to give yourself to Him completely. Jesus gave Himself utterly to the Father in obedience and was exalted to

the top. Jonah threw himself completely into the justice of God and found down there God's gracious provision. And you, if you right now give yourself up completely to God's will, throw yourself into the center of His will. Say, I don't care what the costs are and I don't care what the implications are or the consequences, I want you. If you give up trying to find your own joy and trying to find your own blessedness, and you give yourself to Him, you will find a joy and a blessedness and an honor that you cannot imagine. And you know why? Because what Jonah does is he shows us this. Without knowing it, he's walking in the steps of Jesus Christ, who says later on, years

later, as Jonah went into death for three days and came back out, so I will die and rise again." Jesus Christ, just like Jonah, was the substitute. Jonah substituted himself, in a sense, and says, throw me over and then you won't drown. But Jesus Christ, who didn't deserve to drown, was the ultimate substitute. He was thrown into the wrath of God so that all of that could be paid for. So we could have, just like the sailors had, nothing but sunshine, the sunshine of God's favor. If you recognize that we have a God who substitutes Himself and gets rid of our sin that way, then you've got the real God.

I couldn't believe in a God otherwise. Because how can you live, I couldn't believe in a God who didn't substitute Himself the way God substituted Himself in the form of Jesus Christ on the cross. Because how can you live in a world of real pain and worship a God who's immune to that? This is a God who knows what storms are like because he came into the world in the form of Jesus Christ and dove straight in to the greatest of pain, into the wrath,

into the justice that needs to fall on people who are sinners. Because of his self-substitution we have life. Everybody here, everybody here, see what the lesson is. God sends storms into your life as interventions to show you who you are. You can respond one of two ways, but the right way is to repent, is to get rid of your self-pity, get your heart off yourself, to look at Him and

to recognize that you can be Him because He substituted for Himself, substituted for you on the cross and paid for everything. Are you going to be like the first kind of Jonah, the Jonah of verses 1, 2 and 3, running, angry and saying, I deserve a better life than this and a better set of orders than this? Or are you going to be like the Jonah of the end? Humble yourself under his mighty hand and he will lift you up higher and higher and he will lift you up. Let's pray. Our Father, we ask that you would enable us like Sarah Edwards did, like Job did, like

Jonah did, even like Jesus did, to humble ourselves when Your interventions come into our lives and to see that it's only by getting our minds off of ourselves and seeing our lack of competence to run our own lives, to give ourselves to You, that we're ever able, ever able to come to know You. Father, we know that if we give ourselves to You, there's love waiting to save us. There's a gracious provision, even under the angriest ways of our lives. And we pray that You'll enable us now to trust ourselves to You, to see that no one else has the words of eternal life but you. We give ourselves to you in this way and we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more. Today's sermon was recorded in 1990. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.