I’m sure you are familiar with the story of Jonah in the Bible.  Despite Jonah’s stubborness God chose him to do something great. He was involved in two of the greatest miracles recorded in the Bible: he survives inside a fish for 3 days and he saves a city of 120,000 people from destruction, turning them to repentance and a God they hadn’t known before.

What can we learn from the way God deals with Jonah? Jonah Chapter 2 gives an acocunt of Jonah’s prayer from inside the great fish.  If you haven’t read it recently it’s worth having a look now. 

There’s something interesting about Jonah’s prayer in this passage. He says that he remembered God, that he called out to him, that God heard him. All of these verbs are in the past tense. Jonah’s first prayer is not from inside the great fish, this is just where he recalls it. His first prayer is made as “his life ebbs away”, as he sinks to the bottom of the Sea. It is the simplest cry of one who has run away from God and realises his stupidity, it is a cry of “Help me God!” And so God helps him.

The pagans in the boat above are praising God by this point. And yet for Jonah, the law abiding and religious Jew, it is only as he is about to draw a final watery breath that he remembers that God is merciful, faithful, forgiving. In that moment of turning his face back toward God he is saved. He had his chances before – on the boat, as soon as the storm rose up. As the men cast lots. Even as soon as he’s thrown into the water, but it’s not until he is at the very end that he calls out to his maker. Why did it take so long for Jonah to ask God for help?

Jonah’s delay in asking for God’s help shows s something that is very important for the Christian life, this is the central point I want to bring out today and it is this: God always has a purpose in taking us places we may not choose to go. Now, by that I don’t just mean literal “places” but also circumstances of life. That purpose will always be to achieve one or more of the following three things in us.

He does it to discipline us that we might be transformed into his likeness; to affirm or show us our calling; or to reveal his own character. All three of these things happen to Jonah in the course of his mission to Nineveh. Let’s take a brief look at two of those things and then we’ll take a little longer to look at God’s discipline in our lives.

Firstly we see that God reveals his own character to Jonah. Jonah was an observant Jew, he would have known the idea that the Lord is compassionate and forgiving, yet when it comes to Nineveh he can’t accept it. God has to show Jonah through his own stark circumstance the true depths of his love. It takes the demonstration of the fish and then the withered vine before Jonah finally gets the message.

Just like Jonah, God sometimes has to use drastic circumstances before we can begin to comprehend his character not just in our minds but in our hearts too.

I’m sure you have examples of this in your own life, perhaps in very dire circumstances, perhaps in small ways.  One small way this happened to me personally was when my wife Abby and I first took our daughter Sophie to a big toy shop.  We were wondering around and Sophie suddenly darted off to the end of an aisle.  She looked back at us and ran off to the right, out of sight.  Abby and I looked at each r and started to give chase in that half joking, half panicking way that new parents do.  “Sophie!” we called, following her to where she’d gone.  It can only have been a few seconds but already she wasn’t there.  Neither was she in any of the other aisles nearby.   For 90 seconds, no more we looked for her - all the while my heart pounding in my ears, thoughts rushing through my mind.  Then suddenly, there she was, at the opposite end of the shop.  In the moment that we’d looked away she’d turned around and gone the other way.

This wasn’t a serious situation, and nothing came of it, but for those 90 seconds I had the most stark and memorable understanding of God’s desire to bring for his lost children back to him.  I hated the feeling of desperation and loss and urgency, but I had a glimpse into the very heart of God.

God always has a purpose in taking us places we don’t want to go.

So that is the first point, he does it to show us his character. But secondly he does it to affirm in us our calling.

Through the remarkable intervention of the fish, Jonah ends up precisely where God intended him to be in the first place. It takes something that miraculous and, frankly, terrible to bring him to the fulfilment of God’s calling on his life.

So it is with us, sometimes the route to where God wants us to be is the scenic route, not the motorway. He wants us to learn as we travel, not just arrive.  He does it like this for his own good reasons. The famous evangelist Ravi Zazcharias talks of his own experience of this in is his book Walking From East to West, when as a young man he is in Vietnam preaching the gospel. He tells us of a momentous moment on a journey through the most dangerous part of the country. The jeep he is in inexplicably breaks down at the worst possible place, in the middle of ambush territory. Waiting by the side of the road another white jeep drives past them the in same direction they were going, it doesn’t stop to help them, it is obvious that the drive suspects an ambush. A few minutes later Ravi’s  vehicle comes back to life, and they chug on down the road. After a few miles they come across the scene of an ambush, the white jeep that sped past them is overturned, it’s occupants shot dead.  They had been the victims of an ambush by the Vietcong. Ravi says this:

“God has an appointment with each of us, and it is critical that every man and woman know this. He will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is….
It came into sharp focus for me – and became a turning point in my life.”

Later in the same trip he visits the grave or six missionaries, murdered with their children in their own homes. He says:

“As I gazed down at the markers bearing their names, some of whose children I knew, and noted the short duration of their lives, I thought of their courage. They had given everything. This was all real, for the sake of the gospel. It was a moment of commitment for me. I prayed solemnly, “Lord, I want to be what you want me to be.” I’m willing to preach wherever you send me, at whatever cost.”

God spoke to him in the midst of these terrible circumstances and used it to confirm the calling he had placed on his life.

Now, it is true that we are not all Ravi Zacharias, called to travel the world and preach the gospel as a full-time job. Yet, we are all called.

As we travel through life, God uses both our positive experiences and our negative ones to show us what he is calling us to do. It may be something explicitly to do with Christian ministry , it may be something in the world of work to excel at your job and bring a witness to Christ that way.  It could be as a homemaker, as a parent, or husband or wife.

But if you find yourself in that dark place then ask yourself, is God teaching me something about where he wants me to be, about what he wants me to do? Am I unfulfilled? Am I out of sorts? Where does God want me to be?

The Lord has a purpose for you!  Don’t forget it.

Lastly I would like to spend a little while looking at how God disciplines us.
We learn one key thing about Jonah as he waits and waits before calling out to God for help. He shows us that through his own disobedience he forgets who God is and what he is capable of, almost until it is too late.

When we turn away from God we deprive ourselves of his loving care. This is the same point as Jesus makes in the parable of the prodigal son in the New Testament. It is not the Father’s resentment that keeps the son far from him; it is the son’s own choice and wilful misunderstanding of the father.

Jonah even speaks this truth from his own mouth means when he prays and says:

“Those who cling to worthless idols
forfeit God’s love for them.”

The words used for “worthless idols” here is not the same as that usually used of idols in the Old Testament. It actually means “worthless empty things”.

Those who cling to these empty things forfeit God’s love. They literally swap one thing for the other.

For Jonah, his “idol” was his own will, he places his desire to do his own thing above God’s command. God has to take him to the brink of death before he realises where he has gone wrong! God disciplines him to change him!

Just as the Lord disciplined Jonah, so he brings discipline to bear in our own lives. This is one of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith, we must live up to the Saviour whom we proclaim and God will work out in us that perfection that we so variably strive for!

Just as it says in Hebrews 12

⁴In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood. ⁵And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons:
“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,
⁶because the Lord disciplines those he loves,
and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.”^[a]

⁷Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? ⁸If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. ⁹Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! ¹⁰Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. ¹¹No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

And this is the key point, God’s discipline produces a harvest. Jonah’s self-will is dealt with. God is willing to go to great lengths to discipline us because he knows what is at stake. He knows the full extent of what it means to forfeit His love for a worthless idol, he longs us to be the people we can be in Christ, to fulfil our potential and to enjoy the fullness of life he has to offer. It breaks his heart to see us wander down paths that lead us away from him and so he disciplines us.

How many of you have tried to give something to or do something for one of your children when they are young, something you know they’ll love, but they don’t have the understanding or the attention span to realise what it is? You call them in to the house for a treat you’ve prepared and they insist on staying outside. This is how God is with us. We just don’t get what God has in store for us and so we go off and try to find security and enjoyment outside of him.

CS Lewis puts it like this:

“…if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

So that is the point, God disciplines us to bring us to that which he has prepared for us, our perfection which will be complete in heaven. This process is inevitable and he is unwilling to let any bypass it. The only variable then is your willingness to participate in the process, and this will greatly determine your experience and perception of it. When we find ourselves in circumstances we don’t expect (whether we know we’re running away from God or we haven’t a clue why it’s happened to us) we have the same choice as Jonah: we can get angry and feel sorry for ourselves or we can submit to God’s plan. We may be surrounded by fish guts, but a moment ago we were drowning.

Jonah makes his choice as he cries out to God from the water. It buys him some time; the fish comes along and swallows him.

Jonah has his respite, but now he is in the darkest of places, he is thoroughly trapped and confused. Can you imagine what is must have been like surrounded on all sides in a fishy maze full of all the things you find inside a fish’s stomach? Nothing makes sense, if he ever survived how could he tell his story? No one would believe him, it is so ludicrous. His whole world is shattered and he is out of options. What does he do?

Knowing Jonah, we half expect him to tell God how unfair it is he’s been swallowed by a fish! But he follows up his first cry to God with this profound statement:

“But I, with shouts of grateful praise,
will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed I will make good.
I will say, ‘Salvation comes from the LORD.’”

And so, God commands the fish to vomit him out. Bruised and dazed, but safe and ready to do what God has in store for him. He is a changed man. God always has a purpose in taking us places we may not choose to go.

God speaks to us today through Jonah from this darkest of places. When life is confusing, when we are in that dark place and all our foundations are missing we are faced with these profoundest of choices. Faced with financial insecurity do we ruthlessly pursue our own security or do we trust in God’s provision? Faced with our own moral weakness do we give in and try to find happiness outside of God’s way of doing things? Or do we place our trust in God’s way of doing things? Day to day, these choices are often hidden or too subtle to notice easily, but when we are in that darkest of places, our soul is bared and the choices are stark. This is the moment when the greatest victories of the Christian faith are won, all we have to do is turn to God and call for his help.

God wants to challenge you today: What stands between you and God’s beest for you? Are you willing to go to the very depths to cling onto it, or are you ready to let go now and see what God has in store for you?