August 14th, 2024
I think one of the reasons we love the story of Jonah so much is not because it is a wild tale of a man being swallowed by a big fish, but because it illustrates the wild nature of God’s grace. You may have never thought of God’s grace in this way, but it is indeed wild. Grace is the most transformational concept in the Bible.
I use this language to jolt you from any unbiblical notions of what true grace is. Grace is not safe. It’s not just what people receive when they are good. It doesn’t let sin slip by. It’s far wilder than that. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows its banks. Grace messes up your hair, as one author writes. Grace is not tame.
Do you grasp the depth, beauty, and power of God's grace? What we are going to discover, or perhaps rediscover, is that to the degree we understand the depth, beauty, and power of God's grace, we will be transformed by it. I believe one of Satan's greatest tactics in robbing a Christian of experiencing the transforming power of God's grace is to distract them from it. When we are not relying fully on God's grace, we are relying on some other source for daily life.
So, has God's grace gone wild in your life? When it does, it will wildly wreck you, then rescue you, and ultimately renew you.
1. GRACE WRECKS
The first thing I want you to understand about the wild grace of God is that it first wrecks you. It brings you to the end of yourself and into a deep dependence on God. The first chapter ends with Jonah being swallowed by a big fish. Look at verse 17: “And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”
Notice that Jonah tells us, “the LORD appointed a great fish.” I don’t want you to miss this very important truth about God’s grace: it is God’s grace that sends storms into your life. Jonah exposes this truth in his prayer for deliverance. Look at verse 3: “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.” Notice that Jonah declares, “You cast me into the deep…” (2:9). This is God’s grace toward Jonah. Notice it is God’s waves and God’s billows passing over Jonah.
Inevitably, in life, you are going to go through storms. If you truly want to experience the full, pulsating power of God’s grace, you must see that the storms of life are a means of God’s grace. If you fail to see this, you will spend your whole life running from storms and thus miss God’s grace. God wrecking you is a means of bringing you to the end of yourself so that you will be radically and completely dependent on Him. This is the way you come to Christ. Grace wrecks in a wildly unexpected way. It’s really going to wreck you, and that’s okay because we need to be wrecked. Nothing is more difficult for us to understand than the unconditional grace of God.
Grace is so offensive because it exposes the true condition of our souls before we experience salvation. There is nothing in it that gratifies the pride of man. It announces that unless we are saved by grace, we cannot be saved at all. It declares that apart from Christ and the unspeakable gift of God’s grace, the state of every man is desperate and hopeless. Jonah was dead and beyond saving himself. Grace exposes the true condition of every single one of our hearts apart from Christ. And quite frankly, that offends us.
The grace of God addresses men as guilty, condemned, and perishing criminals. It declares that the most chaste moralist is in the same terrible plight as the most promiscuous pagan, and that the religious, with all his performances, is no better off than the most profane sinner. The Pharisee is no better off than the prostitute. Grace requires you to face your unworthiness without ever making you feel unloved. It is through recognizing ourselves as sinners in desperate need of a Savior that we come to Christ.
Grace offends us because we can't earn it—it's unconditional. We are conditioned against unconditionality; we are told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment precedes acceptance and achievement precedes approval.
Society demands two-way love. Everything is conditional; if you achieve, only then will you receive meaning, security, respect, love, and so on.
But grace is one-way love.
Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. This is the story of Jonah.
Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. This is the story of Jonah.
Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. This is the story of Jonah. And this can be your story too.
Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult NOT to put conditions on grace. The truth is that a “yes grace, but” posture is the kind of posture that perpetuates slavery in our lives and in our relationships. Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no “but”; it’s unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. It’s wild.
2. GRACE RESCUES
It is in despair at the bottom of an overwhelming, suffocating ocean, when his life is fading away, that Jonah experiences the powerful truth that grace rescues. Grace wrecks, then rescues. Look again at verse 6: Jonah writes, “Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O LORD my God.” It is in the pit that Jonah experiences God’s saving grace. When Jonah was in his deepest despair, he experienced “yet God.”
The two greatest words a lost person, a person dead in sin, can hear are these two words from verse 6—“yet God.” Despite our being dead in sin, God rescues us. I want you to see this clearly. Grace rescues! Jonah calls out to God, and He delivers. Look again at verse 1: “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.’”
Grace is wildly scandalous. It gives salvation to the undeserving. Grace rescues us from sin and death. He rescues us not because of anything we can offer, but purely out of His “being rich in mercy” and “because of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses.
The penalty of sin is death. We see evidence of this everywhere in life. When a wrong is committed, death follows. We are the walking dead—we’re zombies apart from Christ. Prior to our salvation, although we were physically alive, we were spiritually dead, incapable of life with God. Our lack of holiness rendered us incapable of a living relationship with a holy God.
Imagine being present when Jesus approached the tomb of Lazarus. None of us would have approached the dead man and said, “Lazarus, you need to get up because Jesus is here to help you. Lazarus, come on now. He is truly a wonderful Savior. All you need to do is reach out to Him, and He will save you. Come on, Lazarus, if you will just take the first step, then He will do the rest.”
We would not have said any of those things because we knew that Lazarus was dead. But when Jesus said, “Lazarus, come forth,” he responded. Do we attribute this to any initiative or effort on Lazarus’s part? No. Lazarus responded, but it was because Jesus gave him ears to hear, strength to move, breath to live, and the will to obey. Lazarus responded, but Jesus was responsible for the new life, because Lazarus was dead.
Jesus alone raised Lazarus to life. He alone is the life-giver because Lazarus was dead and totally unable to do anything. Since we are spiritually dead before God gives us new life, the spiritual life we have must be His doing, by His grace and to His glory. This is as true for Jonah as it was for Lazarus. It is also true for us if we have experienced rescuing grace.
So, it is a work of grace that brings us into new life. It is grace that justifies us. Nothing in and of yourself makes you acceptable to God. He pours out His saving grace upon us in an unconditional way, upon undeserving sinners like you and me. It is grace—period. He rescues us not because we deserve it, but because of His grace.
Why is it that we don’t experience God’s grace in the midst of our despair? Why don’t we experience God’s grace in the midst of chaos? Why don’t we experience the power of God’s grace to deliver us from the storms of life? I think this is the big question that all of us should be asking. Jonah gives us the answer in verse 8: “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.” The NIV translates it this way: “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
What we need to be rescued from the most are the false saviors we turn to in times of distress. God rescues us from lesser things. Idolatry is a major theme throughout Scripture. You can’t read the Bible for very long without being confronted by the sin of idolatry.
John Calvin famously said, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” In other words, “our hearts are idol factories.” Idols are false gods or substitutes for God. You can’t eliminate God without replacing Him with a substitute. Idolatry is finding your identity, value, and worth in what you do, accomplish, or have, rather than in what Christ has done and accomplished on the cross. Upfront, idols promise you life and life to its fullest. However, in the end, they require you to sacrifice everything.
We often don’t see how futile our idols are until we find ourselves overwhelmed because our idols have failed us. Idols eventually sink you. Most of our distress comes from putting our trust in created things rather than our Creator. This is often why we experience anxiety, stress, and fear. Our souls are screaming out that we have put our hope in lesser, fleeting things—things that will ultimately fail us.
Jonah came to this conclusion in verse 8: “Created things can’t love us like our Creator can.” Idols can’t love us with a steadfast love. When we turn to them, sure, they can make us feel loved initially, but because they are created things, temporal things, fleeting things, and perishing things, they will eventually fail us. Only God, through Jesus Christ, can promise us steadfast love. Why is that? Because God’s love for us is rooted in grace. God’s love for us is not dependent upon us but upon His Son, Jesus Christ. God is eternal, so He loves us with an everlasting love.
Jonah is telling us that if you are clinging to something for your security—and if it’s not Jesus—it will actually sink you down further and further. Yet letting go is terrifying. When we pursue anything as ultimate other than God, we are idol-chasing.
Jesus loves you enough to strip you of those functional saviors you have clung to because He is a jealous God. For example, when Jesus strips away something you cling to for comfort instead of Christ, He will often lovingly take it from you. As He does that, all your fears and insecurities are exposed with the uprooting of your false saviors. It may feel like you are under spiritual attack, but actually, you are undergoing spiritual surgery to remove the idols deeply rooted in your heart.
Don’t resist the loving hand of God’s discipline in your life. Take comfort in it; it’s evidence that you are truly a child of God. Never confuse the hand of God with the hand of Satan. Satan will never strip you of your idols. He is very content to let you put your trust in lesser things than Christ. You cannot wrap your hands around an idol and simultaneously have open hands to receive God’s grace. Jonah comes to a point of realizing that everything pales in comparison to his God.
You may be reading this and realize that you have never experienced God's rescuing grace. Grace is simply a gift to be received by faith, trusting in Jesus to be your ultimate Rescuer. But you must let go of all other false saviors. You may realize that, in some way and somehow, your life is a wreck—that might be why you’re here. Your idol has failed you.
Maybe you’re a wreck emotionally. Maybe you’re a wreck financially. Maybe you’re a wreck relationally. You’re struggling in your marriage, with a child, or with a work relationship. You feel like a part of your life is in disarray. The dreams you had for your life have failed you. It may well be God’s grace bringing you to the end of yourself so that you can see that you need a Rescuer—not just to save you from your circumstances, but to save you from your sin—the sin of trying to be your own Savior or looking to someone or something else to be your savior. Jesus wants to save you from your idols.
For some of you, life is going really, really well, but you still feel like something is missing—and that's weighing on you. You may feel like you have everything you've ever reasonably wanted, yet something still aches in your soul, waiting to be filled. What you're missing is God’s grace in your life.
Salvation by grace seems simple, but it’s actually challenging because it requires us to come humbly and empty-handed to God. We earn nothing—Jesus earns it all. We boast in nothing—Jesus receives all our boasting. We don’t save ourselves; Jesus alone saves. Our response to the chaos should be to call out to God. Finally, Jonah is doing this—are you calling out? Some of you may be afraid to call out because you’re unsure of what will happen if God answers.
It’s difficult to call out because you are making yourself vulnerable and fear rejection. But God never rejects those who call out to Him. We call, and He answers. Always. This is what happened to Jonah. In verse 1, “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.’” We worship a God who always answers us. We must be willing to receive His answer in His way and His timing.
3. GRACE RENEWS
The moment you receive grace for the very first time, it begins to change you from the inside out. It renews you and radically reorients the focus and drive of your heart. How do you know you have truly experienced the renewing power of God’s grace? This is a question I want all of us to wrestle with and find an answer to. Jonah answers this question for us in verse 9: “But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to You; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!” Jonah is describing a life captivated by grace, living out a life of obedience to God. Jonah realized how far sin had taken him and how God had pursued and preserved him. It should awaken gratitude.
The vertical response to such amazing grace is gratitude. The concern is that teaching grace will enable sinful behavior. But when one is truly gripped by this grace, it radically reorients us toward holiness (v. 9; Romans 6:15). Here is why Jonah can say, “With the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to You.” I want you to see that Jonah hasn’t been rescued from the whale yet. He hasn’t been freed from his circumstances. Verse 10 hasn’t occurred yet. He hasn’t been puked up on the beach yet. And yet he can say, “With the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to You.” He can say this because he knows this truth about our salvation—“Salvation belongs to the LORD!” Underline that sentence in your Bible. This is the whole theme of the book of Jonah and the Bible itself. The work of our salvation belongs to God from beginning to end. This is what salvation by grace means. We didn’t earn it. We didn’t deserve it. We didn’t work for it. Salvation is a work of God from beginning to end.
This truth has powerful implications to how we live our lives. If I was saved by my good works then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with “rights”—I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by sheer grace—then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me. If I am a sinner saved by grace, if anything I am more subject to the sovereign Lordship of God. We come to know that if Jesus really had done all this for us, we would not be our own. We would joyfully, gratefully belong to Jesus, who provided all this for us at infinite cost to himself. The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life. Is that a contradiction? No! Because we are not in control of our lives. We are all living for something, and we are controlled by that (whatever that something is), the true lord of our lives.
The problem many of us have is the thing we are living for, the thing we are clinging to is sinking us and keeping us from experience God’s rescuing and renewing grace. Jesus has full right to lay claim to your life because he has given himself at such infinite cost so that you can ultimately and eternally be free. The purpose of God's rescuing grace is so that you can experience God's renewing grace. Grace is too wild to let us stay in love with unrighteousness-the life we lived before experiencing God's rescuing grace. Grace is too freeing to leave us in slavery to sin. Too untamed to let our lusts go unconquered. To demand to let us cling to our idols. Grace’s power is too uninhibited to not unleash us for the happiness of true holiness.
Isaac Watts begins his famous hymn:
When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
Then he ends it with these words:
Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.
When you have experienced the true wildness of God’s grace, it becomes your soul’s song: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
Here is how chapter 2 ends: “And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land” (v. 10). Jonah’s passage through death and coming out alive is an image of Christ’s ultimate victory over the grave when He Himself is raised from the dead. The only reason we can experience wrecking grace, rescuing grace, and renewing grace is because Jesus rose from the dead, conquering the enemy of Satan, sin, and death.
Chan Kilgore
Lead Pastor
New River Fellowship
I use this language to jolt you from any unbiblical notions of what true grace is. Grace is not safe. It’s not just what people receive when they are good. It doesn’t let sin slip by. It’s far wilder than that. Grace unsettles everything. Grace overflows its banks. Grace messes up your hair, as one author writes. Grace is not tame.
Do you grasp the depth, beauty, and power of God's grace? What we are going to discover, or perhaps rediscover, is that to the degree we understand the depth, beauty, and power of God's grace, we will be transformed by it. I believe one of Satan's greatest tactics in robbing a Christian of experiencing the transforming power of God's grace is to distract them from it. When we are not relying fully on God's grace, we are relying on some other source for daily life.
So, has God's grace gone wild in your life? When it does, it will wildly wreck you, then rescue you, and ultimately renew you.
1. GRACE WRECKS
The first thing I want you to understand about the wild grace of God is that it first wrecks you. It brings you to the end of yourself and into a deep dependence on God. The first chapter ends with Jonah being swallowed by a big fish. Look at verse 17: “And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”
Notice that Jonah tells us, “the LORD appointed a great fish.” I don’t want you to miss this very important truth about God’s grace: it is God’s grace that sends storms into your life. Jonah exposes this truth in his prayer for deliverance. Look at verse 3: “For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.” Notice that Jonah declares, “You cast me into the deep…” (2:9). This is God’s grace toward Jonah. Notice it is God’s waves and God’s billows passing over Jonah.
Inevitably, in life, you are going to go through storms. If you truly want to experience the full, pulsating power of God’s grace, you must see that the storms of life are a means of God’s grace. If you fail to see this, you will spend your whole life running from storms and thus miss God’s grace. God wrecking you is a means of bringing you to the end of yourself so that you will be radically and completely dependent on Him. This is the way you come to Christ. Grace wrecks in a wildly unexpected way. It’s really going to wreck you, and that’s okay because we need to be wrecked. Nothing is more difficult for us to understand than the unconditional grace of God.
Grace is so offensive because it exposes the true condition of our souls before we experience salvation. There is nothing in it that gratifies the pride of man. It announces that unless we are saved by grace, we cannot be saved at all. It declares that apart from Christ and the unspeakable gift of God’s grace, the state of every man is desperate and hopeless. Jonah was dead and beyond saving himself. Grace exposes the true condition of every single one of our hearts apart from Christ. And quite frankly, that offends us.
The grace of God addresses men as guilty, condemned, and perishing criminals. It declares that the most chaste moralist is in the same terrible plight as the most promiscuous pagan, and that the religious, with all his performances, is no better off than the most profane sinner. The Pharisee is no better off than the prostitute. Grace requires you to face your unworthiness without ever making you feel unloved. It is through recognizing ourselves as sinners in desperate need of a Savior that we come to Christ.
Grace offends us because we can't earn it—it's unconditional. We are conditioned against unconditionality; we are told in a thousand different ways that accomplishment precedes acceptance and achievement precedes approval.
Society demands two-way love. Everything is conditional; if you achieve, only then will you receive meaning, security, respect, love, and so on.
But grace is one-way love.
Grace is love that seeks you out when you have nothing to give in return. This is the story of Jonah.
Grace is love coming at you that has nothing to do with you. This is the story of Jonah.
Grace is being loved when you are unlovable. This is the story of Jonah. And this can be your story too.
Even those of us who have tasted the radical saving grace of God find it intuitively difficult NOT to put conditions on grace. The truth is that a “yes grace, but” posture is the kind of posture that perpetuates slavery in our lives and in our relationships. Grace is radically unbalanced. It has no “but”; it’s unconditional, uncontrollable, unpredictable, and undomesticated. It’s wild.
2. GRACE RESCUES
It is in despair at the bottom of an overwhelming, suffocating ocean, when his life is fading away, that Jonah experiences the powerful truth that grace rescues. Grace wrecks, then rescues. Look again at verse 6: Jonah writes, “Yet you brought up my life from the pit, O LORD my God.” It is in the pit that Jonah experiences God’s saving grace. When Jonah was in his deepest despair, he experienced “yet God.”
The two greatest words a lost person, a person dead in sin, can hear are these two words from verse 6—“yet God.” Despite our being dead in sin, God rescues us. I want you to see this clearly. Grace rescues! Jonah calls out to God, and He delivers. Look again at verse 1: “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.’”
Grace is wildly scandalous. It gives salvation to the undeserving. Grace rescues us from sin and death. He rescues us not because of anything we can offer, but purely out of His “being rich in mercy” and “because of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses.
The penalty of sin is death. We see evidence of this everywhere in life. When a wrong is committed, death follows. We are the walking dead—we’re zombies apart from Christ. Prior to our salvation, although we were physically alive, we were spiritually dead, incapable of life with God. Our lack of holiness rendered us incapable of a living relationship with a holy God.
Imagine being present when Jesus approached the tomb of Lazarus. None of us would have approached the dead man and said, “Lazarus, you need to get up because Jesus is here to help you. Lazarus, come on now. He is truly a wonderful Savior. All you need to do is reach out to Him, and He will save you. Come on, Lazarus, if you will just take the first step, then He will do the rest.”
We would not have said any of those things because we knew that Lazarus was dead. But when Jesus said, “Lazarus, come forth,” he responded. Do we attribute this to any initiative or effort on Lazarus’s part? No. Lazarus responded, but it was because Jesus gave him ears to hear, strength to move, breath to live, and the will to obey. Lazarus responded, but Jesus was responsible for the new life, because Lazarus was dead.
Jesus alone raised Lazarus to life. He alone is the life-giver because Lazarus was dead and totally unable to do anything. Since we are spiritually dead before God gives us new life, the spiritual life we have must be His doing, by His grace and to His glory. This is as true for Jonah as it was for Lazarus. It is also true for us if we have experienced rescuing grace.
So, it is a work of grace that brings us into new life. It is grace that justifies us. Nothing in and of yourself makes you acceptable to God. He pours out His saving grace upon us in an unconditional way, upon undeserving sinners like you and me. It is grace—period. He rescues us not because we deserve it, but because of His grace.
Why is it that we don’t experience God’s grace in the midst of our despair? Why don’t we experience God’s grace in the midst of chaos? Why don’t we experience the power of God’s grace to deliver us from the storms of life? I think this is the big question that all of us should be asking. Jonah gives us the answer in verse 8: “Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.” The NIV translates it this way: “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.
What we need to be rescued from the most are the false saviors we turn to in times of distress. God rescues us from lesser things. Idolatry is a major theme throughout Scripture. You can’t read the Bible for very long without being confronted by the sin of idolatry.
John Calvin famously said, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.” In other words, “our hearts are idol factories.” Idols are false gods or substitutes for God. You can’t eliminate God without replacing Him with a substitute. Idolatry is finding your identity, value, and worth in what you do, accomplish, or have, rather than in what Christ has done and accomplished on the cross. Upfront, idols promise you life and life to its fullest. However, in the end, they require you to sacrifice everything.
We often don’t see how futile our idols are until we find ourselves overwhelmed because our idols have failed us. Idols eventually sink you. Most of our distress comes from putting our trust in created things rather than our Creator. This is often why we experience anxiety, stress, and fear. Our souls are screaming out that we have put our hope in lesser, fleeting things—things that will ultimately fail us.
Jonah came to this conclusion in verse 8: “Created things can’t love us like our Creator can.” Idols can’t love us with a steadfast love. When we turn to them, sure, they can make us feel loved initially, but because they are created things, temporal things, fleeting things, and perishing things, they will eventually fail us. Only God, through Jesus Christ, can promise us steadfast love. Why is that? Because God’s love for us is rooted in grace. God’s love for us is not dependent upon us but upon His Son, Jesus Christ. God is eternal, so He loves us with an everlasting love.
Jonah is telling us that if you are clinging to something for your security—and if it’s not Jesus—it will actually sink you down further and further. Yet letting go is terrifying. When we pursue anything as ultimate other than God, we are idol-chasing.
Jesus loves you enough to strip you of those functional saviors you have clung to because He is a jealous God. For example, when Jesus strips away something you cling to for comfort instead of Christ, He will often lovingly take it from you. As He does that, all your fears and insecurities are exposed with the uprooting of your false saviors. It may feel like you are under spiritual attack, but actually, you are undergoing spiritual surgery to remove the idols deeply rooted in your heart.
Don’t resist the loving hand of God’s discipline in your life. Take comfort in it; it’s evidence that you are truly a child of God. Never confuse the hand of God with the hand of Satan. Satan will never strip you of your idols. He is very content to let you put your trust in lesser things than Christ. You cannot wrap your hands around an idol and simultaneously have open hands to receive God’s grace. Jonah comes to a point of realizing that everything pales in comparison to his God.
You may be reading this and realize that you have never experienced God's rescuing grace. Grace is simply a gift to be received by faith, trusting in Jesus to be your ultimate Rescuer. But you must let go of all other false saviors. You may realize that, in some way and somehow, your life is a wreck—that might be why you’re here. Your idol has failed you.
Maybe you’re a wreck emotionally. Maybe you’re a wreck financially. Maybe you’re a wreck relationally. You’re struggling in your marriage, with a child, or with a work relationship. You feel like a part of your life is in disarray. The dreams you had for your life have failed you. It may well be God’s grace bringing you to the end of yourself so that you can see that you need a Rescuer—not just to save you from your circumstances, but to save you from your sin—the sin of trying to be your own Savior or looking to someone or something else to be your savior. Jesus wants to save you from your idols.
For some of you, life is going really, really well, but you still feel like something is missing—and that's weighing on you. You may feel like you have everything you've ever reasonably wanted, yet something still aches in your soul, waiting to be filled. What you're missing is God’s grace in your life.
Salvation by grace seems simple, but it’s actually challenging because it requires us to come humbly and empty-handed to God. We earn nothing—Jesus earns it all. We boast in nothing—Jesus receives all our boasting. We don’t save ourselves; Jesus alone saves. Our response to the chaos should be to call out to God. Finally, Jonah is doing this—are you calling out? Some of you may be afraid to call out because you’re unsure of what will happen if God answers.
It’s difficult to call out because you are making yourself vulnerable and fear rejection. But God never rejects those who call out to Him. We call, and He answers. Always. This is what happened to Jonah. In verse 1, “Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.’” We worship a God who always answers us. We must be willing to receive His answer in His way and His timing.
3. GRACE RENEWS
The moment you receive grace for the very first time, it begins to change you from the inside out. It renews you and radically reorients the focus and drive of your heart. How do you know you have truly experienced the renewing power of God’s grace? This is a question I want all of us to wrestle with and find an answer to. Jonah answers this question for us in verse 9: “But I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to You; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!” Jonah is describing a life captivated by grace, living out a life of obedience to God. Jonah realized how far sin had taken him and how God had pursued and preserved him. It should awaken gratitude.
The vertical response to such amazing grace is gratitude. The concern is that teaching grace will enable sinful behavior. But when one is truly gripped by this grace, it radically reorients us toward holiness (v. 9; Romans 6:15). Here is why Jonah can say, “With the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to You.” I want you to see that Jonah hasn’t been rescued from the whale yet. He hasn’t been freed from his circumstances. Verse 10 hasn’t occurred yet. He hasn’t been puked up on the beach yet. And yet he can say, “With the voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to You.” He can say this because he knows this truth about our salvation—“Salvation belongs to the LORD!” Underline that sentence in your Bible. This is the whole theme of the book of Jonah and the Bible itself. The work of our salvation belongs to God from beginning to end. This is what salvation by grace means. We didn’t earn it. We didn’t deserve it. We didn’t work for it. Salvation is a work of God from beginning to end.
This truth has powerful implications to how we live our lives. If I was saved by my good works then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with “rights”—I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if I am a sinner saved by sheer grace—then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me. If I am a sinner saved by grace, if anything I am more subject to the sovereign Lordship of God. We come to know that if Jesus really had done all this for us, we would not be our own. We would joyfully, gratefully belong to Jesus, who provided all this for us at infinite cost to himself. The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life. Is that a contradiction? No! Because we are not in control of our lives. We are all living for something, and we are controlled by that (whatever that something is), the true lord of our lives.
The problem many of us have is the thing we are living for, the thing we are clinging to is sinking us and keeping us from experience God’s rescuing and renewing grace. Jesus has full right to lay claim to your life because he has given himself at such infinite cost so that you can ultimately and eternally be free. The purpose of God's rescuing grace is so that you can experience God's renewing grace. Grace is too wild to let us stay in love with unrighteousness-the life we lived before experiencing God's rescuing grace. Grace is too freeing to leave us in slavery to sin. Too untamed to let our lusts go unconquered. To demand to let us cling to our idols. Grace’s power is too uninhibited to not unleash us for the happiness of true holiness.
Isaac Watts begins his famous hymn:
When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
Then he ends it with these words:
Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.
When you have experienced the true wildness of God’s grace, it becomes your soul’s song: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”
Here is how chapter 2 ends: “And the LORD spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land” (v. 10). Jonah’s passage through death and coming out alive is an image of Christ’s ultimate victory over the grave when He Himself is raised from the dead. The only reason we can experience wrecking grace, rescuing grace, and renewing grace is because Jesus rose from the dead, conquering the enemy of Satan, sin, and death.
Chan Kilgore
Lead Pastor
New River Fellowship
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