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00:00 Well, on behalf of the church, a blessed new year to all of you. Um, first thing
00:06 I need to do is apologize to you for the lack of cups. It's actually a good problem. We didn't expect the whole
00:12 bunch of plant people to come in and we're very big now. Praise the Lord. And next time we'll get enough cups for the
00:18 Lord's supper. So, on behalf of the church, my apologies. Uh today we're going to start off a series on the minor
00:25 prophets which is uh Jonah followed by a series on um Habac and after that uh
00:31 this first half of the year on uh money from the book of Luke but today we're going to talk about running from God.
00:38 Very odd topic about starting the year about running from God. So we're not asking you to run from God but asking
00:43 you to run towards God. That's our New Year's resolution. So, we're going to go into chapter one and and talk about um
00:50 the life of his very unique prophet called Jonah. Let's start with a word of prayer. Lord, we ask that you be with us
00:57 this uh afternoon. Help us understand from your word what it means to be
01:04 running from you and what it'll take to run towards you that our lives will be
01:09 transformed in our community around us. For we ask for Jesus' sake. Amen. Three things which we're going to learn
01:16 from Jonah today. Number one, why, when, and why we run from God. Two, we can run
01:24 but you cannot hide. And three, there's always love beneath the waves. Three
01:29 very simple points from the life of this unique prophet. First thing is when and why we run from God. The call comes to
01:36 Jonah. Now, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the son of Amati. He is a prophet. He was a prophet even before
01:43 this call came working for Jerobom II in the northern kingdom. Um and uh this the
01:50 assignment the word of lord came to Jonah son of Amati. Go to Nineve that great city and call out against it for
01:57 their evil has come up before me. So this is a very evil city uh very evil
02:03 inhabitants and he is asked to go all the way up north 250 miles up north in
02:09 order to minister. And this is a very difficult task for Jonah. Now if you
02:15 talk about other prophets, let's look through the Bible how they responded when God called. This is Moses. Moses
02:21 said to God, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out to Egypt?"
02:29 Moses will express inexperience, inadequacy. Uh you have Jeremiah. Then I
02:35 said, "Ah Lord God, behold I don't know how to speak. I'm only a youth. He's a young man, so he's inexperienced. He
02:42 doesn't have what it takes that you go. Isaiah, I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Who shall I send and who will
02:48 go for us?" And then I said, "Here are I send me the most enthusiastic of the Lord." But this is the only prophet who
02:55 does Arana. He he rose to flee to Tarses from the presence of the Lord. He goes in complete opposite direction, you
03:02 know, right out there as far as you could go uh in the complete opposite direction. So if his center of God's
03:07 will is Nineve, he's running from the center of God's will into whichever direction that's
03:15 away from the God's will, from God's will. So we're running when we're not living in line uh with the gospel, which
03:21 is what God wants for the world today. And you find that what is he's probably a good man. He's probably a very ethical
03:28 man. We talk about sin doesn't have to be a violation of a moral code. You have right intentions, right speech. It's the
03:35 way you live your life. This is Paul. Paul describes his life. Circumcised on
03:40 the eighth day of the people of Israel, tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law, a Pharisee, as to zeal, a
03:47 persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law, blameless. According to him, he had no violation of
03:55 the moral code. And yet, he's far away. See, walking in line with what God wants
04:02 is not necessarily governed by moral code. His is Oliver Cromwell in he lives in the 1600s and he actually is the only
04:09 fellow who actually chopped off the head of a king Charles I. Um and he became the Lord Protector of England. A very
04:16 godly man at controversial but godly. He was a Puritan. He wanted to impose Christian values upon the nation of uh
04:24 England. What he did was he actually shut down uh ins, theaters, pubs. You
04:30 couldn't play football. If you were play found uh playing football, you'd be whipped. You couldn't swear. You'd be
04:36 fined. Women could not walk anywhere other than the church on a Sunday. If you walk beyond that to the mall, you
04:42 would get fined or jailed. Could not celebrate Christmas. He imposed the moral code to make the nation godly. But
04:49 actually, you can't do that because the heart is sinful and they rebelled against him. And if you think our
04:55 parliament is difficult here, imagine if you could start again and you choose the
05:00 most godly people in the whole nation and form parliament, you think it would do better.
05:05 You think that's what he did? He he got rid of the old parliament and he had a
05:10 whole bunch of folk chosen from all the districts which were basically deacons or people in the church and they formed
05:16 the parliament within three four years that they kicked them out because they couldn't even agree that it didn't work.
05:21 It's not a moral code that you impose um that will help you here is um so we
05:28 could be sitting in church all right blameless but our hearts could be on a
05:33 ship on the way to Tarsish. It's the way we live our lives and the direction in which our lives are heading. You you
05:40 have here we are running when we're not seeking his presence. Jonah rose and to
05:45 flee to Tarses from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Japa and found the ship going to Tarses. He paid the fair,
05:51 went down on it to go with them to Tashis, away from the presence of the Lord. In Hebrew, the presence of the
05:57 Lord is penet, which actually literally means the face of God. You're running
06:03 when you're not actually seeking the face of God. This is a story of the prodigal son. What is a prodigal son?
06:09 Who's doing a runner? This one is doing a runner. The older brother's at home.
06:14 But he's already run away long ago because he's not interested in anything other than the father's money in the
06:19 lands. He's very upset when the the prodigal come uh son returns to claim part of that. His heart is far from God.
06:27 So therefore, we can be running. We could be sitting in church here and yet our hearts are running when we don't
06:33 face when we don't look at the presence of God and and move towards it. What is the face of God? The face go is a
06:38 consciousness of the brightness of his personal character, his supreme greatness or beauty and his worth. It's
06:46 moving away from that. If the direction of our lives are so focused on something
06:51 other than the beauty and the supreme glory of what God is to you, then no
06:58 matter what happens, you are running. We're designed to look at the face of God. We're designed to bask in his
07:05 presence. Paul when he preached to pagans in Acts chapter 17 says and they should seek God and perhaps feel their
07:13 way towards him and find him. It's in our DNA. We are created to find him.
07:19 Augustine the hippo says you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless
07:25 until uh until they can find rest in you. So we are running if we're not
07:31 seeking God. This is the definition of sin. If being human means life in free
07:37 response to God who freely and graciously addresses us, then sin can be described as a denial of our relatedness
07:43 to God and our need for God's grace. So life is to be lived in response to a holy and wonderful God. If you're not
07:51 responding, you must be running. Thirdly, we are running when your action
07:56 and your words do not match. Jonah chapter 1:9 says, and he says to this, I am a Hebrew, very proud. Why Hebrew?
08:05 Chosen race of all the race. He didn't choose the Chinese. He didn't choose the Indians. He chose the Jews. And I fear
08:12 the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the dry land. And then the storm
08:18 comes. The storm is so great that there was a mighty tempest in the sea so that the ship threatened to break up. Imagine
08:25 you're flying on an airplane and you know what storm hits? You got turbulence. Have you ever been through turbulence? Doesn't matter whe you're
08:32 first class, second class, or no class. The ship feels like it's going to break apart. And can you sleep? Well, uh, he
08:39 does. And the mariners were afraid. And each cried out to his god, and they hurled the cargo that was on the ship
08:44 into the sea to to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone into the inner part of the sea and had laid down and was
08:50 fast asleep. Here he's talking about a god of of the
08:55 heaven and earth who made the dry land. He's the one who fears God. And the and the and when the the tempest comes, the
09:01 the mariners were afraid. They cried out to their god. Uh verse uh 16, the men
09:07 feared the Lord, exceedingly offered sacrifice to the Lord and made vows, but he was fast asleep. Something wrong with
09:14 a guy when your actions don't match what you believe, isn't it? Uh this is John
09:20 Kerry, Secretary of State from the United States, and his typical example there. He says I don't make decisions in
09:26 public life based on religious belief. So which means belie religious belief make no difference to him. So he
09:32 supports abortion. He supports homosexual union. Is that the way we're supposed to live our lives? He's running
09:38 as a story told of a a true story in a um small town middle America where they
09:45 had a pub or a bar they call it there and it was built across the road from a
09:50 church and the people in the church didn't like the bar. It it would attract
09:56 people to ungodly life. So therefore they started prayer meeting after prayer meeting against the bar and true enough
10:03 business was bad and they had to close down. And what he did, the owner of a bar was so upset about the prayer
10:09 meetings, he started a lawsuit. As typical in the US, you sue everybody, right? So he sues the church because the
10:16 church caused the bar to close down by the power of prayer. Big lawsuit. And
10:21 the church in his defense even cited the Benson Harvard study, which is a study on postcardiac bypass patients uh
10:29 showing that actually whether you prayed for them or you didn't pray for them, there's no no result. There's no benefit
10:34 at all. And a judge summed up the case. I have a very interesting case. On one hand, I have a whole bunch I have a bar
10:41 owner who is totally convinced about the power of prayer. A whole bunch of Christians in the church who do not
10:47 believe in the power of prayer. I mean, isn't that a sign that we're actually uh
10:54 uh when our actions do not match our belief or we're not seeking his presence? We're not living in line with
11:00 the gospel. You know, brothers and sisters in Christ, we are running away from God. Now, why did he run? Let's
11:07 drill down into the passage and find out exactly why he ran. This is the divided kingdom, Jerobom. Uh, and they were
11:14 doing well. Uh, they were expanding. They were going into Assyrian territory. They were very successful. The
11:20 Israelites were overcoming the Assyrians at that time. But the Assyrians were really bad people. They whenever they
11:27 caught prisoners what they would do was they would they would actually flay their skin will skin you alive and hang
11:34 the skin over the walls of Nineve right they didn't have uh you know wallpaper
11:40 so they put skins and they buried the people into the ground and grabbed
11:47 their tongue and drove a steak through the tongue so that they would die of thirst that's what they did others they
11:52 would actually poke a big steak through their stomachs and hang them up. Terribly cruel people. And you're asking
11:59 him to go and share the gospel with them. Are you kidding? It's like asking my
12:06 mother to share the gospel or to reach out to people in Japan. I know there are
12:11 some Japanese here, but I'm telling you, the reason why she won't do that is that she watched her husband during the
12:17 Japanese occupation in Malaysia have his head chopped off. And when you do that,
12:22 you have a personal experience of the cruelty. It's very hard for you to actually want to obey God to do that.
12:28 And this is the reason Jonah chapter 3, let me read to you. When when God saw what they did, how they turned from the
12:34 evil ways, God relented of the disaster which he had said he would do to them and he did not do it. It displeased
12:40 Jonah exceedingly. He was very angry and he he was he was angry and prayed to the Lord saying, "Oh Lord, is not this what
12:48 I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarses. For I knew that you are a
12:54 gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster.
13:01 He knew that that the kind of God he worshiped. He knew that that God wanted
13:07 to be kind to his people whom he hated. Now, this is a great book by Edward
13:13 Welch who's basically a Christian psychologist and and you know why? It's when with
13:19 people are big and your god is small. When people around you are in color and your god is like a small black and white
13:25 TV set far far away. That's why he actually ran. See anything that erodess
13:32 the fear of God will intensify the fear of man. All right? So when you actually
13:37 are not in touch with God very much and don't really have a personal experience of him in your life, then the fear of
13:43 man becomes very very big. There's a trial of things. Once you have a fear of man, then if unbelief will follow and
13:51 later on disobedience. He couldn't bring himself to be found. The great prophet of Israel now goes and tries to save
13:60 their enemies. What will people think? What would its family think as it were? In 2008, uh there was a disaster in
14:07 Mumbai. a bunch of terrorists came uh and they rounded up people in the mall
14:13 and in this particular hotel and they shot them. Uh 136 of them were killed
14:19 when about 4 500 were injured in that attack on the city of Mumbai. There was
14:24 a house called the Naramman house where Jewish missionaries were there uh Rivka
14:32 and Gabrielle Holsburg and they and and when the terrorists came inside they
14:38 caught all of them. The only person who escaped was their little baby which is about two three years old smuggled out
14:44 by a nanny and the the lady was actually five months pregnant. They were
14:50 tortured. Their sexual organs were mutilated. and then they were killed.
14:56 This is terrorist, you know. And then on and then one of the foremost rabbis in
15:02 America uh had this to say when they asked him on talk radio um what about
15:08 the love of Jesus? What about loving your enemies? Aren't you guys supposed to love enemies? This is what he writes.
15:14 But to love those who indiscriminately murder God's children is an abomination
15:20 against all that is sacred. Is there a man who is human whose heart is not
15:25 filled with moral revulsion against terrorists who target a rabbi who feeds the hungry? Would God or Jesus ask me to
15:32 extend even one morsel of my limited capacity for compassion to fiends rather
15:37 than saving every last particle of uh for their victims instead? And he writes
15:44 some more. Could God be so really so unreasonable? Could Jesus be so cruel as
15:49 to ask me to love baby killers? And would such a God be moral if he did?
15:54 Could I pray to a God who loves terrorists? Could I find comfort in him knowing that he offers them comfort as
16:00 well? No. Such a God would be my enemy. He would abide in Hades rather than
16:06 heaven. I would be damned before I could worship him. I would accept an eternity in purgatory rather than a moment of the
16:13 celestial bliss shared with these beasts. Amazing.
16:18 Very difficult to love people like terrorists. How many of you were caught
16:24 cheering when they shot Osama bin Laden? Sure. Put your hands up. Yeah. Only one
16:29 or two or three honest people. The rest of us think it's politically incorrect to cheer when he was shot. I should
16:37 simply because there you know when you actually meet killers like him all right
16:43 you could trivialize and says God Jesus asked me to love everybody so I love him too but he has not come and killed your
16:49 mother he has not come and raped your sister so you'll say I'll trivialize it uh it'll be okay or some people will
16:56 tell you I will hate the evil and love the sinner how are you going to extract the evil from the sinner it's like
17:02 orange juice is it you take off the juice and then You you you love one, you hate the other. It's not possible. We
17:08 actually hate the person and his evil together. This they come in a package we
17:14 actually hate. When they actually killed Osama bin Laden, that's called justice. There is we love justice. But in that
17:23 sphere, there's enough room for love and pity. We have pity and desire for their
17:29 salvation as well. All right. It has we're not so onedimensional. We either
17:34 love a person or we hate the person. It comes together. I mean, in God's eyes,
17:43 we're all the same. If you actually look at it in God's eyes, we're all the same.
17:49 All right? Uh we are awful sinners. And the greatest sin that we actually do is to what? Walk away and turn away from
17:57 the God who actually gives you every single breath. That's the atrocity. That's the sin. But in our own eyes, I'm
18:05 very big and he's very small. Isn't it? That's what we do. We each of us need
18:10 all the bag daddies in people's in our lives so that we could feel good. We we we compare ourselves with height, race,
18:17 religion, interacting. You know, when you enter a room, the first thing what is the first thing you do when you meet somebody, you know, you meet somebody
18:23 like Jonathan Spears, you know, and the first thing say, "Oh my god, he's taller than me, but but but he's not as handsome than
18:30 me." and you look, oh, actually he is handsomemer than me and then he's not as smart as me. Oh, but he's quite smart as well. So, you're finding some something
18:37 for you not to like so that you won't feel quite so bad, right? Okay. In fact, they did studies
18:43 uh using brain scans that in an area of your brain that registers pain. And
18:50 whenever you actually find somebody cleverer than you, prettier than you, better, you actually there's pain in
18:56 that part of your brain because you can't stand somebody. You know, you've got to be better than a whole bunch of people in order to feel good about
19:02 yourself. That's how we're actually uh uh uh uh made. So, we have to be better
19:07 than somebody else. Last week, I had actually had a young man uh uh who come in, a young boy, 15 years old, came in
19:14 with a portion of his testice. I mean, his test was twisted and his father is a general manager of a huge GLC or
19:21 government link company and and he wanted two urologists operating on his son rather than one even though it was a very simple operation. And so my
19:27 colleague asked me to come in and and the guy shook my hand and says, "Look, you got to save the testicle. You know,
19:34 my son has 10 A's." Oh, you mean if he's got two A's, I'll lop it off, right?
19:46 I mean, doesn't quite make sense, isn't it? But that's what we do, isn't it? We we have we if people are big and God is
19:54 small, that's what happens to us. Okay, we measure each other. Uh um and you
19:59 know the story is told in England where there's a factory next to a watch uh a
20:07 seller and what the factory does the watch the owner of the watch uh u shop
20:12 does is every day he knows exactly at 4:00 the siren goes off. Everybody
20:17 knocks off work. So he sets his clock at 4:00 all these clocks to the siren. And
20:23 one day the factory owner walks past they say oh I love your clocks you know you know I set my horn to your clocks
20:30 say hey hello you know but that's what we do isn't it if we cut ourselves from
20:35 God the only standard we actually have is each other and so therefore we seek glory from each other people become very
20:42 important people are big and then God is small imagine you get into a traffic light and you're sitting there in
20:48 traffic and then suddenly either your your your neighbor neighbor next to you in the car is actually
20:54 moving backwards. What do you think? Is he moving backwards or are you going
20:60 forwards? And the first thing you do, you jam your brakes on and your brakes, but do you know your brakes are working or not? So, how do you solve the
21:06 problem? Anybody know? How many of you been in that situation before? You don't drive cars.
21:12 What do you do? You look at a fixed object, right, that doesn't move unless the traffic light moves, right? So you
21:18 look at the traffic light or you look at Parkson Grand and that's where you get your bearing whether you know you're
21:24 moving or your neighbor is moving. And in life if we're always looking at the watch and he's looking at the siren we
21:30 are lost. And so therefore the only place where you could fix is only one fixed point in the center of the
21:37 universe that we need to look. When you look at the cross, you become very very
21:43 small because all the differences between me and the other guy disappear because God is infinite. If you look at
21:51 the cross, we become very very big because the cross indicates to me God's power and love is poured out for me and
21:59 I live my life based on that. And then when an atrocity like a Paris coming and
22:05 killing friends and relatives comes in, I do not look at it from the point of view of people's opinion, but I look at
22:11 it in God's light. In chapter four, we'll discuss the pain of accepting
22:16 God's sovereignty. Uh so you have to wait for that sermon on the 5th of January of February. Lastly, secondly,
22:23 we can run but we cannot hide. Um this is when
22:29 where when Jo when when Jonah rose to flee to Tarsish from the presence of God. He went down to Jopa and found a
22:34 ship going there to Tashes and he paid the fair and went down to it uh uh with
22:39 to go with them to Tash away from the presence of God. So So here is Jonah. He wakes up in the morning. He's rubbing
22:46 his eyes and his ears wonder did did God tell me to go to Nineveh? There's some ambiguity there. You know I mean I was
22:54 half asleep when he spoke to me. So what he does, he takes the globe, he spins it around, put his finger there. Ah, Tashish.
23:00 So you know what I'll do? I I'll go down to to Port Clang, you know, and what do
23:06 you know? When you go to Port Clang, the first ship out of there is to Tesish. Must be God's will, isn't it? Right. So
23:11 he gets on it and he goes, I mean, when we've decided young people, for example,
23:16 that I'm going to date a non-Christian, God is good, but you know, you know, and
23:23 then you'll think of all sorts of things. Oh, she's she's just beautiful. Same age as me, same class as me, same
23:28 color of skin as me, same address as me. No, no, no. Or same surname as me. And
23:34 you know, you got a problem, right? So, so, so when you want to find the
23:40 ship to to t run away, you always find the ship to t it all the time. I mean, in my profession, we actually have
23:47 certain things that have to be done. For example, if you got bladder cancer, I need to take it out. You got a kidney cancer, you take it out. There's no two
23:53 ways about it, right? But you got patients who want the second opinion, a third opinion, a fourth opinion. Why?
23:58 Because they don't want to hear what you want to tell them. They want some doctor in the end if you pay them enough money
24:04 to sing your song. So you'll find somebody to sing your song. If you can't find a doctor to sing your song, then
24:09 you find a sensei or bulmo or a naturopath to sing your song. And we got lots of them. As long as you got a money
24:14 to pay, that happens. So if you want to run away from God, you will always find
24:21 a ship to Tarsish. If you always entertain lust in your mind, one day you will find a bed. If you always harbor
24:29 resentment and bitterness in your heart, one day you will wind up hurting somebody else. That's how it works in
24:36 our lives. Obeying God is much harder. Obeying God is like, you know, some of
24:43 you will uh will empathize with me trying to lose weight, isn't it? You got this condition that
24:49 prevents me from going and die. I get hungry, you know. Um drive along the federal highway. All right. You think
24:56 you can It's a weight Weight Watchers hell, you know, because everywhere you've got pop-up restaurants, you you
25:03 got advertisements, you got everything. It's all telling you to eat and eat and eat. I went to to to Bangkok actually
25:09 recently. uh and and washing my hands in front of me. I don't even see my face. I
25:14 see the restaurant. They've got this ads that come on all the time. You're bombarded. So
25:21 basically, the road to Tashes is very easy, very, very easy. But to obey God
25:26 is hard. But if you don't obey God, your life takes a downturn. This is uh Jonah.
25:32 Jonah rose to flee to Tarses from the present Lord. He went down. Look at our author writes to Japa. found a ship
25:38 going to Tarses. He paid for fair and went down into it to go to to to with them to Tarses to go get away from the
25:45 present Lord. And the Lord heard the great wind upon the sea. Go right down here. And but Jonah had gone down into
25:52 the inner part of the ship and laid down and was fast asleep. The author is writing emphasizing the word down. As he
25:59 runs away from God, his life cycles out of control and he's going downhill all
26:05 the time. God lets you run. If you want to run, God lets you run. Romans chapter
26:10 one says, "For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but became futile in
26:16 their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened." There's something that happens to us when we actually run from
26:22 God. Our life comes apart. In fact, if you look at our brains, we're actually hardwired for sin. There's a part of our
26:30 brain called the medial prefrontal cortex. Okay, which actually uh acts in
26:36 such a way that it multiplies everything that you do by two. That's why certain person says I'm the best businessman.
26:42 I've got the hugest business deals. Right. Right. Because there's a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal
26:49 cortex. It lets us exaggerate what we do. So what happens is they did a experiment in Mount Clair University in
26:56 New Jersey where they actually put electromagnetic waves on that part of the brain to suppress that. And once
27:02 they did that the people started telling the truth naturally you would lie and and make
27:09 things bigger. I caught a fish that was this big, right? It's actually this small. So there's part of your brain
27:14 that exaggerates. We're hardwired because we're sinful people. We're running away from God all the time. Sin
27:20 is is like radioactive poison. It's not a bullet that hits you and then you die on the spot. Sin is like pollonium 210.
27:28 You know that this is this chap called Living Yenko. He had a cup of tea with
27:33 palonium in it about a gram of palonium. He took 22 days to die. He was fantastic after that. He went golfing did all
27:40 sorts of things but he only died sometime later. Sin kills you slowly by
27:45 enslaving you and destroying you from inside. uh famous evangelist uh Franklin
27:51 Graham, he wasn't always as cleancut as that before. He tells his testimony, his
27:57 testimony in the younger days was, "The more I tried to fill my life with things I thought would make me happy, the more
28:03 empty I felt inside." Um I realized for the first time that sin had control over
28:09 my life. Franklin Graham was not in charge. Sin was and there's absolutely nothing I could do in my own power to
28:16 overcome it. We go. When you leave God, he lets you run. But you cannot hide because the consequence of sin will form
28:23 a power over you. We sadly remember the
28:28 loss of George Michael uh died recently. And if
28:35 you look in his life, uh this is what he writes. I have never and will never apologize for my sex life. Gay sex is
28:43 natural. Gay sex is good. Not everyone who does it. Not everyone does it, but
28:49 haha, very in yourrface, very defiantly
28:55 sinful, he writes. So that's 12 years of
28:60 depression and fear and lots of other stuff. I swear to God, it was like I had
29:07 a curse on me. I couldn't believe how much God was piling on at once. There was so much death around me. I can't
29:14 tell you. In 2007, he wrote he his life was self-destructive,
29:19 you know, and yet there are parts of his life where he tries to do good. Uh he he even paid £25,000 for a woman to have
29:25 IVF, a random woman. He tipped his waitress £8,400 because she had some
29:31 debts. A life that struggles, you know, to do some good and yet spiraling out of
29:38 control. In the end, he died bloated, empty, and alone. See, you can run,
29:46 but you cannot hide. Lastly, there's always love beneath the waves. God sends a storm into our lives,
29:55 and Jonah knows it. The sea grew more tempestous. He said to them, "Pick me up and hurl me in the sea than the sea will
30:02 quiet down for you. For I know it's because of me that the great tempest has come upon you. It's because of me. He
30:09 knew God was doing something. If he continued to run, he would lose his life. But God was knocking something to
30:16 him. There's a nice fairy tale told of a um a place, a cottage in the middle of
30:21 the forest where they lived a witch. And this witch would entertain strangers. So
30:27 to come to the house, very hospitable. She'd feed them really well until they felt sleepy. And then she would usher
30:33 them into a room where they would lie there and rest overnight. And as soon as
30:38 dawn comes and the sunlight trickles through the window, if they were sleeping on the bed, they would be
30:44 turned into stone. And she takes the stone out and puts it with a whole bunch of stone statues outside. The people are
30:52 still alive, but they're entrapped in stone. One day, a very handsome man came
30:57 and suffered the same fate. He had a good makan and he was invited to sleep
31:02 on the bed. And they went to sleep on the bed. But he had a terrible night. You know, he was tossing and turning. It
31:08 was most uncomfortable. There bits here and bits there. And just before dawn, he got up very, very grumpy. And he there
31:15 was a servant standing nearby. He scolded her and they proceeded to to to to walk away. He did realize that during
31:22 the night, because he was a handsome man, the the servant girl fell in love with him. And so as he was sleeping, she
31:27 was throwing stones and sticks into the pit. So he couldn't get a good night's sleep. And actually that saved his life.
31:35 Isn't that typical of what God does when we're running or we're slumbering away?
31:41 He throws sticks and stones into our lives that sort of trips out our careers and we sort of think that we're not
31:46 Superman anymore. That we're actually vulnerable. When your life comes apart at the seams uh when and your livelihood
31:54 is threatened, you know what? That's God throwing sticks and stones into our lives. Um but then there's always love
32:02 beneath the we waves. picked me up and hurled me into the sea, and the sea will quiet down for you. Uh, and they picked
32:07 up Jonah, hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its ranging raging. The men feared the Lord exceedingly, and
32:14 they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows, and the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three
32:20 days and three nights. You see, when I was young, I had, you know, six uncles,
32:25 and all of them would call me Jonah. And that's an insult. You know why? Because
32:30 you bring bad luck. Jonah used to be a moniker for people with bad luck. But
32:35 actually, what are the odds if people throw you from the ocean and a fish comes and saves your life? That's not
32:41 bad luck. That's very good luck. It's the complete opposite. What are the odds of being thrown into the sea and being
32:47 picked up by a whale? So, we actually have here a picture of God's relentless
32:52 love that he does not let you go away. Like that servant girl who throws stones
32:57 and sticks into the the the bed of the handsome man, God throws stones and sticks upon us. We reaches out to
33:04 rebellious Israel, rebellious prophets, rebellious Assyrians. The challenge
33:09 today, therefore, is for us to look at
33:15 Isaiah 55:6. Seek the Lord while he may be found. In this new year, call upon
33:20 him where he is near. Because thousands of years after Jo Jonah, Matthew writes
33:27 these words. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man
33:33 be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. See, God sent a
33:40 whale or a fish to pick up Jonah. Thousands of years later on, God sent
33:46 his son. So when we are thrown into the waves, when we're thrown into the
33:52 tempest, there's someone there who will pick us up and that is our Lord Jesus Christ. He will never let us go. Let me
33:59 end with a challenge of a true story of a man called Henfam. Henfam lived
34:06 still alive today. uh he worked with the famous apologist
34:11 Ravi Zachcharias and uh in 1971 he was Rav Ravi Zachcharias um translator
34:19 because he knew theology as well as English. So he is having a crusade
34:24 around the country and he translated then the Americans left and the whole country collapsed into communism. He was
34:31 sent to jail because he was thought to be a western collaborator because he
34:37 associated with American Rafi Ravi Zachcharias and they tried to re-educate him. So day and night there would be KL
34:43 Marx and then there'll be communism all streamed to his brain and he got so
34:49 tired one day he said to the Lord, I don't think I'll pray to you anymore. I'll just stop because it's just, you
34:56 know, I'm in prison. Nobody cares. Nobody gives a damn. The moment he said
35:01 that, the next day he got punished in a prison. What do you think is the worst
35:06 duty that you will ever get? Anybody in prison? Yeah. What's the worst duty?
35:14 Community service. Oh, that's good. What's the worst thing that can happen to you in prison? What? What? What duty?
35:21 No. Toilet duty. Yeah. To be condemned to clean the toilets in a prison. That's
35:29 the fate worse than death. And it was. He went into the toilet and the toilet
35:34 stank. You could hardly breathe. And he was cleaning this toilet day in and day
35:39 out. I mean, on that day, it was horrible. And he found a piece of paper scrunched up with some, you know, teeth
35:45 there on it and he cleaned it off. And on that day, he read it. It was a page
35:52 from the Bible. Romans chapter 8. What is the odds? Romans chapter 8, it
35:58 says God causes, you know, in all things, you know, God causes good for all those who love him and are called by him, right? And then he goes down to
36:05 chapter eight, the bottom part says, nothing so she se what shall se separate you from the love of Christ? Nothing.
36:12 And he knew God was speaking to him right that very minute. It's like a whale coming and picking you up when
36:18 you're almost given up. You thrown yourself into the hands of God. And you know what happened next day? He
36:23 volunteered for another toilet duty because he knew the commanding officer in that camp did his business with the
36:31 Bible every day. It's not quiet time, it's other times. And every day he'd collect a piece of
36:37 Bible and he would learn and he would grow. And God didn't leave him alone.
36:42 Now he left prison and uh he planned to escape
36:48 from Vietnam and he was planning with a boat and it was as he's planning a boat
36:54 four Vietnamese soldiers heard about it and came they asked him are you planning
36:59 to escape are you getting a boat he said no he lied understandable he'd be killed if he if
37:06 he didn't lie and he left but as they left he felt a tinge of remorse and guilt because he had told the lie and he
37:13 said to the Lord, "Uh, Lord, um, you know, if they come back again, I won't lie."
37:20 I think there's some ethical issues with that, but but never mind. You've never been in a country like that before. So,
37:26 you know, and you know what? Just before they left, they did come back again. So,
37:31 four fellas came back again and they grabbed him by his collar and they said, you know, are you planning to leave?
37:37 and he stammered out, "Yeah, we're planning to leave." And they leaned forward and say, "Hey, can we come
37:43 along?" They come along. Why? Sure. We'll make space for all four of you. And by God's
37:50 grace, as they were in the Gulf of of of of Thailand outside there, they came to
37:56 a horrible, horrible storm. And they nearly died if not for the four soldiers
38:02 who were actually sailors. They knew how to handle the ship. and they were brought to safety and then he went and
38:10 he migrated. He's a business person in the UA, California somewhere where he contacted Ravi Zachariah. True story.
38:17 And so when you jump beneath the waves, there is love. So let's have the team
38:23 come up and uh end with our last song,
38:29 which is the song of 2017.
38:34 song's entitled Come to the Father. Father's given you two things.
38:41 Two of the most precious things that he gives you for 2017. The word saying he's
38:48 given you his word and he's given you his love. And it doesn't matter who you are
38:55 or whether you've been running or you've been standing still or your heart's not
39:00 been searching for God. Come to him. There's no person who is too awful or
39:06 too evil. If God could save Assyrians, my goodness, couldn't he save Malaysians?
39:13 Couldn't he save us? Couldn't he save Turkish people, Japanese people? He
39:19 could save any single one of us today. Let our New Year resolution not just be
39:25 we're not running from God, but let our New Year's resolution be running towards
39:31 God because there's no in the middle, isn't it? There's no ambivalence towards God. You're either we're created to seek
39:39 him, to run towards him, to desire his face.
39:44 Either that or we're distracted with every other thing in life. And if you're living your life not in line with the
39:50 gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, what he wants us to do, we we created so that we will shine out and tell of his marvelous
39:57 glory to the whole world. If we're not doing that, we're not living lives in line with that, then we're running. If
40:02 we're not finding Jesus as precious, then we're running.
40:10 Oh Lord, help us. We're to come today with our sinful hearts. We'll come today with our sinful desires. We say to God,
40:16 "God, I'm coming to you. Take us, help us, mold us,
40:24 and use us.
