DARE TO BELIEVE – “When Hope Seems Gone”
Jonah 2:1-10
This picture (person sitting against a wall, very dark room, small light in the window) is, to me, a powerful image of despair. It creates a sense of aloneness where an overwhelming gloom settles into your spirit and there's no life or energy to move from where you are. Everything is not completely dark; there's some light but not enough to forget the darkness.
Despair makes hope seem an empty dream as we snap awake to reality and we begin to believe the lie, “there's no way out.”
In those times God provides a way out or a way through those situations. At first I labelled this topic “When hope is gone”. I changed it to “When hope seems gone” – hope is never gone! Job is an example of this truth. He's a man in the Bible whose seven sons and three daughters were killed in one day. In a matter of days he lost his livelihood and his life amounted to a frail scab-sore frame sitting in the rubble of the city dump. Listen to what he says about his lessons in despairing situations. Job 5: 8-11, "My advice to you is this: Go to God and present your case to him. For he does great works too marvelous to understand. He performs miracles without number. He gives rain for the earth. He sends water for the fields. He gives prosperity to the poor and humble, and he takes sufferers to safety…”
Jonah was another man who was well acquainted with despair. He too offers some wonderful lessons on dealing with this unwelcome guest. Like Jonah you may have created your despairing situation. Or you may be like Job so that you didn’t create your reality and it was forced on you by other's choices and decisions. The lesson teaches, among other things that there's no value in pointing fingers and casting blame. That doesn’t change anything. Our lesson today is one of “how” and “what”. “How” can I move from a spirit of despair to a life of hope? “What” are my choices, my options? “What” can I do to experience a different reality to the current one?
Let’s see what Jonah’s story teaches us. We must of course understand the background of how things ended where they did for Jonah.
1. Jonah’s complacency to God’s commission
A commission is a powerful and sacred obligation. It is a symbol of relationship between two or more people, an act of trust and complete dependence of one on another to achieve certain aims. Often there’s no backup plan.
God commissioned Jonah. Let’s read what happens: Jonah 1:1-3a…
(Background) – Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria. Assyria was a strong and brutal nation, being the great enemies of God, of Israel. Assyria plundered, raped and enslaved the Israelites. It is to these that God told Jonah he should tell them of their sins that they may repent and receive God’s favour and blessing. The natural, human side of us can understand Jonah’s reluctance and resistance to helping the enemies of his people. Long before Jesus said in Matthew 5:44, “Bless those who curse you, do good to them that hate you” he practiced what he preached! Jonah was struggling. Look at how he responds to God’s instructions: Jonah 1:3b-6a…
“How can you sleep?” … logical perspective is the storm. We saw a couple of weeks ago the disciples asking Jesus the same question as he slept soundly in the boat during a huge storm. What a strange paradox. Jesus, completely at peace and security with Father’s will, slept. Jonah, on the run from God and justifying his neglect, slept. We have reason to believe Jonah stopped praying. He stopped communicating with God. He stopped caring about what God wanted. He was so completely consumed with how he felt and what he thought was justice in this situation that he focused completely on his own feelings and perspective.
(Compare God’s instruction to Jonah with Jesus’ instruction to his disciples). Sounds strangely familiar to Matthew 28:19...
I am convinced that as much as we have a corporate responsibility to this commission, it was given to people first, not an organization. Jesus didn't command a church with this commission, he commanded a people – his people. Every person who say they follow Jesus has the unique, individual, personal responsibility to tell other people about the alternative to their current realities of life away from God, that being, life with God! In some respects we’re doing well with this responsibility. In other ways I’m concerned that we’re not praying, we’re not communicating and we’ve stopped caring. I’m concerned that we’re complacent with the commission. I’m concerned that we are sleeping.
The question, “how can you sleep?” should haunt us if we can live with ourselves and at the same time avoid God and his Commission. “How can you sleep?” We can sleep because we have the spine-chilling ability to believe anything we want in the interest of self-will. Jonah shared an important insight from his experience in the whale – 2:8a… – the ‘idol’ here is self-will and justification. Self-will becomes the whale that swallows our potential, our purpose and our awareness of God’s purposes for us and we end up settling for the lesser option that is often dark and despairing.
We must not become complacent, personally or as a church, about God's commission for us. Our mandate is clear. Our commission is straightforward. If we miss the mark; if we neglect our calling we’ll lose God’s blessing and bring in a whole host of troubles on us. It happened to Jonah and it can happen to us.
From a personal standpoint much (not all, it is important to know where that’s true and where it isn’t the case) of the pain and trouble we experience are the result of choices made apart from God’s will for us.
But what about those times when we’re dealing with the consequences of someone else’s carelessness, bad choices or neglect? Leads us to evaluate
2. Jonah’s choices
- Two options
First, Jonah could wallow in despair as a pig wallows in mud. People who live like this can’t see roses because they’re too focused on the thorns. They can’t feel the warmth of the sun because of the few grey clouds hovering overhead. The glass is always half empty instead of half full. It is tough to be in relationship with someone who is generally negative, brooding, and complaining. It saps your energy and you can feel joy drain out of you like water flowing out of a container that has a hole in it.
At first Jonah shrugged God off. Had some very bad results – see Jonah 2:1-10…
Jonah 2:6-7 (The Message)…
We can stay here and surrender to overwhelming sense of defeat and despair that comes from the syndrome of seeing the negative side of our realities without the counter-side, the God-side, the positive side.
There was another option which Jonah took awhile to realise but it was powerful and liberating when he came round to it. When he chose this option things changed. The change started when Jonah prayed and received God’s mercy.
Mercy is a fascinating thing. Let's try to understand it better.
I want you to remember a time when a friend or someone close to you avoided you, shrugged you off for some reason. Now imagine that person being in all kinds of trouble or having a lot of problems because of a bad choice that included walking away from you. Then they come to you for help and you help them as if they had never shrugged you off and hurt you. That’s mercy. Mercy – to show compassion to someone who offended you.
The powerful truth here is, Jonah wasn't walking away from people he loved. He wanted to walk away from enemies, people who plundered his towns and cities, killed his people and stripped them of their dignity and identity. As hard as we struggle to forgive the people we love when they hurt us, it doesn’t compare to this situation before us. In this hostile, aggressive and volatile political climate, God throws in “a ton” of mercy! Look at this the alternative! (Blue highlights of Jonah 2:1-10…
The thing about God's mercy is he has no obligation to respond to us in anything. Any response is grace being poured into us and his response is always one of mercy because his response is never to dish out what we deserve.
Jonah teaches something else very important here. When you can't do anything else, PRAY – not the tidy prayers that sound good but the gut-wrenching prayers of agony and pain. Pour it out but in the end you choose to trust God to take care of your situations, believing he has only the best in mind for you.
We can wallow in despair or see the alternative of victory. Which?
The problem with obedience is that it doesn't always mean the struggle disappears or becomes easier. Chapters 3/4 – people of Nineveh repented; Jonah got really angry, still struggling with God’s love and justice – Read Jonah 4:1-2!...
Maybe he watched the Assyrian's stab pregnant women or saw them snatch the last harvest from a child's hands and hungry eyes. I sympathize with and understand Jonah's struggle. He soon forgot the whale episode! But he came round. Things got back on track for Jonah. To extend mercy to the merciless marauders he had to stop to understand the mercy given him. He had to understand everyone is on equal ground and non are righteous apart from God's mercy.
This part of the passage is a hard passage for us. The last war on Canadian soil was almost two centuries ago. It was the “Madison’s War” of 1812. A young USA tried to seize Canada when our British allies were off fighting Napoleon in Europe. Evasion on Canadian soil is something none of us have experienced so we cannot relate to the context of the Scripture and grasp Jonah’s struggle. We must exit the story at this point and find parallels that have the same effect of despair and unhealthy outcomes.
Look at those things that drag you into despair and re-evaluate those things against the mercy of God toward you. Stop sitting in the dark and move toward the light. It's not all bad.
You can stay in the whale of self-will and rejection of God or you can experience the amazing cleansing that comes with the knowledge of his grace and mercy as you forgive the people who hurt you. Forgive them with the same forgiveness God gives to you.
Maybe there are others who need to face the hurt and pain you’ve caused someone. Maybe the time for repentance has come and you need to ask someone to forgive you.
This stuff eats us up, it swallows us whole. The worse thing you can do is nothing and justify that response. It will draw you into a darkness that will enslave and engulf you. It’s called despair.
WRAP
- When hope seems gone, it isn’t. It just seems that way
- Sometimes we create it. Other times we had nothing to do with. Not a good thing to ignore God. Only makes things worse.
- It doesn’t matter so much where we are or even how we got there. What matters is how we’ll respond to where we are and what we do with the situation:
- Live in despair
- Embrace the alternative – deliverance and victory!
