Our God does not demand our worthiness—He grants it. We are broken people who are granted a worthiness not of our own. The miracle of the Gospel is that once wretched and lost, God gives us a new heart—not because we earn it or deserve it or accomplish the right tasks to recreate ourselves—but God gives us a new heart because God is unfathomably kind and never ending in His grace. Jesus paid the price for your old heart—he died for it. And now Jesus gives You His own heart, full of life, because He has adopted you as His own. You are worthy sons and daughters of the King. You are worthy to be loved. You are worthy to be cared for, worthy to have rest, to have hope, to stop spinning so fast and to have peace. You are worthy because Jesus gives you His own worthiness as a gift—it’s called the breastplate of righteousness, Jesus’ own right standing and reputation and worthiness, given to you.

God is interested in all of our lives being transformed. We’re not meant to be adopted by God and then live like orphans. Our transformation is central to what it means to know God. The church has bought the lie that to know about God is to be a Christian. To be a Christian is to be a disciple—and that is the process of transformation.

Two words are essential to the Christian life: repent and follow. These two words are never perfected, but worked out in the Christian life each day. Repent is an action word—it means to turn around, to change direction. Jonah was unrepentant in his fleeing from God, running and running—down, down, down—until his rebellion led him into the darkness of death in the belly of a fish at the bottom of the ocean. His repentance, as we talk about last week, is in the form of a hymn, a psalm, a poem. Jonah laments where he has found himself—hurled into the deep, waves swept over him, engulfed at the bottom of the ocean, covered by seaweed and trapped in a fish. And there Jonah makes his first confession of true repentance: Lord, you are my God. My prayer rose to you and you heard it. Salvation comes from the Lord. Jonah’s repentance, his literal turning around and heading in the right direction after pursuing the wrong direction with all his might comes with God’s help and some good comedy: Jonah 2:10 And the LORD commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land.Our ‘no’ to God, our rebellion and sin, is countered with God’s ‘yes’ to us. The mystery and wonder of the good news of the Gospel is that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. While we were enemies of God, God said ‘yes’ to us by sending his one and only begotten son to die for our sins so that all who trust and believe in Jesus would not perish but have everlasting life. And when we get twisted up in knots, when we start believing shame that says ‘you’re not enough, you’re not worthy, you’ve messed up’, when doubt about who you are and what you are doing starts to creep in, when fear covers you like a blanket and the hope of a future is dim, still Jesus comes to you and still Jesus will free you.Jonah says ‘no’ to God, God pursues Jonah and leads him to repentance, and because God is leading Jonah to repent, because Jonah finally relents and hands his life over to God, God’s purpose for Jonah continues. God vomits the reluctant prophet out of the fish and onto dry land. The message is simple: God will bring you to the place He wants you to be. Your obedience makes the journey more pleasant, but even in your rebellion God’s sovereignty and love for you will ensure that God’s plan for your life is accomplished. Jesus will never leave you nor forsake you because God is madly in love with you—you are precious in His sight.The second word of the Christian life is follow. To follow Jesus is our ‘yes’ to God after we’ve said ‘no’ to our rebellion through the action of repentance. Speaking of following Jesus, Eugene Peterson writes, “We have renounced self-initiative for Jesus-obedience. We have renounced clamoring assertions and replaced them with quiet listening. We watch Jesus work. We listen to Jesus speak….Keeping company with Jesus, observing what he does, and listening to what he says develop into a life of answering God, a life of responding to God, which is a life of prayer.” A life of prayer, a life of responding to God, a life of following Jesus is not a robotic movement in which all actions and all future possibilities are mapped out. The life of following Jesus looks like taking one step at a time, into the fog, into a future you cannot see nor predict. Yet following Jesus is secure because Jesus holds your hand and you are holding his. Following Jesus is joyful because your eyes are focused on Him and thus your joy—Jesus himself—is always with you. Following Jesus is peaceful because God’s Word and the Holy Spirit illuminate who you are and who God is—one step at a time in your life. Why? Because the Bible says that God’s word is a lamp unto our feet. God’s Word and the Holy Spirit take us one step at a time, illuminating what is directly in front of us—that Jesus is crazy about you, that you are precious in His sight, and that Jesus is good enough and kind enough and gracious enough for you. So we stay present in the moment with our Savior so that our life would not be about performance but about trust, so that we would be secure in knowing that we’re safe with Jesus no matter the storms that rage around us. The life of following Jesus is filled with security and joy and peace precisely because Jesus is with us. How deep the Father’s love for us, how vast beyond measure, that He should give His only Son to make a wretch His treasure.

And so at the bottom of the ocean in the belly of a fish Jonah finally faces himself (I’m lost) and in doing so, Jonah faces God. This is my prayer for us today: that God would grant us the gift of the pain of being so lost that we might finally look at ourselves and then look to God. I know it’s not the prayer you would wish me to pray, but to follow Jesus, as we will see, is to follow Him through death and into life. There is no other way. We are people of the cross and the resurrection—that’s the fullness of the gospel: more wicked and lost than we ever would care to admit; more loved and precious in God’s sight than we ever dared hope because Jesus Christ died and rose again for us and our salvation.

You can’t outrun God. It’s futile to try. It’s impossible to outpace his pursuing affection. C.S. Lewis tried. In his autobiographical work Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes, “You must picture me alone in that room…night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.” God’s love has a mugging nature to it. We can run, but we can’t hide. Jonah is finally sinking into death. Jonah’s running has finally stopped. God has won the chase. Our fear is that the story of Jonah will end here: with Jonah sinking into death. We are Jonah, remember? Our fear is that God will simply let Jonah die and that’s the end of the story: justice is served. Our fear is that when we suffer, when we’re lost in sin, when we’ve messed up, that our story will only and forever be summed up as a tragedy. Our fear is that if we face our pain or the way we were abused or the massive problems in our marriage or all the ways we put ourselves to sleep through our justified addictions that we’ll never stop sinking—we’ll die. And here’s the truth: we will die. God’s plan for our salvation includes our death. Doesn’t Jesus show us this? Resurrection comes after death. Following Jesus is not easy. But what’s the alternative? Go to sleep? God will find you. Run? God will chase after you. Try to find life apart from Jesus? Your weariness and desperation will be the means God will bring you back home. The hard truth is that when God saves us there is pain; we must face the reality that we are lost. We must confess: Jesus, I am Jonah, running from your face. And Jesus himself will bring us to our own death because faith in Christ means we follow Jesus—to the cross, to death, and to resurrection.

Our task: identify with Jonah. His story is our story. Reading the book of Jonah is not about gleaning moral lessons from Jonah’s failures. We read this book to discover about what God does with us who run from Him and who this God is who relentlessly pursues us. “We learn about the danger we experience when we run from God’s will, the deliverance we experience when we submit to God’s will, the deliverance others experience when we fulfill God’s will, and the depression we experience when we question God’s will.” Tullian Tchividjian, Surprised by Grace, p 25And we will also see over and over again the gospel in the book of Jonah—the good news that God and God alone saves us when we are in fill tilt rebellion simply because God in His glory and mercy chooses to adopt us as His own.