Word of Salvation – Vol.48 No.34 – September 2003

 

Practised Prayer

Sermon by Rev J Haverland

on Jonah 2

 

Scripture Readings: Psalm 86; James 5:13-20; Jonah 2

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The theme of this sermon is: Jonah draws on the Psalms to describe his near-death experience and his hope in God’s salvation.

And the purpose of this sermon is: To use Jonah’s prayer to encourage us to pray honestly, confidently and thankfully.

Towards the end of his short letter, James has some advice for Christians. He gives it in his usual practical and pithy style.

“Is anyone of you in trouble? He should pray.
 Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.” James 5:13

Good advice. Yet not always followed. Sometimes we get into trouble and the very last option we think of is to pray. At other times we are happy and then we are not always all that quick to thank God and sings songs of praise to Him.

In these matters we aren’t too different from Jonah. It took him a while to get around to praying. The Lord had commanded him to go and preach to Nineveh. He decided to head off in exactly the opposite direction – to Tarshish, which was in modern Spain. The Lord sent a great storm on the Mediterranean Sea and the sailors called on their gods for help. Then the captain found Jonah sleeping soundly in the bottom of the hold and shouted, “Get up and call on your god!” (vs 6)

There is no indication in the text that Jonah prayed. That is to be expected. Disobedience will stifle our prayers. Peter warns husbands about this when he commands us to treat our wives with consideration and respect, “so that nothing will hinder your prayers” (1 Peter 3:7). Disobedience to God and his commands will impede our prayers.

After the lot fell on Jonah, he acknowledged his sin to the sailors and told them he was running away from the Lord (1:10). He faced the consequences of his action when he told them to throw him overboard (1:12). And then, finally, in the belly of the fish, he prayed. No doubt it was dark, smelly, wet, cramped and claustrophobic. These were extreme conditions for prayer. Sometimes we excuse ourselves from prayer because our situation is not comfortable or conducive to prayer. We tell ourselves that it is too cold or too hot, too early or too late. But here, in this situation, in this clammy environment, the Lord forced this prophet to his knees, and Jonah cast himself on the Lord.

Some children grow up in their homes, and go to school for years and years, without learning much. They don’t take it in. They are not interested in education. They don’t want to know. And then later they have to learn painful lessons through bitter experience.

Jonah was like this. He did not want to learn from God’s command, and so the Lord had to teach him some lessons in the ‘school of hard knocks’ – one of the most effective educational institutions God has! “In my distress I called to the Lord”, he cries, in the opening exclamation of his prayer (vs 2).

This happens to us at times. God brings us low and we cry out to Him for His help and His mercy. We come to the end of our own resources and we know our own weakness. We become aware of our absolute dependence on God for everything. Psalm 18:6 reads, “In my distress I called to the Lord, I cried to God for help.” Jonah did this. We need to do the same.

Before we consider some features of his prayer I want you to notice that he has borrowed most of his language from the Psalms. He put it together like this – it was his prayer – but most of it has been borrowed. He had been taught to pray from the Psalter. He had heard the psalms, read them, meditated on them and memorised them. And now, in this dark place and terrible time, the words and phrases came back to him. He had the words to express how he felt.

Think of Jesus in His suffering on the cross and how He went back to the words of Psalm 22 to express His anguish and His cries to the Father: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?”

We often think of prayer as something that is spontaneous – that it just flows out of you. Or people think they should wait until they feel ‘moved’ to pray – that they should ‘feel’ like praying. But most prayer is not like that. Prayer is a discipline. It is something you do even when you don’t feel like doing it. It is not easy to pray – in fact, it’s very difficult. It is probably the hardest of the spiritual disciplines to keep up. You have to learn to pray. And you only learn by practising and you need to keep practising until it comes naturally.

Think of a pianist who keeps practising over and over until it comes easily and seems spontaneous. Or a basketball player who practises the same move again and again until he has it right. In a similar way we need to keep praying, to practise prayer so that we can get better at praying; so that we can give fuller expression to all we want to say to God.

A good way to learn to pray is to read the Psalms. In his first year as a novice in a monastery a monk had to learn all the Psalms by heart, from memory. That must have given them a good foundation for prayer. You might not be able to learn all the Psalms by heart, but it would be a great help to know a number of them – they will give you the words to use. They will help us express our thoughts and feelings in the complexity of our lives as well as helping us to praise God for all He is and all He has done.

So Jonah prayed – finally. And he prayed using his knowledge of the Psalms that he had practised for many years. Now we will notice three features of his prayer to help us in our prayers: His prayer was honest, confident and thankful.

First, HE WAS HONEST

Some of us are inclined to understatement. In his situation we might have said, “This is not the best of situations. My circumstances are not as favourable as they might be.” Jonah didn’t say that. He was realistic.

He says in verse 3:

“You hurled me into the deep,

into the very heart of the seas,

and the current swirled about me;

all your waves and breakers swept over me.”

And in verses 5-6a:

“The engulfing waters threatened me,

the deep surrounded me;

seaweed was wrapped around my head;

to the roots of the mountains I sank down;

the earth beneath barred me in forever.”

His situation was desperate! He was sinking and he thought he would drown! He thought death was inescapable. This was it. He pictured the gates of death closing behind him, clanging shut with a terrible bang. As he reflected on that experience he didn’t pray around the problem. No, he was honest, realistic. This was the situation. He described it as it was.

We need to do the same. Be honest with God. Don’t go round the problem or your sin or your feelings. Express yourself. God knows what you are going through anyway and He knows how you feel about it. So you might as well come out with it. Tell the Lord about your disappointments, your frustration, your feelings or anger or hopelessness, your turmoil of mind, your uncertainty about what to do, where to turn.

One of the most important requirements for prayer is that we are sincere. We hate it when other people are insincere when talking to us; God hates that when we are talking to Him.

This is true no matter how you are praying, for there are many different ways to pray, different types of prayer. Your prayers can be written or free; structured or spontaneous; formal or informal. You can read a prayer or make it up yourself. Variety is often good and helpful in prayer. Whatever you do in prayer, and whatever form your prayers take, the most important thing is to be genuine; to be thinking; to have your mind engaged; to concentrate on what you are doing and saying. True prayer is a meaningful, real communication with God. Jonah was honest – he was genuine.

Second, HE WAS CONFIDENT

He was confident of God’s presence.

In verse 4 he explains that he felt as though he had been banished from God’s sight. He felt as though God no longer cared; as though God had cast him away from His presence.

But then he went on, “yet I will look again toward your holy temple.” He remembered the temple of God in Jerusalem and how the people of Israel gathered there to pray and how the Lord had promised to hear their prayers. When the temple was dedicated, Solomon had prayed, “May your eyes be open towards this temple night and day, this place of which you said, ‘My name shall be there,’ so that you will hear the prayer your servant prays toward this place” (1 Kings 8:29).

Jonah believed this. He believed that God’s ‘Name’ was there. God’s ‘Name’ was a symbol for His Person. God was there. The temple was a symbol of the presence of God among His people. So when Jonah remembered the temple, he remembered the promise that God would be with His people.

In these New Testament times we don’t have the temple any longer because it has been fulfilled in the Lord Jesus. John wrote about Jesus, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14). The Word for ‘dwelling’ is the word for tabernacle. The tabernacle represented God’s presence; but in Jesus God actually came and lived among us. He was Emmanuel, God with us.

Jesus is no longer with us physically, but He is in heaven. And He is there interceding for us. We can “then approach the throne of grace with confidence so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Heb 4:16). You can do that. You can approach God through Jesus and receive His mercy and help.

Jonah was also confident that God heard him. This comes out in his second reference to the temple in verse 7:

“When my life was ebbing away,

I remembered you, Lord,

and my prayer rose to you,

to your holy temple.”

In these words he looks beyond the earthly physical temple in Jerusalem to the heavenly temple. Here he was, in the belly of a fish, in the depths of the sea. From there he remembered the Lord. His prayer went up from the bottom of the sea to the heights of heaven. He was certain that God heard him. “The Lord is in his Holy Temple”, says the psalmist (Psalm 11:4). Jonah was sure of this: “From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry” (vs 2).

This confidence comes through in all the prayers of God’s people. All the Psalms (except Psalm 88) include the expectation that God has heard them. Even in times and places of black darkness, this shaft of light shines through. Even in situations of deep despair, there is this note of hope.

Remember that for yourself. No matter where you are, or what your situation, or how hopeless things seem, you can be confident that the Lord is near you and that He hears you. “I will never leave you nor forsake you”, He says. This is His promise. “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4). This is the confidence of the Christian. The Good Shepherd, Jesus, is always with you.

Jonah’s prayer was honest, it was confident, and…

Third, it was THANKFUL

He expresses his thanks a number of times. He mentions this in his summary statement in verse 2: God had answered him; the Lord had heard his cry; he had not been left on his own.

He mentions this in verse 6: “But you brought my life up from the pit, O Lord my God.” God had worked a great miracle. He thought he was going to drown but the Lord had rescued him, delivered him, saved him from a death by drowning, from a watery grave.

And he mentions this in the conclusion of his prayer in verse 9: “But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the Lord.”

He was confident that God would allow him to see the light of day once again. That God would put him back on the land. He promised to express his thankfulness in offering a sacrifice to God and in fulfilling his vow. He promised that he would obey the Lord. He would do as God commanded. He assured the Lord that he would make good his vows. That, of course, is the test of true repentance – obedience.

He concludes with a final expression of faith and praise: “Salvation comes from the Lord.” This is the climax of his prayer and it is the middle of the book of Jonah. This highlights the importance of this statement.

The end of Chapter 2 parallels the end of chapter 1:16 where we read that the sailors “greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to Him” (vs 16). They faced a crisis, they were saved, and they offered worship to God. That was true of Jonah. He faced a great crisis, he was saved and he too promised to worship God. All of them recognised that “Salvation comes from the Lord.”

In the next chapter we will see that this salvation from the Lord was even extended to the enemies of Israel, the Assyrians of Nineveh, who repented of their sin. Jonah would see that this salvation of the Lord was not just for him but was for all who call on the name of the Lord.

This is what the New Testament teaches us: “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile – the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’.” (Rom 10:12-13).

This brings us back to our theme of prayer because to “call on the Lord” is to pray. So let’s come back to the words of James:

“Is anyone of you in trouble? He should pray.

Is anyone happy? Let him sing songs of praise.”

 

Does anyone want to know the Lord God? Then call on the name of the Lord and you will be saved.

Call on the Lord honestly – being straightforward and sincere. Call on Him confident that He will hear you. Call on Him thankful for the great salvation He offers to all who come to Him.

Amen.