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Part 4 Jonah's surrender to the will of God By Graham Miller

We saw Jonah in full flight from the will of God,
and we saw yesterday the wounds of a friend.
And no backslider ever went further in his backsliding than Jonah.
If any of us here this morning feel that our case is irresolvable,
that our case has so hardened that it can't really be dealt with,
let me remind you again that it was as a drowning man,
woefully self-destroyed, that God intervened to restore Jonah.
The theme of today's message is on surrender,
the surrender of the backslider to his Lord.
And you'll realize how closely it links with that of God's servant last night
in his message on Christ's surrender to his Father's will.
Here we see Jonah's surrender to God.
I want to say for two or three minutes
what I believe are important background thoughts regarding surrender.
And the first is this, that surrender, in my judgment,
is the greatest crisis in a Christian's life.
For some of us it comes at conversion.
I think especially when we're older folk when we're converted,
surrender frequently accompanies our conversion.
When we're younger folk I believe our conversion is often rather gradual or, if sudden,
perhaps leads to long periods of uncertainty,
unsettlement, lack of assurance, doubt, misgiving, backsliding,
and that often the greatest experience we know is perhaps later on
when we're brought to the glad point of full surrender.
It was so in one's own case.
Secondly, surrender involves a willingness to lay all upon the altar.
We don't know when we lay all upon the altar what all involves,
and we don't need to know.
What all means is what God will show to us progressively
as all confronts us bit by bit in every new situation
which we can't possibly anticipate at the point of full surrender.
But we gladly, yes vehemently, yes and throughout tears, give all, all, all.
The matter of surrender frequently faces us in the form of a crisis over a particular issue,
what the Bible calls an idol, what Jonah calls lying vanities,
what William Cooper called an idol in his highly introspective poem when he said,
The dearest idol I possess, what ere that idol be,
help me to tear it from my breast and worship only thee.
Full surrender on our part is not left, as it were, out in the open,
but it's immediately claimed and ratified and received from God's side.
God immediately accepts us in the moment of full surrender, and He burns up the dross.
Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity hath taken away, and thy sin purged.
And yet Isaiah was already a godly man.
It was as a backslider that his iniquity was taken away and his sin purged.
And the third thought under this heading is that it's met from the divine side
with a wonderful enrichment of our personality and dilation of all our powers.
Surrender is followed from God's side, taught us, by a desire on our part now
that Christ should have the preeminence in all departments of our life,
by a new impulse towards prompt obedience to the Holy Spirit,
and by a quickened concern about Christian service.
Strictly speaking, it's only the surrendered Christian, as was made so clear last night,
who can know anything about the place or the purpose of God for his life.
I want now to summarize the five thoughts under which we'll study Jonah's prayer
out of the belly of the great fish.
First, we'll notice that surrender involves our own deep penitence.
Secondly, that surrender involves a high sense of the sovereignty of God
over our own life, personally, particularly.
Third, that surrender involves the renunciation of all that stands between us and our Lord.
Fourth, that surrender involves the yielding of our whole self, body, soul, spirit,
possessions, aspirations, friendships, all, all, all.
And finally, that surrender is met by the immediate act of God.
Now, the first thought is that surrender involves our own deep penitence.
It was as a drowning man, staring death in the face, that Jonah found the deliverance of God.
Dr. Hart Davies, in his little monograph on this book, which has been a help to me at a number of points,
and actually started my interest in the book a number of years ago,
is inclined to agree with those who suggest that Jonah was at first unconscious in the belly of the great fish.
Like many a drowning man, he may have lost consciousness just as God sent the great fish
to preserve him after he even knew that he was rescued.
I believe that Jonah's first knowledge that he was delivered
was when he probably came out of unconsciousness and realized,
well, I'm not in hell after all, I'm in God's hands.
I wanted to be in hell, but, oh, God, thank you for overruling my desire.
A backslider cannot have the last word when God, through Jesus Christ,
has redeemed him once and given to him the Holy Spirit as the firstfruits waiting for the redemption of the purchased possession.
John Calvin again has a very beautiful thought here.
He says that Jonah was received into the belly of the fish as into a hospital.
He had the drip feed. He was put in an oxygen tent.
He was there on a very comfortable mattress.
No doubt the undulation of this great mammal's breathing apparatus would soothe his rest
during the two days of his unsettlement,
and I have no doubt that the God who put him there saw that he was suitably anesthetized
for the two days during which he was unconscious. Think it over.
God takes good care even of the backslider in the hour when he needs to be most severely dealt with.
His wounds are the wounds of a friend.
Verse 2, verse 1 then begins,
Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly.
The man who had had sellotape on his lips is suddenly praying.
The man who through all his backsliding was careless and resolved not to pray
and not to bend and not to return is now before God,
and the first evidence that he's a restored backslider is, behold, he prayeth.
This penitence reminds us, does it not, of that penitential psalm in the Old Testament.
Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness,
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.
Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin,
for I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.
Such surrender, such penitence as this involved in Jonah's case three phases.
First, there was the realization of the extremity of his peril.
Verse 3 and the first part of verse 4,
Thou didst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas,
and the floods compassed me about, all thy biddows and thy waves passed over me.
Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight.
The very thing that he wanted to happen,
he's now afraid God might have allowed to happen,
and he's now so overwhelmed with the fact that God has not permitted it to happen
that he's reduced to amazing penitence.
It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed.
And as we look back over the pathway of even six months of Christian experience
and see how often we stood on the edge of the precipice,
we know that our present standing as Christians today is by virtue of the sovereignty of God.
He put that restraining hand when we wanted to make that foolish, rotten friendship.
He interposed his own sovereign care when we waywardly turned on him.
And our presence today as believers here is a standing testimony to the fact
that though all his waves and his biddows have passed over us,
yet do we look to his holy temple now.
The second thought here is that he realized the hopelessness of his plight, verses 5 and 6a.
The waters compassed me about even to the death, even to the soul.
The depth closed me round about. The weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains.
The earth with her bars was about me forever.
There's no eloquence more eloquent than those simple words.
He recaptures the memory, the vivid, ineradicable memory of the reluctance
with which, as he sang deeper and deeper, he faced the fact that he had chosen this
and that he was going to stick to his choice.
And yet the terrifying experience of drowning began to press in on his reluctant soul
as his backslider and reluctant backslider met in head-on collision.
He wanted to be saved. He didn't want to change his determination.
And so he sank until the great long streamers of kelp wound themselves round him.
He writhed. He moved in agitation. He felt the approach of death.
Darkness moved across his eyes. His mind swam.
But in vivid memory, from the belly of the great fish, the whole terrifying drama is reenacted.
And he's able to marvel that in the very hopelessness of his plight,
when other helpers fail and comforts flee, it was then that God, to prove that Jonah hadn't any part
in his own salvation from backsliding, interposed a mighty redemption.
The third thought here is that this all created in Jonah the intensity of his grief.
The word used in verse 2, the word I cried, I cried unto the Lord, is a word of urgency.
It's a word of intense concern. He's not going with any more polished phrases.
It's a shout of desire for redemption. It's a cry of deep-heart agony.
Calvin has this to say. He said, only the redeemed cry like that,
the pagan howls with rage and resentment. You've met them.
Why did God let my child die? Is that sure?
Only the believer cries to God in the deep distress of his soul in backsliding,
the pagan howls with resentment.
So you've got those three thoughts. Jonah's penitence or surrender here involved his own deep penitence.
It rose out of the hopelessness of his plight and it created in him the intensity of his grief.
Now the second main thought is this, that Jonah's surrender involved a high sense of the sovereignty of God over his life.
And we'll put it into the present tense because this means you and me,
and we'll say that God knows all, God rules all, and God remedies all. God knows all.
Verse 2, I said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord and he heard me.
Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.
God knew. He knew it all.
He knew the emotions of this backslider's soul better than Jonah knew them himself.
Psalm 139, how often we've looked at it.
O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine uprising.
Thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down,
and art acquainted with all my ways.
It's a wonderful step forward when we know that God knows all. He knows us all together.
There is no thought of our heart, but he knows us through and through.
Dear young friend, it's only a decade or two ago and I was sitting where you are sitting today.
And someone else was ministering the word away down in the bush-clad hills
by the estuary of the Awakka River in the southern part of the South Island.
And somehow God said to me, He knows you. He knows all about you.
He knows the things that you think you don't know and no one else knows about you.
Don't retreat behind any veil of shyness in relation to this Savior.
Don't draw up an attitude of stiff reserve. Christ is too tender to say one needless word.
He chooses the utmost economy of words when he says,
My child, give me thine heart, all thy heart, for he knows all and he rules all and he remedies all.
He rules all, as we see in verse 3.
Thou hadst cast me into the deep. Thy billows and thy waves passed over me.
Jonah never had any doubt now that it was God who hurled the hurricane on the little scounder.
That it was God who made the lottery come down and involve him in coming out into the open about his backsliding.
And that it was God put him into that predicament where there was no other helper to save God.
Notice the emphasis on the pronouns. Thou, God, has done it. You cast me into the sea.
It was your waves and your billows that rolled over me. At first I welcomed them and then I was terrified.
And it was you, verse 6, who brought me up to life again from corruption.
And it is he who has kept you in life till this day.
The old Covenanter at the Battle of Erasmus who heard Richard Cameron pray as the dragoons came down and the mist came round in the hills,
O God, take the ripe and spare the green, showed that knowledge of the heart of God, which is illustrated in the case of Jonah.
Jonah was still green and God had more to do with him and more to work within him until he was ripe for the kingdom of heaven.
You're green if you're not in close fellowship with God. And he's giving you time to get back and he's the one who's going to bring you back.
He knows all, he rules all, and he remedies all. If you notice the words of verse 2,
I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord and he heard me. But the Hebrew word means he answered me.
And it means that God was listening attentively for that first indication of the faint sighing within the withered garden of this man's soul.
God was listening in rapt earnestness as he's listening for your first word as you go quietly on your own,
perhaps this afternoon to some quiet spot and say, Lord, thou has searched me, thou art acquainted with all my ways.
I hope you've noticed the words with which he spoke in verse 6.
Yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption? O Lord, my God. God heard and God acted.
God didn't leave him swinging in uncertainty. He didn't say, well, now you'd better have this bit of penance.
He didn't say, now you're lucky to be alive, Jonah. You're lucky to be alive. I could have done a lot of bad things with you.
God welcomed him and in acting brought up his soul from death. And Jonah adds the words, O Lord, my God.
It's a new relationship, isn't it? It's the very same expression that Thomas used when Christ showed him his hands and his sign and said,
be not faithless, but believing. And the third thought here in Jonah's prayer about surrender is that
surrender involves the renunciation of all that stands between me and my Lord.
In verse 8, we read the expression lying vanities. Jonah's trying to summarize and make a kind of philosophy of his own backsliding.
And he says, I know what it was. I got my mind full of the baggage of these lying vanities.
I got all involved in philosophizing about it. I rationalized that it was better to be a godly patriot than a godly prophet.
Those lying vanities, how cunning and sophisticated we can become.
We can justify them to ourselves and all the time be headlong for Tarshish.
Calvin calls lying vanities all inventions with which men deceive themselves.
Maybe intellectual pride. A lot of us here are students. You're at Teachers College, you're at university, you're planning to go.
I commend to you Lord Bacon's student's prayer. I remember learning it as a young student and I found it a great blessing.
This also we humbly and earnestly beg that human things may not prejudice such as our divine.
Neither from the unlocking of the gates of knowledge and the kindling of a greater natural light,
that anything of incredulity or intellectual might should arise in our mind toward thy divine truth.
But rather, our mind being cleansed and purged from fancy and vanity and wholly given over to thy divine word,
there may ever be granted to faith the things that are faiths, the baggage of intellectual pride.
Knowledge puffs up and love builds up. There can be the baggage of concern about what people think about us.
Just a year ago, I think on this very day, the Pinaweir Convention in the south of New Zealand at 50th Jubilee service,
one of the guests who spoke on the platform that afternoon was Mr. J. A. Roy, member of parliament for the electorate of Clutha.
He's been a member of parliament for over 30 years. He was twice decorated with the military cross in World War I.
He's a humble, godly farmer who for 10 years went home every Friday from Wellington from the House of Representatives
to take his little Sunday school in the south of the South Island and came back on Monday night
to do the business of the country in legislation, a little Sunday school of 40 children.
And I heard Jim Roy stand up there, a soldier and a godly man.
I heard him stand up before that crowd of young people and say,
Young people, never be guided by what people think of you. Make up your mind what's right.
And don't look round for applause and don't worry about disapprobation.
If you got rid of the lying vanity of counting heads or being influenced by what they say about you,
please, God, you have, because until you have, you're still down there in the weedy depths of the Mediterranean.
I don't want to illustrate further except by this, which is a little longer.
When we first went to the present parish of Papakura,
there was a small congregation quite closely placed to a residential teacher's college.
And there were two questions I asked the Kirk station when I was invited up to meet the church seven years ago,
and they were considering calling us as their minister.
I won't mention the first, but the second question was, do you have dancing here?
And a little startled, the two elders shook their head and said, no, no.
And three months later, under the impact of a lot of these ratbag students
who come up to our residential teacher's college from other parishes,
I found quite a boiling concern that we didn't have dancing. Let's have it.
How do you get it? You call a congregational meeting. That's easy. Let's get going.
And so the Kirk session was asked to grant the use of dancing within the premises of our church of Papakura.
I should explain that in 1944, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand,
under pressure, approved dancing on church property only where the local Kirk session itself was in unanimous agreement.
The Kirk session talked about it. It was only this innocuous square dancing that was the issue,
whether they were to have one or two shots of the pawpaw patch at the next social.
That was all.
Well, I like pawpaws at any time, but I didn't know much about this pawpaw patch.
And I don't think any of them realized that this was to me a very serious issue.
The issue wasn't whether or not we'd have a dance.
The issue was whether the Holy Spirit would run that church or the devil.
That was the issue. I've never seen it more clearly than as the years have gone by.
The Kirk session was quite unanimous that they would permit square dancing.
And after they had made their decision, these men whom I highly respected,
two of whom had heard me ask the question, do you have dancing in this church?
I said to these men, brethren, I pray God, not only as part of the democratic ethos of our church,
but as part of the ideal of Christian work, that we shall always have unanimity in our decisions.
I believe that the Holy Spirit leads us into unanimity,
and where we have not unanimity in our Kirk session, we will not go ahead, but we'll wait until we have it.
Now, you've reached a unanimous decision, and I want to say that I regret it very much,
and that as soon as the opportunity comes, there's going to be a Christian endeavor started on Saturday night.
And instead of churning out sawdust in the form of youth activities, which are mere entertainment,
we're going to train young people for the kingdom of heaven.
We're going to train them to be missionaries.
We're going to train them to be Sunday school teachers,
so that instead of this little brick church standing on the corner of the Great South Road to be a monument to its own pride,
there's going to be another church over there, and another one over there.
And we're going to realize that we're here not for fun and games, but to fulfill the great commission of Jesus Christ.
And they looked a little bit startled, and they were very fine and able and godly men,
and the passing years have proved how true their prayer and friendship have been.
They didn't know anything about Christian endeavor, and about that covenant that says,
I will support my own church and its services in every way within my power,
and throughout my whole life I will endeavor by God's grace to lead a Christian life.
And so the Christian endeavor began, and immediately tension came into the youth work of the congregation, immediately.
And for the next two or three years, there was that very, very difficult period,
during which some of the young people said, keep away from that outfit.
Saturday night, I'd never give every Saturday night, what have you had a 21st birthday to go to.
Saturday night, and they want you to covenant that you'll go every Saturday night.
Never do me.
We had the anguished experience of seeing the Christian endeavor start for 15 or 18 young people,
and seeing them drop off one by one because the pace was too hot.
And we'd bring in one or two others prayerfully as young folk were converted,
and others who were converted would be poisoned before they ever got there.
Oh no, keep away from that outfit, that'll completely shut you out from any fun and games at all.
And it wasn't until four years had passed, that's about two or three years ago,
that we got down just about stretching the bottom of the barrel.
There'd be seven or eight there on a Saturday night.
And I used to say to myself, Graham Miller, your duty is to prepare messages for God's people tomorrow,
and here are seven or eight people, and tomorrow you're going to have hundreds of people.
Why aren't you back there in this?
And Satan was using all these lying vanities to coax us out of what God knew to be at his will.
And then two years ago, or a little less, my wife came out from her morning devotions and said,
Look at this. I'm going to read the verses.
Cursed be the man that maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord.
For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh,
but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land not inhabited.
The curse of God on those who trust to other methods than God's.
The curse of God, not just the disinterest of God, not just the amused approbation of God,
but the curse of God.
Then after the curse, the blessing.
Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.
For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river,
and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green,
and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
And all that time, God had been adding older folk to the life of the church.
And I suppose its membership had doubled,
and yet the youth work had not been solidly established
until God brought us right to the bottom point
when we renounced the last of the lying vanities of looking to numbers.
You ever get caught in that, fellow minister?
Do your deacons ever say, what's wrong?
The church doesn't seem to be quite so...
Why are these young people not coming on Saturday night?
Are you worried about numbers?
Then you've got a lot of baggage to get rid of.
Are you worried because people say, haven't you got many young people at your church?
Why is that? We've got piles of them down at our place.
We had a social last Saturday night.
You couldn't park the cars in the street.
Doesn't mean a thing.
Cursed be the man that maketh the arm of flesh is trust.
And I've come to this conclusion.
And when we do that, God says, well, there are lots of churches that need my help,
but you're obviously not one of them.
I'll find another place.
That's the choice.
They that, for they that embrace lying vanities, forsake their own mercy.
I don't want to burden you with the sequel.
As soon as God had shown us that the agony of watching these young people slip away,
and slip away under the high standards of the CE Active Members Covenant,
as soon as God has shown us that the agony was part of his pruning,
and was part of the way in which he was getting rid of the baggage of vanity in our own souls,
he began then to send the blessing.
And it wasn't more than a month before a young man stood up and said,
for two and a half years, I've wanted to be a fully surrendered Christian,
but I wouldn't face this decision about Saturday night.
For two and a half years, I've wanted to do it.
I promised God to be a minister.
I promised God to be a missionary, but I wouldn't give him Saturday night.
I wouldn't give it to him.
And he said, I'm standing up here tonight to take the Active Members Covenant at CE
to say that he's got the last bit.
He finished his first year at the university this year,
very creditably, although he'd never matriculated from high school.
He got in on what we call in New Zealand, provisional matriculation,
and he passed Greek one, history one, and philosophy one,
and he's rejoicing in God because the baggage of vanity has been jettisoned out of his soul.
He's not worried about fun and games.
He's worried more now about pleasing God.
Let me add just this, that there are now eleven folks from that little congregation
either in full-time service or training for it,
and that this year we've never had more young people.
We've never been able to run open ears until this year up the street of Papakura.
And when three young men came to me during the year and said, Mr. Miller,
we want to start our training, should we go straight to university or first of all into the BTI?
We just said, well, Lord, you're just keeping your word.
You would have put the curse on us if we'd gone on
fumbling and messing around about this business of fun and games,
and you've taken us through this anguished experience,
and now it does look a bit like as if you're making the promise of Jeremiah chapter 17 come true for us here.
Now, do you know why I've mentioned that at rather some length?
Because there's not a young person here, but you're in the same predicament.
There's not a minister here, but you're in the same predicament.
That's the deepest experience of my soul over the last two years.
A baggage event.
We've got to renounce that, too,
before God can do anything with the church of which we are minister,
with the youth group of which we are leader,
with the Saturday night, which we keep saying is our own.
And when we've done it,
he can make us like a herb in the desert that shall not know when he cometh,
which shall not cease from bearing fruit.
The fourth thought that I leave with you this morning is that
surrender involves the yielding of our whole life, body, soul, and spirit to God.
When Jonah used the preposition I in verse nine there,
he's using the Hebrew emphatic preposition anukhi.
It's not the brief I, it's the I myself form,
which we have in a very acute way in the Ireland languages.
We have a double pronoun when we want to make it emphatic
and just a single one when we want to make it an odd kind of a reference.
I myself, he says in verse nine, will sacrifice unto thee with a voice of thanksgiving.
It's a surrender of all of Jonah that there was.
The strong legs that had run to Joppa, no one else surrendered.
The tight lips that had refused to pray, they are now surrendered.
The iron wool that had refused to bend, this is now relaxed and flexible in the hands of God.
I will pay that I have vowed.
It is better not to vow than to vow and not to pay.
And that's why we're not asking you to come forward and to stand on the spirit of a moment.
We're asking you to remember that it's better not to vow than to vow and not to pay.
Get away on your quiet, on the quiet. See it through.
When God was dealing with Jonah, there were only two people in the whole universe, God and Jonah.
There was no audience. There wasn't even a wife to confer with.
Jonah was there in his hospital and God was talking to him when he had him on his back.
Only two people. You get somewhere today where there'll be only two people in the whole universe,
you and God, and then when he's really talked to you as he wants to talk to you,
then you pay that you owe. Let us pray.
Gracious Father, out of the abundance of thy Holy Spirit,
take these broken words and grant that our hearts may be able to see
that thou wouldest have us, thou wouldest have us holy,
if we are to know the blessedness of life in Christ.
For Jesus' sake. Amen.