Relentless Grace: When We Run From God

So, even though God would have been justified in in taking Jonah out of the story right then and there, he's working in the storm. God is still pursuing him and giving him grace in his disobedience, which leads to our second point. Second point is, God's grace is not always gentle. God's grace is not always gentle, but it is always intentional. God's grace is always on purpose. [01:14:04] (34 seconds)  #GraceOnPurpose

We get religious without relationship. We do all the things. You know, we we we serve. We attend church. Right? We but we avoid intimacy with him. We do all the things that we know how to do, but we refuse to be intimate with him and his word. Where we go through the spiritual motions or we we put on the masks and pretend that everything's okay. Or even worse of all, when Evan said he was preaching to himself, I'm preaching to myself as well. It's using ministry to hide instead of personally surrendering to him. [01:10:35] (48 seconds)  #RelationshipNotReligion

You're a living testimony to what God has done. And so, although the world may not read the bible, they read your life. They read what you do. They read what you say. They read what you post. They read you, your life, every day. And when our lives don't match up, when our lives contradict the word, when our lives contradict the message, they don't question our theology. They question our God. [01:23:52] (37 seconds)  #FaithIsVisible

That even when he's running, God's grace is still evident. And, if we look and apply that to our lives, that even when we run or even when we disobey, God's grace is still there. Worship team, you can come. It's like thinking of of this, I guess, my my questioning to you today is, are you running? Are you running? My encouragement would be to you to to stop running and start surrendering. Stop running. [01:33:21] (43 seconds)  #StopRunningSurrender

God often calls us to places we would not naturally choose. This city, this great city of Nineveh, this country that surrounds it isn't just like a a friendly or or good or at at best and different nation to the nation of Israel. It's not like Canada. It's not like Mexico. He was to go to Nineveh. Nineveh was then the capital of Assyria. Assyria was not friendly to Israel. [00:55:36] (45 seconds)  #CalledToTheUnfamiliar

I think that sometimes when we look at these texts or even when we look at our lives, we get hyper focused or or or we get tunnel visioned on on thinking that God can only operate in maybe my life or maybe my family's life when I think, and we would all know, that God works in everybody's circumstances. We see that God's grace here in the text is being spilled out upon the other sailors through Jonah's circumstances, we all know that the fact of the matter is is God is always doing more than one thing. [01:30:30] (38 seconds)  #GodAtWorkEverywhere

I think that often, sometimes, we think of of God's grace and that it can look like instead of grace, it just looks like judgment, or sometimes it looks like punishment. Sometimes it looks like suffering. And I bet these are the the things that are going through Jonah's mind right now that this is what I deserve. No. What you what you deserve, what we deserve is death. This is God's grace. This is God's grace pursuing him at the end of chapter one. [01:32:27] (39 seconds)  #GracePursues

And let's be honest, if we're thinking that we're above Jonah, what are the things in which we do to flee the presence of the Lord? How do we run from God? I can think of a couple ways. We avoid God's voice, or we avoid the scriptures. When we read scripture and we ignore what it says because we don't like it, or when we stay busy so we don't have to be still and rest in the word of the lord, or we replace this word with noises from the world, whether that be entertainment or or podcast or social media. [01:06:08] (51 seconds)  #AvoidingGodsVoice