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Releasing Your Grip to Receive His Grace-Jonah 2:8-9

By Larry Kirk | April 24, 2007

Recently I read about a little boy whose mother was going to take him and his brothers on their annual trip to the zoo. He was very excited about this trip. His mother started loading up the mini-van, but then he and a brother started fighting over who was going to sit in the front seat. He called it first, but when he ran around to that side of the van, his brother had already jumped in. So a big argument broke out.

His mom suggested a compromise. “One brother sits in the front seat on the way to the zoo and the other on the way back.” He didn’t want that. He said, “No, I’m sitting on the front seat, or I’m not going at all.” They tried to get him to change his mind, but he wouldn’t. Finally his mom said, “OK, you’ve made your choice.” So she left him at home and drove off with the other brothers. He ended up sitting around bored all day. None of his friends were home, and there was nothing on television. He kept thinking about all that he was missing and waiting for them to come home.

Finally they came back, and everyone had had a good time. They told him about the great day and the new animal shows they had seen. They especially talked about the monkey show. The man who did that show told them the old story about how they used to trap monkeys in the jungle, using a little box or cage with a hole in it just big enough for the monkey to force its hand through. They put some food in the trap, and the monkey grabs the banana and then can’t get its hand out of the hole. All it has to do to be free is let go, but it won’t. It wants that banana so badly that it will not release it even though the result is that it forfeits its freedom and ends up trapped.

The man telling the story from his own childhood said that later that night it hit him: he had done the same thing as the monkey. He thought he was being strong by not letting go of the seat he wanted, but he ended up being stupid and missing out.

One lesson we see taught often in the Bible is that our choices have consequences. Sometimes by holding onto something that we want or feel very strongly about, we too end up forfeiting that which is actually far more valuable and important. That’s the principle stated so clearly here in Jonah 2:8-9, “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.”

It’s possible to cling to something that is ultimately worthless, but because you are holding onto it and will not let go, you forfeit something that is far more valuable and important. God wants you to see the importance of what you are in danger of forfeiting, missing out on, losing. Notice that what you are in danger of forfeiting is the grace that could be yours.

To experience the grace that could be yours there are certain things you have to do, and they are all seen here in Jonah 2:8-9.

We Must See the Value of the Grace of God

“Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.” Of course, this doesn’t mean anything to you unless you value God’s grace.

The Hebrew word here translated “grace” is one of the most important words in Scripture. It is definitely something you don’t want to forfeit. Depending on the context it is translated “love, kindness, loving kindness, mercy, steadfast love, unfailing love,” and similar words. It appears hundreds of times in the Bible, 111 times in the book of Psalms alone,

What the word describes is the loyal love of an unobligated giver to an undeserving person. With respect to God, it means He commits to bestow His love on us and be loyal to us in love, because of His kindness and mercy, in spite of our faults and weaknesses. It is by this love that we are saved, sustained, and satisfied. I looked at more than one hundred verses where this word is used, and it was impressive to see what the Bible says about the steadfast love of God.

It is everlasting. Psalm 103:17: “But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and His righteousness with their children’s children.” Psalm 36 says this love of God “endures forever” and repeats that statement twenty-six times in twenty-six verses.

It is far reaching. Psalm 103:11: “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.” It is greater than any love we could ever possibly measure or imagine.

It is surrounding. Psalm 32:10: “Many are the woes of the wicked, but the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.”

It is priceless. Psalm 36:7: “How priceless is your unfailing love! Both high and low among men find refuge in the shadow of your wings.”

It is satisfying. Psalm 90:14: “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.”

A.W. Tozer in his classic book The Pursuit of God sums up the teaching of the Bible by saying:

God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.

Human beings, just as we are made to breathe air, are also made to live connected to the God who gives us His loyal love, surrounds us with it, and satisfies us through it. Our spiritual need for this gracious loyal love is as great and as real as any physical need we know. The love of God is not just an idea to understand or a doctrine to affirm. It is an empowering reality that He wants us to feel in our spirits and sense on our hearts, so that it gets down into us and changes us. You will never experience the empowering enjoyment of the love of God unless you believe in it and value it.

We Must Let Go of Our Substitutes for God

Remember Jonah 2:8: “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.” The biggest enemy of your experience of deep spiritual satisfaction in the lovingkindness and grace of God is an unwillingness to let go of other sources of satisfaction in order to find your satisfaction in Him. Because it is grace that is offered, the problem is not that you might be too unworthy to receive it (grace is for the unworthy). The problem is you might be too preoccupied to perceive it. What God repeatedly does in the Bible is to invite you to let go of your unhealthy dependence on other sources of satisfaction so that you can come and find satisfaction in Him.

In Isaiah 55:1-3, He says: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.”

If you look first at the word picture in verse 1, you will notice that God offers everything needed to meet the needs of your soul. He offers water, wine, and milk. Water refreshes and restores life. Milk nourishes and makes strong. Wine is exhilarating and intoxicating. What God says is that He wants to quench your spiritual thirst, keep you growing strong, and fill your heart with joy.

In verse 3, God reveals the reality behind all this imagery. “Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.” In verse 1, He says, “Come to the waters . . . come for wine and milk.” In verse 3, He says, “Come to me.” You see, God Himself is the water that restores our souls. God Himself is the milk that nourishes our hearts and makes us strong. God Himself is the wine of the spirit that brings true joy and gladness.

The expression “faithful love” in verse 3 translates the same Hebrew word that appears in Jonah 2:8. Hesed is the gracious, loyal love of God. It is His loyal love that gives life strength and joy.

That brings us to a question. If God is like this, if this is what He offers, what keeps us from some sense of this in our lives? Isaiah agrees with Jonah when he says that the problem is we cling to worthless idols. Again look at verse 2: “Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare.” The reason we don’t have a greater experience of the richness of God’s love is because our hands and hearts are filled with other things, things Isaiah calls “that which is not bread, and that which does not satisfy.” You see, it’s the same thing Jonah 2:8 is saying: “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.”

Let us remember that the Bible sees idolatry as an issue of the heart. Idolatry is not only, or even primarily, about bowing down to statues of false gods. It’s about allowing anything to be, for you, a substitute for God

In the 1600s, a theologian named Stephen Charnock wrote a classic book titled The Existence and Attributes of God. In it he made this observation:

[Each person] acts as if God could not make him happy without the addition of something else. Thus the glutton makes a god of his dainties; the ambitious man of his honor, the incontinent man of his lust, the covetous man his wealth; and consequently esteems them as his chiefest good, and the most noble end to which he directs his thoughts . . . . All men worship some golden calf, set up by education, custom, natural inclination and the like.”

We will never understand how these Scriptures speak to us today unless we understand idolatry spiritually and internally. Your idols are whatever you think you need and therefore cling to as your source of happiness.

The Bible gives examples. Colossians 3:5 says “greed is idolatry.” Philippians 3:19 speaks about people “whose god is their stomach.” Second Timothy 3:1-4 speaks of people who are “lovers of themselves” and “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.”

Jesus got at this same issue in several different ways. In Luke 16, He says you cannot serve God and money. In Luke 14, He says you can’t let even your family compete with God as your source of life and happiness so that it competes with Him for your loyalty and focus. In John 5, He says if you serve for the praise of people, that focus on the approval of people, will interfere with your focus on God and your faith in Him.

What the Holy Spirit is saying in Jonah, Isaiah, the words of Jesus, and these other Scriptures is that if anything other than God becomes your focus and source of hope, then that thing has become, for you, an idol. It doesn’t matter if it is a good thing such as family, or a neutral thing such as money, the approval and friendship of people, or some plan, dream, or agenda you have for your life. If, in spite of what you know ought to be, the actual source of your hope and happiness and satisfaction is that thing, whatever it is, it has become an idol for you.

God wants us to understand two things about the idols to which we are tempted to cling.

First, idols are worthless. “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs” (Jonah 2:8).

When the monkey holds onto a banana, he can feel the banana, he can smell it, see it, and easily imagine how sweet it would taste. His freedom, however, is something he cannot see or feel or smell or taste. Is the freedom any less real than the banana? Is it less valuable? Of course not. Neither is God’s loyal love something that you can smell or see physically, but it is no less real and so much more valuable than anything else in all of creation. Every earthly idol is worthless in comparison.

One way the Bible shows us the worthlessness of all the things we might turn into idols is by repeatedly telling us our idols lead to an ironic reversal of expectations. There is a backlash. The very things we lust after and think we need become the source of our most bitter disappointments.

“Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income” (Ecclesiastes 5:10.) Think about that. It’s saying the very fact that you make money an idol insures the outcome that you will never be satisfied by it.

“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). The very person who thinks he is better than others, and lives to gain the respect of others, ends up falling on his face and being humbled.

God wants you to see that whatever becomes an idol for you is worthless. It will never provide what you need and long for.

Second, in clinging to that idol, you forfeit the grace that could be yours.

Idolatry in the heart is like a lethal dose of radioactivity. It doesn’t tear into your body like a bullet. The damage isn’t felt as a sudden impact. The injury isn’t immediately obvious, but it begins to work on you. The decay begins on the inside where your heart is cut off from the fullness of God’s grace.

That’s why we have to live all of life in light of the truth “Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.” Don’t think of repentance as only for bad times. Don’t think of repenting as something you hate but you can do when you’ve done something terrible. Think of repentance as a continual reorientation of your heart to your Savior. Not a rare thing that you try to avoid, but a joyful, liberating spiritual adjustment that keeps you continually identifying and dealing with any idols in your heart so that you go on experiencing the fullness of God’s grace.

We have to see the value of the grace of God. We have to let go of all our substitutes for God. And . . .

We Have to Rejoice in the Love

We Are Given by God

You have not truly repented until you begin to rejoice.

Jonah 2: 9 says, “But I, with a song of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you. What I have vowed I will make good. Salvation comes from the Lord.” That last sentence is the story of the Bible. Salvation comes from the Lord.

It is God’s love that gives us eternal salvation. God sent His Son to save His people from their sins. Jesus is our Savior. Because of sin we deserve judgment. What God offers us instead is salvation. Christ came into our world to live the life we should have lived but would not live and could not live. He lived that life not just to be an example but to be our Savior. He went to the cross and died for our sins. His sacrifice paid for the sins of His people.

We don’t earn or deserve the eternal salvation He gives us. We just receive it by turning and trusting in Him. Salvation is God’s gift of life and forgiveness to anyone who is willing to receive it. And what we discover in the Bible is that if you are willing to receive it, even that willingness is a gift of His grace. Left to yourself you would never admit that you need God’s grace or turn to Him to receive it. In every sense of the word, salvation is from the Lord.

That is true not only for eternity. God’s love gives us salvation every day of this earthly life. Jesus said whoever tries to save his own life will lose it. It’s only as we continually turn to Him as our salvation in all life’s challenges that we experience the salvation that only He gives. Whatever you are facing, whatever tests or tempts you, salvation, always only, ultimately, comes from the Lord.

These two little verses from the very middle of the book of Jonah give us a practical pattern for repentance that we can all practice in our lives. You may be holding onto something. You are clinging to it. It’s what you think you have to have. But what you really have to do is release your grip in order to receive the fullness of grace that God is so ready to give. The paradox of spiritual life is that it is only when you release your grip and receive God’s grace that you can then take hold of life’s issues and challenges in a way that is empowered by God.

Do you believe that the creator God loves you with a loyal love that is astonishing and abounding, a love that surrounds and completely satisfies those who treasure it? If so, why doesn’t that love touch you more deeply than it does? Why doesn’t it put every other issue in life in perspective and give you peace and joy? Could the truth be that there are other things in life that you are clinging to and actually counting more important than God’s love when it comes to how your life actually works?

In fact, this is a good test: Whenever any issue looms so large that it cuts off your ability to rejoice in God’s grace and offer, as verse 9 says, a song of thanksgiving to God, that is a good indication you are in danger of making that thing an idol and clinging to it so tightly that you forfeit the grace that could be yours.

There is an illustration that I have found very helpful. It is the idea of straightening up into God. It’s the thought that you and I were created by God to live in a vertical position and relationship to Him. We were created to stand upright with face turned to Him in a listening and receiving face-to-face relationship in which we are continually finding our identity in Him and drawing life’s strength from Him.

What happened when mankind fell into sin is that we became bent over toward the creation instead of the Creator. Our temptation now is to live life bent over, clinging to the created world and trying to find our identity, our life, our happiness in created things. The only way to put our lives in order again is to see what it is that we are clinging to that is causing us to forfeit the grace that could be ours. Whatever those things are we must let them go so we can straighten up into the steadfast love of God in Christ and experience the fullness of grace only He can give.

That’s the image of repentance here. If we are clinging to idols, human, earthly things, we need to let them go and stand up into the love of God.

You can do this in prayer. You might say:

Lord, I’ve been running from You (or I’ve been angry) because I thought I knew how to be my own Savior. I was clinging to my will. I made an idol out of my desires, what I thought had to be. Forgive me for not trusting you. I’m releasing my grip so I can receive Your grace.

Lord, it is Your love that saves me and Your love that surrounds me. I’m letting go of my idols, because I don’t want my foolishness to cause me to forfeit the fullness of Your grace in any measure. I thank You that You are my Savior. You are my salvation. Your love surrounds and sustains me.

In the twelfth century, a monk named Bernard of Clairvaix wrote a hymn titled “Jesus Thou Joy of Loving Hearts.” That hymn has been sung now for more than eight centuries. One of the verses says:

Jesus thou Joy of loving hearts,

True source of life and light of men

from the best bliss that earth imparts

we turn unfilled to thee again.

I want to acknowledge that through out this series of messages I drew freely from several sources. First the book, Salvation Through Judgment And Mercy: The Gospel According to Jonah (Gospel According to the Old Testament) by Bryan D. Estelle (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing) This is one installment of the very helpful series The Gospel According To the Old Testament D.A. Carson says that “one of the most urgent needs of the church is to grasp how the many parts of the Bible fit together to make one story-line that culminates in Jesus Christ…(and) this series of books goes a long way to meeting that need”. Sinclair Ferguson was quoted as saying “at last a series on the Old Testament designed to provide reliable exposition, biblical theology, and a focus on Christ”. O Palmer Robertson’s little book on Jonah, Jonah: A Study In Compassion, published by Banner of Truth, also proved especially helpful. While preaching this series I also listened to sermons on Jonah by Dr. Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll. Their sermons often suggested helpful ideas which were adapted to fit my approach and my congregation’s needs. Both of their sermon series are available through their web sites at www.redeemer.com and www.marshill.org respectively.

Topics: Jonah |

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