Jonah “Surrendering to Your Purpose”

Praying for a Fish!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXS5ADmTmRc&feature=share (ends at 1:24)

Your Story of Surrendering to Your Purpose At Kids Across America (a Christian Camp) and God said to go, When I got home I got a cd of my favorite preacher from a friend to Go, and then one of our kids that went to KAA got brutally raped and the next week I was resigning from my paying job as a youth pastor to take on a work that I had been running away from for years.

If you are His, and He is Yours, and you have said yes to Him, God will Have His Way!!

Jonah Flees the Presence of the Lord

1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ² “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil^[a] has come up before me.” ³ But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So, he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.

⁴ But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up. ⁵ Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried out to his god. And they hurled the cargo that was in the ship into the sea to lighten it for them. But Jonah had gone down into the inner part of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep (cause you get tired when you are running). ⁶ So the captain came and said to him, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.”

⁷ And they said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, that we may know on whose account this evil has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah. ⁸ Then they said to him, “Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? And where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?” ⁹ And he said to them, “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.” ¹⁰ Then the men were exceedingly afraid and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.

¹¹ Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea grew more and more tempestuous. ¹² He said to them, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” ¹³ Nevertheless, the men rowed hard^[b] to get back to dry land, but they could not (you can not row against God…you can not hide against God), for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them. ¹⁴ Therefore they called out to the Lord, “O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.” ¹⁵ So they picked up Jonah and hurled him into the sea, and the sea ceased from its raging. ¹⁶ Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

A Great Fish Swallows Jonah

^17 [c] And the Lord appointed^[d] a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

By saying that the story of Jonah was only an allegory and was never meant to be understood as actual history. However, whenever the Bible writers used allegories or parables or other symbolic stories, they always either said so or else made it evident in the context. The book of Jonah is certainly written as though it were actual history. Jonah was a real prophet who is mentioned also in II Kings 14:25. None of the ancient Jews or early Christians ever doubted the authenticity and historicity of the book of Jonah and its story.

Most importantly, the Lord Jesus Christ accepted the account as true. He said that the people of Nineveh repented of their sins as a consequence of his preaching (Matthew 12:41). He even said: “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the Earth.” —Matthew 12:40

Thus Christ actually compared Jonah’s experience to His own coming death and resurrection, pointing out the miraculous nature of both.

Whole animals as large or larger than a man have been found in the stomachs of the sperm whale and the white shark.  The “great fish” may have been either a whale or a shark or even a fish specially prepared by the Lord for this purpose. The Hebrew and Greek words that are used merely mean “a great aquatic animal.”

That aside, even from a strictly naturalistic viewpoint, survival after being swallowed by huge fish is not impossible. In the late 1920’s a seaman was swallowed by a large sperm whale in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands. After three days he was recovered unconscious but alive, though he had some damage to his skin (Harrison, 907).

In the first place, it has been well established that the phrase “three days and three nights” in ancient Hebrew usage was an idiomatic expression meaning simply “three days,” and was applicable even if the beginning and ending days of the period were only partial days. Thus, it could refer to a period as short as about 38 hours. There is always some air in the whale’s stomach, and, as long as the animal it has swallowed is still alive, digestive activity will not begin. Thus, Jonah’s experience could possibly have happened entirely with the framework of natural law.  In any case, it was a mighty experience, evidently well-known and certified in his day.

Because the inside of a giant fish will change you.

Because God will have his way, and sometimes He will send a fish, or a storm, or lost job, or a job that is using the circumstance to change you into His image, or circumstances, or environment, or shut down doors, or a pounding in your heart that is accurate to the word of God and verified by witnesses, to do what He wants. 

To be honest here at Hope Community we sort pray for those in our lives and your lives as well.

You go to the church that is praying for giant fish to swallow you.

Praying that liquor taste bad in your mouth, that the club would leave you filling empty, that He would make you patient, that you would surrender to being healthy in your relationships, that sin would make you sick, that you would stop sinning sexually,  that you would be generous and tithe and give offerings because there is blessing in it, that some would foster and adopt, that you would be filled with boldness and talk to your neighbor about Christ, that you would lead a bible study, go on mission, start a non-profit, a bible club in your school (come on young people!)

That you would stop saying no to God and surrender by just saying Yes!!

We pray for a fish in your life because we pray for one in our lives and in our kids’ lives, and in the lives, we love, because we Love you and most Important thing is surrendering to His purpose.

Altar Call:

In actual fact, Nineveh’s repentance makes perfect sense given Jonah’s extraordinary arrival upon the shores of the Mediterranean and the prominence of Dagon worship in that particular area of the ancient world.

http://www.bible-history.com/sketches/ancient/dagon-1.jpg

Dagon was a fish-god who enjoyed popularity among the pantheons of Mesopotamia and the eastern Mediterranean coast. He is mentioned several times in the Bible in relation to the Philistines  Images of Dagon have been found in palaces and temples in Nineveh and throughout the region. In some cases he was represented as a man wearing a fish. In others he was part man, part fish—a merman, of sorts.

As for Jonah’s success in Nineveh, Orientalist Henry Clay Trumbull made a valid point when he wrote, “What better heralding, as a divinely sent messenger to Nineveh, could Jonah have had, than to be thrown up out of the mouth of a great fish, in the presence of witnesses, say on the coast of Phoenicia, where the fish-god was a favorite object of worship? Such an incident would have inevitably aroused the mercurial nature of Oriental observers, so that a multitude would be ready to follow the seemingly new avatar of the fish-god, proclaiming the story of his uprising from the sea, as he went on his mission to the city where the fish-god had its very centre of worship” (H. Clay Trumbull, “Jonah in Nineveh.” Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 2, No.1, 1892, p. 56).

When you surrender, God will go with you in such a supernatural way.

My most supernatural wouldn’t trade it experiences are when I have been fully surrendered to Christ.  They have also been my hardest. It sort of goes hand in hand, but I would choose hard any day over being on the inside of a fish!!

being swallowed by a fish