Bulletins - Grantsdale Community Church

› Introduction
Two weeks ago, we left Elijah under a broom tree, so exhausted that he pleaded for God to just end things. God's response was to hand him a snack and let him sleep.
That was holy rest. That was a good man, spent from faithfulness, being cared for by a patient God.
This week we meet a different prophet, in a different kind of sleep, and I need you to brace yourselves, because Jonah isn’t going to get the same bread and water.
Jonah’s going to get a storm, a shipwreck, and eventually a fish that has very poor table manners.
If you grew up in Sunday school, you already have opinions about Jonah. You've seen the flannel graph. You may even own a stuffed whale, which is a strange gift to give a child.
Honestly, just think about it. “Here, sweetheart, here's a plush reminder that God can arrange for you to be swallowed whole if you don't do what you're told.”
I suppose you might call that character building. And if you were here for my sermon series through the Book of Jonah, then you already understand a different perspective of Jonah that doesn’t follow what you might have had in Sunday school or the typical sermons covering Jonah.
Once again, we’re going to set aside the cartoon version this morning. Because underneath the fish is one of the most emotionally honest books in the entire Bible.
It's about a man who knows exactly what God wants, decides he wants something else, and discovers that running from your calling doesn't lead to freedom. It leads to a cargo hold, in the dark, rocking back and forth while everyone above deck is fighting for their lives.
We’re two weeks into a short series called “When Sleep Feels Like Faith.” Elijah's sleep was God’s mercy. Jonah's sleep, as we're about to see, is something else entirely. You see, not all sleep looks the same.
Some sleep is God saying, “rest, I've got this.” While other sleep is us saying, “if I just close my eyes, maybe this problem, and God who gave me the problem, will just go away.” Jonah’s trying the second kind. And it doesn’t go well, to say the least.
The Word That Came
(Jonah 1:1–2)
The book opens the way most prophetic books open, so plainly that you can miss just how loaded it is.
Jonah 1:1–2 CSB
1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because their evil has come up before me.”
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria wasn’t some neutral foreign nation that Jonah might have mixed feelings about. Assyria was the empire that dismantled the northern kingdom of Israel with a level of brutality that made what God said, “their evil has come up before me” sound like a dramatic understatement.
If you want a modern comparison, God isn’t asking Jonah to go be a missionary to some city like we have in the United States. God’s asking him to go preach mercy to a capital like the capital of the radical Iranian regime in Tehran who’s trying to orchestrate genocide against Israel.
So when God says “get up,” that's not a gentle nudge. That's a direct commission, an assignment with an address on it. Go to that city, and say something to those radical people who want to kill you.
Running the Other Way
(Jonah 1:3)
And Jonah's response is probably the greatest story of running from a calling in all of Scripture.
Jonah 1:3 CSB
3 Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence.
Notice the word “got up.” God said get up and go to Nineveh. Well…Jonah got up, but he went the exact opposite direction. Tarshish is likely somewhere on the coast of modern Spain, which was, in the ancient mideastern imagination, about as far away as you could possibly go.
This isn't a man who's unsure of what God wants. This is a man who heard the assignment clearly and then set his GPS for the farthest possible location, away from the assignment, on purpose.
Notice, it says “he paid the fare and went down into it.” He immediately seeks the hidden darkness of the ships cargo hold. Jonah clearly knows he’s running from God, and like all of us who run from God, he hides in the cargo hold as if God can’t find him there.
Now, I find something almost comforting in just how petty a biblical prophet is acting as he tries to run from God’s calling. Jonah doesn't argue theology with God. He doesn't file a formal complaint.
He just buys a boat ticket in the opposite direction and hopes the whole thing quietly goes away. I don’t know about you, but I know I’ve acted like this to a hard calling in my life. If you’ve been there with me, then we already understand Jonah's strategy.
Some of us might call it prayer and discernment as we intentionally avoid the calling. Jonah is at least honest and just called it another day.
And notice the phrase repeated twice in one verse: “from the LORD's presence.” Jonah knows, and the narrator wants us to know that Jonah knows, exactly what he's doing. This isn't confusion. This is flight.
Here's the theological question worth pondering for a second: Did Jonah actually think he could outrun the God who made the sea he was sailing on?
I would have to argue almost certainly not. Jonah was a working prophet.
He knew his theology very well. I think what Jonah wanted wasn't geographic distance from God so much as functional distance from his assignment.
He wanted out of the job, not out of the relationship.
The Storm That Wasn't Random
(Jonah 1:4)
We do this all the time. We don't usually walk away from God outright. We just quietly stop showing up for the parts of following Him that cost us something.
Jonah 1:4 CSB
4 But the Lord threw a great wind onto the sea, and such a great storm arose on the sea that the ship threatened to break apart.
I love this verse because of the verb. The LORD threw. Not just “a storm happened to arise.” Not that there was “some unfortunate weather patterns.”
The LORD threw a wind onto the sea. Like a pitcher throwing a fastball. This storm has an author, and the author isn’t impressed with the passenger list.
This is worth pausing on, because we tend to spiritualize storms into vague metaphors for “hard seasons of life.” And sometimes that's exactly what they are.
But this storm is specific. It’s aimed directly at the ship. It exists solely because a man got on a boat going the wrong direction, and God wasn’t willing to let that getaway succeed.
Now, I don't say that to suggest, that every hard circumstance in our life is God's targeted response to our disobedience. That would be bad theology and worse pastoral care. And Job would like a word with anyone who claims that.
But I do think we need to recover the idea that sometimes, running from a clear calling never leads to peace. It leads to turbulence.
Not because God is vindictive, but because God loves Jonah too much to let him sail comfortably away from the very thing that would make him more like the God he serves.
Everyone Praying but One Man
(Jonah 1:5)
Jonah 1:5 CSB
5 The sailors were afraid, and each cried out to his god. They threw the ship’s cargo into the sea to lighten the load. Meanwhile, Jonah had gone down to the lowest part of the vessel and had stretched out and fallen into a deep sleep.
Here’s the verse that gives us our title this morning. While professional sailors, men who had almost certainly weathered plenty of Mediterranean storms, and knew the difference between routine chop and something supernatural are throwing cargo overboard and praying to every god they can name. And probably any unknown gods.
Meanwhile Jonah’s downstairs. Asleep. Not dozing. Not resting his eyes. The Hebrew word here describes a deep, heavy sleep. The kind of sleep where we might say someone could sleep through a hurricane.
It’s the same word used for Adam when God performed surgery on him to make Eve, and for Sisera right before Jael drove a tent peg through his skull. It’s not a flattering word to have attached to our name in the middle of a national emergency.
Think about the logistics of that for a second. The ship’s threatening to break apart. Men are literally throwing valuable cargo into the sea, which tells you just how frightened they are. Because sailors don’t casually dump the merchandise.
And yet, somewhere below deck, the one man on this ship who actually knows who is doing this and why, is fast asleep and undisturbed. Like a toddler who has finally worn himself out at a birthday party.
Picture the scene for a moment. You've got sailors from probably half a dozen different ports, each one crying out to a different god, because ancient Mediterranean sailors were nothing if not universally religious in a crisis.
Baal gets a shout. Dagon gets a shout. Somebody's probably praying to a god of knots. It’s a full multi-faith prayer service happening on deck, in a hurricane.
And belowdeck the one man with the correct phone number for the God actually in charge of the weather is snoring through the whole thing.
This isn’t holy rest. Let's be very clear about the contrast with Elijah. Elijah slept because God, in His mercy, told him to. Jonah is asleep because running from God is exhausting!
And denial, it turns out, is a fantastic sedative. There’s a kind of sleep that comes from being spiritually and physically worn out in obedience, and there's a kind of sleep that comes from working very hard at not doing what we know we should be doing.
One is mercy. The other is like anesthesia, and we’re our own anesthesiologist.
I wonder how many of us have gotten remarkably good at sleeping through storms of our own making. Not literal sleep, necessarily, but emotional and spiritual sleep of disobedience.
Scrolling. Bingeing. Staying frantically busy with everything except the conversation, the apology, the ministry, the calling that we've been avoiding.
“What Are You Doing Sound Asleep?”
(Jonah 1:6)
We've built entire industries around helping people sleep through what God is trying to wake them up to do.
Jonah 1:6 CSB
6 The captain approached him and said, “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up! Call to your god. Maybe this god will consider us, and we won’t perish.”
I want you to notice who wakes Jonah up. It isn't God, directly. It's a pagan sea captain, a man with no covenant, no Scripture, no history with the God of Israel, shaking a sleeping prophet and essentially asking him, “Shouldn't you, of all people, be doing something right now?”
There’s a particular sting to being confronted by someone outside the faith about a responsibility we, inside the faith, have been ignoring.
I don't know about you, but I’ve had moments where an unbeliever's simple, practical common sense, exposed my own spiritual sleepwalking faster than any sermon ever could.
“Get up, call on your god” is basically the ancient equivalent of a coworker asking, “Hey, aren't you supposed to be praying about this instead of just complaining and doing nothing about it?”
That stings because it's true, and because it's coming from the wrong place entirely, which somehow makes it sting even more.
And notice the echo. God said “get up, go to Nineveh.” Now the captain says “get up, call on your god.” Jonah can’t escape the God’s command.
He tried to outrun it by sea, and the sea itself, through the mouth of a Gentile sailor, hands it right back to him. I’m telling you there’s no amount geographical distance that removes us from our calling.
There's just delay, and the delay is expensive for everybody standing near us.
What This Passage Teaches Us
Let’s take a look at four things this passage teaches us.
First, running from a calling doesn't remove us from the story
It just changes our role in it. Jonah didn't escape God's purposes by boarding that ship. He became the reason a boatload of terrified sailors nearly drowned.
Our disobedience is never a private transaction. Somebody else is always on the boat with us, throwing cargo overboard, paying a price for our disobedience.
Second, not all sleep is rest
And we have to learn to tell the difference. Elijah's sleep restored him for the journey ahead. Jonah's sleep was a worldly escape from a journey he'd already refused to take.
Ask yourself honestly, am I wore out from fulfilling God’s calling, or over a calling God wants me to pick back up, because I’m not doing it?
One kind of tired needs bread and a nap. The other kind needs to hear its name called and get up on deck.
Third, God is relentless
Not in a way that crushes us, but in a way that will not let us drown quietly in our own avoidance. The storm isn't God abandoning Jonah to the consequences of his choice.
The storm is God still pursuing him, even in his flight, even in his disobedient sleep, even below deck in the dark.
That should terrify us a little bit and comfort us enormously at the same time.
The same God who threw the wind onto the sea is the God who will not let us sleep peacefully through the calling he has for us. That's not cruelty.
If we’re a parent, we understand this instinctively. We don't let our child sleep through the moment the house is on fire, even if waking them up is unpleasant for both of us.
Fourth, sometimes God uses the last people we’d ever expect to wake us up
We should be humble enough to listen anyway. God didn't send an angel to shake Jonah's shoulder. He used a pagan ship captain with no theological training and no covenant history.
Just enough plain observation to say, in effect, “this seems like it’s your department.”
God isn’t limited to using people who look like us, sound like us, or believe what we believe in order to get our attention.
Sometimes the wake-up call comes from the last person on the boat we’d expect to be preaching to us. The wise move is to hear it anyway instead of getting defensive about the messenger.
› Conclusion: The Storm Is Not the End of the Story
Here's what we need to carry out of this room. Jonah isn’t a story about a bad man punished by an angry God.
Jonah is a story about a God who refuses to let one of his own, quietly disappear into the cargo hold of his own avoidance and disobedience.
The storm might look like judgment from where Jonah’s sleeping. But, from where God’s standing, it's pursuit. It's love that refuses to let go, even when we very much wish it would let go. At least for a few more nautical miles.
If there's a Nineveh in our life this morning, some assignment we’ve heard clearly, but we’ve been quietly sailing away from. May I gently suggest that the discomfort we’ve been feeling lately might not be random bad luck.
It might be a great wind, thrown onto our sea, by a God who loves us too much to let us sleep through our own life.
Next week we’ll stay on the water, but everything flips.
Instead of a runaway prophet asleep in the hold while a storm threatens everyone around him, we'll find Jesus Himself asleep in a boat, in the middle of another real storm, completely at peace, while His disciples panic.
Same setting. Same sleeping posture. Two entirely different reasons for the rest. Jonah slept because he was wore out from running. Jesus slept because he trusted. We'll spend next Sunday learning to tell the two apart in our own lives, because all of us have done plenty of both.
For today, though, the captain's question is still hanging in the air, and I think it's fair for it to be aimed at some of us.
What are you doing, sound asleep? Get up. Call on your God. He’s never once stopped calling you.
- - Jonah 1:1–2ESV
- - Jonah 1:3ESV
- - Jonah 1:4ESV
- - Jonah 1:5ESV
- - Jonah 1:6ESV

The Word That Came

Running the Other Way

The Storm That Wasn't Random

Everyone Praying but One Man

“What Are You Doing Sound Asleep?”

What This Passage Teaches Us

First, running from a calling doesn't remove us from the story

Second, not all sleep is rest

Third, God is relentless

Fourth, sometimes God uses the last people we’d ever expect to wake us up

Jonah 1:1–2ESV

Jonah 1:3ESV

Jonah 1:4ESV

Jonah 1:5ESV

Jonah 1:6ESV