A Word for Today | Jonah 2:1-9
Many Christians can attest that it took a frightening experience – when they feared for their safety and realized their great need for God – to motivate them to pray. We find an example in the life of the prophet Jonah after he was swallowed by the whale. Jonah chapter 1 tells of how the prophet ran from where God was sending him. When God chased Jonah down and cast a great storm at his ship, the unbelieving crew members berated him – the sole believer present – for not praying. In Jonah’s case, it seems that he was too disgruntled towards God to pray. But when he admitted that the storm was his fault and the crew threw him overboard, Jonah’s outlook changed.
I love Jonah’s prayer in chapter 2, in part because he is so honest about his self-pity: “The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head” (Jon. 2:5). That is a sad situation! Nonetheless, when faced with this dire reality, Jonah prayed. God in His grace had brought the prophet to the place where he realized his great dependency. Down in the deep, he was separated from God, from other believers, and even from the witness of God’s Word. So finally, he turned to God in prayer.
Jonah prayed because he knew that he deserved what happened to him. He also knew that God had caused his predicament, just as Christians know that God is sovereign over the coronavirus. Do any of us doubt that our nation needs to be spiritually humbled? It was Jonah’s humbling experience that persuaded him to pray. He “called out to the Lord, out of my distress” (Jon. 2:1). Moreover, Jonah knew that God had answered him. How did he know this? He knew it because his faith was stirred back to life: “When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you” (Jon. 2:7). This most sullen prophet in the Old Testament ends his prayer actually thanking God. By the time he emerges from the deep, his heart is right with God and he is ready to fulfill his calling of preaching the gospel to Israel’s enemies.
As the days and weeks of the coronavirus shut-down begin to mount, perhaps some of us are becoming frustrated. Let’s take that frustration as a motivation to pray. Like Jonah, let us seek in our prayers for our faith to be rekindled, and let’s pray that God will bring us back out with a renewed fervor to spread His gospel. God’s salvation is sure, so we have nothing to fear. So let’s prayerfully resolve, like Jonah, to emerge from our ordeal spiritual strengthened, thankful to the Lord who does not forsake us, and zealous to live for Jesus Christ.
In Christ’s Love,
Pastor Phillips
