How To Be A Miserable Christian

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So we're in Jonah chapter 4. I want to begin, before we get right into the text, with a bit of a quote.

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I'm going to take us through the annals of history for a second to get to that quote. In 1965, there was a medical doctor turned pastor and preacher.

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His name was Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones. And he published a book in that 1965 year called

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Spiritual Depression. And really what it was was a compilation of 21 sermons that he had preached at Westminster Chapel in London, England, after the

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Second World War. And in this book, what he aimed to do was to carefully and to biblically lay out the causes and cures of a unique kind of depression that he noted was increasing amongst

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Christians. As he looked at the Christian population, he saw that many were downtrodden and melancholy.

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And so he preached these messages. And it became so important that he published this book of messages.

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And at the early chapters of this book, he says one thing that I typically highlight in all of my books, and I highlighted this saying or similar sayings many times, but at the beginning he says this.

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He says, There are large numbers of Christians who give the impression of being unhappy.

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They are cast down. Their souls are disquieted within them. He continues a little bit further, and he says this.

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And I think that it bears truth if we honestly consider it. He says, The people out in the world, they shout at their football matches.

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They talk about the films that they have seen. They are full of excitement, and they want everyone to know about it.

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But Christian people, he says, too often seem to be perpetually in the doldrums and too often give this appearance of unhappiness and a lack of freedom and an absence of joy.

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And he goes on in this book to talk about how this ends up making for a terrible witness when the world is filled with miserable

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Christians who want to make unbelievers around them know that they are miserable. But one of the things that he says is that this kind of spiritual misery is incongruent with the reality in which the

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Christian now lives. How is it that a Christian, that any Christian can be thoroughly acquainted with the goodness of God, with the person and work of Jesus Christ, that we can wholly rest on the perfect justification that Christ accomplished on our behalf on the cross at Calvary, that we can be certain that a heavenly home awaits us and yet still be filled with, overcome with, feelings of despondency?

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If we look around today, even though it seems incongruent, I think that we would have to agree with the doctor that there are many today who are miserable

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Christians, perhaps more miserable Christians in the world today than ever before.

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And perhaps you're in this room and you would put yourself in that category, that I am a despondent,

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I am unhappy, I am a miserable Christian. You would confess, you would say,

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I have great confidence in Christ. I am truly certain that I am a Christian, and yet I confess that I am truly miserable.

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That might be, it's very likely that that is the case of some Christians in this room, that you know you ought to be filled with joy, but you just are not.

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Now, if that is you, or if you know someone that is in that position, I think that our passage today is going to give us some really good help on the matter.

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And the reason for that is this. As we enter into Jonah chapter 4, in these 11 verses, 12 verses that are before us, what we're going to find is a miserable man of God, a man who had been called by God to be a prophet, who had been sent out to proclaim his word, who was a true prophet of God, and yet was truly miserable.

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We don't find him bursting at the seams with joy in chapter 4, but we find him as miserable and as wretched as a man could possibly be.

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And what we're going to do as we study this last chapter of Jonah is this. We're going to find that here, and this is going to sound really negative, but we will frame it positively, that here in this passage, we will discover at least three surefire ways that you can be a miserable

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Christian. If you want to be a miserable Christian, these are three issues of perspective that will cloud your vision, that will cast you down, that will disquiet your soul.

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But, to frame it positively, if we were to turn this around, reverse engineer it, what we'll see is this.

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This also provides us with three means that God has ordained and does use to bring his people out of misery and to restore to us the joy of our salvation.

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Three ways to be filled with unspeakable and unshakable joy in Christ.

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I think that for all of us, whether we persist in feeling miserable or unhappy or just visit there from time to time, this is going to provide a lot of help.

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How, Lord, can I be filled with joy in you? We're going to go right into the text and discover these for ourselves.

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We're going to start in Jonah 4, and I'm going to read verses 1 -5. It says this, Therefore now,

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O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.

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And the Lord said, Do you do well to be angry? Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city and made a booth for himself there.

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He sat under it in the shade till he should see what would become of the city.

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So from this text, I want to demonstrate first that the first way or one of the ways that you can be a miserable

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Christian is this, and I apologize, I don't have a handout, so I'll be really explicit in my points today. The first way to be a miserable

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Christian from this text is this, to misunderstand God's saving purposes for sinful man.

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To misunderstand God's saving purposes for sinful man, other men, other people out there.

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Now today our text begins with the word, but. And hopefully by now we've trained you that if you see a chapter that begins with the word but, or a paragraph that begins with the word but, that's a conjunction.

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And what it means is that this text builds on what has already taken place in the previous passage.

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And so by way of a brief review, what we know last week is that Jonah finally did obey

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God, that he went to Nineveh, and that he preached a message of repentance.

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He said that the Lord was going to destroy Nineveh within 40 days if they did not turn from their wicked ways.

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And what we find is after chapter 4, the scene shifts from a focus on Jonah. We don't hear about Jonah for the rest of the chapter.

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And for the remainder of chapter 3, what we find is this, that this message of judgment, of God's judgment spreads like wildfire through the people, three days across the city, 120 ,000 people, and makes its way all the way up to the king, to the point that everyone, even the animals, they have in repentance to God.

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And what we find in chapter, in verse 10, excuse me, of chapter 3, is probably the climax of the whole book.

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We have everyone obeying God, and then in verse 10, we see this, that when

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God saw how this ruthless and wicked people had turned from their evil ways, God's righteous anger abated.

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His anger relented. He relented of the disaster that he had planned for the city.

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God put away his wrath, and he showed mercy for the people in Nineveh. And so we haven't heard about Jonah now for the last several verses, but we return now in chapter 4, in verse 1, to Jonah.

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And what we find is this, where God's anger has relented, Jonah appears on the scene, and what is he?

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But he is angry. His attitude contrasts God's entirely. Jonah, in fact, burns with a seething anger.

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And this is really no exaggeration to say that. When we consider the strong language in verse 1, if we were to look at the

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Hebrew text, what we find is this, that Jonah actually ascribes evil to God.

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If you're reading from the ESV Bible, you'll see on the footnote to the bottom of the page that he actually ascribes evil to him.

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And the word anger that he uses can literally be translated to cause a fire to burn.

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A fire was kindled within Jonah's heart, and he was set ablaze with a white -hot rage.

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And so in verse 2, he offers up a complaint to God. He says, this is exactly what

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I said would happen. When God sent him to Nineveh, that's why he fled to Tarshish, to the opposite side, if you remember, from chapter 1.

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Jonah didn't just flee to a different city within Israel, but he got in a ship to go to Tarshish.

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And that was likely Tartessus, which was across the Mediterranean Sea, on the west side of Spain, where the

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Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean, to the farthest reaches of the known world.

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That's why Jonah went, because he knew, he said. And he almost quotes exactly from Exodus 34, verses 6 and 7, that God is a gracious God, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.

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And so he would rather flee from his own land, from his own people, from his own calling, from his own

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God. He would rather run than see God's grace and mercy be dispensed upon the enemies of Israel.

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And here, what we see is that Jonah understood Scripture, and understood the character and attributes of God, at least at a basic level.

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He knew that God was gracious and merciful. He knew that God was slow to anger, that he was abounding in steadfast love.

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He knew that God was quick to forgive sin, but he did not embrace it. And so, he was filled with his own anger and bitterness, and he flees from God.

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And again, we see it here, he sees God dispensing grace upon Nineveh, and he's filled with anger, white, hot rage.

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Now we're going to speed through a couple of these verses, but in verse 3, he asks God, almost as a suicidal man, that God would just take him.

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That God would take his life. God rebukes him with a returning question in chapter 4.

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And then in verse 5, it says this, that he went east, where he built a little booth, or a tabernacle, to shade himself from the hot sun.

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And there he wanted to see if God would reconsider and destroy the city. Now, I want to bring something to your attention.

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Maybe you've read this text several times before. We've just surveyed it, but what most people, what many people do not notice when they read this text, is just the significance of Jonah building that booth outside the city.

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This booth was probably made from wood, maybe leaves, palm leaves, and it would have looked strikingly similar to what the

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Israelites would build during the Feast of Booths, if you remember that. The Feast of Booths, we can read about it in Leviticus chapter 23, where God ordained that.

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What God ordered the people to do, the people of Israel in Leviticus 23, was this. They were to have a festival, a feast that lasted seven days.

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During that seven days, they were to build booths for themselves and dwell in the booths. And the point of that was this.

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That as they feasted and as they lived in the booths, all the children, the little children of Israel would ask their parents, what is this about?

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The young men and the young women would ask their parents or the seniors, what was this about? And the truth that it was to teach was this.

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That while the nation of Israel wandered in the wilderness for 40 years,

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God provided for them, that he protected them, that he accompanied them with his presence.

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It was meant to be a memorial of the faithfulness of God. And so here,

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Jonah sets up in this booth to watch the city be destroyed.

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But he failed to see the irony in all of this. These booths were meant to teach the people that even while Israel was a stiff -necked nation, while they were rebellious and disobedient,

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God endured with them, that he was patient with them, that he led them with a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day, that he rained manna on them, their clothes did not wear out, their shoes did not wear out.

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He provided for them perfectly in spite of their stubbornness, in spite of their wretchedness, in spite of their rebellion.

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The seven days of feasting that was to take place was to remind them of how

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God took a hard -hearted people out of slavery in Egypt. He drove the nations out before them in the promised land, and he delivered them faithfully to the land that he had promised their ancestors.

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And as those hard -hearted people dwelled in those booths for 40 years, God showed them unparalleled kindness.

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Now, Jonah didn't recognize the irony in this, that even as he sat in a symbol of God's love and kindness and grace and mercy, he sat there waiting for this city to be destroyed.

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And so with a good vantage point, he hoped that the wrath of God had only been delayed and not turned away.

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And so with a good vantage point, he was seated there under the symbol of God's love and patience, and he waited to see

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God's wrath and destructive power poured out on this repentant people.

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In fact, Jonah became so fixated on the sinfulness of this city that he had lost sight of God's saving purposes for this people and of the reality that God takes great pleasure in saving lost sinners for his own glory.

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Now, we might be reading this. Maybe you read this at home this week and thought, how does this possibly apply to us?

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We see Jonah looking at this group of sinful, rebellious people in Nineveh, recently repented and still wanting destruction.

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What I would say is this, when we look at Jonah and when we look at this story, it can be very easy for us to tell ourselves that we would certainly never be like this man, that we would never be like Jonah, that we would never, and think about this, that we would never put off telling others about God's free salvation, especially when their eternity depended on it.

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We would never withhold that information. We would never become so angry or disenfranchised with a people or a city or a king or a political leader to the extent that we would think they were beyond God's salvation.

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We say to ourselves, we would never simply sit idle, abiding under God's good grace in the gospel and wait with the expectation that the wicked around us would perish in their sins.

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Is that true, that we would never do those things? Brothers and sisters, I would submit, if we just wait a second, that isn't this exactly what we all do?

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Isn't this exactly what many Christians do every single day of our lives?

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That we have a message, a gospel to proclaim to a lost and dying people, and yet we're reluctant to preach it.

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That we see a sinful and rebellious country around us. We see decisions that are made on the school board and decisions that are made on the

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Supreme Court and decisions that are made in the halls of Parliament, and we say, we grow like Jonah with seething anger towards these people.

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Dear ones, I think if we look carefully at ourselves, if we were to engage in some honest self -examination, we're far more like Jonah than we would care to admit.

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I want to ask you a series of questions in this regard. You can diagnose yourself. Is it possible that many

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Christians today, that you today, are made miserable? You're an unhappy Christian because you've become so obsessed with the sinfulness of sinners around us that you have lost sight of Christ and of his sovereign and preeminent rule over the world.

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Have you allowed disdain and disgust for sinful people to crowd out your love and compassion for those who are utterly and hopelessly lost in their sin?

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Have you forgotten, brother or sister, that you too were once dead in your trespasses and sins and that it was

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God alone that raised you to life and seated you with Christ in the heavenly places, that everything that you have, you have received, that none of it has come from you, even your ability to discern between good and evil, which clearly the world does not have, was given to you as a gift of grace by God himself.

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Is it possible that you've become so worldly in your outlook, that you have lost sight of God, that you have lost sight of his saving purposes for the world?

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I fear, dear friends, that it has almost become a full -time job among some

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Christians to grind their teeth at foolish and evil politicians, to spend their days grumbling and complaining about their unrighteous bosses or their lost co -workers, to consume the bad news of the world so continuously that you lose sight of the good news of Jesus Christ.

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And I'm not talking about some kind of righteous anger. Brothers and sisters, there is a place for righteous anger when we see legitimate cases of injustice, when we see millions of babies slaughtered in the name of convenience or freedom or women's rights, when we see innocent people in prison that ought to move us to righteous anger, but it ought to move us also to action.

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But too often we are not moved to action, we're moved to sinful anger. And the reason why we know that is because it doesn't bring about action, it brings about bitterness and complaining and grumbling.

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What we often see is not righteous anger, but an unhealthy and unrighteous obsession that causes

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Christians to act, not to act, but to spend their time commiserating over the sins of others, rather than looking to Christ, laboring obediently in prayer and preaching the gospel to a dying world.

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What I'd suggest is that many Christians have lost their joy because they've lost sight of God and they've lost sight of the mission of God, our mission as it relates to sinful people.

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Oh brethren, I thought about it this week. Would that there would be a

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Nineveh -sized revival in our city, and Nineveh -sized revivals across our land, but it will not come through wallowing in our complaints and in our anger.

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It will only come as we heed God's word and bring the gospel to the lost and the perishing.

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As we see those politicians making foolish and unrighteous decisions, instead of complaining about them, bring them before the throne of God above to seek out their salvation, to ask that the

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Lord, as our brother did today, would save them, that He would grant them to repentance.

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God has commanded us to go out as the king's heralds to the highways and the hedges and to compel the sinners not to go away or to go to hell, but to come in and to be right with God by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.

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What would become of our workplaces if instead of complaining about our bosses and our co -workers and made ourselves miserable in the process, we prayed for them and preached

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Christ to their lost souls? What would become of our country if we obeyed 1

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Timothy 2 and earnestly prayed for those who are in leadership? What would become of our own souls if we took the care not to get entangled in civilian affairs, but looked to Christ, run the race with endurance, and seek the good of our cities by giving them

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Christ? Dear friends, I'm not saying this is the cause for your misery or this unhappiness, but I know, at least speaking about myself,

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I know that this can be the case for me, that as I look at the world around me, I go, what is happening?

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This world is going to hell, that God has told us not to fixate on that as Jonah has, to look at the sinfulness of sinners, but to bring, to look to Christ and to bring the gospel to bear in the lives of those people.

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I love the example of John Knox. John Knox lived during a time when there was intense

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Christian persecution. The people were evil, and it was true that the rulers were even more evil still.

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But he did not descend into depression. He didn't grumble and complain that the world was going to hell.

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Instead, what he would do is he would often stay up late into the night, and he would passionately pray.

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History tells us he would say, Oh Lord, give me Scotland or I die.

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And Knox was such a man, he prayed for his nation so much as he saw the evil, the wickedness of the rulers that the murderous queen,

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Mary Tudor, we're going to hear a little bit more about her later on in the sermon, but this evil, murderous queen,

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Mary Tudor, who persecuted Christians like it was going out of style, she said that she feared

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John Knox's prayers more than all of the armies of Europe. Wouldn't that be true?

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Wouldn't that be wonderful if that were true of this church? Instead of commiserating about the fallen nature of the world, we gave ourselves to praying for that world and of reaching that world with the good news of Christ.

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The next truth we find is in verse 6. Verse 6 reads like this, Now the Lord God appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be shade over his head to save him from his discomfort.

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So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. The second cause for misery that I want to point out from our text is this,

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God's people, Christians are often miserable because we misunderstand God's saving purpose for sinful self.

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Not only do we misunderstand God's saving purposes for other sinful men, but we misunderstand God's saving purposes for our own souls.

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I want you to see this with me. Jonah was sitting under the intense heat of that sun as he sat there east of the city watching for its destruction.

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And even as he dwelled in that little booth, he probably was growing very uncomfortable in that heat, the daytime temperature.

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If you remember back to chapter 1, Nineveh was located in modern day

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Mosul, Iraq. So the daytime temperature could get as high as 40 degrees Celsius.

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So if you can picture Jonah sitting in the 40 degrees Celsius weather under the sun, he was probably growing uncomfortable.

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And just as God had appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah from the icy waters or the cool waters of the

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Mediterranean, in chapter 1 verse 17, now God, in his great mercy and grace, appointed a plant to grow and to offer shade to Nineveh from the sun.

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Now, theologians, I love reading the commentaries about these things and how people speculate what kind of plant it was.

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Others say it was a gourd that grew up over the booth and had big shady leaves.

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Again, I think if you have the ESV, they render that at the bottom in your footnotes as the castor oil plant.

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That's what John MacArthur says it was, was a castor oil plant. And castor oil plants grew very fast, especially in hot weather.

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And they could grow up to 20 feet in a single growing season. So just imagine that, having a plant that could shoot up 20 feet over the course of a short growing season.

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And they would often have large leaves that could offer shade from the intense heat. So maybe it was a castor plant.

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But what we see is this, that if we note the wording, I want us to see the wording in verse 6. It says this, that God sent the plant to, not to shade

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Jonah. He didn't send the plant to cover Jonah, but he sent the plant, it says, to save Jonah.

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Now that's really interesting vocabulary, isn't it? God would send a plant to save Jonah.

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Why is that? Now this Hebrew word, it also means to deliver or to defend.

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And we're told that it was to save Jonah from his discomfort. That's how it's rendered in our

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English versions. But what's interesting is this, that that word that's used for discomfort is actually, it's a double -edged sword.

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It's a word with two meanings. And it's probably not used coincidentally or accidentally.

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But that word, it's the Hebrew word ra 'at. It can be translated as discomfort, as we see in our

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English Bibles. But it's also regularly translated in our Old Testaments as the words evil, wickedness, and depravity.

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It's a loaded term, that God would send this plant to save Jonah from his discomfort.

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Or we could say to defend him from his evil, his wickedness, and his depravity.

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And I want you to see this with me. The imagery that this paints, that as Jonah sat in rebellion, waiting for the destruction of Nineveh, he sat, as it were, under the hot sun of God's displeasure.

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He sat there, that same word for angry, burning hot. Now, Jonah himself is seated under the burning, hot sun of God's displeasure.

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And yet, God delivered and defended him, not only from his discomfort, but from the consequences of his sinful rebellion.

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It serves as a picture of God's readiness to show grace even to the rebellious, to atone for sinful rebellion, to cover

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Jonah's sin based on God's own divine initiative. And all we're told here is that Jonah was made glad, not because of God, not because of God's grace, but simply he was made exceedingly glad because of the plant.

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There's no mention of God in Jonah's thinking. But that didn't stop God from covering

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Jonah, as it were, from forgiving Jonah. As Jonah sat on that hill, not only did

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God relent of his disaster upon Nineveh, but God relented of his disaster upon Jonah.

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Now, what again is this teaching us? I want to show you this, that not only was

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Jonah miserable as he sat there looking at Nineveh because he got God's saving purposes wrong for Nineveh, but Jonah was miserable because he got

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God's saving purposes wrong for himself as well. Now, what's interesting is we never see

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Jonah repent in this book, but based on good credibility, we can say that this book was likely, very likely written by Jonah.

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And so it's possible, it's almost certain that Jonah would have repented at one time and in humility recounted the story of his own rebellion.

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And so it wasn't until later when Jonah would write this book that he would recognize that at that moment, as he sat miserable on that hill, he was in fact the object of God's undeserved love and grace and forgiveness.

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And I would put before you today that the reason why many Christians today are miserable and have lost the joy of their salvation is because they have lost sight of their salvation itself.

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They've lost sight of the finished work of Jesus Christ wrought on Calvary's tree 2 ,000 years ago.

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Many of you who are feeling cold, if you're feeling hard, if you're feeling miserable, if you're feeling this way, it's very likely that you are because you've lost sight of the fact, dear brother and sister, that you are freely forgiven in Jesus Christ.

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Now, some of you might stop me and say, but certainly they could recite the gospel.

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They can give us all the details of the gospel. I'd say, absolutely, that's true. That's very possible.

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Some might even be able to break apart and outline, unpack the mechanics of justification or of penal substitutionary atonement.

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But it's very true that even those who can wax eloquently about God's saving grace, of God's justification of Christ's death, his propitiatory death on the cross, even those, it's possible, may have or have lost sight of the fact that this very act of redemption, this very act that was accomplished by Christ on behalf of sinners applies to you now, personally and perfectly and permanently.

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Dear friends, many of us are prone to despondency because we are forgetful and we're short -sighted creatures.

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And we're forgetful and we're short -sighted about the most important things in the world, including the gospel.

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We drift from a system of divine accomplishment where God has done it all to a system of human achievement -oriented

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Christianity, which is no Christianity at all. And this is why, dear friends, we need to preach the gospel to ourselves.

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We must apply this gospel to us as personal and precious every single day.

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I love a book written by Jerry Bridges. It's titled The Discipline of Grace.

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If you've never read it, write that down. Go find it. Oftentimes you can find it at the thrift stores, The Discipline of Grace.

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And it's such a wonderful book. And he says this. He says, because of our frequent failures before God.

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And isn't that true of us? Just how often we become aware of our frequent failures before God.

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He says, because of our frequent failures before God, we feel under condemnation.

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We do not feel that God is for us, but rather, surely, he must be against us.

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We think that he is bringing charges against us. And at such times, we must preach the gospel to ourselves.

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We must review what God has declared to be true about our justification in Christ.

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And he says this. He elaborates on it. He says, we must keep in mind. And dear brother and sister, if you are in Christ here today, this is true of you.

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He says, we must keep in mind that our justification by God is based solely on the meritorious work of Christ and our union with him.

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That God sees us legally as so connected with Christ that what he did, we did.

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When he lived a life of perfect obedience. Dear Saint, this is about you. It is as if you had lived a perfect life of obedience.

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When he died on the cross to satisfy the just demands of God's law, it is just as if we had died on the cross.

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Christ stood in our place as our representative, both in his sinless life and his sin -bearing life.

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And if you're a Christian and you're unhappy, it's very possible that you have not taken this to heart recently.

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You've not taken this heart today. That in Christ, right now, there is no condemnation for you.

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That you have perfect peace with God and that it's all based not on your performance but on what

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Christ has already done for you. Now children, children in the room,

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I want to pose something to you or put something before you. As kids, I sometimes, and maybe for parents,

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I'll say this, how difficult it can be to relay the gospel to your children that it is as good as it is and that it is free and it's fully free.

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Kids and adults, we are often inclined to think that it's somehow based on what we can do.

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I think back to a story of a man named John Wesley. John Wesley was a very faithful evangelist.

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He certainly came with a lot of quirks, as we all do. And one of the things that John Wesley did,

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I want you guys to tell me, kids, if you'd like to go to this school. But he founded a school called

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Kingswood Hill School. And he built it in the middle of the country because he said that he found that many parents, he called them tender parents, were offering their sons and daughters to the devil.

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And so what Wesley tried to do, he said he wanted to teach children how to be disciplined. And so to do that, he started

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Kingswood Hill School. And he said this, that if you're a child, kids think of this, between the ages of 6 and 12, all play is forbidden.

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The moment you turn 6 years of age, you need to put the toys away. You need to learn discipline.

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You need to learn structure. He would have the children wake up, guess what time? At 4 a .m.

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every morning. And from 4 a .m. until 5 a .m. they would do their private devotions.

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And then 5 a .m. to 6 a .m. there would be corporate worship and breakfast. And it wasn't until sunset that the children could eventually get off of school and go and definitely not play but rest in time for the next day.

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On Fridays, the children were forced to fast until 3 p .m. He said it was good for the body.

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It was good for the soul. And certainly kids, you would be very pleased to wake up at 4 a .m. and defer dinner until 3 p .m.

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And when the children did eat, I love the menu, it was milk porridge and water gruel for breakfast.

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Doesn't that sound good? Bread and butter for lunch. Sometimes with cheese. And suppers rotated between cold roast beef, boiled mutton, bacon and vegetables, or dumplings.

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And the kids were kept on a strict study schedule. Every single day they learned reading, writing, arithmetic, languages like Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and English, history, geography, chronology, rhetoric, logic, ethics, geometry, algebra, physics and music.

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Now what John Wesley may have been inadvertently doing is teaching that somehow

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God's grace and God's salvation was dependent upon those children's discipline, their ability to wake up and to jump through all of the hoops.

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But that's not at all the way God's grace works. And for us as adults, we can smile at that story, but we treat it the same way.

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If we don't do our Bible reading, if we don't do our prayer, if we stumble in this regard that God is now no longer pleased with us and we can no longer approach

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Him. And so we become miserable. But just like Jonah didn't see

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God's love and favor and grace toward him, if you are in Christ, it is as if you stand before God, you do stand before God with the perfect righteousness of His only

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Son. And that He says to you as He said to His Son, this is my son, this is my daughter, in whom

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I am well pleased. This is the truth that we often forget for ourselves, dear brothers and sisters, this mystery of double imputation.

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That as Christ was on that cross, He took our sin, that it was imputed to Him.

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And not based on nothing at all, but based on grace through faith,

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His righteousness is imputed to us. And so when we stand before God, we can come boldly and with confidence and with great assurance into the presence of God.

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Lastly, we'll read verses 7 through 11. It says this, but when dawn came up, this plant is shielding

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Jonah from the sun, when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant so that it withered.

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When the sun rose, God appointed scorching east wind and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint.

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And he asked, notice again, a second time now, that he might die. He said, it is better for me to die than live.

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But God said to Jonah, do you do well? Again, ask the same question, to be angry this time for the plant.

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And he said, yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die. And the

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Lord said, you pity the plant for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night.

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And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120 ,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, totally lost, and also much cattle.

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Sometimes we are miserable because we fixate on the sins of others. Sometimes we're miserable because we fixate on our own sins.

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And sometimes here we see we're miserable because we misunderstand God's wise providence in our circumstances.

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We misunderstand God's wise providence in our circumstances. As dawn appears,

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God, just as he appointed a fish, and just as he appointed a plant, now God appoints, this is sovereign providence on God's part, he appoints a worm.

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And it takes out the plant. And what doesn't take out the plant, a wind, probably what's called a

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Sirocco wind, this blazing hot wind that would come from the

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Arabian desert and from the Sahara desert comes and bakes this plant.

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And when the plant died, again we see Jonah wanted to die. Now some would ask, why would

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God do this? Why would God raise up the plant just in time to kill the plant before Jonah?

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And this is why. It is because of God's wise providence. It's because of God's wise plan.

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God brought Jonah comfort, and then he brought Jonah affliction to teach him, and to sanctify him.

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But because Jonah did not understand God's wise providence, he was made miserable because of it.

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But dear saints, I want you to see this. This is what we can take home and learn from this, that often too we become miserable because we suffer, because of health issues, because of financial issues, because of whatever it is under the sun, rather than seeing that this is

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God's wise and sovereign providence. Just as God appointed the worm, just as God appointed the plant, just as God appointed the fish,

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God appoints every single circumstance in our lives. And he does it just like Jonah, that we might learn more about him, that we might be sanctified, that we might be more dependent on him, sometimes to discipline us, sometimes to prepare for us an eternal weight of glory.

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That's what Paul said when he wrote to the Corinthians in his second letter, in chapter 4, verses 11 and 18, he said, for this momentary, light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

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We look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen, for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

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And what this means is that God is sovereign over your cancer, God is sovereign over your times of great health,

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God is sovereign over your times of great happiness, and God is sovereign over your great times of suffering, and that there is nothing in the universe that can take place without God appointing and ordaining it.

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As R .C. Sproul used to say, there is no maverick molecule in the universe.

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That when the coronavirus came, COVID -19 came, God was sovereign over that virus.

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That God is sovereign over every detail, and Romans 8 .28 tells us that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love

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Him and to those who are called according to His purpose. I think

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I've told this group before that I have at times struggled with sinful anxiety, just dwelling on sinful worries in my life.

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And one of the things that relieves me the most in that, that rescued me from this misery was that truth in Romans 8 .28

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that everything that God does, even the discipline that God brings about,

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He brings about for my good, because He called me, and He loves me. There's a story

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I think that illustrates this in a very positive way. In the year 1558, the bishop of London issued a royal warrant for the arrest of a man named

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Bernard Gilpin. He was a Protestant theologian who was a fervent student of God's word and would often counter

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Roman Catholic doctrine. Now, Mary Tudor, bloody Mary, had come into power in 1554 and it was her goal, after the death of her father

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King Henry and her brother Edward, to reinstate a Catholic England.

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And so she promptly started to persecute Christians around England. And so being offended by Gilpin's Bernard Gilpin's doctrine and his teaching, they issued a warrant for his arrest and the bishop of London promised that they would find the reformer and that they would execute him within two weeks time.

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And so they went and looked for him and they found him. His guards arrested him and they promptly took him back to London where he was to die by being burned at the stake.

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And as he was on his way to London, I'm not sure if he was walking or by horse or whatever happened, but he fell off the horse and he broke his leg.

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And it was a severe fracture to the point that the people around him thought, surely this is just adding insult to injury now.

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This man is about to go and die and now he's going to suffer with this fractured leg until the moment of his death.

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And some of the guards, they taunted Gilpin by quoting a saying that he was known for because Gilpin believed in the sovereignty of God.

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He believed in the wise providence of God. He often said, nothing happens to us but what is intended for our good.

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And so the guards taunted him. What is this? Is this what God meant for you? Nothing happens to us but what is intended for our good?

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And even as they tormented him, they asked him whether he thought this broken leg was ordained by God for his benefit.

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And Gilpin simply and meekly replied, he said, I have no doubt about it, that God has ordained this broken leg.

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Now, because his leg was so severely fractured, they couldn't move him to London. And so they had to keep him in place just enough so that his leg could heal so they could transport him for his execution.

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But as he waited there for the healing of his leg, Queen Mary Tudor died. His accuser had died and because there was no accuser left, they released him.

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And he spent the next 25 years teaching against the Roman Catholic Church and preaching the free gospel of grace in the face of Jesus Christ.

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Now, sometimes things happen like that and it's joyous and it's pleasing. And other times we encounter

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God's contrary providence and it will be hard to swallow. We might find it hard to bear the loss of a child, a terminal illness, but we must trust that God's future grace in that moment will give us everything that we need to live for him.

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You might have heard of a man named Bob Jennings, a dear brother who passed away and went to be with the

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Lord in 2012. You can still find a lot of his sermons online. They're excellent. He's a good friend of Mack Tomlinson.

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That's kind of how I met Mack. And people, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2012 and people prayed earnestly for him.

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As a matter of fact, he said that he felt so unworthy of all the prayer that was offered up for him.

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But as he got nearer and nearer to death, one of the very last sermons that he preached, he said that Jesus' prayer, where Jesus said that they might be with me, had overridden

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God's prayer, that it was God's design, God's desire to bring him home rather than to keep him alive.

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And in that prayer, as he prepared to die and as he preached one of his last sermons, he said,

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Lord, what have you done? And he said, what have you done in killing me and bringing me to my end?

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He said, no, what have you done sending your Son to put away our sin by the sacrifice of yourself?

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You've called us saints, not sinners, sheep, not goats, friends, not enemies. You've called us sons, not cursed but blessed.

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We wait upon you. Our eyes are upon you. We can't see enough.

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We can't tell enough. We can't talk enough. We cannot sing your praises worthily.

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God gave Bob Jennings probably more grace in his death than I see in many Christians in their living.

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And yet God was sovereign over that and he's sovereign over every circumstance and we can say like the song says, whatever my

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God ordains is right. Whatever our God ordains is right.

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And so as we close this out, how do we be a miserable Christian? Misunderstand God's grace for the world.

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Get fixated on sin. But how do we find joy? Never mind the people that were as we once were but bring the gospel to them.

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How do we find joy but to look at how God has saved us through his Son? How do we find joy but to gladly and joyfully accept

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God's sovereign providence, his contrary providences as sovereign and good and wise?

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As I started with a quote from Martin Lloyd -Jones, I'll finish with a quote from Martin Lloyd -Jones, he says this, he says it behooves us therefore and speaking about being a miserable or by being a joyful Christian, he says it behooves us therefore for the sake of the kingdom of God and the glory of Christ in whom we believe to represent him and his cause in such a way that men and women will be drawn and attracted as they observe our joy, as they observe our love, whatever our circumstance or condition, we must so live that they will be compelled to say, would to God that I could be like that?

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Would to God that I could live in this world and go through this world as that person does?