Jan. 28, 2018 PM Open Doors by Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Jan. 28, 2018 PM: Open Doors Jonah 1:1-3 Pastor Josh Sheldon

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The book of Jonah, the prophet Jonah, you find just after Obadiah.
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And I wish to say a few words, to speak a bit on these first three verses again.
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The first three verses, same text that we had last week. But I think between last week and,
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Lord willing, this afternoon, we will have a good introduction and then be able to dive into some of the more well -known parts of this well -known prophet.
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And as you'll recall, I likened him to Sam asking Frodo at the end of that Lord of the
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Rings episode when he wondered if the legend of what he and Frodo did would ever be written. And Frodo answered, he says, oh yes, they will.
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And they will ask to know about Frodo, who's the most famous of all the hobbits, which is saying something.
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And I made the case, and I want you to remember this, that Jonah, in many ways, is the most famous of the prophets.
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You can speak to many people outside of Christ about the prophet Ezekiel and they will just look at you.
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Who is Ezekiel? That's just a common name. Isaiah, and know nothing about Isaiah 53 and the vicarious sufferings of our
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Lord Jesus Christ. And that famous passage, Isaiah 7 and Isaiah 9, so commonly cited during Christmas.
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They won't even know that that was the prophet Isaiah. But Jonah, because of the storm and going the wrong direction and whales and such like that, the most famous of prophets.
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Last Sunday we made the case for him. We met the prophet Jonah last
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Sunday. And we understood that his disobedience to the Lord, which we're going to deal with this afternoon, that despite that, he was a great prophet.
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He is a prophet. Fits in the mold of Elijah. Elijah being one of the only prophets sent outside of the people of Israel as a judgment against them.
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And here Jonah is going to go outside those borders. I gave several other reasons. I want to remind you of just one more.
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So understand that though Jonah with the other prophets in this grouping are called minor prophets, there's nothing minor about them.
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There's nothing minor or small about the word that they proclaimed or the God that they served.
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Jonah is the one that Jesus points to without a hint of criticism. And says,
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No sign will be given to you except for the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah was in the belly of the well for three days and three nights, so will the
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Lord be in the tomb for three days and three nights. And so Jonah, and we could argue more clearly than almost any other prophet, pictures in his life as a living parable of it, the death, burial, and resurrection of our
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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Jonah knew that for him to go and cry out against the city of Nineveh would open up at least the possibility of forgiveness.
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That at least the chance that they would be forgiven by the grace of the God that he was being compelled to serve, that they might find forgiveness, they might find redemption, they might find
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God's favor and His grace. A faith that we would do well to emulate ourselves, knowing that as we speak the gospel, it's a word of power from a powerful
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God and it's powerful to save. Jonah knew this. For what other cause would
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Yahweh even commission a prophet but to speak His grace to a people? There was no doubt in his mind that God can and God does forgive.
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The word for evil you'll recall when God says to the prophet, for their evil has come up before me.
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That word is also often translated as distress or trouble. And for myself,
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I think distress fits the context of the whole book of Jonah better than evil.
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Not that they weren't evil. They were definitely an evil people. And as we look at the background of the Assyrians, whose capital was
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Nineveh, pardon me, as we get into this, a little deeper into this prophet and his book, you'll see that, yes, they were a wicked, violent, vile people.
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But still distress fits the context of Jonah better, especially the end of the book in chapter 4 and verse 11 when
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God says, should I not also be concerned with them? So their troubles, their trials, their distress has come up to him.
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In Jonah, we have a sovereign God. We're going to see many instances of His sovereignty as we go through this prophecy.
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We have a sovereign God. We see a God who's aware of and concerned for everything.
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He knows all things. There's not an instant, no matter how small that occurs, that is not under His providential, sovereign will.
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And we also have this prophet who, unique among prophets, knowing the
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God that he serves, having faith in the word of that God that is commissioning him, is trying to decline the assignment.
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So in the second sermon on these three verses, I want us to note first that he's simply told to arise and go.
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Arise, go. The first part he gets right, doesn't he?
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He arises, he gets up. The language speaks of an immediate compliance and a constancy in preparation.
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And we need to ask for what? What is he preparing himself for? God, and there's no doubt that it's God speaking to him,
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God says, arise, go. Well, what's he getting ready for?
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When I was called to arise and get ready to preach at the pastor's conference last year, not personally by God as Jonah, but by the men organizing the conference, and we know that God tells me in His word to be ready to preach the word in and out of season, what did
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I do? Well, sort of like Jonah, I arose and I went. I went and I studied and I found out what my subject was and what the scripture was that I'd be reading or preaching from.
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And I prepared myself. Jonah prepared himself to go.
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And he rose up right away to do it. It's just that as we know so well, as we look at this most famous list of prophets, he went the opposite way.
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Now in God's economy, what is half compliance worth? He was told two things.
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Arise, go. He arises, but he doesn't go, or at least he goes the wrong way. We know half compliance is worth nothing at all.
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It's no compliance at all. As James and Paul both teach us, he who does all the commandments lives by them.
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And then James warns us that in order to live by the law, by the commandments, we must do all of them, all of the time, with never a fault to be held to our account.
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We think about this for a moment, what situation was Jonah in when he rose up and he went, but he went his own way.
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He went to do his own agenda. He went to prepare himself to go away from the command of the
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Lord. On the outside, he must have looked good to all men. Wouldn't it?
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What are you doing? Well, I'm getting ready to do the work of a prophet or something like that. On the outside, out their appearance would look good.
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His giftedness was to be put to use for good and holy purposes, or so everyone would think. Seeing this man known to be a prophet of the
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Most High God, known to have stood before Israel's king, that's in 2 Kings 14 when he stood before Jeroboam II and prophesied to him, and prophesied accurately about the expansion of his borders back to the extent that they were under King Solomon, he would be known somewhat.
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And it would look good. What are you doing? Well, I'm getting ready to go on a mission. Oh, it must be a holy mission, a pious mission.
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You're a very religious man. And the fact that he was preparing himself contrary to his orders is in the first word of verse 3.
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Do you see that there? But. But, that three -letter word is often so important as we go through Scripture.
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But Jonah rose. There are words in the Hebrew that could mean and.
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And he rose. Or so. So he rose. We could even have something that says consequently, as a result of having heard this word from God, he rose up.
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Those words are readily available. But that's not what it says. We have but.
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In the sense of rather. In the sense of instead. Conversely to what the
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Lord told him, he rose. He rose as he was told, but not in accordance with what
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Yahweh, what the Lord had said. Not to go, but to flee. In the second place,
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I want us to look this afternoon simply at the risk of what we call open doors.
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Open doors. Jonah has risen up to go against God's design. And none of us here can ever say that we don't do that.
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That we don't get up and prepare ourselves to go an opposite direction. And like ourselves, it seems that Jonah is claiming some kind of divine guidance every time something goes his way, or at least doesn't bring his whole project crashing down on his head.
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His goal is expressed there in verse 3, isn't it? It's to flee the presence of God. Now we need to be fair to Jonah and understand that he understood that God's presence is not something you can actually escape.
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The Lord is not bound by time or space. In Isaiah, he declares himself as he who inhabits eternity.
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He's not limited to a building. Solomon preached that. Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built.
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The prophet knew these truths. When we get to his prayer in the next chapter, the one he prayed in the belly of the fish, he will pray from a life experience that made real these truths.
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When he fled the Lord's presence, he really knew it was a futile attempt. He was trying to get away from the mission that God had given him.
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How does such a journey begin? How do we start going the wrong way?
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Well, first of all, it's with a choice. Listen, we make a choice, we make a decision to follow my own whims, to follow my own agenda, my own desires.
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Even as Christians, we have to admit that we do this. Even a heart of flesh that's been cleansed from its sins, that new heart implanted by the
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Holy Spirit when he regenerated us, even it can be deceived. And by whom? By ourselves.
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By ourselves. Only if we let it, but it can happen. It's a heart of flesh bestowed by God upon regeneration.
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And so it has to be tamped down, and I would argue that it takes some work to tamp down. At least I would hope it takes some effort.
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I would hope we have to really kind of strain at it to put aside its pricks to our conscience.
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You see how smoothly it's all going for Jonah. He goes to Joppa, it's a seaport in Western Israel, and sort of like he says, see, the good
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Lord has opened a door for me. Opened doors. He got me this far, the weather's good, the road is clear, no traffic delays, nothing like that.
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I made it to Joppa in record time. The Lord opened the door for me, I must be on the right track. And so here we are, we're in this
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Joppa. We're not told where he was when he first was told by God to arise.
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We can assume it wasn't Joppa, that he had to travel to Joppa, he had to get there. If we allegorize this just a bit, what is
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Joppa to us? Well, it's like Jonah hoped it would be for himself. It's sort of a leaping off point of a journey away from God.
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It is us whenever we try to protect ourselves from this razor sharp cutting edge of God's word. Whenever we squelch our conscience, we have to run off to a
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Joppa, a place where we can get away from it, a place where we can set our plans in motion and ignore the pricks of conscience that,
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Lord willing, we might be feeling. At least he should take some work to tamp it down. Whenever we squelch our own conscience, our
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God -driven conscience, we're running off to Joppa. God's word is a discerner of our thoughts, it's an exposer of our conscience.
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I would argue, if I'm going to allegorize Joppa just a bit, if I can have a little bit of freedom there,
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Joppa is where the rich young ruler resorted to when he turned away from Jesus and left both himself and our
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Lord sad. He stood before the living word of God and heard the will of God and turned away sad from that will.
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He says, no, I can't obey this. For whatever reason, we know it is his riches. For whatever reason, we have.
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And off to Joppa. Where is our Joppa? Where is my Joppa?
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It is removing myself from the fellowship of the saints, for example. Why? Why would we do that?
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Because that one at the church, that one person I know I might run into, has that boldness of spirit to call my sin, sin.
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And that vexes me, and that might turn me back the right direction, which is where I don't want to go.
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Why Joppa? Why would I go to another place? The pastor there doesn't know me. He'll believe whatever
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I tell him. What is Joppa? This is exactly what it is for Jonah. It's the beginning of our escape from God.
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It's where we go when we want to follow our own whims, our own ways, our own agenda, our preconceived determination.
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And none of us can be completely innocent of this. Even believers in the
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Lord Jesus Christ, even those indwelt and inhabited by His Holy Spirit, even you and I who have found ourselves searching everywhere for a path away from God's presence, have this happen to us at times.
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We, like Jonah, we rebel when God's word grates against us. Now, a few weeks ago in this very place, one of the brothers and I met a man who came here and he worshipped with us on Sunday.
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And as we talked to him, we found out that he was having troubles and difficulties with his marriage.
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And he was planning to divorce his wife. And as we talked to him, I'm not going to go into any details, but as we talked to him, we found that he had no biblical grounds for this.
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And we told him so. We told him very clearly the situation allowed for it. It demanded it.
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But he was finding support by misapplying and mangling the meaning, for example, of 1
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Corinthians 7. Again, we don't want to go into details about the whole thing.
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Just understand that this man claimed to be a Christian, told us of his plan, and looking at Jonah 1 through 3,
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I would say, well, that's Joppa. You're going off the wrong direction because God's word clearly says, no, you have no biblical ground for divorce.
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You need to, to Christ's glory and by the power of his spirit, work this out.
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But off to Joppa he went, and I pray he was halted in his Balaam -like madness.
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But this is what we do. And I think all of us have to be at least vigilant about it, if not admit how often we can accomplish this feat of taking
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God's word and looking upon it and say, well, this isn't meeting. Let me just keep working on this verse. Let me parse it out some more. Let me look between the lines.
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Let me find another commentator, someone else who seems to know the Lord well, until I get this opinion
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I want, and I can go this direction that in my heart of hearts, conscience, if you will,
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I know is wrong. It's so easy for us to see
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God's hand delivering us to our desired destination. Like Jonah, wherever he started, when he got to Joppa, could he not have seen that as an open door?
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See, the Lord delivered me here. I get to go west, away from Nineveh. It's so easy.
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Open doors abound. Jonah arrives safe and sound. Open door number one is successfully entered and passed through.
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And so now here he is at the shipping dock. Where is he going to find door number two?
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Well, there it is. It's right where he hoped it would be, a ship loading up its cargo. And he says, where are you going?
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And the answer is the end of the earth. He says, great. That ought to about do it. And we know from later in the chapter in verse 10 that the sailors knew that he was running from God because he told them.
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It was probably here. As he was finding out which ship he could get on, which direction it was going and all that, they probably asked him, what are you doing?
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Where are you going? Who are you? This is probably when that happened. We know in verse 10 that they knew he was running from God.
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We know it would have made sense to those pagan sailors also that each man's deity, each man's
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God only had power in that particular location, in that locale. So they would have understood.
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So has he found an open door? Has he found a way to go to his predetermined direction, away from God's command?
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There's the ship. It has room for him. There's the ship with room for him and it's heading the right direction.
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Away. Away from Nineveh and its unsavory assignment. Away from Israel and the people he was supposed to serve by serving
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God. Away from the conviction that might have come had he met just one righteous Israelite, just one who followed the
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Lord and not the golden calves that were Israel's deity of choice and the conviction that that meeting might have brought him.
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But the door is open. It's an open door. It must be God's will. It must be he who set this ship here going right where I wanted it to go.
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And the only thing left is the fare. So he reaches into his wallet and there it is, just the right amount.
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I read a background commentary about this that said that the fare would have been fairly expensive, not small change.
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And another background commentator said that he probably rented the whole ship in order to get himself onto it.
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And I don't remember quite where he got that from, but he was a pretty well -known commentator. I can't even remember his name.
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The idea being that he needed some money. He needed some funds. He reaches in his wallet, and there it is.
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Hallelujah. He could have said, there's another open door. You know, when
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I was first saved, my wife told me about tithing. I think she gave me about a week, and she told me about that.
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And I was thinking about this, and I was hemming and hawing. I said, well, I am a Christian, and I guess if that's what
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I have to do, but I don't know. Can we talk about this? Let's find some other verses. Isn't there a way we can kind of negotiate here?
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At that moment, I had just gotten the mail out of the mailbox, and we're up in the house, and I'm sorting through it, and there's something from the
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IRS. And you get that letter from the IRS. We're from the government. We're here to help you. Well, that was actually my tax refund check that year.
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And it turned out to be, to the penny, one -tenth of my monthly salary.
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And I kind of surrendered on that point. At the time, I took it for a sign, and I still do, understanding
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God's providence, but that understanding of his providence and the way he works has matured. But I do believe that the
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Lord intended that check to come, and for me to open that envelope exactly when it happened, right when
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I was questioning whether or not we're to donate to the church. Jonah's in the same spot.
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He needs the fare, and he has the fare. The difference is, of course, that he paid the fare in order to continue rebellion.
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The check I had in my hands brought the opposite. It brought some glad obedience. And Jonah, we can notice, didn't stop to pray.
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At least there's no record of it. I mean, if he did, what would he say? Would he pray, O Lord, you are a
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God, you alone, you are a God who is to be obeyed, a holy and righteous God, now gracious Savior, allow your word to me, your servant, your prophet, allow your word to me to fall to the ground.
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Let me, your servant, make your word of no effect. Send another in my place, leave me in peace, or don't send anybody at all to Nineveh, and that'd be better yet.
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What's he going to pray? No, he would no more pray like that, though that might have expressed things accurately.
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But he could no more pray like that than a Christian could pray that God would allow him to call his brother a fool, or to honor him for not reconciling with an offended brother.
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We can't honor those who go against God's will. We can't pray to God to give us strength to disobey
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God. Why did Jonah not pray? It's a risky thing to argue from silences in the scripture, but sometimes it's a resounding silence, and I ask, why did
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Jonah not stop and pray? I've often told people, when they ask if they should do this or not do the other thing, if it's clearly written in the
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Bible, so don't pray about whether or not to do something that's clearly stated do or don't in the Bible. Pray for strength to do or don't.
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Pray for God to give you the wherewithal in your spirit to obey his word. But let's not argue with God when it's clearly laid out for us.
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Why did Jonah not pray? Why do we not pray? Because I think we know the answer would come from heartfelt prayer offered to God in spirit and truth.
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So why no prayer? Because we already know the answer is no. Why do children not ask mommy if they can have a fourth scoop of ice cream?
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Because they know the answer is to say no. And it really puts us in no better position than that kind of a child who doesn't ask, but kind of hides knowing what the parents are going to say.
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We don't pray because the answer is clear in scripture, the answer is no or the answer is yes, and we want yes or we want no.
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So we don't ask. We don't get on our own knees and ask our father.
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We don't go to our brother or sister and lay the case before them because we know we're going to get rebuked.
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So often we ought to pray, not that God would reveal his will. His will is complete. It addresses everything that pertains to life and godliness, says 2
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Peter 1 .3. It has everything we need for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, says 2
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Timothy 3 .16. It'd be like praying to God whether we'd be joining Eve. We'd be saying, did you actually say?
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Knowing good and well, he did. We don't pray because we don't want to.
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We don't want to hear God say that we're wrong. We don't want to hear God say, now get away from Joppa and go back where I told you to be.
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Get away from there and get back into the word and do what it plainly says. So what do we do?
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What does Jonah do? It's off to Tarshish. God having blessed us with all these open doors, one affirmation after another, west, away from Nineveh, away from God's clearly revealed will.
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So why is that so attractive? Why is Tarshish so attractive? I think it's because like Bunyan's vanity fair, it conforms itself to our predetermined desires.
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Tarshish is just like that. That's where I determined I want to go. Tarshish was over 2 ,000 miles away, just west of Gibraltar.
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And for an Israelite, that is the end of the world. So all these open doors, all these many crooked paths made straight,
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God's providence seeming to favor him. The way of duty, the path of gospel obedience is,
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Jesus says, a hard way. There are but few who find it. And Bunyan's dangerous journey reminds us that there are only a few who stay on it.
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Matthew Henry puts it this way. We may be out of the way of duty and yet meet with a favorable gale.
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The ready way is not always the right way. The more modern expression, we used to use this in the audit department at PG &E a lot, is that the easy way out usually leads back in.
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I think Matthew Henry's quite a bit more eloquent than I am though, so I want to say it again. We may be out of the way of duty and yet may meet with a favorable gale.
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The ready way is not always the right way. For Jonah, the easy way out leads back in.
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That little proverb does come true. But first he has ahead of him storms, a great fish, and then a few days and nights to think things through.
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So brethren, beloved in Christ, God has committed his word to us.
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No less than he committed his word to Jonah. He spoke to Jonah. The opening of Hebrews says that God speaks now in this same word.
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The same God by the same Holy Spirit who spoke in that way to Jonah speaks to us today.
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God has given us his word, a full word complete with everything we need. It's an infallible word.
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It has no error. It is inerrant. Everything it teaches is truthful down to the tiniest detail.
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Too often our waywardness is not from ignorance of that word. It's clarity ringing clearly in this confused and muddled and just plain mixed up world.
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It's because we with Jonah don't like what it says. It goes against what we've decided.
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I want a divorce. The word of God says no. I want to withhold. God's word says generosity.
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This unbeliever will surely come to faith after we're married. God's word says do not be unequally yoked. I only wanted to find out if she agrees with me that this other sister was so out of line while Jesus, the very word of God, says go to your brother or sister, just the two of you, and show him or her their fault.
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And all these things are so easy to disobey. If only we want to. We will find a way.
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God says east, we'll find a way to go west. And really all that's needed is that he disagrees with me, the great ego.
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We need to be vigilant about these things. God has spoken to us so clearly, so plainly.
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The direction to Jonah was so simple. Arise, go to Nineveh, cry out against it.
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Period. Even I can understand that. I don't know if I wouldn't do what
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Jonah did, but I couldn't understand it. The opening of Hebrews puts us all in the realm of Jonah 1 .1,
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where Jonah 1 .1 says, Now the word of the Lord came, Hebrews opens with, long ago at many times in many ways
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God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, who is
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Jesus our Lord. Our problem is not usually with open or closed doors.
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We can make those up with the ease of an enchanter. Our problem is usually Jonah's.
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It's not the clarity with which God speaks, but the clarity of our obedience. Jonah believed
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God just might actually forgive Nineveh, and he didn't want to see that. So his running was, in a negative sense, sort of a faithful running.
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He fled because he didn't want to have anything to do with seeing mercy poured out upon those people, a mercy that he thought was very probable and would be very real.
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Jonah believed God might actually forgive Nineveh. He just didn't want to see it. So his running, in the negative sense, is this faithful running.
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Well, let's understand, as we look at this prophet, as we think about him running a different direction and trying to do something different with this mission that was given to him,
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God's ways are always right. If he sent Jonah to Nineveh, then Nineveh, no matter how distasteful it might be to him, is the right place to be.
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And so it is for us. So it is for our duty. Jesus likened the
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Christian life to the daily bearing of a cross. Excuse me. It may be hard.
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It will be hard. But it's good. It's a good and clear word of God that we follow when we do this.
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We don't live with a stoic grin, a grin and bear it kind of grimace. No, as the
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Lord told us, we wash, we dress nicely, we anoint ourselves so that our trials are not used like banners in a parade to call attention to ourselves.
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And we might even say, the closer to a Nineveh that we are called, the more joyous must be the outer appearance.
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With Isaiah, can't we cry out, here I am, send me, and then when sent, go?
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And when God's word calls for obedience, can we not say, with Isaiah, here
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I am, choose me to obey this word, and then, dear ones, to obey it.
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Isaiah said, here I am, send me, and with the psalmist, we can say, I desire to do your will, oh my God.
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When these words are applied to our Lord Jesus Christ, they change us a little bit. He says, I've come to do your will, oh my
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God. We do need to be careful about when we call things open doors.
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That comes from that one reference that Paul makes, that God opened a door for us.
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We went through and he accomplished much. And also, we take it as this normative and constant work of God.
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But let us beware, when it's our agenda, that we're seeing the path along.
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That we're saying, well, I want to go this way, and all of a sudden, I was able to make it. I didn't trip and fall on my face. My car didn't break down.
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There was no traffic. The bridge wasn't too windy to blow me off. I had the right change in my pocket to get the toll.
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And all these things fall into place, and we say, it must be God's will. Oftentimes, it is.
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I don't deny that God works that way. God does open doors. God does make crooked paths straight.
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Let us be sure, as we're proceeding, that we're not doing it for our own purposes. That we've looked to God's word.
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That we've confirmed it through prayer, through the ministry of brothers and sisters in the Lord. That we have confirmation, and then go with confidence.
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When we think of the table that's before us, as we transition from the preaching to the table, think about Jesus, who came to accomplish the
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Father's will. A will of God. A journey
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He gave Him, if you will, that was not going to be at all easy. Jesus came to accomplish
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His Father's will. I've come to do Your will, O my God. What was that will? To save His people.
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And to save them by dying for them on the cross. To save them by feeling in Himself, by having poured out upon Him God's wrath at our sin.
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Jesus came to accomplish His Father's will, and did that with the joy that He would have.
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He was tempted for 40 days to find an open door to a Joppa. The devil enticed Him to flee the cross and to go instead to Tarshish.
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But He rebuked the tempter. He went to Nineveh, to the Nineveh of Golgotha. And there, surrounded by enemies who would make an
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Assyrian blush, He accomplished salvation for us. He did the will of God. Do you think the
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Assyrians were worse than you or me? These Assyrians, we know the end of Jonah. They're going to be forgiven, at least for that time.
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Do you think they were worse than us? Were they less worthy of salvation than we are? No, they are not.
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God handed to His Son a bunch of sinners no better than them.
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And yet Jesus came to do the Father's will and accomplished it at the cross. While we were yet enemies of God, says
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Paul, while we were hating God the way the Assyrians hated God, that's when Jesus came and showed us what?
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The Father. That's when Jesus came and did what? He showed us the love of the Father. That's when
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Jesus, because of the love between Him and the Father, accomplished His will on the cross for us.
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While we were enemies, while we hated God, Jesus died for us.
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And then the Spirit of God comes, remakes a soul, gives you a new heart, gives you faith to believe this gospel, to repent of your sins, and to come to Him.
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Gives you faith so that when we open these elements, when we serve them to you, you know that this is just bread, this is just wine.
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They're nothing more than that. But they represent so much more. The death of our
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Lord Jesus Christ, who told to go to an Assyria and save those lousy
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Ninevites, which is all of us, and He did it. Not west with Jonah, but to the
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Golgotha. Died for our sins, buried, and on the third day raised again.
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We come to this table because our Lord, unlike Jonah in Luke 9 .51, what do we read?
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In the middle of this gospel. And the rest of the gospel has this journey ahead of Him. What did He do? He set His faith to go to Jerusalem.
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He set His faith to go to the cross. He set His faith to go to Golgotha and there to accomplish
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His Father's will. We are here today and we will celebrate the table in a moment.
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Why? Because Joppa or Tarshish never entered our Lord's mind.
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Only the Father's will. Go west, are you mad? No. My people's redemption, the ones that God gave me, is this way.
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And not for a trace, not for a moment, did Jesus Christ ever think of anything else.
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No alternatives, no other directions. No options. We're here this afternoon to come to this table because of that.
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Only the will of His Father, no matter what it took, entered into Jesus' mind and thereby
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He saved our eternal souls. Amen? Let us prepare for the table once again with song.