Salvation Belongs To The Lord

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.

Jonah’s Call, Spurgeon’s Conversion, and the Point of the Sermon

So we're in Jonah now, chapter 1, verse 17. And I want to begin our time, I haven't done it in a while, with a bit of a story. So we're going to travel back in time to January 13, 1850. January 13, 1850, there was a young man, a 15-year-old boy, who was out walking from his home to church when he was caught in a terrible blizzard, probably comparable to some of the blizzards that we see here in Edmonton.

And he was walking down the street, down a street called Artillery Street in Colchester, England. And because of this raging winter storm, the pummeling snow, and the wind that was bearing down on him and the town, he decided it would be best to turn into a little Methodist church to find refuge from the storm.

And so when he entered into the building, because it was Sunday and the church was gathered for Lord's Day worship, he decided that it would be best for him to just stay put in this church. And rather than to go to his own church, he would just participate in this Methodist service.

And so he sat down amongst all of the Lord's people. And a lay preacher, an untrained Methodist preacher, stood up behind the pulpit and he turned in his Bible to Isaiah chapter 45 and verse 22. And as he turned there, he read it, where God says to the prophet Isaiah, he says this, Isaiah 45, 22, "'Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth, for I am God, and there is no other.

Turn to me.'". And this was a providential text for this young man because leading up to this storm and this occurrence, he felt that he was in a state of agony over his own sin. His conscience was stinging with the guilt of his own sin and shame before a holy God.

He knew that he was a sinner, that he was at odds with his Creator, but he did not know how to be made right with God. And so he felt as he walked into this Methodist church that he was a hopeless case.

How could he be right with a holy God when he was so low and wretched and despisable? But as he sat there, this eccentric Methodist preacher preached this text from Isaiah 45, "'Turn to me and be saved.'".

And maybe what you might expect if you've heard much about the Methodists and maybe the Methodists of old, he pointed at this young man in his seat and he said, "'You, young man, you look miserable. Look, look, look to Christ.

Look to Jesus Christ even now and be saved.'". And at that very moment as that 15-year-old boy sat in the pew in some obscure church on Artillery Street on the eastern edge of England, the boy saw Jesus Christ.

Not with his eyes, but he saw Jesus Christ, he said, with his heart. That he saw that Jesus Christ, for the first time ever, was the only Savior of the world. That the clouds of confusion rolled back.

That the darkness of sin and despair was gone. And for the first time in his life, this young man, this boy, knew what it meant to be completely forgiven of his sins. And as that young boy, after the church service ended, he went home, he walked through the snow, and he said that it was as if every snowflake reasoned with him and preached to him about the pardon that he had found in Christ.

Though his sins were as scarlet, though they had burned red like crimson just a few hours earlier, creation now preached to him and he saw that before God, he had become, just like we were singing in that last song, he had become white as the driven snow.

As perfect and pristine as each snowflake that fell from the sky. Now, does anyone know who that young boy was? Do I have a nod of heads anywhere? That young boy, he later became a household name in England and throughout the world.

He grew up, and we now know him as Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers. And years later, he wrote, he reflected on that anguish of soul that he experienced when he was just a young man prior to his conversion.

And he described it this way. Maybe this was to describe some of you in this room. He said, I would rather pass through seven years of the most wearisome pain and the most languishing sickness. I would rather have pain or sickness than I would ever again want to pass through that terrible discovery of the evil of sin.

Spurgeon knew what it was like to feel like the chief of sinners, to be the most wretched of men. God visited Charles Spurgeon with such conviction of sin that it haunted him at every hour of every day.

Now, you know that we like, we appreciate Spurgeonisms. I know at least Steve and I do. We often laugh about it. And this is something that really only Spurgeon, I think, would recount. But it's no exaggeration.

Spurgeon said that he would often go to bed, and he would lay in bed and try to fall asleep, but he would lose sleep because it would be as if each of the Ten Commandments would rise up and appear before him in front of God and bear witness and point to Spurgeon and say, you have broken me.

And as he prepared to go to bed, it felt as if every command of God he had violated, and he stood before God condemned. But when God providentially brought that raging blizzard, when it blew so hard that it drove Spurgeon into that small Methodist church, Spurgeon said this.

He said that he learned for the first time. He said, you are a great sinner, but he, that is Christ, is a greater Savior. Do not say that you have matched Christ. Do not say that you have overmatched Christ.

Come, Goliath sinner, the son of David, can conquer you and save you yet. And so, in the life of Charles Spurgeon, we find a man who was a great sinner, a chief of sinners, and yet found a greater Savior in Jesus Christ.

Jonah’s Descent into Death and the Great Fish

Now, why do I begin with this particular story? I open with this story because I think it perfectly aligns with the theme of our text today in the second chapter of Jonah. As we enter this second chapter of Jonah, we see that God, by way of review, had called Jonah to go to Israel's enemies to preach a message of repentance for the forgiveness of the Ninevites' sins, but he refused.

So he got into a boat to sail to the opposite end of the known world, and when he did, God hurled a great tempest upon the sea. Last week, we heard from our brother Steve that the sailors, these experienced, likely Phoenician sailors, were so desperate that they eventually and reluctantly cast Jonah overboard to calm the raging sea, and that God's righteous anger was abated when Jonah entered that water.

God's wrath was dealt with. And today, like Charles Spurgeon in the snowstorm, now, we're going to find Jonah sinking into despair. Jonah spends all of his time in this chapter in the water, or in a creature within the water.

He had grieved God by his own rebellion. He had transgressed every word that God had spoken to him, and he was near death as he sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. And yet the story, as we know, doesn't end here.

To the contrary, the second chapter of Jonah, we'll see, becomes a psalm of thanksgiving to God, as Jonah cries out to God, and as God saves Jonah in the most remarkable fashion. And so today, we discover with Jonah the same truth that Spurgeon discovered in the midst of the storm, that we are sinners, that Jonah was a great sinner, that we are sinners.

But God is a greater Savior. And that's what this passage preaches. The main point of this text, as we will see, is that it paints a striking picture of the perilous consequences of sin. We're going to be reminded of the exceedingly destructive nature of sin, how sin makes us exceedingly miserable.

But our text doesn't leave us there. Our text also shows us God's great willingness to save. And children, I want you to pay special attention to this. God's great willingness to save, and God's sovereign saving ability, that he can rescue any rebellious sinner who turns to him in repentance.

And so this text, if we rightly understand it, is far more than just a man in a big fish. This text is about giving us hope that we are never beyond God's sovereign ability to save. So, let's turn in our Bibles then to Jonah chapter 1 and verse 17.

And what I'm going to do, like we have done for the last couple of weeks, it just seemed best in the structure. We're going to do an exposition of the text. You'll see that in the insert in your bulletin.

And then we're going to draw out four lessons that we learned from this particular text. So, let's look first at Jonah chapter 1 and verse 17. It says this, And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.

And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Now, when people think about Jonah, this is what they picture, right? The blue whale in the water with Jonah in his stomach. We don't know for certain if this was a whale, but what we see is this, that it says there that the Lord appointed a great fish.

We're going to see that word appointed four times in the book of Jonah. This is the first of those four times. The remaining times, we're going to see those in chapter 4, verses 6, 7, and 8. And that word appointed is the Hebrew word manna.

You might recognize it because it has the same root as the word that we read about manna being provided to the nation of Israel in the wilderness. And what it means, it means to appoint, or to provide, or even to predestine.

And the message that is being conveyed with the use of this word appointed is this, that the repeated use of the word shows that God is sovereign over every circumstance in this book. God was sovereign over the command to go to Nineveh.

God was sovereign over the storm at sea. God is now, we're going to see, sovereign over all of his creation, even the big fish in the ocean that he is going to put at the right place in the right time to save Jonah.

And we're told that God appointed this great fish to swallow up Jonah. And that the meaning of this word, sometimes you'll hear purists and they say, well, it was definitely a fish, it wasn't a whale.

And the reality is we actually do not know because the word that is used there simply means sea creature in the generic form. And so it could be like Noah likes to watch videos with Goliath groupers, these giant fish that I suppose could swallow up a man.

It could be a giant fish like that. Some have speculated it could be a shark. Even others have speculated that it could have been a sperm whale because of their size. A sperm whale can swallow a giant squid in one gulp.

And so apparently they can swallow a man in one gulp as well. But here we see that Jonah was in this great fish. And we're told for three days and three nights. Now some liberal scholars, I always like to give you a bit of an approach on the liberal scholar view, some would say that Jonah spent three days and three nights in an inn called the great fish.

That it could not possibly make sense that Jonah was in a great fish. He had to be in a hotel that was named the great fish. But of course, as our sister nods or shakes her head, it's nonsensical. We have every reason to believe based on the words in this text that this was a literal sea creature or giant fish that Jonah went into.

And kids, you might appreciate this, that there are actually multiple accounts of fishermen or sailors who have spent time inside of whales and big fish in the course of their travels. And I looked at some of the history.

There was one man just as recently as last year who was partially swallowed by a humpback whale just off of Massachusetts, although it was just for a short period of time. But if we go back to the most sensational story, there was a man named James Bartley.

Now this is a contested story today, and I readily acknowledge that. But history tells us that in the 1800s, there was a man named James Bartley who was an apprentice seaman on the South Atlantic Ocean.

And in February 1891, newspapers and a number of scientific journals published articles about one of Bartley's experiences at sea. He was on a fishing boat in the South Atlantic Sea when he attempted to harpoon an 80-foot sperm whale.

And as they were trying to bring the sperm whale in, it crashed on the boat and knocked a number of men out of the boat, and James Bartley was consumed by the sperm whale. Now the harpoon was still in the sperm whale, and so they used a winch to draw the sperm whale back up onto another boat, and they cut open the sperm whale, and there inside the sperm whale was James Bartley.

His skin had been bleached, he lost all of his hair, and he was blind, but he had survived. And we're told at least by history's account that he spent the next 18 years working as a blind cobbler before he died at the age of 39.

Some would say that he spent as long as 15 hours inside the whale, some said that he spent 36 hours in the whale. Now I don't know for certain how or how many of those details are true or accurate, except to say that what we do know is that in this text there was a man, a historical man named Jonah, just like Daniel who went to the lion's den, just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that went into Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.

Jonah was cast into the sea, and God ordained that a sea creature would preserve his life by swallowing him whole, where he would spend three days and three nights inside that great creature. And we're going to look at some of the significance of those three days and three nights in a little bit.

But God, who has preserved many of his people's lives through the most unlikely or impossible circumstances, was able to preserve Jonah in the stomach of that great fish. It's written in Scripture. It is inspired.

It's historically accurate. If God can save Daniel, if he can save Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, if he can raise Christ from the grave after three days, he can put a man in the belly of a great fish.

And that's exactly what he did. And then chapter 2 tells us how he responded. The entire chapter, chapter 2, is actually a psalm or a prayer of thanksgiving to God. And I want you to note this with me.

It's really interesting. It's not a psalm or a prayer of thanksgiving that God would rescue him from the great fish, from this great sea creature, but it's a psalm and a prayer of thanksgiving that God had saved Jonah through the great fish.

It was actually the great fish that was providentially provided, ordained by God to save Jonah when he went into the water. Jonah rightly understood that the great fish was not further punishment from God, but was in fact God's providential rescue plan from death by drowning.

God ordained that this fish would be in that exact spot in the sea, that it would find him out, that it would swallow him up, that it would spit him out on dry land. And if we were to work our way through this psalm, we actually learn something of what happened between the time that Jonah was cast into the sea and the time when he was rescued by means of the great fish.

That's what chapter 2 is all about, in fact. That at the beginning, at the end, we see Jonah in this great fish, but all of the psalm in chapter 2 is his recounting of what happened before the great fish swallowed him up.

And so what we're going to do, we're not going to read it again, but I'm just going to work through verse by verse, and we're going to unpack a little bit of this text. So verse 2, we're told that Jonah was cast into the sea, and for the first time in the whole account, we see that Jonah approaches God in prayer, that he called out to God in distress.

But the one thing we need to note is that it wasn't immediate. We're going to find, actually, as we see the psalm unfold, that Jonah held out, even then, to the last possible moment before he cried out to God.

And so let's look at this together. We see that Jonah, in verse 2, that he cried out from the belly. It says, "...from the belly of Sheol I cried out.". Now, in the Old Testament, we often read about Sheol.

In the New Testament, we hear a lot about hell, sometimes about Hades, but in the Old Testament, we hear a great deal about Sheol. And what Sheol was understood by the average Old Testament reader, by the Jew in Israel, was this, that Sheol was the place of the dead.

That's where people went when they died. In some cases, we would see that there's a differentiation between Sheol and Hades, that there was a place for those who were good or understood to not be wicked and immediately deserving of punishment, and then those who were cast into Hades, a place that was worse and for the worst people.

But Sheol is described in the Old Testament, if we were to survey it really briefly, as being below the surface of the earth. Immediately, that idea of the underworld, where people went when they died.

Lamentations 3 .6 tells us that it was a dark place. Job 17 .16 describes those who go down to Sheol as those who descend into the dust. Psalm 94 .17 says that Sheol is deafeningly silent. That one of the characteristics of Sheol is that there is no sound.

You are alone. You see nothing, you smell nothing, you taste nothing, you hear nothing. Isaiah 38 tells us that Sheol has gates that keep individuals from leaving. In the Old Testament, as God's progressive revelation unfolded, Sheol was understood as the intermediate place where people would go to await the coming judgment.

And what Jonah tells us here is that he felt himself descending into Sheol. It was as if he was as good as dead. He was a helpless rebel waiting to drown and then to be judged by Almighty God. And so he sunk deeper and deeper until in verse 4 we see that he felt as if he had been banished from the presence of the Lord.

He said, I am driven away from your sight. He felt that his iniquities had made a separation between him and God like we would read in Isaiah 59 .2. In verses 5 and 6 of this psalm, we read that Jonah descended to the very bottom of the sea.

Now where do I get that, the very bottom of the sea? Jonah was not cast into the sea, we would understand, where he immediately floated to the surface. I know that when I was a child and my father taught me how to swim, it was a rather graphic experience.

I'm not sure if I've ever told this story. For most of you, you probably had a lovely childhood where you took swimming lessons and you learned in a pool. I remember my dad, one evening he decided I was going to learn how to swim after supper.

I'd only ever swam in my life jacket before. And so on this particular occasion, I knew what he had planned and so I ate my dinner as fast as I could. I excused myself from the table and I hid in the bushes.

We lived on an acreage with four acres and we had a dugout that was about 20 feet deep and it was stocked with fish and a dock that went out onto the dugout. And so I hid in the bushes as my dad looked for me and he called me and he threatened and eventually I took his threat seriously and so he picked me up.

I was maybe Elise's age, maybe a little bit younger than that. And he picked me up by my swimming trunks and by my arm and he walked me to the edge of the dock and he just threw me into the water. And by God's grace, I learned that when you fall in the water like that, you tend to float or at least bob up and down if you have the right posture.

But this is not what happened to Jonah. He did not get thrown overboard and then just bob up and down in the water as we might expect where the great fish then swallowed him at the surface. No, verses 5 and 6 say that Jonah was cast into the sea and then he went down.

He went down into the water. He went down further and further until he found himself entangled in the seaweeds at the base, it says, at the root of the mountains where one sea floor meets the other at the bottom.

Jonah descended to the very bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and he felt as if he was enclosed by the very gates of hell. Verse 7 tells us that Jonah began to lose consciousness, that he was fainting, he was fading away.

But at the last moment, when his oxygen levels were all but depleted, Jonah remembered the goodness and the steadfast love of God. And in that moment, he prayed to God, well, God could still be found.

And in contrast to the deaf, the dumb, the mute, the vain idols of those pagan sailors on that boat that we read about in chapter 1, God acted and he brought up Jonah's life from the pit. And he did that by means we know of the great fish.

He sent the great fish to rescue Jonah. And then in verse 9, as Jonah sat in the belly of that great sea creature, he did what he should have done at the beginning. Interestingly enough, he did what the pagan sailors did.

In chapter 1, in verse 16, if you look back there, what did they do? It says that the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows. And that's exactly what Jonah did in chapter 9.

He said, but I, with the voice of thanksgiving, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will pay. And so that was likely a promise that when he got out of that great fish, he would make sacrifice to God, and the vow was likely that he would go to Nineveh, and that he would preach that message of repentance to the Ninevites.

And then in the end of verse 9, 9b, we could say, we find the climax of the whole psalm. The climax of the whole psalm reads like this. He says, I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord. Jonah confesses to God what every saint through history has and will confess, that salvation belongs to the Lord.

It's neither man nor creature, but God alone who saves. It is God alone who set his saving purposes on the Ninevites. It was God alone who had cast Jonah into the sea. It was God alone who appointed and foreordained Jonah's rescue.

Salvation belongs to God, and He alone decides who will be saved, how they will be saved, when they will be saved, where they will be saved, and why they will be saved. God alone has the exclusive power to bring about salvation based on His own divine initiative alone.

And then verse 10, when Jonah recognized all of this, the fish vomited Jonah onto dry land, perhaps, some speculate, near Joppa, where he first set out to go across the Mediterranean Sea to Tarshish. As one commentator puts it, and I appreciate the word usage, they said, it was an unconventional and very unceremonious return to land.

But it was a return to land nonetheless. Jonah had nearly gone to the place of the dead, where he would have been judged and rightly condemned for his rebellion against God. But at the last possible moment, Jonah cried out to God, and he was saved, spit out on dry land, and put back into God's service.

What an interesting chapter in the Bible. Now, you might read that, maybe in your own devotional time, in your family worship time, and ask yourself, how does this apply? What can we possibly learn from Jonah's time in the sea, and then his time in the great fish?

I would suggest that we can learn at least four. I'm going to give us four lessons from this psalm in Jonah chapter 2. And so we'll briefly look at them together. I anticipated my voice would be going, and it sort of is.

So they're briefer points, perhaps unusual, but there are good things to learn here. So the first lesson that we learn from this text is this. Jonah's experience. You'll see this in your bulletin insert.

Jonah's experience demonstrates the destructive and miserable effects of sin. Jonah's experience demonstrates the destructive and miserable effects of sin. Pay attention to this. When Jonah set his heart to disobey God, he set off on a course to demonstrate for our good, for all of us, the absolute corrupting misery that comes with willful, presumptuous sin against God.

Jonah is the personification of the old maxim that sin always over-promises and always under-delivers. He is a living representation of that. For whatever reason, Jonah felt that he would be better, that it would be better, that he would be happier, that he would be more content to disobey rather than to obey God's command.

Jonah believed that for a time, the wages of sin, instead of being death, would be happiness, or at least justice, as he thought, for the Ninevites. But note with me, brother and sister, what was on the other side of Jonah's sin.

What we see with Jonah in the boat, and then in the water, and then in the fish, is that the same destructive and miserable effects that we always find in the wake of sin were in the wake of Jonah's sin.

His sin had separated him from God. He no longer felt that he could pray, or even more dangerous, he no longer felt the desire to pray. He no longer desired God. He found himself descending into the abyss where the very bars of Sheol would keep him from God forever.

He descended into a kind of spiritual depression of the gravest degree. I would define Jonah's time in Jonah 1 -2 as hopeless, helpless, useless, godless. Sin had made him miserable, and he had become the object of God's divine and righteous disapproval.

Now, beloved saints, I want you to hear this with me. You know all of this already, don't you? It's kind of like I'm preaching to the choir. Shane, tell us something that we haven't already heard. But I want to point out to you that, in fact, you do not yet know this fully.

That often it is the case, if we're honest with ourselves, we must admit that we continue to believe the foolish lies that sin promises, that sin will somehow bring us happiness. That it will bring us contentment.

That it will bring us a sense of purpose, or pleasure, or whatever it is on the other side. Since the fall in Genesis 3, Satan has been deceiving people into thinking that sin will make our lives better, not worse.

Remember, he said, you will have knowledge of good and evil. You will be like God. Surely, you will not die. He made promises of knowledge, and of understanding, and of happiness, and of purpose. But at what cost?

At the cost of death. And regrettably, Satan and his minions have been very successful in this campaign of teaching or reinforcing in our hearts that there is some benefit to be gained from sin. Kids, pay attention to this.

Sin promises us happiness, but it delivers despair, continuously, in the long run, doesn't it? Sin promises us fulfillment, but it delivers us emptiness. Sin promises us purpose, but delivers futility.

Sin promises us ease, and delivers a wasted life. Sin promises friends, and fame, and popularity, but delivers alienation from God and man. Sin promises us the good life, but delivers death every single time.

I remember when I first started, when I was in training with the Edmonton police, and they sat us down, and one of the things that they said, if you remember the movie The Matrix, there was the red pill and the blue pill moment, where they had to decide if they were going to go back to their ignorant existence, or if, I can't remember what color the pill was, if they would take the other pill, they would see, in that language, how deep the rabbit hole went.

Just how dark and depraved things actually were, and are. And I was reading a book, it's a book actually that we have in our church library, by Charles Leiter, Justification and Regeneration, and he said that if we were to go just last night, Saturday night in Edmonton, and have a view of all of the evil, and the sin, and the wickedness that was committed just in our city last night, we would not be able to sleep for days, or weeks.

Just the depraved consequences of sin. And yet, dear saint, you and I, in the old man, still believe that that sin serves some purpose in our lives. Some of us in this room, without a doubt, I believe, you believe that the fleeting pleasures of looking at explicit photos and videos online will bring you happiness.

But in the end, and you know it, every time without fail, that fleeting pleasure gives way to bitterness and shame. Some of you in this room believe that if you give your best time and energy to something else, or someone else other than God, even for just a short time, your sinful idolatry will be worthwhile in the end.

But in the end, you will reap only that which vain idols can give, the same thing that it could give those sailors in the boat, nothing at all. Some of you in this room believe that the world has more to offer you than the God who made this world.

You have become friends with this world at the cost of enmity with God, and you will reap the wind, rather than an eternal relationship with God himself. Brother or sister, what is the lie that you believe in relation to the besetting sins in your life?

What kind of promise of happiness or pleasure is it offering that you go back to it again and again? Believers, I want to embolden you in your battle for holiness. I want to help you hasten on your sanctification.

And if you're to do that, you need to make it a point to remember that your happiness in this life is directly correlated to your holiness in this life. If I were to give you the mission, Noah, if I were to give you the mission to go out into the world and find the happiest man in the whole wide world, what I would know with certainty is that when you found that man, I could take that man here and bring him here and show you a man who has devoted his life, who has made it his great aim to consecrate himself fully to God and to his service.

Susanna, sister, if you were to go out and look for the woman, the happiest and most fulfilled woman in the world, I could tell you with certainty that in that woman I could show you a woman who is the most devoted to God, the most submissive to God and to His Word.

What we need to understand, brother and sister, is that if we are to be happy, happiness comes not with sin and with the fleeting pleasures of sin that are here for a moment and then gone, but happiness comes with Christ-likeness.

It comes with devotion to God and to His will and to His purposes. Probably the happiest man in the whole world and perhaps the most, I want to say embittered, but that's not the word, the most grieved man in the whole world was the Lord Jesus Christ.

We must make it our aim to be holy. Now, unbeliever, if you're an unbeliever in this room, Jonah's issue is your issue. The crux of your problem is that you esteem sin more than God. You have believed the lie that disregard for God will bring you happiness, that it will bring you lasting joy.

But this blasphemous thought, when it's wed with unbelief in the person and work of Jesus Christ, takes you further and further away from God and further and further away from true happiness. Jesus Christ takes away the sin of the world.

But if you're an unbeliever today, you are professing that you do not want Christ because He threatens to take away the very thing that you cherish most. But I want you to see the foolishness and the misery of sin.

Sin, if you are in love with sin today, even if you wouldn't use those words, if you live for sinful and fleeting pleasures today, let me tell you, it is insanity. I recently read a story about a man, a pastor in the 1800s.

His name was Henry White, and he ministered in London, England. And on one particular night, he was in bed, he was about to fall asleep, and he heard a knock at the door, a frantic knock at the door. And so he went to the door, and a woman met him there and said that her husband was on his deathbed.

He was about to die. And if Henry White could just come and share the gospel with him and pray with him. And so Henry White got on his clothing. He went to the woman's house. As he walked up to the woman's house, he noted that it was really a humble home.

It was the kind of house that a poor person would live in. It wasn't well kept. It was dirty. It was a slum-like house. But as he entered in, and he saw this man who appeared to be about 40 years old laying in bed, he noticed that there was something odd about the house.

That while it was a very humble house on the outside, on the inside it was full of jewelry and clothing and fancy silver dishes on the table. And as he started to put it together, he thought to himself, this man must be a thief.

That must be his trade. And Henry White was exactly right. That this man had been a lifelong thief. That had been his vocation. To steal from other people and to keep it and to sell it and to make his living through the thieving from other people.

So as he kneeled down, he made it his objective that he was going to minister to this man. And so he shared the gospel with him, how Christ had died for sinners. And he offered to pray with him. And as he spoke with this 40-year-old man, one of the things that he noticed as he got down on his knees, that the man's face lit up as he came to kneel next to him.

And he looked at where the man's gaze had gone. And the man's gaze had gone to Henry White's pocket watch. He had a pocket watch with a gold chain that attached it. And the man was fixed on his pocket watch.

And Henry White disregarded that. He prayed with the man. He pleaded with him that he would repent and believe in Christ. And after he finished praying with this man, he realized as he looked at the man that the man had died in the midst of his prayer.