Transcript
A (0:03)
Welcome to Gospel and Life. During January, we're inviting our listeners to consider becoming a Gospel and Life Monthly partner. Monthly partners are an important part in helping us to plan for how we can be the most effective in reaching people all over the world with the gospel. If you'd like to become a monthly Partner, just visit gospelinlife.com partner that's gospelandlife.com partner what comes to mind when you hear about the Ten Commandments? For many people, they bring up feelings of guilt and shame, or they seem like a list of rules that are impossible to follow. In today's sermon, Tim Keller shows us how God didn't give us the Ten Commandments to crush us with unattainable moral standards, but to point us to Jesus Christ, the only one who perfectly fulfills God's law.
B (0:57)
Jonah 1:1 10 But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, o Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live. But the Lord replied, have you any right to be angry? Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade, and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a vine that made it and made it grow over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort. And Jonah was very happy about the vine. But it dawned the next day at dawn. The next day God provided a worm which chewed the vine so that it withered when the sun rose. God provided a scorching east wind and the sun blazed on Jonah's head, so he grew faint. He wanted to die and said, it would be better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, do you have a right to be angry about the vine? I do, he said. I am angry enough to die. But the Lord said, you have been concerned about this vine. Though you did not tend it or make it grow, it sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city? This is the word of the Lord. 1974 Patty Hearst Remember 19 years old, millionaire heiress or Heiress of a fortune, the Hearst newspaper fortune, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, I remembered. And within just a few weeks, her life was so empty that within a few weeks they were able to take the cuffs off of her and they were able to take off the ropes and to take off the guards. And she joined them and she took the name Tanya. And she was involved in a bank robbery in which a woman was killed. By the way, it was a woman, a Seventh Day Adventist woman, who was just depositing the weekly offerings at the bank. And that group blew her away. And what was so intriguing about this is that Patty Hearst became a co conspirator in her own kidnapping. She became enamored with her jailers, and after a while, they could take the cuffs off because her idolization of her jailers was her chain. And when anybody tried to free her or liberate her, she sneered and snarled at them. She was a co conspirator in her own kidnapping. Jonah was an extremely prominent religious figure in his day. He might have been the leading prophet and preacher and religious figure in Israel. And when we meet him here, he has just gone to Nineveh, which was the New York City of the era. It was the capital of the world. It was the largest city of the largest and most important empire in the whole world, Assyria. And he goes there and he's done a preaching campaign. And the entire city has turned to God in repentance, led by the king himself. And that's what we read in chapter three. And certainly we would expect that at the end of chapter three, at verse it only goes to verse ten. But we would have expected that Jonah, the book of Jonah, would have ended at chapter three, verse 11. And chapter three, verse 11, would. Would have read like this. And Jonah went home to his own home, rejoicing, right? But instead we read verse one that says he was exceedingly angry. Now, here's a question. What had gotten Jonah, this great prophet, so tied up in knots, so messed up inside that he is suicidal? He says, I am ready to die. I don't have any purpose in life anymore. What could have so distorted his vision that he. That he couldn't rejoice in this great triumph, not just of the kingdom of God, but of his own career? What had this man so controlled and tied up in knots? Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. But just for a moment, let's realize what the principle is, because this. We're not here today to talk about Jonah. We're here to talk about you and me. Jonah was a co conspirator in his own kidnapping. When God came to him a couple of times to try to liberate them, liberate Jonah, he sneered and he snarled at him. In all of our lives we have little lords, small l, little gods, pseudo gods, idols, things that we worship. And we're bound by those things. They control our lives. And we're co conspirators on our own kidnapping. We're bound by them. And if somebody tries to come in and liberate us from them or talk to us about them, we snarl at them. Because, you see, the fact that we're enamored with them, it's our very adoration, our idolization of them is what binds us. God in his grace seeks to liberate us. And he seeks to liberate us with the most liberating of all the commandments of the Ten Commandments, which is what we're looking at today. The first. I am the Lord thy God. He says, thou shalt have no other gods before me. What he's saying there is. I'm the only God there is. All others are imposters. My yoke is easy, my burden is light. And the yoke of any other God is bondage. Or as John Donne put it. And we printed this little classic quote by the Christian minister, John Donne, in the front of the Bulletin. Take me to you imprison me. He's talking to God. Take me to you, imprison me. For I, except you, enthrall me, never shall be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. That's what the first commandment's about. If you have any other gods before God, and we all do to that degree that we have got other gods before him, we're in bondage, co conspirators with our own jailers. Now let's take a look at Jonah. I said let's step away from Jonah for a minute, but now let's look at him. Because Jonah is a case study. And those of you from law school, from business school, from medical school, a lot of different schools use case studies. It's one of the best ways to learn principles. So let's use Jonah used his case study. And let's look at it and tear it apart. Let's break it down. First thing we see is in the first three verses. Though Jonah does not yet detect the idol controlling his life, his heart idol, we can detect it. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord O Lord, is not this what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee away to Tarshish the first time you called me to go to Nineveh. And I knew you were a gracious and compassionate God. Slow to anger, abounding in love, who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life. It's better for me to die than to live. What is going on? Let's recap the setting if you want to get the hang of what John has done. He has gone to the greatest city in the world, the mortal enemy of Israel. Here he, an Israelite prophet, goes and calls everyone to repentance and to turn to the God of Israel. And they do. And the king sends out a royal decree and calls everyone from the poorest to the richest to bow the knee to God. Now, if you want to get the hang of what that kind of accomplishment that was, you have to recognize it would be something like if the mayor and the City Council of New York called everybody into Times Square for a prayer meeting and said, we've got to repent for the sin of this city. Let's get our down on our knees. Are you getting the hang of the accomplishment? Are you getting the hang of what actually happened? But Jonah is ready to slit his wrists. Why? Jonah was proud of his nationality. He was proud of his people. He was proud of his heritage. But the pride in his people had gone wrong, you see, because he was proud of his people. He was deeply concerned for the national security of Israel. And yet this good thing, this love for his people had become racism. Because what is he complaining about? He's saying, I knew that this might happen, Lord God. I knew you're the kind of God that relents from sending calamity. I wanted these dirty Assyrians to be wiped off the map. And I was afraid of this. I knew that you have this bad habit of forgiving people. Look at it. I knew you were a compassionate God. This is the reason I get so upset the first time. You see, his natural and good love for his own people had become racism because he wanted the annihilation of his enemies, not the rehabilitation of his enemies. And I'll tell you what had happened. What had happened was it had become racism because that love for God had turned into an idol. He now got his identity from his Jewishness, his identity from his national heritage. Because when he says, I am angry enough to die, that means what? It means that his real purpose in life was gone. Now that Israel's national security was not secure. He says now that's the thing obviously he was living for, because he says now, my life has no meaning, I have no purpose. I'm ready to go, I'm ready to die. You see, even though he had said, I believe in God, he served God as long as he could use God for his real purpose. And his real purpose, his real goal, his real God was the interest, the political interests of Israel. And as long as serving God fit in with that goal, he looked very religious. But as soon as God called him to do something that went against his real goal and his real God, suddenly Jonah screamed out what God was telling him and he said, I won't do it. Now, friends, we've all got those screens. We've all got those screens. What is it? What are we talking about? If there's anything in your life that you say, lord, I believe in you, but I've got to have that to be happy. And if you don't give me that, our relationship is negotiable. Now, most of us are hiding from ourselves and we're so subtle about this that we can't even say that very consciously. I've heard people say it right in front of me. I mean, you know, and most people know you never say that in front of a professional Christian type, but a lot of you won't even say it in front of yourselves. And yet you're saying it. We have certain non negotiable things in our lives. We must have, we must have a certain level of financial security or we must have a certain level of approval and popularity or we must have a certain level of certainty. We have to have those things. And if those things are not there, or if those things are even threatened, we experience a loss of meaning in life, right? We start to say, what am I really living for? We experience that emptiness, that loss of meaning in life, which shows that those are really our gods, not him. We say, I am angry, yes, I'm angry enough to die. Now, my friends, everybody's idols are different. There's an infinite variety. And some people have asked a great question. Where do they come from? Now, not tonight, but the next couple weeks in the evening service, I'm actually going to get into that in some detail. Some people say, well, our idols are fixed from our childhood. And by the way, I'm not sure that's wrong. But the only thing we've got to talk about here is the Bible says that we've all got them. Romans chapter one says everybody, everybody lifts up something created and gives glory to it instead of the Creator. And that means somewhere, for whatever reasons, for all sorts of complex reasons that probably have to do with heredity and environment and that sort of thing, we've latched onto certain things deep down, at some level of our being. We say to ourselves, if I have that, I'll be safe. If I achieve that, I can feel good about myself. If I achieve that, I can have a worthwhile life. And if I don't have these things, I'm angry enough to die. And you see, our idols are very different. Very different. You nervous types, you need certainty and you can't live with risk. And when the risk comes in you, you lose everything because you've got to have certainty. You relational types, you've got to have approval, and you can't live with disapproval. You don't mind uncertainty as long as you got people there telling you, I love you. You achiever types, you, you can't live with failure. You don't mind people not liking you as long as you know you've achieved. You see? And we look down our noses at each other. If we don't have, if the other person has a different idol than us. When people come into the Christian faith, there's a. If they cross the line and they receive Christ as savior, they begin to see what is expected of a Christian. And it's so interesting to see how different people's reactions are to the things the Bible requires. One of the first things you learn, the Bible says, is you must give of your substance to the Lord's work and to the needs of people. You must tithe. It's fascinating to see that some people come on in and when they read that, they say, that's a great idea. You're right, that's good, I'll do it. And other people have apoplexy. Then there's another thing that the Bible says, and that is Jesus says, if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father. In other words, you should be willing to speak up, to open your mouth, to identify yourself as a Christian to your friends. You should speak up for him. Some people, they become Christians, they get in and they read that. And some people say, that's right, that's good, I'll do it. And other people have apoplexy. And very often they're different people than the ones who had apoplexy about the tithing. And we look down our nose at each other. But is just idols. Our idols are different. Don't you see? Certain things control us and they all are different. But whatever our God is, as this great quote by Becky Pippard says, that God controls us.