The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because their wickedness has confronted Me.” However, Jonah got up to flee to Tarshish from the Lord’s presence. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went down into it to go with them to Tarshish, from the LORD’s presence. Jonah 1:1-3 HCSB
You may look in your mirror and think God made you to simply decorate this earth. You may think that you are very wise and God made you so that others could be amazed by your wisdom. But my friend, no matter how good looking and/or intelligent you may be God made you for a specific purpose. You see, precious, it’s not all about you. It’s all about Him. We need to be in His presence.
Our pastor spoke yesterday about six reasons why God doesn’t hear our prayers. If you want to hear the whole sermon, go to Grace Fellowship Baptist Church’s Facebook page and you can view it in its entirety. But one thing he said is that God won’t answer our prayers unless we surrender to Him.
Most of us learned about Jonah being swallowed by the big fish when we were young children in Sunday School. Jonah was given a specific job to do by God and he didn’t want to do it. So instead, he ran away. Note our Scripture passage says he tried to flee from the LORD’s presence. Now let me stop here and say that we never want to be outside of God’s presence. We need God in our lives. With Him we have no hope. The worst thing about hell won’t be the heat and the torment, it will be the absence of God’s presence.
We all know this did not go so well for Jonah because he wound up in this horrible storm, getting tossed overboard and swallowed by this big fish. In the end he still had to go and do as God had told him to do. We see in the end of the book of Jonah that Jonah was grumpy and had anger issues, but this is another blog for another day. The point I’m trying to make here is that Jonah was assigned a task by God Himself, and he tried to get out of doing it.
Jonah was able to run from God. God didn’t stop him from doing so. Jonah was trying to flee God’s presence. All he did was bring on God’s wrath. We can refuse to do what God tells us to do. We can turn our backs on God. We can totally reject Jesus Christ. But we can’t hide from God. No good will come from any of this. If we want peace and joy in our lives, we must turn to Jesus. We must accept Him as our Savior. And as our pastor said yesterday, we must surrender to His will.
God commands us to do two things. First, He commands that we love Him with all we’ve got. If we do this, the second one comes easily, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. When we do these two things we want to surrender to God. We want to be in His will. We have no desire to run or hide from God. We want to live each day in His presence. We feel the need for Him every hour of our lives.
If you are alive and well, you have a job to do. We all are called to different ministries, but we are called to serve God. Our pastor told us yesterday that if we wanted our prayers to be heard, we must be saved and we must surrender. When we do this, we will get our assignments. We are all given spiritual gifts that God fully intends for us to use.
1 Peter 5:8 tells us to submit to God, resist the devil and he will flee from you. The devil is the one who needs to be on the run not us. We need to be walking alongside God. We need to be doing whatever it is He has called us to do. If He calls you to do something, He will fully equip you to do it.
If you want true peace and joy in your life, surrender to God. Stop trying to flee from His presence. Submit to Him and whatever it is He calls you to do. You can run from Him if He allows it, but you cannot hide from Him.
Have a great day!