Looking up Before Reaching Out
November 9, 2025
Preached by Noah Gwinn
Scripture Reading
Jonah 2:1-10
1 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish,2 saying,
“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
3 For you cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your breakers and your waves
passed over me.
4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
5 The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head.
6 To the roots of the mountains I went down,
to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.
Yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
7 When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
10 And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
Last week, Pastor Benjamin shared that as our church was coming out of 2024 and into 2025, our leadership began to sense that the Lord was leading us to focus on pursuing a culture of prayer and a culture of outreach as a church this year. And so, as one way to equip us for outreach, last week we began a sermon series through the Old Testament book of Jonah. Our hope is that, among other efforts, in studying this book together, we will look our reluctance to reach out to our neighbors square in the face and be spurred on by the Lord toward outreach. As we come to Jonah chapter 2 this morning, we are going to see the turn that needs to happen inside of us before we can even consider reaching out to others. If the passage last week was about looking in before reaching out, this week is about looking upbefore reaching out. Before we go any further, let’s pray together and ask the Lord to speak to us through his Word.
Heavenly Father…
INTRODUCTION
Jonah most likely lived in the mid-700s BC. But about 2500 years later, in the mid-1700s AD, lived another man whose story mirrors Jonah’s in some profound ways. This man, like Jonah, was living in rebellion against God, even though he had known God. This man, like Jonah, had cultural animosity toward people who did not look like him, so much so that he made a living by shipping slaves around the world from Africa. Like Jonah, while this man was on a ship, not living in line with God’s desire for him, God sent a storm to get ahold of him. The ship threatened to break up. And like Jonah, in the midst of this storm, this man called out to God for mercy, and God delivered him. After making port in Ireland, this man went to the first church he could find and dedicated his life to serving the Lord. That man’s name was John Newton. And reflecting on the way God had delivered him, he penned these words which will doubtless be very familiar to you:
Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
Like in the story of John Newton, Jonah, this rebellious prodigal prophet is met by the strong, surprising, and severe mercy of God, and he is changed. In our passage today, we’re going to see that until we have experienced mercy from God, we cannot share the mercy of God. Until we receive mercy, that great gift from God where we do not get the punishment we deserve, we can’t possibly preach that same good news to others. We’ll look at this one main theme under three headings – (1) the strong mercy of devotion, (2) the surprising mercy of discipline, and (3) the severe mercy of deliverance.
THE STRONG MERCY OF DEVOTION
First, let’s look at the strong mercy of devotion. I’ll read verse 1 again:
1 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish
Before we get to the heart of this prayer, I think it’s important to address something. It’s about Jonah getting swallowed by this fish. In our day, you will hear plenty of people try to come up with ways of making this possible. You’ll hear people reference stories of modern-day fishermen getting swallowed by fish and surviving (although they aren’t in the belly of those fish as long as Jonah was). Or sometimes you’ll hear people say Jonah must have been dreaming, or sometimes you’ll hear even crazier explanations of how to rationalize this using natural means. But part of the point of this whole story is that a man being swallowed by a fish for three days and surviving is not naturally possible. God is using a supernatural event to redirect his prophet. So much of the gymnastics we try to do with the Bible to make this story less supernatural actually causes us to miss the point. In fact, this is what one Bible scholar said:
“Unfortunately, most of the time when we look at the prophecy of Jonah, most of us focus on the fish. We focus our attention on questions like, Was it a whale? Is it possible that a human being can live three days in the belly of a fish and then be vomited on dry land? How big exactly was the fish? What else was swimming around in the whale's belly? Interestingly, the Bible doesn't make a big deal about the fish. It just says, ‘The LORD appointed a great fish" (Jonah 1:17), and it swallowed up Jonah.’
[He continues…] Our fixation on the fish can cause us to miss the true message of Jonah. In fact, one writer and commentator confessed, "I was so obsessed with what was going inside the whale that I missed seeing the drama going on inside of Jonah.' Inside Jonah, the real drama was taking place. That is the focus of Scripture.”[1]
Friends, the Bible is unashamedly supernatural, and we shouldn’t be afraid of that. Christianity and science are totally compatible, but science cannot determine what the Bible says as if God stands under science. No, God created the world and can do whatever he wants when he intervenes. But let’s press on.
Again, verse 1: “Then Jonah prayed…”. Believe it or not, this is the first time in the book of Jonah that Jonah prays. Until now, God has called out to Jonah, and the sailors have called out to God, but Jonah hasn’t actually called out to God until now, after a crazy storm, after being thrown overboard into the sea, and after being swallowed by a huge fish. As far as he knows, he’s headed to his watery grave.
Jonah here is a picture of so many of us. Let me ask you a question. As you reflect back on your spiritual life, when has your prayer life been strongest? Has it been when things have been going really well? When you’ve got all you need, all you want? Or has your prayer life come alive when you’ve gone through a storm? For many of us, like Jonah, we may claim “I am a [Christian], and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land,” with our lips, but our hearts don’t always acknowledge him. Often it takes storm clouds rolling in for us to remember just how dependent we are on God. May it not be so. May our lives be marked by dependent prayer, even when it’s sunny with a high of 75.
Look at verses 1-2 again with me:
1 Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, 2 saying,
“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and you heard my voice.
So Jonah prays. And one thing that his prayer reveals is that he is deeply steeped in the Psalms. Nearly every line of Jonah’s prayer echoes a Psalm. So much so that in the 8 verses that make up his prayer, there are nearly 30 direct quotations or allusions to Psalms. What this means is that Jonah’s prayer is a crafted collage of remembered songs and prayers reshaped into one anthem of deliverance. Jonah had devoted his life to praying and singing the songs of God’s people so much that in his moment of greatest anguish, he has language to pray and songs to sing that can’t help but bubble up out of his soul. When he’s at what he believes could be the end of his life, he’s got prayers and songs that have been on his lips and the lips of God’s people for generations that are helping to guide him and comfort him. He has been like an absorbent towel, soaking up all of the goodness of these Psalms for decades so that when he is wrung out, what comes out of him are songs and prayers from God’s Word.
My fear for us is that our generation is living and dying by the songs we hear on Christian radio or Spotify that are here today and gone tomorrow. If our worship is shaped more by songs that come and go over the course of five years rather than songs have that have stood the test of time, I worry for us. Many of you may remember anthems of the faith that were sung when you were children, but I worry for our kids now. Do they have songs to carry with them to the grave? My goal as your worship pastor is to resource you with songs from the ages that have stood the test of time as well as new songs that are being written that I believe have a timeless quality that very well could be sung in not just 5 years, but 50 years. My desire is for you and your families to carry anthems of faith with you to your grave. So that when you are wrung out like a towel, what comes out of you are the songs and prayers that God’s people have sung for ages. That’s what Jonah had.
Moving on. Look at verse 2: “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
Jonah called. God answered. We’ll talk about what God’s answer was a little later. But for now what’s important is that God answered. To this point in the story, God has called Jonah, and Jonah did not answer. The sailors called out to their gods, and their gods did not answer. But when Jonah calls out to God, God answers. Maybe you’re in a season where you have been calling out to God and it feels like he is not listening. Maybe you’ve been praying and praying and you’re seeing nothing change and you’re exhausted and wondering if God even cares. Friends, Jonah’s story reminds us that whether we are in sin or suffering, God hears the cries of his people, and he answers. Keep asking. Keep seeking. Keep knocking. The Lord will answer, even if through unexpected means.
THE SURPRISING MERCY OF DISCIPLINE
So far, we’ve seen the strong mercy of devotion to God. Now let’s turn our attention to the surprising mercy of discipline. Look at verses 3-6 with me.
3 For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas,
and the flood surrounded me;
all your waves and your billows
passed over me.
4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away
from your sight;
yet I shall again look
upon your holy temple.’
5 The waters closed in over me to take my life;
the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
6 at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me forever; (we’ll stop here for now)
If you’re looking in your Bible at Jonah chapter 2, what you’ll notice is that it’s set off differently from the rest of the book. The rest of the book is a narrative, it’s a story, so it looks like a story. But this prayer is set off like poetry, because it is. And as any good student of literature knows, when you’re looking at poetry what you want to look for are themes, motifs, repetitions. One of these that you may have noticed is all of the water imagery. Verse 3: you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas… the flood surrounded me… your waves and your billows passed over me. Verse 5: the waters closed in over me… the deep surrounded me… weeds [think seaweed] were wrapped about my head.
Of course, he certainly uses water imagery because he’s been thrown into the sea and swallowed by a fish, but I think there’s more to it than just that. You see, in the ancient world, and particularly in the Hebrew imagination, the sea represented chaos or unrestrained evil. This is why at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21, when it describes the perfect new creation at the end of all things, it says, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Rev. 21:1). It’s not that there will be no surfing or jet skis in heaven, but it is to say that when God renews creation, there will be no chaos or evil anymore. And so, it should be no surprise then, that in the Old Testament, the image of salvation that God’s people carried with them for generations was the Exodus, this picture of God bringing his people through the sea unharmed, and at the same time the judgment of the enemies of God’s people being that this same sea closed in on them and crushed them. The image of salvation of God’s people on this side of the cross is not so much the Exodus as it is baptism, an image of God’s people going down into the waters of chaos and yet being brought up by Christ from their watery grave.[2]
This is where Jonah finds himself. God has sent a watery judgment his way. He has cast Jonah into the deep where the flood surrounded him and the waves and billows have passed over him. Jonah had said that he wanted to get away from God, so God sent Jonah into the midst of the chaos of the sea. God was giving Jonah exactly what he asked for so that he could see that what he asked for is not what he really wanted. Being driven from the presence of the Lord isn’t solving any of the problems that Jonah was running from. The surprising mercy of discipline is that when we come to the end of ourselves and God gives us what we want and it’s still not enough, we have nowhere to turn but back to him. When we live in rebellion against God and he sends storms our way, those storms are intended to drive us back to him. The great pastor Charles Spurgeon said it this way: “I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.”
God is not afraid to send waves so that we might be cast upon the Rock of Ages. God is not bashful about sending a storm to discipline his children. If there was no storm for John Newton, there would be no Amazing Grace. If there had been no storm for Jonah, there would be no Jonah 2 (or 3 or 4 for that matter). What experience of God’s mercy and grace might be on the other side of the storm for you? I want to be careful, as Benjamin said last week, because there might be a storm in your life on account of no particular sin of yours. And yet there are some of you who have just come out of a storm, are in the middle of a storm right now, or see one on the horizon, and it is without a doubt God’s merciful discipline for you. If that is you, do not get bitter. Do not lose heart. Do not throw in the towel. God disciplines the ones he loves. He wants to refine you through discipline. In the midst of Jonah’s storm, he called out to the Lord, and the Lord answered him. Call out to the Lord. Return to him today.
THE SEVERE MERCY OF DELIVERANCE
Well, we’ve seen the strong mercy of devotion to God and the surprising mercy of discipline. Now let’s look at the severe mercy of deliverance. We’ll pick up midway through verse 6 and read through verse 10.
yet you brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord my God.
7 When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
10 And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land.
To this point in the story, Jonah has been going down, down, down. In chapter 1 he went down to Joppa, then down into the ship, then down into the inner part of the ship. Then in chapter 2 we’ve seen that Jonah was cast into the deep, and he’s gone down to what he calls the roots of the mountains. In the mind of the ancients, heaven was up and the underworld was down. And we’re getting this picture that to this point in the book, Jonah is on a one-way trip to the underworld. But then after a chapter and a half of down, down, down, look at where we picked up in verse 6: “yet you brought up my life from the pit.” Here in the midst of this prayer, Jonah goes from down, down, down, to looking up – to the point where at the end of the chapter, the fish vomits Jonah up on dry land. He’s no longer in the depths of the sea. This shift in language from down, down, down, to up, up, up reflects something going on in Jonah’s heart too. There’s a change that happens in Jonah’s life that we call repentance. Repentance is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Christian circles and can be easily misunderstood. What it means to repent is to turn. Specifically, when talking about Christianity and God, to repent means to turn from our sin and to turn to God.
And I believe that this prayer represents something of a repentance moment for Jonah. Where in chapter 1 we see Jonah in total rebellion against God, now we see his heart softened to God. In chapter 1 he runs from the Lord and refuses to pray, but now we see him turning to God and seeking him in prayer. His life is still crazy, and we’ll see in the chapters to come that Jonah certainly has more repentance to do. But the turn has happened. Jonah is a man full of faith and trust in God. Like check this out – Jonah, who is still in the belly of a fish… still potentially on his way to a watery demise, says in verse 6 that God brought his life up from the pit. What a prayer of faith! Jonah here is preaching to himself what he knows to be true, regardless of what his circumstances look like or what he feels. In moments when your feelings betray your faith, you can either listen to your heart or you can preach to it.[3] You can either be tossed to and fro by the waves of your heart and be ruled by your feelings or you can speak truth to your heart. Jonah preaches to his heart and it made all the difference. Even though, as far as Jonah knows, he may die in the belly of this fish, God has truly redeemed his life from the even greater abyss. There is a greater reality than his circumstances, and the same is true for you. If you are in Christ, no matter how dark your circumstances, the Lord has redeemed your life from the pit as well.
So, what is it about this deliverance that leads me to call it a severe mercy? Well, you’ll notice that in both halves of this prayer poem, Jonah returns to this idea of the Lord in his holy temple. Why do you think he does that? To get a full picture of this, we need to back up. Since the garden of Eden, when God clothed Adam and Eve with animal skins to cover their shame after sinning and plunging the world into brokenness, death has always been required to cover our sin. And in the kindness and grace of God, God regularly supplied an animal to be a substitute in our place so that we didn’t have to die. Examples of this are all over the place, from the ram that was sacrificed on the altar in place of Isaac, to the lambs that were slaughtered so that the people of Israel would have blood to paint their door with during the Passover, to the whole sacrificial system of the Old Covenant. So Jonah looks upon the holy temple and his prayer came to God in his holy temple because it was in the temple that sacrifices were made, and the blood from these sacrifices was sprinkled on the mercy seat. Do you see why this mercy is so severe? In order for Jonah to be reconciled to God, blood needed to be spilled.
After looking to the temple for reconciliation, Jonah can’t help but exclaim with a shout of praise, “Salvation belongs to the Lord!” Bible scholars have said that this exclamation is not only the heart of the book of Jonah but is the heart of the whole Bible. Salvation didn’t come from Jonah. It didn’t come from the fish; salvation came from the Lord. Too often, we functionally believe that salvation comes from us. That we can pursue the right things for happiness and satisfaction and security. That we can take care of our sin problems on our own. But we can’t. Salvation has to come from the Lord or else it’s no salvation at all.
The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis illustrates this in his Chronicles of Narnia novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace, an obnoxious, self-obsessed character had become a dragon after pursuing his greed too far. And he had come to the end of himself and tried and tried to tear his dragon scales off to become a boy again, but they kept growing back. It wasn’t until Eustace encountered the lion Aslan, Lewis’ Christ figure, that everything began to change. This is what Lewis writes:
“Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke— ‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is fun to see it coming away….
“Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again.”[4]
We, like Eustace, will do whatever we can to manage our sin on our own terms because we often believe that salvation belongs to us, not the Lord. We believe the lie that we don’t need God. We are all dragons trying to peel our own scales off. But Jesus comes to us and says, “you will have to let me undress you.” And Jesus’ method of tearing our scales off will hurt worse than our own feeble attempts, but it is the only thing that will actually change us. This can all sound very abstract so let me get concrete with a couple examples. Maybe Jesus being the one to tear your scales off means that you finally admit to yourself and to God that you can’t manage your porn addiction on your own and you need to do the hard work of bringing it into the light to a trusted Christian brother or sister. Or maybe it means you have someone else regularly look over your finances if you struggle with greed. There are plenty of other examples I could give, but the point is that Jesus’ method of tearing our scales off will hurt worse than our own feeble attempts, but it is the only thing that will actually change us. It’s the only thing that actually changed Jonah. Jonah didn’t need to just try harder, he didn’t need a self-help book or an encouraging message to cause him to turn back to God. Jonah needed a severe mercy. A mercy that required his discipline and the blood of a sacrifice.
And the same is true for us. Whether we are on a speedboat running from the Lord or just drifting away on a lazy river, we need the severe mercy of a wakeup call. And we too need a sacrifice. Ultimately, all the sacrifices under the Old Covenant point forward to a full and final sacrifice. Jesus, the true lamb that was slain for the sins of the world, willingly laid down his life so that you and I might receive his mercy. Jonah looked to the temple, but you and I can look to the cross, where God himself paid the bloody price of deliverance for all who would come to him in faith.
If you feel like you’re in a storm, turn to Jesus for mercy. If you are exhausted from trying to manage your sin on your own terms, turn to Jesus for mercy. Jonah needed to experience the mercy of God so that he could actually reach the people he was called to reach. If we know nothing of a personal encounter with God’s mercy, we can’t honestly share the good news of Jesus. We might as well just have a TV commercial disclaimer that says, “Not a real customer. Paid actor.” But the other benefit to having a personal encounter with God’s mercy is that it takes all kinds of pressure off us as we reach out. We don’t always need to have the perfect apologetic argument for the existence of God. We don’t need to have the whole Bible memorized so we can answer any question on the spot. We just need to witness to Christ and what he’s done in our lives. If you have been changed because of an encounter with the grace and mercy of Jesus, just tell people about that. And trust that the Spirit of God will be working through you as you share your own story. Church, until we have experienced mercy from God, we cannot share the mercy of God. But once we have experienced mercy from God, we are sent out on mission to share his great mercy. This was Jonah’s task, and it’s our task too. I can’t wait to get to next summer and see the displays in the lobby full of rubber bands. I can’t wait to hear stories of our friends and family members and neighbors and coworkers embracing the gospel for the first time. I can’t wait for our pews to be full of weak, wounded, and wayward people who today do not enjoy the living Jesus.
Unless you and I receive and experience mercy from Jesus, we will have nothing to reach out to our neighbors with. If you want to see your friends or family or neighbors or coworkers encountered with the gospel, we must turn to Jesus for mercy and grace.
Let’s pray. Heavenly Father…
[1] Anthony J. Carter, Running from Mercy, 80.
[2] This insight was gleaned from Bob Thune’s sermon, “A Come-to-Jesus Moment”
[3] This line inspired by a similar line from Tim Keller’s sermon, “Your Own Grace”
[4] C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 474-475.
Sermon Discussion Questions
Think of a time when you were far from God, yet he met you with mercy instead of judgment. What did that experience reveal about his heart? How might your life look different if he had given you what you deserved instead?
Jonah’s prayer flowed out of the Psalms he had stored in his heart. When life squeezes you, what tends to “come out” of you—worry, complaint, worship, Scripture? What might it look like for you to become more “soaked” in God’s Word so that his truth naturally rises up in hard moments?
Jonah only prayed after he hit rock bottom. Why do you think it’s so easy to neglect prayer until we’re desperate? What changes could you make to help you turn to God sooner, before the crisis comes?
Jonah looked toward the temple, where sacrifices were made; we look to the cross, where Jesus paid it all. How does remembering the cost of your salvation change the way you respond to God today? What area of your life needs to be recentered on gratitude for that mercy?
Jonah spoke truth to his own heart in the darkness. What lies or fears tend to drown out truth in your mind? What specific truth from Scripture do you need to “preach” to yourself this week?
