Dear congregation, after Saul of Tarsus was converted, the Lord spake to Ananias about him in a vision. Ananias was sent looking for this persecutor who had been so radically and suddenly changed. And one of the proofs which the Lord gave to Ananias of a great change which had happened in Saul of Tarsus was, And behold, he prays. You can read about it in Acts 9 verse 22. Behold, he's praying Ananias. And Saul, of course, had uttered many prayers. He had been a Pharisee. He would have prided himself in praying multiple times a day. So he had, as Matthew Henry says, he had spoken many prayers. But now he prayed those prayers. Behold, he prays. And we could say that very same thing about Jonah. where we meet him in the second chapter of the book of Jonah tonight. Behold, Jonah prays. As we read in verse 1, Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the fish's belly. And we want to look this evening with the Lord's help at how the Lord brings people to true prayer, what He uses, and what are the marks of that prayer that He teaches His people to pray. And we want to see that from this whole chapter. But let me read at this time only verse 2, where you really have a summary of the whole thing. 2a that is. and said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me. Theme with the Lord's help tonight is, I cried, He heard. I cried, He heard. We'll see, first of all, the experience behind this prayer, how the Lord led Jonah up to this point and through this time. So the experience behind this prayer, the look in prayer, the look in prayer, then the discovery made in prayer, and lastly, the confession, the confession arising from prayer. I cried, he heard, the experience, the look, the discovery, and the confession. Well, congregation, a few weeks ago we watched the spiritual decline of the prophet of the Lord, Jonah, as it unfolded. At first he disobeyed the Word of the Lord. And as is inevitable, whenever you disobey the Lord, you run from the Lord. You leave the presence of the Lord, as he did. He ran from God. Those two things always go together. Disobedience and running. Disobedience and distance, if you will, from the Lord. And so instead of going to Nineveh to preach against it, he boarded a ship to go in the opposite direction to Tarshish. But the Lord pursued His disobedient and backsliding servant, sending first a storm, unlike anything that the sailors, the ship's sailors had ever seen. And the Lord pursued Jonah by these sailors as well. Call on your God! the shipmaster had implored him. But as far as we can tell from the first chapter, nothing could move Jonah to pray. Think about that. A child of God, and yet how much he resembled the wicked, of which the Lord says in Psalm 10, verse 4, the wicked through the pride of his countenance will not seek after God. Think about that congregation also for yourself. The Lord delights to hear your voice in true prayer before Him. How often our hearts are void of prayer. David says to the Lord, my voice shalt thou hear in the morning and I will look up But so often, there are days, weeks, months maybe, and true prayer scarcely, or not at all, rises from our heart. Jonah was silent. Jonah would rather die than to give in and to give up to the Lord. And that while God, from his side, was matchless mercy to Jonah, bearing with Jonah, beckoning to Jonah, pursuing Jonah, bearing with Jonah, waiting to be gracious to this wandering, this rebellious prophet. And how in the end we saw the Lord prepared a great fish to swallow this recalcitrant prophet Jonah. this fish who would save him from his self-chosen death. You see, congregation, the Lord was more interested in saving a rebellious and defiant Jonah than Jonah was in being saved. And doesn't that show our heart when left to ourselves Whether we're believers or unbelievers here tonight, it doesn't matter. Sometimes we have the notion that we are ready and willing to be saved, but it's the Lord who withholds, the Lord who holds back, and the Lord is not willing that we should be saved. God cares for us, the Psalter says. Our God is He, who would not fear His majesty in earth as well as heaven. He saves the needy when they cry. He saves their souls when death draws nigh. And so it was for Jonah here as well. So after being thrown into the sea by the sailors, as he himself had proposed, instead of sinking down to his death at the bottom of the Mediterranean, see what he wished for. is a great fish children came and opened its jaws and its wide mouth and swallowed up Jonah. And there he was in the belly of this great fish. Well, there's two things we need to see here about this experience that Jonah has here. And the first is that he is an inch from death. In fact, for all intents and purposes, Jonah is done for. Verses 5 and 6, the waters compassed me about, even to the soul. The depth closed me round about. The weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains. The earth with her bars was about me forever. He's in a watery grave, and he's done for, from all appearances. He had run from God. But run, he could no longer. He had tried to hide from God, but he could hide no longer. And now there's nothing. Nothing left for him to do. He can't appease God. His sins have found him out, and death, which is the punishment for sin, is upon him. That, first of all, Jonah is a hair away from death. But there's something more, and Jonah senses it. Jonah here is under judgment. You see, you can be greatly afflicted. You can even be at the point of death. You could even, humanly speaking, be in the belly of a fish down at the bottom of a sea and it not be judgment. If you are a child of God and God determines that that's how he will receive you into glory forever, Through no sin of your own, you're there. That is not judgment. That is simply the Lord's way of taking you to himself. But in Jonah's case, that's not what's going on. Jonah feels it. This particular place that he's in is judgment. for him, at least in a measure. And he says it in verse two, he says, from the belly of hell cried I. In other words, he knows himself here essentially dead. He's in the grave. And yes, in hell in this sense that there is torment in his experience just now, and he has deserved it. he says it in verse 3, thou has cast me into the depth, into the midst of the seas. Thou has cast me. Of course the sailors had cast him. But behind those sailors he sees the hand of God. with whom he has had to reckon. He tried to escape him, but escape him he could not. And behind those sailors' strong hands, he sees the hands of God that are against him. All thy billows, he says, and thy waves passed over me. And he says in verse 4, I am cast out of thy sight as a punishment for my sins. The very thing that I went after to hide from the presence of God, I'm now in. I'm cast out of the sight of God and all because of my sin. And that's ultimately, dear friends, what sin will bring you and me to be cast out. of God's sight forever. You see here how Jonah experiences in a measure that God has found him out, and God has executed judgment in a measure upon him. Obviously not full judgment. Jonah would have been in hell forever. But the Lord makes him to taste and to see something of what he deserves. And God appears before Jonah there as judge. One author, Hugh Martin, he says it this way, God had clothed himself before Jonah in all the insignia of a judged, an incensed judge. He had summoned Jonah to his tribunal and witnessed against him. Jonah here inside this whale is in God's prison, and he's there justly, and he can't get out. And this is not something just for Jonah bodily, physically. Verse 7 says, My soul fainted within me. My soul fainted within me. Literally that means my soul caved in upon itself. It collapsed and fell in upon itself. And yet congregation, Jonah doesn't die. Jonah is not consumed. Now there's definitely a miracle here, isn't there? three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish. We all know that we need oxygen to live, to breathe from the air around us. Where do you get oxygen? Underwater, subterranean, a place like this fish's belly. Scholars speculate that maybe this fish came up to the surface and swallowed some air and Jonah could breathe, or maybe he went into some semi-conscious state, or maybe the Lord just upheld him. The Lord can do anything. But there in that moment, when physically speaking, he was not able to breathe, He cried, he prayed, something he hadn't done for a very long time. And that's what we want to see in our second point, the look in prayer. There in the depths, Jonah prays. There's a few things we should know before we really get into what all this means. When you look at this second chapter of Jonah, you read it verse by verse, it sounds like Jonah's remembering this from years, at least later on. He's recalling his prayer and he's writing it down as he best remembers it. And there's hints in this prayer of the Lord's answer to the prayer already. I cried, he says, and he heard me. Thou heardest my voice. Thou hast brought up my life from corruption, he says. And he prays that already in the belly of this fish. Now, obviously, he could in prayer already have sensed some of that answer. It's possible. Some of you know what that's like, that you're praying in the midst of great tumult and conflict and difficulty, and you don't see anything that tells you God has heard you and answered you, because nothing has changed in your circumstances, and yet you can have that deep conviction that God gives you in your heart and in your soul, that He has heard you. that your prayer has reached into his ear. I cried, and thou heardest me." The Lord heard me. The other thing you should notice about this prayer is that it's actually a string of scriptural references. A lot of the Psalms especially are just being quoted here and strung together. And oftentimes that's how we pray, isn't it? Take the language of the scriptures and we bring it back to the Lord. And maybe these are things that he learned as a child or studied later in life. And here in the moment, they're there. on his lips and in his heart. For example, Psalm 30 verse 3 says, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave. That's one of the verses here. Psalm 42 verse 7, all thy waves and thy billows have gone over my soul. Psalm 3 verse 8, salvation belongeth to the Lord. All those ideas, those petitions and truths are elsewhere in the Scripture. And Jonah brings them before the Lord. They're no less his prayer. They are the vehicle, you could say, whereby his soul speaks to God, cries to God. And isn't that true? Scripture does that, doesn't it? As you're reading it, so often, especially the Psalms, there's so many words that God has given you to take back to Him and to pray to Him. Bow down thine ear, O Lord, and hear, for I am poor, great my need. It's as if the Lord is giving you there. Something whereby you can go back to him and take his word back to him and use it in prayer. The other thing we need to see about Jonah here and his prayer is that Jonah was a believer. We saw that last time. He was a man of God. He was a true prophet of God. He was a servant of God. It emphasizes that. He fled from the Lord his God. And yet, as you, dear believer, know, there are times in your life, many times, in which what you needed originally, you need again, as much, as really, as truly in your life. This is not the first prayer, we trust, that Jonah ever prayed, but in a way he prays it here as if he had never prayed before in his life. This is a new beginning. And how we too, dear believers, need many a new beginning, in which we go to the Lord like we did at the first. Nothing in our hands, simply to His cross we cling. And now, having seen that, We come to the heart of this prayer. Do you know what the heart of this prayer is, children and young people? If you boiled it all down to one thing, it's just this. A look. A look up to the Lord. Verse four. Yet I will look again. I will look again. And really, when you get at what prayer is, it's not fancy speeches. Sometimes ministers can give that impression like it's all kinds of beautiful language that we pile on top of each other. And that's what prayer is. And you can sit back and you say, well, I can't speak like that. I can't think like that. It must be for ministers. It must be for older people. No. True prayer is this. It's a look. in our need, in our sin, in our shame, to God, with whom there is mercy, with whom there's everything that we could ever need. You know, it's like this. In our sin, we turn away from God. We turn our back to God, and we say no. That's what Adam and Eve did in paradise. And that's what Jonah did here. He turned his back on the word of God. God said, go there. He went the exact opposite way. And he ran. And he was resolved. He was decided to turn away from God. And there was never a look. He never looked back. He never looked up. He never saw God. The further, the better. And that's what sin does in our life. Oh yes, we may have our habits of prayer. We might have our words of prayer. We might still fold our hands and close our eyes and say certain things. But dear friends, that's not prayer. if there's not that look to God Himself, the Creator of all, the One who reveals Himself in His Word, the One who pursues sinners with His mercy. Whither can I go from Thy presence? Sinner here tonight, God is right there. You can't escape from Him. He's right there. He knows you're down sitting and you're up rising. He understands your thoughts are far off. He's right behind you. Your back is turned to Him. But Isaiah says, you'll hear a voice behind you. And that's because we've left God. But it's right behind us. And it says, look unto me. look unto me and be you saved. That's why verse four says here, yet I will look again. I will look again to the Lord from whom I've tried to run. I couldn't look him in the eyes. I couldn't bear to see his look. I couldn't bear to see His majesty, His glory, His holiness, His justice, but neither could I bear to see His frown, His long-suffering, His mercy. But now Jonah is brought to the place where he needs God. And he will look. He says it there with resolve. Yet I will look. Make that your resolve. Yet, despite everything I've done, despite everything I've not done, despite all the wanderings, all the sin, all the rebellion, yet I will look again. I've resisted the Lord so long. I couldn't bear to look in his eyes. But now I lay down my weapons. Now despite everything, despite the long running from God, even despite the judgment I feel myself to be under just now, cast out of the Lord's presence, yet I will look." Dear congregation, there's life in a look. Don't ever forget that. One look to the Lord. Now Jonah, and you can sense this here from this prayer, Jonah is going through a struggle in his soul, in which his feelings are telling him one thing, and faith is telling him another thing. Do you know about that? Do you know about that struggle in prayer, that rustling in prayer? Not even so much with the Lord, though that can be there as well, but in this particular case, he's rustling down his feelings. His feelings say, you're a dead man. You've done the unpardonable. There's no hope for you. I am cast out of thy presence. That's what feeling says. Yet faith says, yet will I look. Yet there's mercy. And feelings say, God is angry with me, and justly so, and so it's hopeless for me. But faith answers those feelings, and faith says, but yet there is mercy with God. Feelings say, I'm hopelessly guilty. I deserve death. There's no more hope for me. But faith says, with the Lord, there's mercy. Do you know what that's like? Do you know what that man said to Jesus one time? He said, Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief. And it's in prayer that those two things wrestle, don't they, so often for prominence. where sometimes it seems like faith is underneath, and unbelief seems to triumph, and then the Lord giving help, then it turns around, and you take your unbelief, and you unmask it for what it is, and you take hold of the promises of God, and you say, yet will I look. I'm resolved to look, no matter what. If I perish, I perish, but I will perish looking to the Lord. And notice that Jonah knows where to look. Verse 4, I will look toward thy holy temple. Verse 4. It's an amazing thing. And in verse 7, he says something similar. When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came in unto thee into thine holy temple." What does that mean? Interpreters of the Bible, they disagree. Some say he was actually looking at the temple in Jerusalem, at least in his mind's eyes. He thought about that dwelling place of God, that place that God had established there in Jerusalem, where was the mercy seat, whereby God answered his people in peace and pardon. The bases of the blood of the atonement that was sprinkled on that mercy seat. The Lord would speak peace to sinners, whoever they were who came. The bases of the blood. He's turning his mind there. Towards God's house. Towards God's home. It should have been his home. And he turns, like the prodigal son in that faraway country, he turns his mind there to that faraway home, that place where God dwelt, where he spoke peace. It's interesting that when Solomon dedicated the temple, this temple in Jerusalem, he prayed a long prayer that you can read in 1 Kings 8. And as part of that prayer, he said this, if these people sin against thee, and thou be angry with them and deliver them to the enemy, yet if they shall bethink themselves and repent and make supplication unto thee, saying, we have sinned, and pray toward their land, and the house which I have built for thy name, then hear thou their prayer and forgive thy people, that thy eyes may be open unto the supplication of thy servant to hearken unto them in all that they call unto thee for." In other words, Solomon, hundreds of years before, he's saying, if there's some man somewhere, some woman somewhere who's far gone, in their sin. But they bethink themselves. They come to their senses. They think about this place. You know, there was that temple in Jerusalem, and I didn't regard it back then, but that's where the sacrifice was. That's where there was the atonement. That's where the mercy seat was. And now I'm hundreds of miles from that. But God, for the sake of that sacrifice, please have mercy upon me. And if you looked towards it in the sense that in your mind you looked towards that far off place where the blood of sprinkling was, then God bound Himself To hear for the blood sake, for the sacrifice sake. To hear and forgive. And that's why Jonah here prays and looks to God and to the temple. Dear friends, as long as we are in this life, no matter how far gone we are, No matter how far we've strayed from the Lord, there's life in a look at the Savior, at Calvary, that one and only sacrifice for Jonah's, for sinners like you and like me. What an amazing thing it is that Jonah, who in this moment, Physically speaking, he had little to no oxygen. But he cries. He gasps spiritually in his soul. You know, that can happen, that through your circumstances, through the difficulties of life, Whatever they are, things you bring upon yourself or things that are brought upon you, whatever it is, you can feel so unable to breathe sometimes. It's like the air is sucked out of you and you don't know where to go. Sometimes it feels like you're gonna die. But if that drives you to pray, to cry to God, And indeed, maybe you don't have oxygen, physically speaking, but prayer has been called the oxygen of the soul, whereby the soul that prays draws in the breath that God gives, the breath of mercy into the lungs of the soul and cries to God for mercy. God is in that. Some of you, many of you know that usually a baby's first breath when it's born is a cry. And doctors and nurses like it if it's a robust cry, a loud cry. Spiritually speaking, that's what we need. Not nice, polished, long prayers that could be printed in a book. but a cry to God, looking to Him. Dear friends, do you know this? Do you know what this is like? To cry to God for mercy. That this is like oxygen in your soul. No idea where it came from even. As if God pours it into your soul. You look away from yourself, something you'd never done and never would do. You look to the Lord. And if this look is yours, you will also make a discovery, as we see in our third point, a discovery. Do you know that prayer is something where it's not only that we tell God certain things, Jeremiah 33 verse 3 says, call upon me and I will answer thee and show thee great and marvelous things that thou knewest not. In other words the Lord is saying there I have so much to show you but you won't even come and look to me and all that I have to show you. Well in prayer In true prayer, the Lord makes us to see so many things. He makes us to discover things that maybe we knew mentally or doctrinally at some level, but we learn them for ourselves and our own souls. And Jonah makes a discovery, and he speaks about it here. He says in verse eight, they that observe lying vanities, forsake their own mercy. Now that's quite a discovery. Let me explain a few words here. Lying vanities is a phrase for idols. In the Old Testament you can read of this in Psalm 31 verse 6. David says, I hate lying vanities, idols. Or Jeremiah 8 verse 19 and Jeremiah 14 verse 22 say, are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause rain? Can any idol help you? No. Why is Jonah saying that here? Well, Jonah had given himself over to the idolatry of his own Mind and heart. He thought he knew better than the Lord and he worshipped really himself, which is what we do. We might not think about it that way. But that's what he did. Instead of following the Lord, he followed his own heart. He thought he knew better. And notice this word, it's a very interesting word, lying vanity. Don't you think those two words really sum up life without God? It's a delusion, it's a lie, and it's vanity. It's gone in a moment. like a puff of wind, like a little bit of vapor like the Bible says our life is. And to live your life for lies and for vanity. Why would you do that? But that's what we all do by nature. And some of you are doing that right now. You're living for lies and for vanity. Stuff that's You don't know how fast, and you live for that deceitful vanity. That's what I was doing, Jonah says. And that's what the Ninevites are doing, to whom I was called to preach the gospel. They are idol worshipers. And I'm no better than them because I, too, followed my own devices. And I and the Ninevites have one thing in common. We forsake our own mercy. That's what it says here. We forsake our own mercy. We're running away. We're leaving the mercy that's in God for sinners. And instead we're worshiping and living for idols, which are here today and gone tomorrow. They have mouths but they speak not, they have noses but they smell not, they have eyes but they see not, and we're living for those things, and we're turning away from the mercy of God. Sometimes people in our church and other churches, they think that God couldn't have mercy on them. I'm so far from God, there's no way He could have mercy on me. I don't deserve it, people say. You can think that way. I don't deserve the Lord to have mercy upon me. My dear friend, if that's your thinking, do you know what? You could never deserve mercy. Because mercy is undeserved. And you can never undeserve mercy in this life. You can't. Mercy is the free gift of God for the miserable, for those who have nothing but demerits, nothing but sin and shame and misery. whose lives are broken, they're shipwrecked, they have nothing, they are nothing but a bundle of sin. And God says, I am mercy for such like that. My heart is brimming with mercy for idolaters, for those who go after idols. who worship lying vanities, who live their life in the bubble which soon will be gone. I ask you tonight, when you look at your life, and you look at the God of mercy, by the light of God's Word, what must you conclude? If you're honest, you've run from mercy every day of your life, until and unless God makes you need His mercy. And some of you, God knows how many, are running from mercy. And you may have all kinds of pious excuses whereby, well, I've been told it's not for me, or it can't be for me, and whatever it is. Dear friends, this prayer tells you something. It tells you, you are forsaking your own mercy. You are leaving, you are deserting the mercy that God has in His heart for sinners. Notice how it says here, they forsake their own mercy. It has their name, as it were, written on it, their own mercy. These Ninevites were forsaking their own mercy. Jonah was forsaking his own mercy. That's how full, that's how free, that's how real the mercy of God, that's how personal the mercy of God is. There's one of two things that can happen with sinners and mercy. They come under mercy, or they forsake mercy. Which are you? And yet the Lord pursues you yet tonight. He comes with His persistent mercy in His Word, in the preaching of His Word, the proclamation of His truth. through the ministry of His Holy Spirit, which strives with people who are given over to lying vanities. Oh, my dear friend, when will you lose the battle against mercy? When will you lay down your weapons against mercy? When will you buckle under mercy? The mercy that is in the heart of God for sinners like you, people who have lived all their life long pursuing vanity and lies of one kind or another. The Lord comes yet again, and for the sake of Christ, He is ready and willing. He stands ready. It even says this in the Bible, that He waits to be gracious. Imagine that. He waits to be gracious. For wretched sinners, not the righteous, not the righteous, but sinners, like Jonah. Sinners, like the Ninevites. Oh, what a discovery. Jonah makes him prayer. He comes here in a certain sense in the belly of this fish. He comes face to face with the mercy of God, which has, as it were, beat him there. It was there before he got there, and he recognizes it, and he looks to it. I will look to the temple, he says, but in a certain sense, God's mercy is right there in the belly of this great fish. Mercy that keeps him from perishing, keeps him back from being utterly consumed. Mercy which holds his soul in life until he cries. Mercy that makes him cry. Mercy that gives him, in a certain sense, from the Old Testament perspective, it gives him a view, holds before his eyes a view of the temple in Jerusalem and that blood of the sacrifice. And we can just go straight to Calvary and say, mercy that gives you sinner, of you, of what is in the heart of God, for a person like you, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. That before you had any being, before you breathed any breath here on this earth, God made provision in the Son of His love. He who was in his bosom from all eternity, he said, go. And the son said, I will go. And I'll go so deep and so far. I'll go right there into that Mediterranean Sea, right there into the belly of that great fish for the likes of a rebellious enemy like Jonah. And I'll be there waiting for him. The Lord Jesus in the Bible speaks, sinking in deep mire where there is no standing. I'm coming to deep waters where the floods overflow me. The Lord Jesus was not content until he was in the lowest place, where he experienced the bitter dregs of the wrath of God against the likes of Jonah. and He would drink that cup, and He would suffer the just for the unjust, to bring sinners to God, to merit all that we have demerited, in order to give mercy to those who will not even pray, until God brings us to that very edge, and we cry and look to Him for mercy. My dear friends, What do you have against mercy? What do you have against Christ? You are unconverted. What do you have against Him? God spared not His own Son, but gave Him up, the Bible says, for us all, in order that we be kept back from the grave, in order that we would be weaned off of lying vanities, and live for mercy, and out of mercy, again and again. Every time we stray, people of God, we need more mercy. Sometimes we wonder, God saved us in the past, and He showed mercy to us in the past, and yet we've spurned it again, we've forsaken it again. And we wonder, We fear that that mercy of God will run dry. Our mercy does. Our kindness does. My dear friend, if that's you tonight, the mercy of God is from everlasting to everlasting. It's from east to west. It's an ocean that knows no borders, no bottom. It's deep and wide. It's more than enough. than every sinner who's ever lived, to dive into that ocean of mercy, and to find everything there that a lost sinner needs. And so Jonah there in the belly of the fish, he learns so very much. He discovers so very much, also about Christ. And he learns to confess it, as we see in our final point. Confession arising in his prayer. Maybe you've heard of the person, saved person, who once was asked, what did you contribute to your salvation? And they looked and they said, I contributed my sin and my resistance against mercy. That's what I contributed. And that's exactly what Jonah would have said. He would have said, listen, From my side it was all sin, wretched, heinous sin. Salvation is of the Lord. That's how he ends this prayer. Salvation is of the Lord. He's thought it out, he's devised it, he's orchestrated it, he's worked it out, and he will bring it to conclusion. Of him, and through him, and unto him are all things. From my side, sin. Salvation, it's all of Him. It's all of grace. And you can see that Jonah has already been turned into an evangelist. We'll see more of this in the next chapter. He goes to Nineveh, and there'll be problems there. We'll see from his side, there's still so much that's lacking, but he's turned into an evangelist already here. Salvation is of the Lord. In other words, if the Lord could save me, He can save anyone. It's of the Lord. It's all of grace. And Jonah knows that even before the fish vomits him out. You can read that. The fish doesn't spit him out until the next verse. But even there in this, what seems to be a watery grave, the Lord has met him with His mercy. And He knows it. And every sinner whom God saves knows it and confesses it. Salvation is of the Lord. And here Jonah's faith, as it were, reaches its peak in a certain sense. I said earlier there was this struggle between feeling and faith in Jonah. But here, faith rises above feeling. Salvation is of the Lord. He boasts in God all the day long. He ascribes all to the Lord. The Lord is worthy of all praise. And you see, that's what the Lord is after. The Lord is after this praise of His people who boast in Him, not in self, but only in God. Oh dear friends, do you see here how the Lord's dealings are marvelous, miraculous? Calvin says in his commentary that this fish that the Lord prepared was a kind of hospital in which Jonah was healed. revived and sent again into spiritual service. Who would have ever thought that? That that whale, that large fish that opened its mouth there to Jonah could ever be a hospital in which spiritually speaking he was revived He was healed and he was sent forth again. But isn't that how the Lord works? He brings us into tribulation, into turmoil, into difficulty, of which we say, how can this ever be used for good? And the Lord uses it for good. And yes, then the outward man may perish, like Paul says, but the inward man is renewed day by day. And then the Lord makes us pray. And the Lord makes us cry, and he hears us. And we say it with Jonah, I cried, he heard, all for the sake of Christ. Because Christ came into my place, and he cried on Calvary, and heaven was shut to him. He lifted up his voice, and in a certain sense, he was not heard. My God, my God. In order, that we might be heard. And he was heard in the resurrection from the dead. And he would say it himself, as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the belly of the earth. He took Jonah's place, and he came out. And He, not only revived, He resurrected. And because of Him, there is mercy for Ninevites, for sinners, for idolaters, like you and like me. He is God's salvation. Do you know that the Hebrew word there in this last verse of the prayer, salvation, is actually Yeshua? Yeshua is of the Lord. You could almost say that that's Jesus' name. Jesus is my Savior. He is my salvation. I've met Him here. And because He lives, I live. And I can face tomorrow and whatever God brings my way. Oh, it's all mercy. And will I forsake mercy again? Yes, from my side I will. But will God forsake the works which His hands have begun? Will He forsake His mercy? No, He cannot. Because with Him there is mercy. And He will abundantly pardon all who come unto Him. My friend, don't leave today a mercy forsaker. believe, a mercy embracer, and cry to this God, in Jesus Christ, all because of Him. And you too will be able to say, I cried, and for Christ's sake, He heard. Amen.