June 14, 2026 - Sleeping In The Storm

Jonah, chapter one. I'd like you to hear these words today. I think they'll be on the screen as we read through this. Jonah, chapter one, it's a story that you probably already know. The word of the Lord came to Jonah's son of Amitai. Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed to where did he go? By the end of this sermon, everybody is going to know how to say Tarshish. The Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Japa where he found a ship bound for that port. And after paying the fare, he went aboard and he sailed for where? He went to Tarshish. Yeah, to flee from the Lord. And then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea. It was such a violent storm that arose that the ship threatened to break up. And all the sailors were afraid and each of them cried out to his own God. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah, but Jonah had gone below deck where he laid down and he fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him and said, "How can you sleep? Get up and call on your God. Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish." And then the sailors said to each other, "Come, let us cast lots and find out who's responsible for this calamity." And they cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, "Will tell us who's responsible for all making all this trouble for us and what kind of work do you do? And where do you come from and what is your country and from what people are you?" That's like rapid fire questions. And Jonah just said, "Look, I'm a Hebrew. I worship the Lord the God of Heaven." I can imagine the sailors at this point being a little disgusted with Jonah because they said, "I worship the Lord the God of Heaven who made the sea and the dry land. I worship the guy who made the water that's waging right now." And this terrified them. And they said, "What have you done?" And they knew he was running away from the Lord because he had already told them so. And the sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, "Well, what have you done?" And then they asked him, "What should we do to make the sea calm down for us? If your God made the sea, then what should we do to you to calm this whole mess down?" And Jonah said, "Pick me up and throw me into the sea and it will become calm." And I know that it's my fault that this storm has come on you. But instead the men did their best to row back to land. They didn't like the idea of throwing a guy into the sea and putting him to death. They didn't like that idea. And so they tried to row back, but they couldn't for the sea grew even wilder than before. I love that sentence. The sea grew even wilder than before. Then they cried out to the Lord, "Please, Lord, don't let us die for taking this man's life. Don't hold us accountable for killing an innocent man for you, Lord, have done as you pleased." And then they took Jonah and they threw him overboard. And the raging sea grew calm. But this the men greatly feared the Lord and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and they made vows to him. Verse 17. Now the Lord provided a huge fish. And Jonah, he provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights. I was thinking about this message this week. And I was thinking about it literally all the way until I woke up this morning. I was thinking about this message this week as I went to Costco, believe it or not, as I went to Costco. And I was watching the way that we all behave in Costco. We line up for samples and we wait for pizza slices at the cafe and all the ways that we behave as watching people. I was walking yesterday in downtown O'Clayer and I was just watching people. I went to the farmers market in the hopes of snagging some strawberries and I was just watching people. I was thinking this week about this story and I kept thinking about it again and again and again. And when I woke up this morning, the very first thought that I had was I'm going to run at this message a little bit differently than I'd planned. And so if this makes sense, praise the Lord. And if this does it make sense, you can just say to your neighbor, man, he probably should have gone with the other plan this morning instead of that one. But I want to talk to you today a little bit about Jonah. And more specifically today, I want to talk to you today about sleeping in the storm, sleeping in the storm. And I want to start with this picture this morning. I think it'll be on the next slide. I want to start with this idea that this message today is for someone who's tired. It's for someone who's tired. Not someone who's physically tired. You might be physically tired. Don't get me wrong. But I'm talking about it kind of tired when it's like downing your bones tired. I'm talking about it kind of tired when you're just numb tired. I'm talking about it kind of tired that when people ask you how you're doing, you can't say, oh, I'm doing great. You just say I'm doing okay. I'm just kind of numb. I'm just doing okay. It's the kind of tiredness that makes you just kind of feel like you're going through the motions. It's like you, it's like leather rinse repeat. Like it says on the back of your shampoo bottle. It's like you're just doing it again and again and again. And your walk with God has come to a point where maybe you just feel asleep. Maybe you just feel weary. Maybe you just feel fatigued and you're still in church. Like you're still showing up on a Sunday morning. You're still singing the songs. You're still saying, "Good morning. How are you fine? Fine, fine. How are you? Good to see you." Deep down inside, there's something that feels like it's gone to sleep. I was thinking about this as it relates to Julie and I and our own relationship growing up when we had kids. And I was thinking about the fact that there was a point when the boys were really, really little that they would cry in the middle of the night. And there was a temptation that we had. Often, we would try to say, "Hey, let's alternate nights. One person would wake up and get the kid, the other person would wake up and all of that." But one of the things that especially I did, I don't remember Julie doing this at all, but man, I did it way too much, was that I faked that I was asleep. Have you ever done that? So you got a kid in the other room where the baby monitor is next to the bed and it's, "Whaa, whaa, whaa." You know, and this baby is crying. You know, you're, you know, just fake that you're asleep. And I did some reading this week. Believe it or not, I googled. I was like, people who fake that they are asleep while their baby is crying. You googled that and you will learn that there is such a thing as selective auditory attention. Selective auditory attention. That means you filter out the sounds that you don't want to hear and you filter out the sounds that you say aren't your responsibility. It is selective auditory attention. Anybody else have that in your life? Am I the only one? What cries I wondered have we learned to sleep through? I wonder what cries we've learned to sleep through. I pictured this scene and here I see these sailors and they're on the ship and they're throwing stuff overboard and they're doing everything they know. They're crying out to their lowercase gods and they're asking gods, what do we do? And how do we call them the storm and they're in the lowest part, down in the deep, down in what they call the whole of the ship. There was Jonah and Jonah was sound asleep but he should have been awake. He should have been awake. How does it happen that someone is sound asleep in the middle of a storm and people up on deck are fearing for their lives and yet down in the deep this one who was a prophet of God has this selective auditory task or giftedness where he's tuning out all the noise around him. How does that happen? I thought this week about the descent that Jonah took, the way down, it'll be on the screen. I thought about the descent that probably felt like relief for Jonah. This passage is full of a certain word that happens again and again. It says that Jonah went down to Japa. He went down into the ship. Verse 5, he went down into the inner part of the ship. And a little bit in verse 15, he'll go down into the sea. Jonah keeps going down. And I can imagine for Jonah when he finally got to his place on the ship, when he finally boarded the ship and he crawled down in the deep of this ship, I can imagine him saying to himself, "I finally have some relief." Remember, he's running the opposite direction from God. I thought through the steps that Jonah probably took on this descent. They'll be on the screen. I thought that Jonah knew what God was asking. But he decided that it cost too much. I thought about how we do the same. Jonah wasn't confused about the call. Jonah wasn't wondering, "God, are you sure?" Jonah knew exactly what God had said. And yet here, he found himself saying, "God, I know exactly what you're asking, but it costs way too much. It's way, way, way too much. The price tag is too high. This relationship too hard to restore. The apologies to humbling to make. The calls to increase." The price tag is too high on what God wants. Or then I thought about Jonah and what we do. And I thought about the fact that sometimes we just find a ship and it's going the opposite direction. Here's Jonah. The word of the Lord comes to Jonah and what is he doing? He finds a boat and it's headed west and east supposed to go east. Jonah found a ship that was available and he paid the fare and everything lined up. And I can imagine that in Jonah's mind, he rationalized maybe, "Hey, this is God's plan. This is God's purpose. This is the way that it's supposed to be." And I want you to know that could be, nothing could be farther from the truth. Jonah found a ship and it was going the other direction. Sometimes with God, we find a ship that's going the other direction and we say, "Well, this must be God's plan. This must be God's purpose." And the truth is, the truth is, it's going against the plan of God. Or how about this? I can imagine Jonah that the further down he went and the further down we go that the quieter the storm got. You do know, you can block out a sound for so long that you just turn down the volume on it. You can block it out for so long that the voice of God gets quieter in your life and harder to understand and more muffled. They found themselves, their Jonah did deep down and it didn't probably even feel like rebellion. It felt like, it felt like rest and yet Jonah was down in the deep. Have you ever been there? Have you ever been down in the deep and you thought it was relief and reality as it wasn't? You were just going the other direction. Jonah found himself, this is the second thing I want you to see. Spiritually numb, he was present but he was unreachable. Jonah's sleep here is not ordinary sleep. Jonah's sleep here was not Sunday afternoon nap or as we called it when I was a kid, the Wesleyan hour. That's what we called it in our house. We would, we went to a Wesleyan church. There used to be a little radio program called the Wesleyan hour and we called the nap in the afternoon that we took on a Sunday the Wesleyan hour and Jonah was more than taking a nap. The word here for Jonah's sleep in Hebrew is the word radam. It means a deep, stupor like unnatural sleep. This is the sleep that Adam, that God puts Adam under before God performs surgery on Adam and Genesis. It's radam. It's spiritual numbness. It's more than a nap. It's a you're out cold. One commentator says, "Radam is not a nap. It is a condition. It is something clinical and not just descriptive." And I thought, here's Jonah and he's present. He's in the boat but he's unreachable. He's in a coma, so to speak, and he's in the way deep, down dark of the ship. He's present but he's unreachable. Man, that messed me up this week. I thought about how many times in my life and my walk with God, I've said, "God, I'm here. God, I'm present, but I'm not reachable." In fact, I think one of the sad verses in this passage of Scripture is that the captain of the ship, a man who's calling on other gods, has to go below deck and try to shake Jonah awake and say to him, "How can you sleep? Get up and call on your God and maybe your God will take notice of us so that we will not perish. And it hit me this week when I read that verse that sometimes we think that if I run from God, it only affects me, but it never does. It affects others too. It affects all these men on this ship that feared for their lives and are wondering, how do we get out of this mess? And here's the captain of the ship going to a present but unreachable prophet and saying, "How can you sleep? Call on your God. Get up for maybe he'll take notice and we won't perish." See, Jonah was on the ship. He was present in it. He was just removed from the storm. In fact, the storm somewhere along the way stopped bothering him. Somewhere along the way, he tuned the storm out. He reached over and he turned the baby monitor down next to the bed, so to speak. And he was withdrawn. He was withdrawn from hard questions. You notice all the questions in this passage? Where are you? Where do you come from? What's your country? What's your people? What are you doing? How did you end up here? Where are we going? All of these things. He was withdrawn. Jonah was spiritually numb. I read this this week. One author says this about this part of this passage. The deep is where you go alone. There's a reason that Jonah isn't sleeping on the deck with the crew. Jonah has withdrawn to the most isolated part of the ship. The state that he is in almost always includes going, moving away from people and moving away from others. And ultimately, we find ourselves sleeping in the deep, sleeping in the deep. They cornered Jonah and they say, "Jone, what have you done? What have you done?" And verse 10 tells us. He told them. He said, "I'm running from God. I'm running the opposite direction from God." And here's Jonah. It's spiritually numb. And I thought, "I've been numb before. I've been present but unreachable before. I've been asleep before. And Jonah was too." Then I thought this this week when I read this passage. Sometimes the storm that is around us is grace. Sometimes the storm that's around us is grace. Verse 4 says that God hurled a great wind upon the sea. It says that God took the storm and he hurled it. He threw a great wind on the sea. It wasn't a gentle nudge. It wasn't a soft suggestion. It wasn't tapping Jonah on the shoulder. It was God throwing a storm, Jonah's way, throwing a storm, Jonah's way to wake Jonah up to what he was saying. And I don't think that every storm is from God. I don't think that God causes every storm in our lives. But I do think that there are times in our lives that God will stir up a storm around us in a way that will call us to be a deeper follower of him. I think that sometimes the storm is grace. It's what Sheldon Van Aachen writes about when he talks about a severe mercy. There's times that will walk through seasons or chapters or passages of our lives. And we'll find ourselves saying, "This hurts and this is hard and this is difficult." It's what Van Aachen calls a severe mercy. But sometimes the storm is grace. Sometimes the storm is grace. God stirred up the storm and ultimately they take Jonah and they throw him into the sea and even the whale was prepared. It's said God had appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. God had prepared and designated and assigned in advance this fish to be ready to catch Jonah. I wonder if you're in a storm today. If you might say, "God, what do you want to teach me through the storm?" God, how do you want me to respond in the storm? Sometimes we call the storm bad luck. Sometimes we call the storm just a hard season. Sometimes we call the storm just a bad year. And the reality is as it probably was, all of those things, all of the adabab, but so. Sometimes the storm, the thing that keeps you up at night, the thing that you've been turning the volume down on might be the most loving thing that God has ever offered to you is the storm. So I just got to this point, and this is what I really wanted to say this morning, all of the other stuff, that was the introduction. This is what I really wanted to say this morning, is are you awake? Are you awake? Why do I wake? Like sit up straight awake. Like God, I'm ready for whatever you have awake. Are you awake? And I was drawn, even when I woke up this morning, I thought I felt like I was just supposed to tell you to focus on this one verse, verse six. It won't be on the screen, but verse six, where the captain goes to Jonah and says, how can you sleep? Get up and call on your God, and maybe he will take notice of us that we will not perish. And I'm thinking about that conversation this morning, and I'm thinking that was probably not a calm and quiet conversation. That was not a, hey Jonah, I hate to bother you, I know you're resting, but could you get up and call on your God? Now I think there was some volume and what was happening in this conversation. It made my mind race back to when I was a kid. My mother, we had kind of a pattern, we had a routine for how we would get ready for school in the morning. And the first call of the day, the first time that the call came to wake up, my mother would simply walk by the door and she would knock on the door and she would say, "Chad boy, I don't know why "she would call me Chad boy sometimes," which she would, Chad boy, time to get up. And it was friendly and it was nice and it was cheerful and it was pleasant and beautiful. And then I would hear it and I would roll over and I'd go back to sleep. And then she would come and she would open the door and she would say, "Chad McCullum, it's time to get up." It became a little more intense, a little more severe. It became a little higher. She started amplifying volume in the kitchen and banging pots and pans around and the like. And then she would come and she would, the door would be completely open and she would use my middle name, Chad Jeremy McCullum. It's time to get up. And I would, I'd, five more minutes, five more minutes. Then she would invent a name for me and this, I knew, I knew in this moment that if I got this far, that I had to wake up, she would say, "Chad with Jeremiah McCullum." And none of those are my, my name is Chad Jeremy McCullum. She would call me Chad with Jeremiah McCullum. It's time to get up. There might have been some additional commentary there, I don't know. And in that moment, it was finally like time to wake up, time to wake up. And as I was thinking this week about this passage and even thinking this morning about this passage, I wonder if God's calling your name. I wonder if God is calling your name and saying, "Get up, get up, get up and call on your God." Get up and respond, get up and call on no other thing and call on no other God, get up and call on your God. The same word that's used here to invite Jonah to wake up from his slumber is the same word that's used when they called, when Jonah was called to go to Neniva. It was to get up, to get up from where he was and to acknowledge where he is and call on his God. I want you to know today that if you call on God, he hears you. If you call on God, he hears you, he'll hear the cry of any earnest soul. And that's my invitation for you today, is to be a person who calls on God with confidence and with boldness and hope and doesn't just roll over and hit the spiritual snooze bar. But to say, I wanna get up and call on my God because, because, do you see what happens in this verse? Because maybe God will take notice and they won't perish. Maybe God will hear us calling on His name and the world around us won't perish in the storm. I'd like you to bow your heads with me if you would. We're gonna sing a song here in closing. But just before we do, I'd like you to kind of do a little bit of assessment of your heart and of your soul today. Now, I don't know if you're sound asleep spiritually today or if you're wide awake, but I pray that we would be a people that are wide awake spiritually. I pray that we would be a people that are wide awake to whatever God has for us, that are wide awake to whatever God wants to say to us, that are wide awake to whatever God wants to do in and through us, that we wouldn't just kind of selectively turn down the sound, that we wouldn't collectively just turn down the volume, but that we would say, God, wake us up to whatever you have for us, wake us up God to whatever you want for us, wake us up God to whatever you want to do through us and through me, through you. So Jesus, that's my prayer today. I pray that we would be people who follow well. I pray that we would be people who are wide awake in alert God to what you're doing in the world and ready to respond. I pray that it doesn't take a pagan ship captain to come down below deck to wake us up, but that God we would be wide awake to you. May it be true in our lives and true for every single one of us in this room today in Christening. Amen. Let's stand together.