Evangelistic effectiveness grows out of cramped, dark nights.
Here are the facts: God told Jonah to go share the word with some people he didn’t like. Jonah ran in the other direction. He hopped on board a ship to set sail to the far western edge of the Mediterranean for Tarshish, on the sunny shores of Spain.
God went and got him and brought him back. It was not a simple return, though. It was a process. You see, during Jonah’s attempted escape from his mission, a storm broke out and the sailors threw him overboard. They thought he was the reason for the tempest (they were right).
God then “appointed a large fish to swallow Jonah” (1:17), presumably a whale shark or a Goliath Grouper. When Jonah hit the water, the fish may have already had its mouth open, feeding, and sucked him in like a large piece of accidental debris.
Jonah chapter 2 then gives an x-ray view of what happened next inside that fish—prayer. These weren’t negotiations and promises, like, “God, if you get me out of this, I swear I’ll_____”. God had caught Jonah, and stopped his running, squeezing him to the point that he was willing to pray with unfeigned faith. The prophet began to recognize God’s ownership and management of the situation—“You cast me into the deep,” he says, even though the sailors had thrown him in. “Your waves and your billows passed over me” (2:3). The violent cloudburst had been God-inspired.
Incredibly, the tone of Jonah’s prayer inside the fish grew hopeful and celebratory, until he prayed “with the voice of thanksgiving,” saying, “Salvation belongs to the Lord!” (2:9). At that point the ordeal came to an end. “The Lord spoke to the fish and it vomited him out” (2:10). He was back at Joppa where he had started, except unlike before, he was ready to obey. And so he went to Nineveh, the place he had detested. There, the greatest revival in history occurred with 120,000 people repenting.
Disobedient pre-fish Jonah had become obedient post-fish Jonah. Like him, God often deliberately takes us through things in order to energize our ministries with spiritual experience, practical wisdom, comfort, and trust.
As those who bring Jesus to the world, we’re not exempt from pain and frustration, ourselves. Hopefully, in the midst of our personal storms, we’re learning the sufficiency of Christ. That doesn’t mean simply slapping on band-aids, dodging, hiding, and faking, when trouble arises. Certainly not invoking trite religious slogans.
The gospel is not about a photoshopped version of yourself. When you’re in the fish, forget trying to figure out how to spin it to sound like a winner. Instead, pray those deep-searching prayers like Jonah, because that’s when God is equipping you for the sake of others. The Christian who can say, “I went through that,” or, “I’m going through it now, and it hurts terribly,” often establishes instant credibility with listeners.
A buddy of mine invited me to lunch with a friend of his. When we sat down, I asked the friend to share his spiritual life journey. Basically, the friend’s punchline was about the hate he felt for religion. Apparently, church involvement had been forced upon him most of his young life. It had driven him away from Christ.
Turns out, I spent some time inside that fish myself.
I shared with the guy my own drug problem as a youth—drug to church, that is—and how I had missed the reality and power of the gospel while growing up in the Bible belt. “Actually, the emptiness of religion drove me to Christ,” I said.
I didn’t try to outdo the fellow. There were differences between our stories. I didn’t blame my parents, for one thing. But the similarities were obvious. Still, having heard my testimony, the disillusioned guy didn’t get saved that day. There was no dramatic turn-around, no sudden light from heaven. But evangelistic outcomes are not my job, anyway. They’re not yours, either. Our part is to be faithful, to bring to the table what we have found in Jesus. The rest of it–conversion, new birth, regeneration—all belong to God.
We lay out the gospel, the unique story of the One who went through the most traumatic of all events, from the cross to the grave. You could call Him the greater Jonah.
“For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40).
When this story crosses our paths, affecting us and owning us, it becomes our story as well.
Tell it often.
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash
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