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    Stumbling Toward Obedience: Learning from Jonah's Failure to Love God and the People He Came to Save
    Stumbling Toward Obedience: Learning from Jonah's Failure to Love God and the People He Came to Save
    Stumbling Toward Obedience: Learning from Jonah's Failure to Love God and the People He Came to Save
    Ebook134 pages3 hours

    Stumbling Toward Obedience: Learning from Jonah's Failure to Love God and the People He Came to Save

    By David R. Hawkins

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    About this ebook

    Jesus demonstrated complete submission to the Fathers will to the point of His confident assertion, I always do those things that please My Father (John 8:29). He gave Himself in humility at Calvary to satisfy Gods wrath against all sin, as well as all sinners, and declared from the cross, It is finished. He then experienced death but rose in victory over death, thus proving His claims to divinity and giving to all His spiritual descendants resurrection power for daily living.

    So what is to be our response to all Christ Jesus is and all that He has suffered and accomplished on our behalf? What should be our lifes focus, our objective, our agenda, and our passion? Obedience to the things our Lord and Savior has commanded. Obedience is our duty, to be sure, but it is more than that. It is the way we express our thanksgiving for what Christ has done for us. It is gratefulness lived out on a daily basis. This kind of living involves a consistent orientation toward laying aside personal or selfish desires and agendas that bring us temporal gratification. Instead, we embrace what Jesus Christ tells us to do: to proclaim the gospel of hope to those who know it not. This is the highest expression of gratefulness from a life made new by the living Lord.

    Your culture, your communities, your friends, your co-workers, and your family members need to hear a word from God. You and I are the delivery persons for Gods message. We are the spokespersons for the gospel of Jesus Christ! We are the ones to whom God has said, Arise, go to Nineveh. Our Nineveh, dear people of God, is the lost people around us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWestBow Press
    Release dateJul 5, 2013
    ISBN9781449799069
    Stumbling Toward Obedience: Learning from Jonah's Failure to Love God and the People He Came to Save

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      Book preview

      Stumbling Toward Obedience - David R. Hawkins

      Copyright © 2013 David R. Hawkins.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      WestBow Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      WestBow Press

      A Division of Thomas Nelson

      1663 Liberty Drive

      Bloomington, IN 47403

      www.westbowpress.com

      1-(866) 928-1240

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

      Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

      Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

      Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

      ISBN: 978-1-4497-9907-6 (sc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4497-9908-3 (hc)

      ISBN: 978-1-4497-9906-9 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911355

      WestBow Press rev. date: 07/01/2013

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      PART 1   God’s Call Upon Every Servant

      Jonah 1:1-2

      Chapter 1   Under Orders

      PART 2    The Anatomy of Stumbling

      Jonah 1:1 - 16

      Chapter 2   God Speaks, But We Choose a Different Pathway

      Chapter 3   Sleeping While Others Are Perishing

      Chapter 4   Giving Lip-Service to Following God in the Midst of Rebellion

      Chapter 5   Choosing Death Over Repentance

      PART 3   God’s Discipline and the Servant’s Restoration

      Jonah 1:17 - 4:11

      Chapter 6   Swallowed Up in God’s Discipline

      Chapter 7   The God of the Second Chance

      Chapter 8   The God Who Pursues Sinners

      Chapter 9   The Sins of a Stumbling Heart

      Chapter 10   Ensuring Obedience has a Fighting Chance

      A Final Word

      Endnotes

      Dedication

      To my beloved Vickie,

      my wife and companion of thirty-nine years, and

      God’s most precious gift to me in life.

      Her heart for God is deeper and more surrendered

      than anyone I have ever known.

      Her deep musings on the Word of God

      and her exemplary pursuit of God

      help spur me on toward uncompromising obedience

      on the straight and narrow way.

      Special thanks is offered to Bethany Goccia,

      our second daughter, whose natural abilities with words has always amazed as well as entertained us.

      Also Sam Whicker, our first son-in-law, fellow pastor, and beloved member of our family. Both of these family members served me by reading, editing, kindly offering their suggestions, and by simply putting forth their loving efforts to help. Their kind suggestions helped take me from wordy clutter to a more down-to-earth approach. Thank you.

      These family members (and all our family which now numbers 15) are so precious to us as fellow redeemed sinners and pilgrims in the grace of Jesus.

      You all are so loved!

      Introduction

      Why would I write about stumbling? Frankly, I have a lot of experience. Ultimately, we want to examine the state of our hearts that leads us to stumbling so that we may achieve a more consistent obedience to our Lord. Scripture’s command is that we Walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you were called (Ephesians 4:1). But in my walk with God, I have at times frustrated myself when I kept retaking the same ground over and over. It is as though whatever steps forward I took, I then fell backward several steps.

      The Bible says in James 3:2, We all stumble in many ways. And as I engage self-evaluation, I have to ask myself: Why do I fail the Lord? Why do I so often pursue my own agenda, while laying claim to being His servant and clinging to His agenda? How can I in one moment exult in who Christ is and that I am forever His, and then shortly afterward have attitudes and thoughts that are anything but Christlike?

      None of us likes to admit it, but hearts that stumble are something we all wrestle with. As Christians, we intensely dislike this heart tendency of ours. But victory is first achieved by understanding something about the nature of our hearts, even as God’s redeemed ones. Jeremiah 17:9 provides a startlingly direct revelation of what our hearts are truly like: The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? Truly, when it comes to the state of our natural hearts, the news is not good.

      Although in Christ our hearts have been made new, subtle intrusions can enter in that often go unnoticed or uncorrected. Thus, a once passionate and vital walk with God can gradually, even stealthily, become unresponsive and hardened. While we ought to remain tender and pliable toward God, the sad reality is that we don’t always.

      In the wilderness, Israel experienced a hardening when they refused to act in faith to receive the promises of God concerning a new land. King Solomon, although beginning well and being greatly blessed by God, eventually allowed his heart to be turned away from a pure devotion to God. Eclipsed by lesser loves, Solomon’s heart became calloused where once it was sensitive. In the New Testament, Ananias and Sapphira experienced the same. All these examples had tragically similar endings, as is most often the case with hearts that stumble.

      Someone once said that the same sun that melts the butter also hardens the clay. The difference, of course, is in the nature of the object affected by the sun’s heat. Similarly, the genuine child of God ought to be one that melts into pliability in God’s hands, rather than turn from usefulness into hardened clay that is no longer fit for His service. We are warned in Hebrews 3:8 to keep a vigilant posture toward the tendency of our own hearts. Written to genuine believers in Jesus Christ, the author of Hebrews says: Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day of temptation in the wilderness. Notice that the responsibility to avert a hardening of the heart is on the individual believer.

      In his hymn, Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, Robert Robinson wrote of his own heart’s tendency toward stumbling: Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it; Prone to leave the God I love. After penning these words, he eventually wandered away from God, becoming a faith casualty. This sad commentary is not reserved for Mr. Robinson alone. It can happen to any of God’s servants in any life setting. If we are not constantly vigilant toward that which would quench the fire of God in our hearts, the passion for Him will soon die as a result of the hardening toward His ways. Gail MacDonald put it poignantly in her book, High Call, High Privilege, Untended fires soon die and become a pile of ashes. This is why we must constantly exercise ourselves toward vigilance concerning that which would douse the fires of our heart’s passion for God. The cry of our hearts must ever and always be: O make me Thine forever, and should I fainting be, Lord, let me never, never, outlive my love to Thee.¹

      Repeatedly God has drawn my attention to the prophet Jonah. Honestly, though, when I first began studying Jonah, I did so with disobedient believers in mind – people who (in my experience) had wandered from God, substituting their own life pursuits for fulfilling His will. But the more I have walked through a few sovereignly orchestrated events of life, I’ve been humbled to see more of what I’m truly made of. I have realized that Jonah’s life is not so far removed from the tendencies of my own heart. And because 1 Corinthians 10:13 teaches us that all temptation is common, I have confidence that what God is saying to me, He also wants to say to you. So this book (in the words I once heard) is one beggar showing other beggars where to find bread.

      The lessons from Jonah’s life may prevent us from growing hard-hearted and stumbling to the point of ultimate failure in our service to our Lord. Avoiding a fatal stumbling, however, requires that we take heed. The lessons from Jonah’s heart and life may even soften some hearts that have already set out on the pathway to becoming unresponsive and calloused toward God—the precursors to spiritual failure.

      I have assumptions as I write. First, that you may have picked up this book out of a personal identification with its title, for we all struggle with our flesh and its warfare against the Spirit. We are all in the same boat; we are all made of the same human fabric with all its sinful tendencies. Secondly, I assume that men and women of God are still men and women—sinners in need of God’s sanctifying grace in our daily lives. We still fail God and at times do so in great measure and with huge consequences. Thirdly, even saved and redeemed people occasionally need help to master their sinful bent. That is where Jonah will help us immeasurably. And the deeper we immerse ourselves in his book (his Spirit-inspired written testimony), the more deeply and completely we may come to understand our own hearts.

      With these assumptions in mind and the study of Jonah’s stumbling in front of us, we must guard ourselves from a this could never happen to me attitude. 1 Corinthians 10:12 exhorts us, Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. Said another way, if we think it couldn’t happen to us, then we are prime candidates for failure. Therefore, the humility of walking with Jesus must include a perpetual caution toward our heart’s tendency to stray.

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