Allergic to God: Sorry/Not Sorry

Out with me. I'm a little bit alive up here. If you want to turn that down just a little bit, Amy. We're going to look at Jonah chapter two. We're going to pray this prayer or read together this prayer of Jonah's from inside the fish. If you'll join me as people of God read the word of God together.

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish, and he said, I called out of the distress to the Lord, and he answered me. I called for help from the depth of Sheol. You heard my voice, for you threw me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the current flowed around me. All your breakers and waves passed over me. So I said, I have been cast out of your sight. Nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple. Water encompassed me to the point of death. The deep flowed around me. Seaweed was wrapped around my head. I descended to the base of the mountains. The earth with its bars was around me forever. But you have brought up my life from the pit, Lord my God. While I was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you into your holy temple. Those who are followers of worthless idols abandoned their faithfulness, but I will sacrifice to you with a voice of thanksgiving. That which I have vowed, I will pay. Salvation is from the Lord. Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land.

— Jonah 2:1-10

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Yes, even the part that says vomited. This is one of the few places that you get the middle school vomited scene in the Bible, and so we're going to make sure we say that out loud together.

A friend of mine sent me a podcast this past week about duck hunting. And just to be really clear, I'm not a duck hunter. I have no desire to go duck hunting. I've never been duck hunting. But I listened to it and it grabbed my attention because it was so fascinating understanding the science of migration. Now, lots of things migrate, right? Whales migrate, butterflies migrate, geese migrate, all kinds of animals migrate, but this was all about ducks and about the flight path of mallards from Canada down to Arkansas and why that is the duck hunting capital of the United States. You can tell I've already lost about two thirds of you already.

But it got me really thinking because the two words that they emphasized over and over about ducks and how they know how to migrate are orientation and navigation. And ducks do something that most humans can't do. I mean, many of us have a hard time finding our car coming out of the airport or the mall. Right? But ducks somehow know how to orient, know where they are on the planet, what direction they're facing, and navigate what direction to go and do that every year. It's fascinating.

And migration reminds me both of this season in the church calendar, Lent, but also the book of Jonah. So let me explain both those. Lent is a forty day season between Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday when the church focuses on our sin and our need for the cross. We focus on mortality. We talk about repentance. We think about our own hearts. And really, Lent is a journey inward. It requires orientation and navigation. We go sort of look inside of us and understand why, again, do we need a savior and how that applies to us on a regular basis. And this story is also a story of a prophet who has problems with both orientation and navigation.

So if you're just joining us, let me catch you up a little bit on what's happening. Jonah is a prophet, arguably the worst prophet in the Old Testament because he's called by God to go preach a word of destruction against the enemies of Israel, the Assyrians, and instead of turning his heart toward God and navigating his feet in line with God's purposes, Jonah goes the opposite way. He goes west and not east. He goes toward Tarshish in Spain, not east toward Assyria, Nineveh, the capital city. He goes down into a boat, not up to the city of Nineveh. He does everything that God tells him not to do.

And he gets on a boat, and as he's going on this journey, there's a great storm that comes on the sea, and as the storm goes from kind of hurricane level to super hurricane, the seasoned sailors on this vessel fear for their lives. They begin throwing cargo overboard. They start asking the passengers, What did you do? Did somebody do something bad? And Jonah actually raises his hand and says, I am a prophet of God, and I'm on the run from God. If you want to save yourselves, throw me in the water. The sailors do not want to do that. They don't want to make Jonah's god more angry. They start rowing, trying to get to shore. It doesn't work. They finally throw him into the sea and the storm subsides.

And Jonah, we read last week, is swallowed up by a great fish. So this is where we're picking up today—from inside. If I was a reporter, I'd be like, Here we are on location inside the belly of the fish. Right? This is where we would be.

And we're picking up this story where Jonah is inside the fish, and then he's vomited out on dry land. Now, I can't imagine a more indescribable horror than being swallowed alive by anything. I want to take a moment to talk about fish and whales and all that because some of you will feel like you've been cheated if we don't talk about this part, at least at some point in the sermon series.

So did this happen, and how do we understand this happened? Well, there's a number of stories historically when I studied for this sermon series of people being swallowed by fish or whales. Jimmy Kimmel actually had somebody who was taken into a whale's mouth recently. James sent it to me. You can look that up. That was only about thirty seconds, though, inside the mouth of a whale.

There's a story from 1891 from a whaling ship called Star of the East that was sailing near the Falkland Islands, off the coast of South America, on a whaling hunt. As they were hunting, they saw a sperm whale far off in the distance. They deployed two smaller vessels to go harpoon it. One of them was flipped upside down by the whale's tail, and the other one successfully harpooned the whale, and they brought it back to the boat. Of course, they can't find either of the crew members in the other boat. They assume they were drowned.

Well, the next day, as they have the whale's body next to their boat and they're beginning to dissect it, they bring the whale's stomach up onto the deck of the ship with a little crane, and they notice it's moving. They cut it open, and one of their crew, Bartley, was inside. This guy had been in there, and he describes his experience like this. It took them three weeks for him to regain sanity. For two weeks, he was raving mad. And so the third week, they're able to sort of get out of him what happened, and he describes going and being brought into this great darkness and down through a very tight spot into a wider place where he is in gastric juices. He can breathe, but he faints because of the heat eventually from this. And when they pull him out of the stomach, this guy who'd been hairy and tan was like bleached white and had no hair on any part of his body.

So is that what happened to Jonah? I don't know. It's just an interesting story. I do want to say this: when we read things like this in Scripture, we do have to understand that we're reading something where God is intervening. We believe over and over the stories about God's intervention in the life of His prophet. And so for us to say, "Hey, something of supernatural occurrence happened here," is not at all beyond the pale. It's really important for us to cling to that and say, I don't know. I don't know how this happened. I don't know how anybody survives three days in a whale or a fish. Anyway, that's the story.

Jonah's Prayer: Real Repentance or Sorry, Not Sorry?

Now let's get back to the normal sermon. The focus of this sermon today is not actually the fish, but it's the prayer of Jonah. And I want to ask these questions about Jonah's prayer. What is this? What are we reading? Is this a prophet who is changing, or is this a prophet who's sorry, not sorry?

So I want to look at this together because at the end of Jonah one, we see Jonah relent. He has gotten to the point where he's like, in the middle of the super hurricane, the only way you're going to save yourself, sailors, is by throwing me in the water. He's finally come to a place where I can't run from God, I guess you just got to throw me overboard. That is Jonah relenting from his rebellion. But is he repenting? That's the question I want to look at.

I mean, this sounds really good. If you read this in your devotion time, you're like, "Man, this is a good prayer." Listen to verse two:

I called out in my distress to the Lord, He answered me. I called for help from the depth of Sheol, you heard my voice.

Sounds like Psalm 17. Verse four:

I have been cast out of your sight nevertheless, I will look again toward your holy temple.

Verse seven:

You brought my life from the pit, Lord my God. When I was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you in your holy temple.

I mean, amen, right? Verse eight and nine, and I'm going to read the NIV version because it's the one I grew up on. Right?

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs, but I, with the song of thanksgiving, vowed, and I will sacrifice to you. I will make good. Salvation comes from the Lord.

I mean, Amen, Jonah. This sounds like King David. He sounds really good. But is it real?

You know the phrase sorry, not sorry? Our politicians, artists, celebrities are really good at sorry, not sorry apologies.

Have you heard these before where there's this statement that's made, but when you really listen to it, there's no content to it? It's a way of saying, I'm sorry, but I'm not really apologizing. I'm sorry, but I'm not sorry. Anybody ever been sorry, not sorry? I hope there's some honest people in the house this morning, right? Lots of us—everybody here has been sorry, not sorry. We know what that's like, where you're like, "Yeah, I did that, but I'm not really feel bad. I don't really feel bad about that."

And it reminds me of what Jesus said about the people in His generation. He actually references Jonah, and he says, "These people, they honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me." And I want to look at Jonah's prayer because I think there are four things wrong with Jonah's prayer, where he is sorry, not sorry, where his lips say the right things, but his heart is far from the Lord, just like us. Just like us. And I want to see if we can find ourselves in this.

Problem Number One: Jonah Denies His Sin

Jonah denies his sin. This is a prayer of all people who are stuck everywhere, where it's like, "I don't want to be in this situation, I want to be out of these circumstances." And he prays the stuck prayer: "Lord, help me." But don't you think it's interesting? Here's Jonah, the passage before this. He can acknowledge to the sailors, "I'm the cause of the problem here. I'm running from God. I sinned against the Lord," but he can't acknowledge that to God. See how he's denying his sin?

I'm not going to tell any specific people, but as a dad, there have been lots of times we've had to discipline kids where there is this "I'm sorry" cry when they realize they are stuck between the rock and the hard place of my love and my discipline as a dad. My sweet angelic children have been stuck there, and there's this "I'm sorry," and you're like, "What sorry is that?" Because that can mean lots of things. "I'm sorry I'm here. Right? I'm sorry that you're paying attention today. Right?" There's lots of things that "I'm sorry" means in that moment. And while I can't tell the difference, God can always tell the difference.

God tells us over in Scripture—He is the searcher of hearts. He knows what's on the inside of us, and a lot of times we don't even know. Scripture tells us:

The heart is deceitful and wicked above all things. Who can know it?

We don't even know ourselves many times, but God is the searcher of hearts.

Biblical repentance is a heartfelt remorse that turns away from my sin to the Lord. And it doesn't just happen at the one time of conversion. This is supposed to be a very normal thing in the Christian life. It's why we confess our sins in church every week. This is a normal activity of Christians. This is like eating and breathing for us. This is normal.

But a person can feel bad for what they did and not repent. They can feel sorry for their circumstances, but not toward the Lord. And this is really important for us to know this. That's Jonah, and that's often about us. Remember, repentance is not just about your actions, it's about the orientation of your heart.

So let's think about ducks again. I bring up a lot of ducks today, not fish, but lots of ducks, okay? So how do ducks orient themselves? Well, I found out a lot of migration happens at nighttime, and scientists have studied how ducks know the right way on the compass to go at night. Well, what they figured out is that ducks read the sky. They read the stars. Not like mariners who are looking at patterns, but ducks actually have this thing that they do as they're flying where they look back toward Polaris, the North Star—that part of the sky which doesn't move. Ducks are aware of that. Isn't this brilliant? Ducks are aware of that when they're flying. And so they know north, south, east, west.

Here's the question for us. I'm not sure we're as smart as ducks. I just don't know that we can orient ourselves very well to know what my heart is headed towards. So here's the first test. I'm going to give you four tests today. Do you know which way your heart's facing this morning? You know, I guarantee all of us have sinned this week. I guarantee it. I don't have to be an observer of your life to know that. I guarantee you've sinned regularly this week. But as you think about your response to what you see, is your heart turned toward the Lord or away? Toward or away? So are you sure that your heart is oriented the right way?

Problem Number Two: Jonah Blames God

Jonah blames God. Look at verses three through seven:

You hurled me into the depths of the very heart of the sea and the current swirled about me. Your waves and breakers swept over me. I said, "I've been banished from your sight, yet I will look again toward your holy temple."

Now this is interesting.

Again, sounds so good, so churchy. Good job, Jonah. He has all the right words, but let's fact check this one like the State of the Union address, right? Let's fact check. Is that in fact what happened in the story?

Instead of accepting his circumstances, this is what Jonah is saying: You did this. God, You hurled me into the deficit. Let's remember, who ran away from whom? Who got on a boat? Who told the sailors, Throw me in the heart of the sea? Did God do this? No, Jonah did this. All these things are a consequence of his own rebellion. He's on the run. It's Jonah's fault that he's where he is. You did this to me, God.

And look what else he says here. I think this is fascinating. Jonah's full of self pity. Listen to what he says in verse four:

I said, I am driven away from your sight.

So here's the question: did Jonah feel forgotten by God? Absolutely, he did. And there are so many times that I think we feel like we have been forgotten by God. God doesn't see me. God doesn't care. God doesn't know what's going on. Jonah is very alienated from God's heart.

And you know, I just want to remind you: God sends even the hard circumstances in your life, even some of the things that you're dealing with right now that you're like, I would love to erase that from my life story. Even in those circumstances, God is present to you. God is so green. He is into recycling everything. He uses every part of your life. And all of those little things are little moments where God is saying, Hey, I'm right here in all these circumstances. I'm with you. Turn toward Me, not away in anger.

Again, this is about the orientation of the heart. It's about real repentance. And this is what it looks like to be an unrepentant person: make yourself the victim, full self pity, God's forgotten me. Again, what does God care about? The orientation of our hearts, which way they're facing.

Orientation Like the Ducks

So again, some ducks. Right. Yes, ducks use the North Star at night to navigate. Well, what do they do during the daytime? How do they orient themselves during the daytime? Fascinating.

Ducks have what are small magnetoreceptors in their beaks that connect through the ophthalmic nerve up to the brain that function like a magnetic compass. It's unbelievable that they can do this. But again, even in the daytime, when they can't see the North Star, they can tell north, south, east, west. This is true of the bills of a lot of animals that migrate or a lot of birds that migrate.

Again, can we orient ourselves like ducks can? I'm not sure I think I'm more like Jonah, where I don't know. Maybe I'm the only person here with this, but I look at my circumstances, and I so often evaluate God on the basis of my circumstances. I'm like, if this is happening, God must have forgotten me. I'm being punished for something. Something bad is happening because of me and my circumstance.

I'm reading and evaluating my God's character by what's going on around me rather than saying, Oh, God's even here. I can turn to Him in this place. I mean, am I the only person crazy like that? Don't we do this all the time?

Problem Number Three: Comparing Yourself to Others

Problem number three. Jonah compares himself to other people. Again, verses eight and nine. I love the NIV:

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs.

I'm not going to talk about idolatry around certain sports activities today. I'll save that around your basketball idolatry for another sermon, so don't worry about that. But doesn't it sound like Jonah is about to launch into a good old sermon on idolatry? Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs? Well, that's true. Jonah is actually right here, and yet he's so wrong.

Because look where he goes. He goes straight from verse eight, which sounds like he's going to preach to us on idolizing UNC basketball or something like that. To, but I. And look what he's doing here. So listen, verse nine tells us the real story, what's going on:

But I, those according to orthodox forfeit grace, but not me.

That's what he's doing. Right? There are those people out there who are idle worshipers, but I. Right? There are those people who are bad, but I. Those sinners, but not me. That's what he's doing over and over here with this.

You know, who is they? I mean, who is he talking about? Let's be straight. The sailors. We saw that last week—the sailors. When they hear about God, they're like, oh, this is the real God? They worship. While Jonah's like, Heisman to God. You know, who else is he talking about? Maybe Nineveh? We're going to see his hard heart toward Nineveh next week. You know, so he's like, Those people, but not me. Right? I'm different.

And you can be sure that when you're dividing the world between us and them, there's a deep problem with your heart. There's a deep sense in which you don't believe what the Bible says about you, about your sin. Because if we really have a biblical doctrine of sin, there is no us and them. There's never an us and them. There's just an us and him. That's the only division. He is the righteous one we are not.

This is what sin does for us. It gives us a twenty twenty vision for the sins of others and a total blindness to our own. So let's imagine the scene. You go out to dinner with friends this week, okay, you're going out, big group of you around a big table, and everybody is ordering dinner, everybody, for some reason, orders soup, and you order spaghetti and meatballs. Okay? And you start eating, and you realize they forgot to bring you a napkin. No worries, you're good. You're good with spaghetti and meatballs. Throughout dinner, people are slurping their soup very neatly and you're just enjoying the heck out of these spaghetti and meatballs. So about halfway through dinner, you look up and you realize the guy sitting across from you has just a little drip right here on his chin. You're like, look at that. Yeah, you actually say something. It's like one of your friends. You're like, look at that. You can't even eat right. And your friend is met with dead silence at the irony because you are covered, without realizing it, in spaghetti sauce. This is all over you. That's the irony of what we do all the time.

Jesus told a parable about this, didn't He? That we have this orientation toward others with their sin where we're like, oh, I can see just a little speck, just a little dribble on the chin right there. That's funny. Well, we have a log sticking out of our own eye with regard to our own sinful condition. Here's the thing. You can be sure that when you're comparing yourself, there's something off with your heart.

I want to think about ducks again. Ducks are able to do something that we can't with navigation. Navigation is the direction you're headed in the world. And again, this involves their eyes. Ducks and migratory birds have the ability to see polarized light move over the course of the planet.

There's this crazy theory, and I'm not going to get this right, but I'm going to tell you about it. So in the 1970s, there's this German-born physicist named Klaus Schlutten who was like, there's got to be some kind of photosensitivity in the eyeballs of ducks. What is that? And everybody thought he was a crackpot. He tried to get his paper published over and over again and got it finally published in this little corner of the scientific world, and everybody thought he was nuts. Until toward the end of his life, I mean, just the last couple of years, science has come around and said there is—it turns out birds are using a form of quantum physics called quantum entanglement to navigate. Their eyes have photosensitive receptors that can see light, and they're doing something where they see like where we see a landscape that's flat and kind of laid out before us and disappears, theirs looks like an arc where they can see the magnetic field of the Earth and photosensitive light. And they're using this to guide them in the landscape about where to fly.

Here's my question. I'm not sure that we see our sea as well as ducks. We're like Jonah. The navigation of our own hearts is really hard for us because we can be like Jonah where we'll see this next week moving in the right direction, but our hearts are turned the wrong way. See, orientation and navigation are both important, and there's a way to be right and be wrong. And so there's a way to sound like Jonah.

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit grace.

Yeah, amen. But I—right? No. Clearly, you know the right steps, but your heart is turned away. See, there's something off in us. So again, here's test number three: who are your they? Who are your they in your life? Who are the us versus them for you?

Problem Number Four: Jonah Avoids the Real Issue

And finally, problem number four. Jonah avoids the real issue. This is verse nine.

But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice you. What I have vowed, I will make good. I will say, salvation comes from the Lord.

Now, this one's going to be a little hard for y'all, but I'm going to take you there, okay? The problem with what Jonah is doing here that sounds really good is he's bargaining with God. See, sometimes I think we think repentance is this: I'm going to turn away from my sin and promise to do better. But that promise to do better part is a problem. Because what Jonah is doing and what we so often do is we make bargains with God. I'll do better next time. I promise I'll change. And what he's doing, this is not real repentance, heart turned toward God. Lord, forgive me. Cleanse me. This is a prisoner's—it's like a prisoner's compromise with the Lord.

I'm stuck. If I promise to do better, will you fix this for me? You know, repentance doesn't require we make promises to God. I know that sounds like churchy repentant language, but it's not true. God doesn't want us to put confidence in ourselves and in our own flesh. Over and over, Scripture tells us not to look at self, but look at Him.

Colossians 3 — Set your mind on things above. Hebrews 12 — Fix your eyes on Jesus.

Repentance doesn't involve your promise that you're going to get it right next time. It doesn't do that because in fact, that's Satan's play with our hearts. Satan's play is to make you focus on yourself and linger over your sin and be in a place of groveling and promise making for the future. If you end up with that orientation, I want you to think about this: Do you need a cross to do that? Do we need a cross if we have the power within ourselves just to do better next time? No. Real repentance is turning to the Lord and agreeing with God about our sin and laying it at His feet and letting it go. Not just churning in this.

Ducks use rivers like we use interstates. This is why Arkansas is the duck hunting capital of the United States. Ducks have a huge flight path—half the ducks in the United States go from Canada and up north down the Mississippi, and they navigate down all the tributaries of the Mississippi, and they end up right toward the end of the Mississippi. That's why it's a huge duck hunting place. In the spring, they go back up the rivers. They're able to go back and trace backwards the way they came.

Here's the fourth test: Can you trace back in your heart where bargaining to do better is actually fake repentance? It's bypassing Jesus. It's something that's sort of missing the whole point.

Good News

Brothers and sisters, I want to end here with some good news. I know this has been a heavy sermon this morning. It's a hard passage, talking about all the ways that we don't repent and get it wrong. And I have good news for you today.

You know, this is good news for people who are sorry, not sorry, like me. People who are relenters and not repenters, like Jonah, like all of us in the ways that we subtly keep our hearts from being turned toward God and our feet from moving toward Him in obedience and repentance.

God is not done with Jonah. Even though God vomited him up on the dry land, there's a sermon of hope right there. God isn't done with this guy yet. If it was me, I'd have the fish vomit him up way down low. We're done. This is a tomb for you at this point.

But I want to give you this hope because there is a greater Jonah. Jesus called Himself this. He pointed Himself as the greater Jonah. He kept pointing out the sign of Jonah.

When the greater Jonah came, when Jesus came, He began His public ministry where? With His baptism. His baptism in the Jordan River. John the Baptist, His cousin, sees Jesus come from a long way off, and he tells his disciples, "Hey, there's the lamb who's going to take away the sins of the world."

Yet Jesus comes to John the Baptist to be baptized in the Jordan River. John's baptism was called a baptism of repentance. So when Jesus comes to him, he's confused. He asks Him, "You're here to be baptized by me? I'm the one who has need to be baptized by you. You're the lamb who takes away the sins of the world. You don't need to be baptized."

And yet he baptizes Jesus. Why? Because Jesus' baptism is His public identification. This is what His ministry is about—identification with you and me and Jonah as sinners. This is what I'm here to do. I'm here to be counted among the sinners so that you and Jonah and all of us can be counted among the righteous.

And what do you remember what happened when Jesus was baptized? There was a sign that appeared up in the sky. What was it? A dove. Right? The word Jonah means in Hebrew? Dove. The sign of Jonah appears above Jesus at His baptism. And this is what I want to press upon you today.

If God is not ashamed to be identified with this guy, with Jonah, then God is not ashamed to be identified with you. He's not ashamed of you. Even with your hardness of heart, even with your pseudo repentance, even with your sorry not sorry.

Here's the testimony of the book of Jonah: all of our repentance needs repenting over. All of even our best tears of repentance have to be washed in the blood of Jesus. There is nothing in us that really, really wants all of who God is. And yet God is so gracious. He is so gracious to terrible repenters like Jonah, and like me, and like you.

I think our repentance often smells just as bad as Jonah did after that fish. Can you imagine how bad that guy smelled? Our repentance smells like that. And yet, we're going to see this next week—God comes to him again and recommissions him. Not done. Not sick of you yet. I'm in here. The good news of the Gospel is that we're terrible at orientation, and we're horrible at navigating the depth of our own hearts. God's love for you is greater still, and God is writing a story in your life.

This is what's so encouraging to me about reading Jonah—God is writing a story in this guy's life. This episode we just read this morning of terrible repentance, he's in process. Jonah's in process. Anybody here not in process? The Lord's work in our lives is a process, and He is up to this.

This morning, I want to encourage you because I see when I preach. I can tell when God is pricking your heart. I can tell when you're uncomfortable. I can tell when you're like, oh, this is hard to hear. But look, if that's happening in you this morning, be of good courage. The Spirit's at work. He's doing his thing in you. That sense of discomfort is the spirit's work in you. And you should lean into this and be of good hope.

Because if you're convicted today of your hard heart and your bad repenting, your denial of sin in your prayers, you're comparing yourself to others, you're blaming God—God is inviting you to take another step this morning. God is inviting you. He's at work here this morning and inviting you to take another step with Him on this process, on this journey. He's not done. This isn't a sign that things are all bad. This is a sign that things are all good. We're moving the right direction.

The invitation for us is to do what is happening in the story of Jonah. What is God doing in Jonah's story? He's resetting the GPS to this guy's heart. It's like all the navigation systems on your phone and in your car are all broken, and God is repairing them all. That's what God's up to.

If you want to know what God is up to in your life right now, this is what God's up to in your life right now. This is one of the main things God is up to in your life right now—resetting and recalibrating your heart so that your heart is turned toward Him and your feet and your life begin to move toward Him. Be of good courage.

Closing Hymn and Prayer

I want to end with the words of this hymn. We're going to sing this in a couple minutes. It's so personal to us:

The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen could ever tell. It goes beyond the highest star and it reaches to the lowest hell. The guilty pair bowed down with care God gave his son to win. His erring child he reconciled and pardoned from his sin. Oh, love of God, how rich and pure, how measureless and strong. It shall forevermore endure, the saints and angels' song.

Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for your grace for rebels—the kind that look like rebels on the outside and the kind that are also rebels on the inside. Father, we find ourselves over and over in this book, and we thank you that it's working rightly this morning. It works like a mirror, and it's showing us our own hearts.

Father, we pray more and more that you would capture us with your love. That more and more, it wouldn't just be our lips that would proclaim you, but our hearts. Lord, we ask for this grace to be ever more increasing in us. In Jesus name. Amen.