Crying Out To God

Crying Out To God

The sailors picked Jonah up and threw him into the raging sea, and the storm stopped at once! The sailors were awestruck by the LORD’s great power, and they offered him a sacrifice and vowed to serve him. –Jonah 1:15-16

“But Jonah got up and went in the opposite direction in order to get away from the LORD” (Jonah 1:3). Who of us has not, at one time or another, clearly heard God’s instruction and run in the opposite direction? That was the case with the prophet Jonah, who boarded a ship hoping to escape from the Lord. But the story says that “as the ship was sailing along, suddenly the LORD flung a powerful wind over the sea, causing a violent storm that threatened to send them to the bottom. Fearing for their lives, the desperate sailors shouted to their gods for help” (1:4-5).

Jonah finally fessed up and told them that the storm was his fault, that he was running away from God. Then the rugged sailors “cried out to the LORD, Jonah’s God” (1:14), they were “awestruck by the LORD’s great power, and they offered him a sacrifice and vowed to serve him” (1:16).

Crying out to God. We just don’t do it when we are sailing along under sunny skies, do we? We’re complacent and comfortable and blissfully unaware of our desperate need for God. But then a storm hits and our cries to God come from deep within us as we beg God to show his power in our situation. And usually we are not alone. When the storm hits the hardest, we find that those around us are drawn in as well, creating a chorus of cries to the Almighty to save us from the storm.

I’ve heard it in the waiting room of hospitals after an accident, during a surgery. I’ve heard it in the prayers of parents whose children are walking on a path toward destruction. I’ve heard it from children desperate for their parents to claim Christ before they slip into eternity.

God uses storms in our lives to cause us and those around us to cry out to him. All pretense is gone and we throw ourselves at the mercy of our only source of hope. And when we cry out to him, he bends down to listen.

Only Savior, we cry out to you to save us! We are powerless to save ourselves from the fury around us and desperate to see you reveal yourself in the midst of the storm.

DIGGING DEEPER