Rollercoaster
By Grant Gaines
Have you ever noticed how big of a deal everything is to a child? If they don’t get that one extra piece of candy from the store, it’s as if they are going to surely die within the next few minutes because of malnutrition. And on the flip side, if you give a kid that oh-so-magical Christmas gift during the holidays, they act as if there is not a problem in the world. A kid’s perspective is tied exclusively to how they feel.
Of course as you mature everyone knows that you never have a problem with having a poor perspective because of emotion again, right?
Welllll, maybe we still tend to allow our emotions to control us at least a little bit from time to time if we’re honest with each other, don’t we? And the problem with finding our perspective primarily in emotions is that, if you’re anything like me, emotions can change quicker than Barry Sanders on the football field. One moment I’m on top of the world then the next moment I feel like the worst person in the world. Emotions are a dizzying roller coaster that we have to be careful to handle with caution-just ask Jonah.
You’ve likely heard the story of Jonah at some point in your life so I’m not going to spend too much time talking about Jonah’s hide-and-seek game with God, his awkward stay in the belly of a giant fish, or even his eight word repentance message to the Ninevites. Instead, I want to look at Jonah’s perspective after all of these events happened as Jonah 4 picks up on the story.
The Ninevites, who were an enemy of Jonah’s home country Israel, had just repented from their wicked ways which saved them from the total destruction that potentially awaited them. And this was no small turn around-Jonah 4:11 (NIV) tells us that, “Nineveh [had] more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who [could not] tell their right and from their left…” which is another way of saying that the city had 120,000 kids who were not even old enough to know something as basic as right and left. So if there were 120,000 kids, how many adults must there have been? We don’t know exactly, but I can assure you that this was no small city.
What’s awesome about this giant city, as you likely remember, is that they all turned from their evil ways to follow the Lord. One short, eight word message from Jonah and 120,000+ people repent. Pretty awesome turnaround, wouldn’t you agree? You would have to imagine that Jonah, after preaching that message and seeing all of those people heed his plea would have felt pretty good about life at that particular moment, wouldn’t you?
But that’s not what Jonah 4:1-3 (NIV) tells us when it says, “But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, ‘Isn’t this what I said, LORD, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.'”
Hold on, why was Jonah mad at God? Was it because the Lord didn’t save all of those people? No. Jonah was mad at God because He did save all of those people. Talk about a bad attitude! Jonah was so mad, in fact, that he asked God to kill him dead on the spot because he felt that it was better to be dead than to live with the knowledge that the Lord had saved his enemies.
To say that Jonah had a bad perspective would be an understatement of epic proportions. This guy not only got delivered from sure death after spending days in the belly of a giant fish, but he also saw arguably the biggest turnaround of a city in human history. And what was his perspective when all was said and done? Anger.
What Jonah suffered from is the same thing you and I often suffer from as well-a bad perspective because of an over-reliance on emotions rather than truth. As Pastor Todd Wagner often says, “emotions are real, they’re just not reliable.”
God Himself is recorded in Scripture as having emotions that rage from joy all the way to indignation. Needless to say, emotions are a real part of our lives…and that’s the way God intended them to be. However, we get in trouble when we let emotions start driving our thoughts, feelings, and actions in a way that is contrary to the life that God designed for us to have. That’s why we’re warned in Jeremiah 17:9 (NIV), “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” We can’t trust our hearts because our hearts have led us astray time and time again as I’m sure we can all attest to.
So instead of relying on our emotions like Jonah did, what should we look to as our true compass? The Truth. And in case you’re wondering, the Truth is a person, not an unstable idea or fluid concept. In John 14:6 (NIV, bold mine) Jesus declared this to be the case when He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Jesus is our truth that we are to look at, study, and follow as we go throughout each day. The tabloids, the news, and the internet can’t help us keep the right perspective because everything in our world changes quicker than a high school girl changes her fashion. Or to put it another way, as the old hymn put it, all other ground (other than Christ) is sinking sand.
So if you want the correct perspective in a world that is so violent and volatile, you must look nowhere else other than Christ and His Word. These are the only things that will keep us level headed in this fast-paced society that we live in.
All of those distractions and trials that were once so impactful on how we felt, operated, and perceived our day-to-day lives suddenly stop becoming such a big determinant to how we live our lives because we are anchored in the truth that God is firmly seated on His heavenly throne orchestrating every act for His ultimate glory. That’s really the only way that we can keep a correct perspective in the world we live in.
What’s the source of your perspective?
Comments? Questions? Suggestions?
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©Grant Gaines 2013
