Faith Ignores The Symptoms

The trouble of it is with the church today, we come with hope in the stead of faith. Faith is positive. Faith needs no booster; faith knows what it's talking about it's talking about. Faith is strong. Faith has hairs on the chest; it speaks and the rest of them shut up. Symptoms can't even speak at all when real godly faith speaks. It's got the floor. It knows where it's at. It's had an experience.

Jonah had plenty of symptoms
When I hear people say of their symptoms, I think of Jonah. If there was any man who had a right to complain about symptoms, it would been Jonah. We would think him to be backslid because he was out of the will of God when he had failed to do what God told him to do. And then he had his hands tied behind him; he was in the belly of a fish, and out into the stormy ocean with a big tornado on top of the ocean, in the belly of a whale with seaweeds around his neck and vomit. And if he looked this a way it was whale's belly. Every way he looked it was whale's belly. You talk about symptoms, he had them. There's no one here tonight in that condition.

Jonah believed in the power of prayer
But look what that fellow done. We think he was backslid and so out of the will of God, and we are perfectly in His will. And under that kind of a setup he said, "They are lying vanities. I won't even look at them. But once more will I look to Your holy temple." For he knew that when Solomon dedicated the temple and prayed this prayer to God, "If Thy people be in trouble anywhere and will look towards this holy temple, then hear their prayers, Lord, and deliver them..."

We should look away from the symptoms
And he believed in Solomon's prayer and a temple that was built by man. And under those symptoms and them circumstances, if he could believe Solomon's prayer, and a temple that had been made with men, what ought we tonight under these circumstances, not look to a temple made with hands or an earthly man who prayed, but to the throne of God Himself where Jesus stands at His right hand with His own Blood making intercession upon our confession, when He died for that purpose. We should look away from our symptoms and call those things which are as though they are not. God made the promise.

Believe God - Expect Great Things!
And look what God did for that prophet under those circumstances. He kept him alive three days. Now, we know that the people of Nineveh worshipped idols. And their god of the sea was the whale. And all the fisherman along the banks, and here comes the whale swimming right into the shore and spits the prophet out on the bank: the god producing the prophet. Certainly they would hear it.

And as he went through the city preaching, the people who did not know which is right and left hand repented till they put ashes and sackcloth on their animals. And Jesus referred to that, that the people of Nineveh repented at the preaching at the preaching of Jonah, and He said, "A greater than Jonah is here." And they called Him Beelzebub.

WMB ("The Sin of Unbelief" - 1958)