Jonah 2:9 “Salvation belongs to the LORD!”  God’s dramatic intervention in the life of Jonah is full of hope—not only for those who seek God, but also for those who, like Jonah, have determined to shut him out.  Many people believe God opens the door of salvation and then stands back, leaving it up to us to decide if we want to come in.   But if God made salvation possible and then stepped back, refusing to interfere with our choice, then the entire life of believers would be about us—our believing, our serving, our following, and our choices to live a good life.  In the case of Jonah, imprisoned in the whale’s belly, God was claiming someone who was quite incapable of performing any redeeming work to compensate for his sin. God was not relying on Jonah to save Jonah. The message remains the same for each of us today: if you have trusted God for salvation, he has done more than simply make salvation possible; he has actually saved you. Colin Smith, “Jonah,” in Gospel Transformation B

"God the Holy Spirit can take the humblest preaching or the feeblest words of our witness to Christ, and transform them by His power into a convicting word in the lives of others. Apart from the ministry of the Holy Spirit we would never clearly see the truth of God concerning our sin, or the truth of God about our Savior. I believe this is what Jesus meant in John 6:44: 'No one can come to Me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.' ” Billy Graham, The Holy Spirit: Activating God’s Power in Your Life (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 1988), 55.

  "Reason quite properly rejects contradiction, but rationalism abhors mystery, which every heresy attempts in its own way to resolve." Michael Horton, Pilgrim Theology: Core Doctrines for Christian Disciples (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012), 177.