I remember once when I was driving through the mountains between North Carolina and Tennessee and it was getting late. I don’t know exactly what happened, but at some point, my sister – who was in the backseat – jumped halfway into the front seat while reaching for the steering wheel and simultaneously screaming, “Paul, wake up!”
It almost killed us because I wasn’t asleep and my reaction to her reaction caused me to jerk the wheel when I didn’t need to.
It was one of the most terrifying 3 seconds of our lives and we still can’t agree about what actually happened. She swears she saw my eyes closed in the rear-view mirror and I’m positive that she just happened to look in the mirror while I was blinking. Since this is my blog, we’ll go with my side of the story.
The one thing that I do know is that what happened in the car that night was a lot like what happened in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. You can find it in Matthew, Mark, or Luke, but let me recap it for you like this: Jesus was ACTUALLY asleep in the middle of a storm and the disciples reached for Him yelling, “Jesus, wake up!!” The biggest difference between my sister in the car and the disciples in the boat is that they didn’t think Jesus was asleep; the knew He was.
Fast forward to the end of the story and we find Jesus saying something that we might not have expected. Instead of telling them they did the right thing in coming to Him about the storm, He basically rebuked them for waking Him up.
He replied, “You of little faith, why are you so afraid?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and the waves, and it was completely calm.
(Matthew 8:26)
I think we can learn 3 things from the way Jesus challenged His disciples in that boat.
If Jesus is sleeping, we don’t need to be scrambling.
Jesus wasn’t sleeping on the job. His disciples thought that He was asleep because He didn’t know what was happening, but Jesus was asleep because He was in control of what was happening. He rebuked the disciples because they missed the obvious: what we do in a storm should match what God does in a storm, and God never panics in a storm.
[Tweet “What we do in a storm should match what God does in a storm, and God never panics in a storm.”]What’s in us should affect what’s around us.
1 John 4:4 tells us that we’ve overcome because we’re God’s children and because the one in us is greater than the one who is in the world. In short, what we carry inside us should impact what’s carrying on around us more than the other way around. You and I are called to be thermostats more than thermometers. We set the temperature instead of reflecting it.
[Tweet “What we carry inside us should impact what’s carrying on around us “]Instead of rocking the boat, remember who’s in the boat.
At the end of the day, we may find ourselves a little more like the disciples than we want to be. I think that right now a lot of us may even feel like my sister when it comes to the coronavirus, the spread of it, and the effect of it on world markets. From our perspective, it can seem like God’s asleep at the wheel and that can lead to a bunch of us reaching for the wheel and screaming at God to wake up.
But the most critical lesson that the disciples learned in the boat that day was that Jesus was in the boat with them. It’s amazing how quickly a storm can take our eyes off of what matters the most, isn’t it? We see the waves, we feel the wind and the rain, we check the stock market or the number of COVID-19 cases on the trackers and we begin to fear all that we might lose instead of remembering what can never be taken from us.
Jesus is still in the boat. He hasn’t left and He isn’t going to.
Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.
(Hebrews 13:5)
He didn’t beat the disciples up that day and He isn’t beating us up today. But He is reminding all of us that He is here. He’s present in the problem and His presence is the solution.
[Tweet “Jesus is present in the problem and His presence is the solution.”]Jesus has such a way of revealing our lack of faith without shaming us for our lack of faith, doesn’t He? The end result of the boat story wasn’t the disciples hanging their heads about themselves, but increasing their faith in Him.
They also made it through the storm. So will we.
