Mark 4:35-41
This morning we are going to
hear God’s Word, and we’re going to hear it from Mark Chapter
4. So if you have your Bible, I
would invite you to turn there with me. We’re going to look
at Mark Chapter 4. And this is a passage that occurs
in God’s Word right after Jesus has spent a great deal of time
teaching. And he is exhausted. He’s physically
exhausted. It reminds us that Jesus was
not only God, but that he was man. That he was someone who
hungered, who thirsted, and who grew weary and physically tired
as well. And so after he finishes teaching,
he and his disciples get on a boat to head across the Sea of Galilee. and something unexpected happens.
And so we are going to read that passage here in just a moment.
But before we read it, let’s take a moment to pray and ask
God’s blessing upon his word. Lord, we need your word to feed
our souls every bit as much as we need food to feed our bodies. And so we ask now that you would
nourish our soul for the sake of our good. that you would stir
up repentance and faith, that you would help us to see our
need in this passage, and that we would find our need met in
you alone. And we ask it in Jesus’ name,
amen. Mark chapter four, beginning
in verse 35. On that day when evening had
come, he said to them, let us go across to the other side.
And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just
as he was. And other boats were with him.
And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into
the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in
the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to
him, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? And he
awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, peace, be still. And the wind ceased and there
was a great calm. And he said to them, why are
you so afraid? Have you still no faith? And
they were filled with great fear and said to one another, who
is this that even the wind and the sea obey? Amen. This is God’s Word to us this
morning. Well, I want to talk to you a little bit about fear
today, about being afraid. Actually, in this passage, Jesus
asks that question to the disciples. Why are you so afraid? And a lot of people are afraid
these days. We live with this mild set of
fear that sometimes crops up given different circumstances
over the course of our lives, but this is a particularly worrisome
time. for many people given the inconveniences
and maybe more serious things such as loss of job or a drastic
cut in income or maybe an actual infection in our health with
regard to this, with regard to what’s happening. People are
afraid of what is happening and what could happen and what life
will look like in a few months or a year down the road and what
will happen if there’s a huge spike in cases. Maybe you have
a sense of fear as to how the governor and the president are
handling the situation. how our politicians are leading
in this midst of time. You may not call it fear, but
that’s really what’s happening at the root of our souls. It
manifests itself as anger. manifests itself often as this
passive-aggressive sense that comes out of us, or even an outright
rage. And there’s certainly enough
anger to go around, isn’t there? I mean, we see it in social media,
as we see what’s written there. And we see it in people’s response
to what they hear in the news, and what they’re seeing coming
across the news, and the decisions that are being made. They’re
infuriating people. And then there’s the fear, again,
usually manifesting itself in some form of anger at the other
ordinary things of life that have nothing to do with this
particular situation that we’re in, right? Things like our health
and our financial situation, the outcomes of our decisions,
the decisions that our children make. We have a fear about those
things, and we wonder if it’s all going to work out for our
good. And the common denominator in all of these things is this
sense of powerlessness over our circumstances. When this pandemic
came, we didn’t have any power to change it. And we don’t have
the power to do anything about how our governor is leading,
or how our president is leading, or how our other leaders are
leading. And when you can’t do anything to make it better, we
start to ask the why questions. When something bad happens to
you and it stirs up fear, you ask, why is this happening to
me? What did I do to cause this? Why is this happening to me and
how can I get through it? And who brought this upon us
or upon our lives? We start to look for a scapegoat.
We start to want to blame shift even. And the passage that we’ve
just read is a story of a different circumstance maybe than what
we’re going through, but it’s the same idea. It’s the feeling
of being totally powerless in situations that are painful and
scary. And it stirs up that latent fear
that exists in all of us. And oftentimes, that fear manifests
itself as anger. In the passage, what we discover
is that there are a few guys out on the boat in the Sea of
Galilee. And there’s this violent storm.
Wow, that was a great catch. Did you see that? That should
impress you. They’re out on the, they’re out
on the Sea of Galilee and there’s this violent storm that comes
in and, and the Sea of Galilee is like over 600 feet below sea
level and, and it’s kind of surrounded by mountains so these storms
would come in unexpectedly and they were violent. And they could
cause some profound damage and even death for people who were
out on a boat and unexpectedly finding this happen to them just
as these men were. And they’re out there on the
boat in the Sea of Galilee and the storm comes and they think
that they’re gonna die. I mean, that’s how severe this
storm is. And Jesus is with them. Now,
they’ve already seen Jesus heal people. They’ve already seen
Jesus display His power over evil. They have seen Him do miraculous
things that they have never seen anyone do before. And Jesus is
with them in this boat in the midst of this terrible situation,
and what’s He doing? He’s fast asleep. He’s out cold. He’s sleeping in the midst of
this storm, and it makes them angry. They go to Jesus and they
ask Him, don’t you care? Don’t you care that we’re perishing?
Don’t you care? Now if you’re honest, you’ve
asked Jesus that question. And it’s not even really a question.
I mean, have you ever been asked a question that isn’t really
a question? Why didn’t you take out the trash? That’s not a question. That’s an accusation. And that’s
really what these disciples, these people are doing here.
They’re accusing Jesus of just being checked out from a circumstance
that could kill them. And if you were one of the disciples,
you would probably be angry too. I mean, let’s just be honest.
You would probably be angry too. I would. Because that’s what
goes on in our hearts when life hurts, and there’s nothing that
we can do about it. We get angry, and we get angry
because we’re afraid. And when the storms of life start
to come our way, we oftentimes face an equation, and the equation
goes a little bit like this. It’s the situation that we’re
in plus myself equals fear. or hurt, or sadness, whatever
it may be. And oftentimes it manifests itself
as anger. It manifests itself as outrage
at the trials we face. But I wanna challenge you to
think a little bit differently. Because what if we face trials
like this instead, with this equation in mind? The storm,
plus myself, plus Jesus, the storm plus myself plus Jesus. See, you’ve added a whole other
variable there, and it’s a variable that you’ve added that is the
only one who can have any authority over the storm, who can actually
do anything about it. Because if Jesus is in the equation,
then we can face whatever storm that we’re facing in life with
a whole different perspective. If Jesus is in the boat with
us, our fear can be transformed into hope. And our hurt can move
to courage. And our sadness can move to rest. And our anger can shift to peace. Because over and over and over
again, what we see in Scripture is that Jesus has full authority
over the forces of evil. and illness and disease and nature. And when we realize that and
we actually internalize it and believe what Jesus has said and
what he has done, then we have a whole different way of going
through the storms that we face in life. We go through them with
hope and with peace and with confidence to go through the
junk of life. And we see it right here. Jesus
is in the boat. Jesus is in the boat with them,
and he speaks to the storm personally like it was some kind of unruly
heckler. Jesus is in the boat, and he
speaks to the storm, and he rebukes it on his own power and authority. He doesn’t need to call on anyone
greater than himself. Because he is the authority over
nature. He is the authority over the
things that we have the least power over. And when he speaks
to it, he says, peace be still. And what happens? The water,
which is raging, which is about to tip over their boat and sink
it and drown everybody, becomes smooth as glass. You could look
down and you could see your face in it. In fact, the Greek word
here for great calm that we just read could also be translated
dead calm. I mean, deadly calm waters. I mean, they’re just crystal
clear, right? That’s what happens. And it doesn’t
happen through some secondary means, but it just happens because
Jesus speaks into it by the power of his word, and it just completely
calms down. And it all begs the question,
because we have to come back and look and say, what difference
does this make when the rubber meets the road in my life? Because
it begs the question, why don’t we live as if the same Jesus
who saved these men in the boat can also save us as well? Why don’t we live as if the same
Jesus were with us? Why can’t we just look to Jesus
and trust him that he’s gonna work everything out for our good
when the trials and the storms come along. Well, I think there
are a couple reasons why. Number one, One reason why it’s
hard for us to believe that Jesus is right with us in the midst
of the storm is that it’s far more natural for us to take what
we see and experience as being the greater reality than Jesus. It’s far more natural to take
the circumstances that are pressing down on us, that are confronting
us face to face, as being a much greater and much fiercer and
much more powerful reality than we take Jesus who is unseen. Does that make sense? Our default
mode is to live by sight rather than by faith. When you are in
the storm of life, The wind and the rain are the most powerful
dynamics in your life. That is your reality. And as
far as you can tell, nothing is going to determine your fate
more than the circumstances you’re facing. And sometimes those circumstances
are so intense that it just feels like you’re gonna be swallowed
whole. I mean, think about it. If you have a baby on the way
and the doctor tells you that your child is gonna be born with
special needs, then that is your reality. That’s your life. You can’t change that. And that
seems like the most foreboding and the most powerful dynamic
hitting you face to face right there. That seems more powerful
than Jesus. If someone close to you dies,
that’s your reality. And you can’t change that. You
have no power over that. And it’s a loss that you’re never
getting back. and you can’t miss the storm. It hits you, and it hit these
guys right in the face. They felt it, they saw it, they
experienced it, and all the realities of life were secondary to what
was going on right there, and nothing seemed more powerful,
even though Jesus was within feet of them. He was in the boat
with them. And these were people who had
seen what Jesus had done. They witnessed it with their
eyes. They had experienced it. I mean, can you imagine that?
I mean, can you imagine going through a storm, an issue in
your life, a circumstance that’s just a watershed issue, something
that brings you great pain and suffering, and knowing that Jesus
physically was right there. physically between where I am
and the grass. You could turn and you could
talk to him. You could grab him by the shoulders and say, help
me. Physically, you could look into
his eyes and do that. Wouldn’t you think that that
would make a difference in your faith? Wouldn’t you think that
that would make a difference in the way that you would go
through that storm? See, that’s what these guys had
here. They had Jesus in the boat right there with them. And they
have Jesus with them, but they’re still afraid. And they’re still
angry. They’re afraid and they’re angry.
And Jesus gives them the answer as to why they’re afraid and
they’re angry. And the answer is that they have no faith. These
are men who are lacking in faith. They do not trust that Jesus
is going to do them good. And that leads me to the second
reason why we have a hard time trusting that Jesus will calm
the storm. And that reason is this, sometimes
he lets the storm overtake us. I mean, that’s the reality. Sometimes the storm overtakes
us. There are people, I’m amazed by this, people who eat kale
three meals out of the day, and they take care of their bodies,
and they exercise, and they walk their 10,000 steps, and they
do all the right things to take care of their bodies, and they
get cancer when they’re 45 years old and they die. The next door neighbor’s eating
at Burger King three meals a day and he lives to be 95 years old.
Why is that? It seems unfair, doesn’t it?
There are people that face the most colossal forms of evil imaginable. They face injustice. They lose
their livelihood. They lose their reputations.
They lose relationships. Sometimes justice does not always
prevail in this fallen, broken world in which we live. And these
are the kinds of things that make you and I wonder if God
is powerful or if he’s good. or if we’re going to be honest,
if he really even exists. I mean, this is what the guys
are facing in this boat. They go to him and they say,
do you even care that we’re perishing? They’re starting, even though
they have witnessed with their eyes the things that Jesus has
done, they’re starting to maybe doubt that he really is the Messiah
after all, that he really is God after all. Suffering can
do that, can’t it? It can lead us to just cast off
any belief in a powerful, loving God who promises to work all
things for the good of those who love him and have been called
according to his purpose. And maybe you know people who
fiercely deny the existence of God because they’ve had to go
through certain sufferings, and they’ve had to weather it, and
they faced the consequences of it, and they think that if God
actually exists, he must not be powerful. He must not be powerful
enough to handle my storm to have it work out for my good.
Or maybe God exists and he’s powerful, but he has the power
to handle it, but he doesn’t love me enough. He doesn’t care
enough. So either God is not powerful
enough or he’s not loving enough, and if God’s not powerful enough
to deal with the storm, or if he’s not loving enough to deal
with the storm, then there’s no reason to worship him. That’s
not the God that I wanna worship. I’ll just go my own way. That’s
what people think. A lot of people think like that.
And I just want to challenge that notion, because that’s not
something that just our atheist friends deal with, or our agnostic
friends deal with, or our really superficial Christmas and Easter
kind of Christian friends deal with. This is the kind of thing
that I deal with and that you deal with, if we’re gonna be
honest, because in the midst of the storm, when things appear
to be random, when it appears as if God does not care, or that
he does not love us, or that he does not have power over it,
we begin to think this way. But I want to challenge the thinking
because just because something appears to be random, appears
to be not working for our good, and appears to have no point,
doesn’t mean that it is. Because something feels like
it’s out of control doesn’t mean that it is. Because we don’t
feel God’s love in the midst of the storm immediately at every
point along the way doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love us. And
because the storm is not ending on our time frame in the way
in which we’ve decided that it should end doesn’t mean that
he’s not powerful over it. We are people with tremendously
limited understandings. We need to be people who stop
for a minute and doubt our doubts and are a little bit more skeptical
of our skepticism. Because none of us have this
exhaustive understanding of our circumstances and of what God
is doing. I mean, if you decide that God
doesn’t exist, if he doesn’t care, or if he’s not powerful
because your circumstances are somewhere between being some
kind of form of a mild nuisance all the way to a watershed event
in your life, then really what you’re doing is you’re living
by blind faith in your own understanding. What you’ve actually done is
you’ve elevated yourself to a level of God where you’re saying, my
understanding of this is what’s ultimate, not Jesus. My ability
to make sense of this is what is ultimately true, not what
Jesus says and who Jesus is and who he reveals himself to be
in the Bible. You don’t have to be able to
comprehend everything for it to have a purpose. You don’t
have to be able to understand it all to know that God loves
you. And we know that that is false
because our children often don’t understand why we discipline
them. Our children don’t understand oftentimes why we have certain
rules, and why they can’t have what they want, and why they
have to suffer certain things that they have to suffer, and
go through certain experiences that they have to go through.
Why would we allow them to do that if we were in control, we
have the power over it as parents, and we loved them enough? They
don’t understand that fully. But if you’re a parent, you understand
it, don’t you? You don’t even have to be a parent to know this,
right? You understand it. You understand
exactly what you’re doing. You understand why you have the
rules that you do. You understand why you have the
consequences that you do. You understand why you allow
your children to experience certain types of suffering and discomfort
that you allow them to experience. And it’s not because you don’t
have the power to change their circumstances or that you don’t
love them with all of your heart. It’s because you’re seeking their
good. And it’s because you do love them. but their understanding
is limited. And if that’s the case in a child’s
relationship to a parent, and a parent’s relationship to a
child, how much more is that the case with regard to our relationship
with God? Right? I mean, God is sovereign
over the universe. He has exhaustive understanding
of all things. We understand like maybe one
and a half percent of what’s going on. We don’t get it all,
and you’re not gonna get it all in this life. The secret things
belong to the Lord. See, in the Bible you find people
who, from cover to cover, go through incredible storms. Incredible
storms. I mean, we think of the suffering
of Job, right? We think of the suffering of
Joseph, being betrayed by all of his siblings and being sold
into slavery. We think of the suffering that
Ruth and Naomi had to face. And what we discover is this
idea that if God loves me, he’s gonna, I kind of feel like he’s
gonna just rid my life of all these storms. But when we look
at them, when we look at the Job’s and the Joseph’s and the
Ruth’s and the Naomi’s of scripture, we discover that that concept
is totally false. Because you’re not gonna find
a single person of any significance in the Bible from Genesis to
Revelation who doesn’t go through some kind of colossal form of
suffering. And yet we are able to see on
this side of the history of the scripture that God loved his
people. God loves Job. He loves Naomi. He loves Ruth. He loves Joseph. He’s working
things out for their good. But how could they see that possibly
in the thick of it all? In the thick of the suffering
of their life? I mean, we know that God loved his people because
all of the disciples, except for Judas, and we know what happened
to him, and the apostle John, they were all killed for following
Jesus. In the 2,000 years of church history, natural disasters,
disease, persecution, you name it, have happened to God’s people.
They’re happening right now, today. They’re happening today. And sometimes the very worst
things happen to them. The very worst possible things
happen to them. A storm came and the storm overtook
them, and yet there’s no denying that God loves his people. And
he may display his power and his love in a very tangible way
that you can feel and experience down to your bone marrow in his
display of power over the storm of your life. I mean, we know
the outcomes for Joseph and for Ruth and Naomi and for Job. We know the ends of the story.
We know that God not only redeemed what was stolen from them, but
he redeemed it and it was even better than what they had before.
But for every one of those folks, there’s an Abel, right? Cain
and Abel, that Abel. There’s Zechariah. There’s Uriah
the Hittite. The godly man unjustly murdered.
There’s John the Baptist. There’s most of the disciples.
Here, in this story, Jesus calms the storm. The men call upon
Jesus with a very angry, disappointed, doubting, fearful faith. We’re not reading about the great
heroes of the Bible here. That’s not who these men are. These are not poster children
for impeccable faith. They went to Jesus in the same
way we go to Jesus. go to him with a weak and fragile
faith. But what they did is they went
to him nonetheless. They went to him nonetheless
because somewhere they knew they had at least enough faith to
know that Jesus could bring the calm and the peace and that he
would do them good. Look at what Jesus says in verse
40. Why are you so afraid? The idea
behind the Greek word here for afraid is the word dread. You know what that’s like when
you dreaded something, like it just bears down on you and you’re
looking into the future and it just seems like a bottomless
pit of suffering. But after going through the storm
and experiencing Jesus’ love and experiencing His power over
it, what you see in verse 41 is that these men were filled
with great fear. So there’s the word afraid in
verse 40 and there’s the word fear in verse 41. But they’re
two different Greek words. The Greek word in verse 40 is
the word for dread, for just this powerful fear. And the Greek
word for fear in verse 41 is this word awe. They are awestruck
by the awesomeness of who Jesus is and his power over the storm. And that’s the point of the story,
right? The storm that you are facing
may feel like the greatest reality of your life. But one of my favorite
theologians, J.C. Ryle, once said that sight, sense,
and feeling can make even believers poor theologians. Sight, sense,
and feeling make believers very poor theologians. Because even
though the storm may feel like the greatest reality of your
life, and you can feel it and touch it and experience it, the
greater reality is that Jesus is more powerful than the storm.
Whether you are going through the most torrential hurricane
you’ve ever experienced, or you’re just going through some kind
of little sprinkly shower Remember this. The storm that you’re facing
is not what defines your life. It doesn’t define your life. It’s not the greatest reality
of your life, even though it may feel like it. Let me say
one more thing before I’m done. We need to deal with a serious
hypothetical, but it could have happened. Let’s say these men
who were on the boat, who were saved by Jesus in this circumstance,
where he calms the water, were back out a week or a month later
on the boat in the Sea of Galilee, and another storm, unexpected,
comes along, and it overtakes them, and their boat tips over,
and they all drown, and they all die. That could have happened. That’s something that could happen.
You know, what if you get cancer and you don’t beat it? What if you get unjustly sued,
and the court rules against you unjustly, and you’re destroyed
financially, and your reputation is ruined, even though you did
nothing wrong? What if someone close to you betrays you? And
that person never repents, never turns back and never asks for
forgiveness, never seeks reconciliation. Could you still say that God
is good? Could you still say that God
is powerful? That you trust him? That you’re
not defined by the storm, but you’re defined instead by the
grace and the merits of Jesus Christ credited to you in the
gospel? Let me help us think through
that by pointing you to another storm in the Bible. In the Old
Testament, we all know of this man named Jonah, right? He was
in a boat. Remember what happened to him?
A similar thing, right? There’s this huge storm that
comes, and Jonah, what’s he doing? He’s asleep. And the people on
the boat think that they are going to die, just like these
disciples. And so the storm is eventually
calmed, right? It’s calmed and the sailors become
filled with fear. They become filled with awe.
But there’s a difference, right, in how that storm was calmed
versus the storm that we just read here in Mark. In Mark, in
this passage, Jesus calms the storm by the power of his word.
In Jonah, the storm is called how? They threw him out into
the daggum sea. They threw him off the boat and
into the water. That’s how the storm was called. Now, hold that thought for a
second, because in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that one
greater than Jonah is here. Who’s he referring to? He’s referring
to himself. So here’s the point. When Jesus
says that one greater than Jonah is here, what he’s saying is
that he is the one who is going to destroy destruction. He is
the one who is going to break brokenness, and he is the one
who is going to kill death. And he’s gonna do it by being
thrown into the ultimate storm. Because remember another storm
that happened when Jesus was on the cross. The skies were
darkened that day. And on the cross, there was a
storm that would completely and totally undo all of us. It was
the absolute unmitigated wrath of the Father against your sin
and my sin that we deserve. And instead of being poured out
on us, instead of you having to go through that storm and
me having to go through that storm, Jesus is the one who goes through
that storm for us. And he takes it. And he spoke
some different words that day. He spoke the words, it is finished. And just like Jonah, that storm
swept him away. See, God never promises that
the stories of your life will end happily ever after. He never
makes that promises to you. You may never get answers as
to why you suffered the way you did or why you continue to suffer. And your suffering may not have
anything to do with a lack of faith or some besetting sin or
some kind of lack of repentance. Sometimes people will say things
like, you know, someday you’ll learn, someday you’ll know why
you had to endure such a trial. No, that’s not true. You may
never learn it in this life. You may never know. So what do
you do then? You just keep casting your gaze
upon Jesus who is good, and who loves you, and who is faithful,
and who is powerful in the midst of that storm. You go to him
with this wimpy little linguine spine, faith that you have and
you keep looking to him and you cling to him and you remember
that the trial that you face never gets the final word in
your life. Jesus gets the final word in your life because he
promises to deliver you from the ultimate storm. He makes
you that promise and he will never go back on his word. And
so you can entrust your life to the one who is greater than
Jonah. to Jesus, the one who was thrown into the storm and
swept away for you. And you can believe what is true
about him, that beyond a shadow of a doubt, he is not only great,
but he is also good. He’s not only powerful enough
to conquer our greatest storm, but loving enough to hold on
to us when it feels like the winds and the waves are going
to sweep us away. Let’s take that with you as you
go. Let’s pray together. Father, we are people with, just like
these men, who have such weak faith. And we look at our circumstances
as being so much greater than who you are. And so we ask that
you would cause us to be repentant and cause us to look to Jesus,
who is the author and the finisher of our faith, the one who endured
the storm for us and promises never to leave us nor forsake
us. And we ask this in the name of
him who came such a distance for us, our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.