Being in the Center of a Storm maybe the Center of God’s Will

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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Get started today at cambridgecollege .edu. Today on the

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Wrap Report, we're going to get a sermon that I just preached at my church, the Master's Church of Bucks County, on Mark chapter 4.

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This is going to be a message for many of us that will be challenging, but also,

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I think, be very, very helpful. Because as you're maybe struggling with issues, as you kind of look around and see the culture going, well, crazy, there is a passage that we see in Scripture that would be very helpful in times that we are wondering if God knows what he's doing.

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That sounds strange to say. We're not alone in asking that question. The disciples asked the same thing.

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And I hope that this message would encourage you to realize that the one thing to be more afraid of than a storm outside of a ship or boat is to realize you have

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God inside the boat. Also, to keep in mind that sometimes being in the center of a storm means to be in the very center of God's will.

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That's coming to you today on the Wrap Report. Welcome to the

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Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

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This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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If you wouldn't mind opening up your copy of God's Word to the book of Mark in chapter 4.

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We're going to finish up chapter 4 today. When you get to Mark chapter 4, if you wouldn't mind rising one more time for the reading of God's Word out of reverence for His Word.

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Mark, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, has written this in Mark chapter 4, starting in verse 35.

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On that day when evening came, He said to them, Let us go over to the other side.

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Leaving the crowd, they took Him alone with them in the boat, just as He was, and the other boats were with Him.

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And there arose a fierce gale of wind, and the waves were breaking over the boat so much that the boat was already filling up.

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Jesus Himself was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. And they woke

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Him and said to Him, Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing? And He got up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea,

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Hush, be still. And the wind died down, and it became perfectly calm.

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And He said to them, Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?

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They became very much afraid and said to one another, Who then is this that even the wind and sea obey

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Him? Let's pray. Lord, we come to this text, and we ask,

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Lord, that You would help us to, by the personal Holy Spirit, to understand it and apply it to our lives.

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There is much here, Lord. I ask that, at this hour,

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You would help me to communicate the truths not only of this Word of Yours, but also that we would apply it, as there is great need in many of our lives today.

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We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated. As we've come to this text,

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Christ has been teaching the different parables, that we had been looking at.

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He was going through with the mass of people. And as we had said,

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He was teaching in parable, which many people try to say He teaches in parables, so that He would be better understood.

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But as we saw in chapter 4 here, the Scriptures say the exact opposite. He spoke in parables so He would not be understood by the masses, but then would privately teach the disciples.

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So He comes to a part where He has been teaching His disciples. We see this in verse 33 and 34.

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It says, With many such parables He was speaking the Word to them so far as they were able to hear it.

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And He did not speak to them without a parable, but He was explaining everything privately to His disciples.

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So now He wants to get away with His disciples. He wants to have a time where He can get alone.

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Now that may surprise some of us. Here is the Creator of the universe. God never sleeps.

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And yet, we're going to see that Christ in His humanity needed a time of respite.

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Now, for some that may be encouraging, because some of us like our rest. And maybe some of you are like me, who don't know how to stop working.

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And therefore, my wife would like me to take this passage. This is a passage that I may get in trouble with.

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Because this is a passage we see even the God of the universe, after teaching for a long time, needed rest.

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But what we end up seeing is as evening came, if you remember from the beginning of this chapter, He got on a boat.

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And if you remember the reason He had gotten onto a boat was because He's preaching to the crowds and He wanted to amplify

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His voice. And water is a natural amplifier. And so He was already on this boat and He was teaching.

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And we see that the day comes into evening and He said, let us go to the other side.

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Now, Pastor John MacArthur believes that the boats they were on were probably owned, in his belief, by either

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Andrew and Peter or James and John. We know that those two families, those two sets of brothers were fishermen.

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We know that. We know they were partners in a fishing business. Dr. MacArthur actually says that he believes up to seven of the disciples may have been fishermen.

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And that's gonna become important as we look at this text. They were not only fishermen, but they were fishermen here on this

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Sea of Galilee. And that's gonna be an important point as we're gonna see. But we're gonna see two things in this text.

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One is the fear of a storm. The second is the fear of God.

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And we're gonna see that in this text. We start with the fear of the storm. They go over to go to the other side, leaving the crowd, it says in verse 36, they took along with them in a boat, just as He was with the other boats.

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So the idea here of the other boats, the thinking is that this would have been a small fishing boat, maybe enough to fit about five to seven men.

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So the thought is that the disciples, for all 12 of them plus Christ, you'd have to have at least two, maybe more boats.

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And so they're on these boats and they're gonna go across to the other side. By the way, note that this is completely opposite to everything that our culture teaches us that Christian leaders should be doing.

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Given a large platform and a large audience, what does he do? He leaves and goes to the other side, right?

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Everything in our culture would say, no, do everything to build that platform. That wasn't Christ's way, he knew better.

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So he goes to go to the other side. And the event that ends up happening is very striking.

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We see as they've taken their boats, and I will mention, I've been trying to figure out, it says in verse 36, leaving the crowd, they took him along with them in a boat just as he was.

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And I tried to figure out what that phrase is there for, just as he was.

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I could not find any commentator that really made any comment about that, which was quite frustrating.

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But it is a thing, it seems whatever state, was that state that Jesus was exhausted and they took him that way?

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We don't know. But whatever state he was in, that's how they took him.

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Does it mean that they took him without eating? Or I don't know. So I'll leave that to your imagination.

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One of the questions I'll ask Christ when I see him, it'll be on a long list, trust me.

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But as we get to verse 37, we see the storm, okay? So before we can understand what's going on with the disciples here, we need to do a little bit of understanding the geography.

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Because that's going to play in very big to this. We have to understand something about the

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Sea of Galilee, okay? The Sea of Galilee is almost 700 feet below sea level.

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It is actually the deepest freshwater lake in the world.

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Now some of you are going, wait, the Dead Sea is the deepest, that's right. The Dead Sea is even deeper, about 1 ,400, but that's saltwater, okay?

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So the Sea of Galilee is a freshwater sea, and it is the deepest freshwater spot in the world.

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But around it is a mountain range, which reaches to an elevation of 9 ,000 feet, over 9 ,000 feet.

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So you're talking a very large drop. If you've ever been in a valley in a mountain range, there's something you'd realize that you kind of can't see over the mountains.

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So now picture the scene. If these people grew up on the Sea of Galilee, at least four of them we know were fishermen on the

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Sea of Galilee, which means their fathers were in that business, we know that. So they grew up on this sea, they grew up in the middle of the sea doing fishing.

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And all that's important because if you can't see over the mountain range, one thing you cannot see is a storm that might come.

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So there's a very good chance that these fishermen were used to being at sea in storms.

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In fact, the way that this is, with the steep cliffs that they have over the

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Sea of Galilee, it made it very vulnerable to high winds that would seem to suddenly come up.

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Suddenly, because if you're in that valley, you cannot see them. It often led to very violent storms.

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There would be cooler air that comes down from the mountains, they would come into the basin there of the

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Sea of Galilee, and it would intensify and create a storm.

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There's record, according to John MacArthur, that in 1992, there was one such storm that generated 10 -foot waves on a lake.

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Now some of you, if you understand lakes, this is not a very big lake. This is a lake that is only about 13 miles across.

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And so, for a 10 -foot wave, there's got to be a lot of wind pushing that.

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And that's the case here. This is a storm that would seemingly come out of nowhere.

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I mean, Jesus was just teaching on the shoreline, teaching the people from this boat.

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And it says that they were, that the other boats were with them.

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There's no evidence that there was any bad weather at that moment. There had to have been enough time for Christ to have gone to sleep.

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Now for some people, that's very easy to do. Some of you wish you could just lie your head on a pillow and be out like a light.

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But not everyone has that joy. And what you end up seeing is that here you have a fierce gale of wind.

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Very interesting, the words here. The word that you end up seeing here, where it says a fierce gale, the word fierce is megas.

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We get the word mega, right? Everything's mega means big. This is a mega gale.

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Well, actually the word gale is a term that refers to a strong wind. It's used for hurricanes and whirlwinds.

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So this is something that they were not used to. This is different than the storms that they're used to.

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This is a storm that's enough that takes experienced fishermen who would be desensitized being on the water, being on that sea in storms.

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They're desensitized to that and they're scared. Tells you that this was a very big event for them.

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This is a mega hurricane, is how we could translate this. A mega hurricane of wind.

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Now, if you're not used to being at sea, maybe being at sea could scare you.

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I grew up, as some of you know, I grew up on a yacht. My wife, however, has not. We went to Alaska for our 10th wedding anniversary.

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It was supposed to be with John MacArthur, but he wanted to stay home because his daughter was giving birth to their first grandchild.

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So they moved the date, but we couldn't move it anymore. But we ended up hitting a whale.

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Of course, the captain said they didn't. Where we were sitting, we knew we did because we saw the whale.

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But the entire ship just keeled up. Now, my wife was very nervous as we're sitting at dinner and all the plates are sliding off the table.

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I was less nervous. Why? Because I've been used to being in high waves. You see, when you're used to that, you become desensitized to these things.

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These men would have been desensitized to it. I'm sure some of the men, like Matthew, who is a tax collector, he may not have been on sea that much.

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He might have been a little bit more afraid. Maybe it's him who's voicing these things. But to Peter and Andrew and James and John, the fact that they would be scared tells you that this is a more severe storm than they're used to.

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In fact, we see, as I mentioned from the language, it is a mega hurricane.

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And to the point where the waves are breaking over the boat. Sounds scary, doesn't it? Remember, this is probably, if Dr.

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MacArthur's right, a boat that only has about five to seven people. You figure, what are the disciples in the other boats thinking?

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They're wishing they were in the boat with Christ. Let me express how fearful they are.

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How afraid do you have to be to question the God of the universe as the disciples will do and saying, teacher, do you not care that we're perishing?

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I mean, you kind of have to be a little bit out of your mind to get to the point that you're going to question the creator of the universe.

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You have to be in a great fear. And they are. They are in a great fear here.

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The boat is filling up. These are experienced fishermen. They probably are knowing that if this continues, they're going to sink.

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But yet, the reality is that being in that center of that storm was actually the center of God's will.

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Because God had a lesson for them to learn. Now, that is something we don't want to think about.

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The last thing we want to think about when we have things going bad in our life is that this is God's will.

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We always want to think that somehow it's not God's will. Somehow, something's wrong.

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I don't know if you've ever had the experience, maybe I'm alone, when you're really, really sick and you think, is there some sin in my life?

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Did I do something wrong? Right, we have just this natural thinking to do that.

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And yet, sometimes, even at the worst times in our life, we are exactly in the center of God's will.

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Now, I happen to know that some of us here are dealing with some very, very difficult situations.

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Some with family, some at work, some with friends. And we often will think, what's

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God's will? What should I be doing? Is there something I've been doing wrong with all this persecution?

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And the reality is, as we look at our culture, the persecution's going to be getting worse, not better.

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And we could be asking, what's wrong? Just like the disciples may have been asking here.

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But the reality is, nothing was wrong. This is a storm like nothing they've ever seen before.

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Maybe it was a supernatural storm created just for the purpose of teaching the disciples a lesson.

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Reality is, God often will put things in our lives as well to teach us lessons. We don't like them, usually.

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If you're anything like me, when God wants to teach you a lesson, it usually takes a couple of times, and we don't learn it the first time very easily.

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And so, the Lord has to make the situation a little bit more and a little bit more for us to see lessons.

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The same with the disciples. So, at least we can feel that we're in good company. Sometimes, the

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Lord needs to create a scenario where we end up seeing what it is

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God wants us to see. Sometimes, it's not even anything to do with us. With the disciples here, it's not that they've done something to create this storm, but it is that God wanted them to learn something.

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And so, one of the things that the disciples should have done and something that we should do, but granted, we're not always gonna do this.

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So, it's much easier to preach it than live it. But what we should be doing is when we have difficult circumstances, is not to ask what did we do wrong, but Lord, what do you have to teach me?

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I can't help but to think at times, if some of you have gotten the privilege of getting to meet

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Justin Peters, and I've shared this often, is that Justin is a guy, I've never once heard him complain.

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You look at his circumstances with cerebral palsy and he struggles to even walk short distances. It takes him, if you don't know, three hours to get dressed in the morning.

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And he can't even finish getting dressed. When we travel together, I have to help him get dressed because he's limited on what he could do.

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And yet, he doesn't complain. I've asked him about this. Like, you know, it's so easy to complain in circumstances.

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And his answer is, I'm a sinner who deserved hell, who have no standing before the

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Almighty God. I deserve rightfully to burn for all of eternity.

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And God gave me eternal life. What's there to complain about? And then you kind of feel about this big.

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But that's what we should be having that mindset. But at least some of us may be encouraged to know that even the disciples who walked with Christ needed lessons.

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So here you have this fierce gale, this very violent, powerful storm that descends upon the lake to a point where the boat's filling up.

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They're starting to get very much afraid. And where's Jesus?

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He's in the stern, asleep on a cushion. In case you don't know what stern is, it, you know, when you're basically on ships, they do everything in different language.

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So you don't have a front and a back, a right and a left. Even their miles are off. Right, we'll talk about a mile.

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Well, a nautical mile is 1 .1 miles. Couldn't you have just stuck with a mile? Okay, so, if you're at, on the right side of a ship, that's gonna be star port.

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On the left side is port. You want the cheap way of figuring it out? Left is four letters, port is four letters, okay?

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I had to grow up and remember right and left was port and star port. But that's your right and your left.

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You have your bow, which is the front of the ship, and your stern, which would be the back of the ship.

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So with this, what it's saying is he is at the back of the ship, asleep. But the fact that he is asleep tells you one of a couple things.

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It tells you that he was exhausted. How tired do you have to be to sleep through a hurricane -type winds?

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Not just hurricane -type winds, but a mega hurricane -type winds. And he's asleep.

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One commentator says that this is probably the greatest example of the humanity of Christ, that he was asleep.

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He'd be so exhausted from teaching and doing all the ministry he was doing that he gets into this boat and falls asleep and can sleep through a hurricane.

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Now, I know there's many people that, you know, that you would think they probably could sleep through hurricanes, but there's very few that actually do.

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And yet, that's exactly what Christ is doing. Christ is completely at peace. Now, granted, he's got the advantage.

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He's omniscient, right? There's nothing that he doesn't know. So this storm doesn't surprise him in it least.

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He understands completely what this storm is about. But there, they, the disciples, they wake him up scared out of their mind to the point that they're gonna say, teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?

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So what we see is that their fear is a justified fear. The water's coming into the boat.

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They have this storm that is unlike anyone that they've seen and they're now questioning

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Christ about whether he cares for them. Now, they have seen, as we've looked at, they've already seen him do miracles.

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So what is the question of saying, do you not care for us? Isn't he in the same position as them?

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He's on the same boat. So if the boat goes down, doesn't that mean he goes down as well?

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But yet they're questioning him. The thought would be that they're expecting him to do a miracle here.

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They're expecting him to get them out of this situation. Like, why did this even happen with you here?

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We, they've seen him do these other miracles. But he was willing to allow that for a teaching opportunity.

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The other thing this tells you is it shows you their mindset. The idea that they were thought that they were gonna be perishing.

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They did not see a way out of this. They saw death, drowning as their option, or if they're good enough swimmers.

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But depending where they are in that lake, it could be a long swim. Not many of us would be able to swim a mile or two.

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So it could be concerning to them. And they're that much afraid.

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And Jesus, in verse 39, he got up, and I just love how it just says, and he rebuked the wind.

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Just, he rebuked the wind. No fanfare, this is one of the things that tells us that this was not written by men, okay?

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If the Bible was written by men, you'd have all this fanfare build up to this. It just says, he rebuked the wind.

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And said to the sea, hush, be still. That, right there, goes from that display of his humanity in that he would need sleep, to a display of his deity.

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What he was doing for his disciples was putting his deity on display for them to see.

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That he could command the weather. But the way he commanded this is amazing.

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Because not only does it say that he said, hush, be still, but read along with that, it says, and the wind died down and became perfectly calm.

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It's interesting because in the Greek, this word perfectly is the same Greek word that we saw earlier, megas.

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It became greatly calm, immediately. Now, storms don't usually just dissipate immediately.

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Waves do not dissipate immediately. When the wind pushes a wave, it keeps going until it hits either the shoreline or some object, or if there's land underneath the sandbar, it might hit that and break.

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But this says it became perfectly calm. All those waves that were brushing against the boat, tipping the boat over, getting into the boat, perfectly calm.

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And the disciples went from being afraid of a storm to having a different fear.

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Because suddenly they realized there was something scarier in their boat than what was outside of their boat.

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Suddenly they realized God was in their boat. We end up seeing that it becomes perfectly calm.

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And He says to them, why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?

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Now that becomes important. Do you still have no faith?

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In other words, what is that saying? That they had no faith prior. So this whole incident is to teach them a lesson about faith.

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Excuse me. They're trying to teach them, Christ wants to teach them something.

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The issue at this teaching opportunity is one of fear and faith.

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So He wants to know if they are still afraid or why they're afraid if they still have no faith.

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After all the miracles that they have done or that they've seen, we would tend to say, don't they know to have faith in Him?

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You know, this is something you see throughout the Scriptures. Look at the

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Israelites. What happens with the Israelites? They walk up to a sea,

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God parts the sea, they walk on dry ground. Three, three and a half million people walk on dry ground, go across, the

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Egyptians come in and the sea just closes up. And what do they do when they get to the other side?

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You left us here to die, we got no food. Where are we gonna get food from?

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So God starts dropping bread down from heaven. You just wake up in the morning, there's your daily nourishment and you eat.

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Now, that should, when you go to lunch this afternoon, should give you some enjoyment and when you pray, you could pray and be thankful that you could be eating manna every day for 40 years like they did.

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You know, they complained about the manna. I mean, God is dropping every day. You talk about seeing miracles, every day

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God is putting bread down on the ground for people to eat and what do they do? We want meat.

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God says, okay, you want meat, I'll give you quail. So much quail, you're sick of it. They're thankful just for the manna.

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Time and time again, God would do miraculous things and what are people doing? Complaining about it.

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Here you have the disciples, they've seen miracle after miracle and then there's this storm and what do they do?

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They're gonna complain about it and accuse the creator of the universe of not caring for them.

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That takes some guts to stand up to the creator of the universe, the

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Lord, and accuse him of not caring for you, that you're perishing, but then they have a greater fear.

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Verse 41, they became very much afraid with one another.

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The word for fear here is phobos. We get the English word phobia from. And so you have this fear, but it's a very much a great fear.

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And what do they say to one another? Who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him?

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I want you to recognize something. The disciples understood who Christ was. If not before, they're starting to understand more now.

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It is always gonna be kind of hard. If we were one of the disciples, think that we would just immediately have our theology straight and recognize he's

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God. The disciples did not, and I hate to break it to many of us, we wouldn't either had we not had the

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Bible. If we were at that time, we wouldn't have had our theology all straightened out and the disciples don't either.

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Yes, there's plenty of things they've already seen to point that Jesus Christ is who he said he is, God Almighty, but Christ wants to teach them this lesson even more.

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And they understand because they're saying, who is this that's in the boat? They're starting to realize that they were afraid before, but now they have a very much fear.

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Because they realize that there's something more fearful in the boat than the storm that was outside of the boat.

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It is a fearful thing as we see with them when they recognize Jesus as God.

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Why? Because every time that we see people that recognize God, the thing they notice is their sin.

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We saw, we'll see it with Peter, when he'll see Christ say he's not worthy.

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You see it when you look at any throughout the Old Testament, you're going to see anybody that ends up seeing

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God sees their sin. When Daniel just has an angel, what does he say?

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I'm of a sinful people. What does Isaiah say when he sees the glory of God in Isaiah six?

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He falls down on his face and says he's a sinner. He's a sinful people with sinful lips.

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See in the face of God, the only thing that a person is going to see is their sinfulness compared to his holiness.

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This is the reason when you have all these books that are written about someone seeing Jesus, they went up to heaven and they were playing in the

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Jordan River with Jesus having splashing fights. Yes, there's a book about that.

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There is a book written in the 80s about a guy who was shaving in the mirror and Jesus appeared in the mirror and he had a conversation with him.

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Do you know why I don't believe that account? Because he kept shaving.

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If he saw the Lord of the universe, he would not shave, he'd fall down before him and recognize his sinfulness.

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And that's what the disciples are doing right here. They're recognizing who is this man that commands the waves and they supernaturally just stop.

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They become mega calm. Going from a mega hurricane to a mega calm.

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That's what Christ can do. And they recognize this is something only

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God can do. Because those waves must not have gone to the shoreline, they just dissipated.

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They acted against nature. Who can do such a thing is the question they're asking. Who can create a situation that you have this storm and the waves just dissipate without hitting against something?

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The answer rightly is the one they recognize, God. And they were in that storm as part of God's will.

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Because being in the center of that storm, God was gonna teach them a lesson about who

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Christ was and is. You see, they needed a little bit more encouragement.

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For their faith. They were still lacking. That should also be an encouragement for us.

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Because we're gonna be honest, there's many areas of our lives we're still lacking. Let's think about in your own situation, the things you're dealing with.

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Just in life, things are not getting better. And if there's anyone that believes in post -millennialism, where the thought that everything's gonna get better when it gets to this really good point, then

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Christ is gonna come. I really wonder if they're watching the news. Because I'm just saying, it doesn't seem to be lining up with their theology.

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It seems to be going more the way, well, that we would hold to as a pre -millennialist, right? That things are gonna get worse and worse and worse and then

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God's just gonna take the church out. And we can moan and groan and worry about what's gonna happen in the future in this country.

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There's far too many Christians that are worried about what's gonna happen after this election.

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Well, let me spill the beans and let you know. I can actually tell you. If Joe Biden wins the election, it's because God put him there.

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If Donald Trump wins the election and the country goes crazy with riots, that's because God ordained that to happen.

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Do we understand why? No. The question is not, what do we do wrong?

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Is God not active here? Is he not paying attention? This is not the God of Baal, as we had learned in Sunday school, where they'd cut themselves to try to wake up and wake him up.

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No, the God of the universe is not asleep. He's on his throne, doing exactly what he plans to do.

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We just might not like it. But guess what? If this country goes into chaos, that chaos is

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God's will. The question we need to ask is, where's our faith? Are we still of little faith?

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Does the Lord maybe need to wake up the American church to say, you know what?

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Your celebrity preacher, the TV or preacher, whoever, that's not where the answer is.

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Going to church to have a feel -good message, that's not where the answer is.

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For those who were in Sunday school and heard Scott teaching about the fact that it's this that we have the answer.

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But not enough Christians are turning to this. They don't find that the scripture is efficient. And they look elsewhere in the world or in politics.

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Well, we too may have a similar yet different lesson that the disciples had to learn.

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Their lesson was they lacked faith and didn't quite understand well enough that Jesus is

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God and is in control of all things. But as we look at our culture, we may ask the same question.

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Because there are plenty of Christians that seem to be questioning whether God knows what He is doing right now in the world.

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The answer is God absolutely knows what He's doing.

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There's not a single Adam in the universe outside of His control. And if God allows these things to happen, it is happening that our faith may be strengthened.

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Oh, we might find other ways we'd prefer it to be strengthened, I agree. But God knows better than us.

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Maybe this is a time for the church to put away comfortable Christianity and be willing to take on, have greater faith and take on what the

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Lord commands the church to do. There's something the church has been very lacking of doing which is to really make an impact in our culture through the gospel, not through politics.

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As we look at upcoming events in our culture, may the encouragement of this text be that we would seek how the

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Lord wants us to have a greater faith. The disciples needed to learn that lesson.

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They still had no faith. They still were lacking. We too lack faith.

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We too need to recognize who Christ is. Where He sits right now in the throne of glory and He is in control,

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He is sovereign. As Scott had said in Sunday school, the word sovereignty is belittled much.

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But oh, what an important word it is because that is the lesson the disciples had to learn.

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That Jesus is sovereign and we can trust

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Him just like the disciples could trust Him in all things. Let's pray.

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Heavenly Father, the disciples had to learn a very difficult lesson and it is no less difficult for us when we have to learn the lesson of faith.

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When we have to be put in a position outside of our comfort zone because there's things we lack faith in.

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Lord, help us not to be too hard on the disciples to think that why couldn't they recognize who

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Christ was because we sometimes struggle with trying to solve problems our own way instead of looking to You.

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Help us, Lord, to look to You first and foremost that we would grow in our faith, that we'd be more like You each and every day.

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