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May 26, 2024

Forecast: Chance of Storms

Passage: Mark 4:35-41

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Gospel of Mark

Keywords: faith, fear, trials, will of god, unplanned, life storms

Summary:

Life is full of storms, some foreseen, many not. The reality is that, as Christ-followers, it is Jesus himself that calls us into those storms, goes with us in them and seeks to deepen our faith in them. This message looks at how God wants to use life's storms to grow us and the people around us.

Detail:

Forecast:  Chance of Storms

Mark 4:35-41

May 26, 2024

Fellowship Question:

What’s the worst storm you’ve ever been in in your life? 

INTRO: 

VIDEO: 00:00:00-00:00:25 (1st 25 seconds)  https://weather.com/storms/tornado/video/survivor-describes-terrifying-moments-as-iowa-tornado-hit

Good reminder not to leave your communication with God up to the last seconds of life.  We never know, do we?  Hopefully this event started a lifetime of prayer and relationship with God for this young mother.

Anyone here glad you don’t live in tornado alley this year?  It’s been a difficult year for so many people living in the Midwest and South due to storm after storm producing deadly tornados.  As of May 17, we’ve seen 808 tornados with 17 resulting deaths.  Surprisingly, that is still projected to come in under 2023’s number of 1294 tornados with 83 related deaths.  I’ll take our Spokane weather any day!

            What is it about us humans that whether it’s a fox-hole in war or a house being torn apart by a tornado, our reflexive tendency is to cry out to God for help?  And why does it take events utterly beyond our control to move most of us to the realization that life is often beyond our control and we really should be asking God to intervene? 

            That’s one of the many messages in today’s text, Mark 4:35-41. 

Life’s storms are God’s school.

Let’s read Mark 4:35-41

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” 36 Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. 37 A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 38 Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

39 He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

40 He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

41 They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

            Life’s storms come in all kinds of packages.  Like the weather, some can be fairly predictable—like aging, paying your taxes, the demands of parenting and the toil of work.  But so many of the worst storms in life seem utterly unpredictable—cancer, crippling or life-taking accidents, divorce, unexpected death, financial ruin, war, illness and many more.

            Life’s storms always impact life’s relationships.  They test the very fiber of our closest relationships and try the very character of our lives.  Every one of us can respond in a spectrum of ways.  We can get angry, blame others, rail against the injustices and run from or outright fight against the God and people who mean the most to us…OR we can become more like Jesus, loving more sacrificially, listening more intently, valuing more deeply what never fades or changes or can be destroyed or taken away.  Two very similar people can go through virtually the exact same experience at the same time and come through it as very different people.  The difference is usually whether we treat the storm as God’s school to learn in OR as something far inferior to be avoided, hated, fought against and rejected. 

            In this chapter 4 of Mark, Jesus has just spent the whole day teaching about faith and power of His Word to build faith. The chapter started with the parable of the soils which called everyone to be very careful and intentional about how we hear the Word of God.  The other parables of the lamp on a stand and the farmer who sowed the seed and the parable of the mustard seed… all of them extoled the power of the Word of God to build our faith-relationship with God. 

            So now the Holy Spirit leads Mark to write about the life-application Jesus scheduled for his disciples around these truths he just taught them.  Mark signals that with the passing words, “That day when evening came….”  He’s cluing us in to the fact that that day’s teaching was about to be linked to that day’s experience—a storm. 

NOTE:  God has a way of providing life experiences for us that test and build the truths he has scheduled for us to learn.  We shouldn’t be surprised that certain situations arise that test us in close proximity to the ‘course material’ God is teaching us.  (Almost makes me not want to teach about life’s storms!)

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” 

            The next phrase which contains Jesus’ command to go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee is significant when it comes to God’s school of life’s storms:  GOD WILL DIRECT OUR LIVES INTO STORMS.  Don’t confuse that with the storms themselves.  The Bible teaches that God uses physical weather as part of his curriculum in our schooling.  Life-sustaining rain, sunshine, orderly seasons and weather that blesses both creation and creature are signs of God’s blessing.  Conversely, destructive storms, droughts, floods, fires and such—they are often signs of God’s discipline and judgment (though not always) and are usually provoked and implemented by angels or demons or the brokenness of a fallen creation. 

            Regardless of the cause or agent of life storms, God always wants them to purify, strengthen and mold us more into the image of Jesus by drawing us closer to Him, not driving us further away.  But God always gives us the freedom to choose how we will respond to the storm AND how we will respond to Him in it. 

            In this story, God wants us to be very clear that obeying God’s call on our lives will sometimes lead us into terrifying storms.  The idea of traveling at the end of the day…across the Sea of Galilee…in a small fishing boat…when a life-threatening storm would descend—that was God’s idea!  The disciples were going to be in this pickle precisely because they were obedient to the call of Christ.  Storms often accompany obedience. 

            I’m sure not a few of the disciples were thinking to themselves, “Really, Lord.  If you are really the Messiah, why would you have us all board a boat and strike out into the dark into a storm that is sure to be our undoing?”  Unplanned storms, particularly ones that destroy what we love (be it a boat, our safety, a loved one or just our peace and quiet), are God’s will for our lives.  Satan may be the agent of those storms (like sickness, violence, destructive natural disasters, etc.  See Job.).  But God has so willed that even those things, horrible as they are (and they are), will form part of His divine will for our blessing, growth and glory. 

ILL:  Murder of a young missionary couple in Haiti this week. 

Davy and Natallie Lloyd, 23 and 21, met at Bible college in the U.S.  Davy was raised in Haiti where his parents had started a ministry to children, Missions In Haiti.  That Mission was maintaining a couple of homes for poor children that housed 58 boys and girls.  They had also built a church, a bakery and a school with more than 240 students. 

This past week, the Lloyds along with some of their boys were leaving a youth group gathering when they were ambushed by a gang in 3 trucks. Davy Lloyd later called his family on a star-link call to tell them that gang members had hit him on the head with the barrel of a gun, forced him upstairs, stolen their belongings and left him tied up.  As his parents listened on the line, another gang showed up at their home, someone started shooting, the line went dead… and Davy and Natallie were both killed.

            Natalie’s dad, Missouri state Representative Ben Baker, said this, “They loved Haiti and loved its people dearly and ultimately gave everything for them. Davy and Natalie reached countless lives in so many ways and we want them to be remembered for who they were, selfless and full of love and devotion to the people of Haiti.” 

            Clearly, demons and demonically-inspired people who steal, kill and destroy did this.  But this catastrophic ‘storm’ that has now taken two devoted lives and engulfed their friends and family in a storm of grief and sorrow, was a storm into which Jesus had called them.  It was a storm in which Jesus was present.  And it was a storm in which Jesus was sovereign.  A storm’s ending does not detract from the presence of Jesus or the power of obedience.    

Remember that about any life-storm you are in. 

  • God often directs us into the storms of life.
  • Storms often accompany obedience to God
  • And, God is always with us in the storms of life, regardless of the outcome.

Here’s another thing about life’s storms:  they usually descend on us in the midst of life’s ‘average activities.’ Crossing the Sea of Galilee was about as “average” an activity as you could find, at least for the several fishermen-disciples in the boat.  Being in a boat at night was a very common activity for these men.  Regardless of what causes the storms in our lives, most of the unexpected ones come while we’re just doing what God has called us to do in the normal flow of life.  May we not be overly-surprised by that. 

            Notice the next statement in vs. 36-- Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. I think there are a couple of important truths here, though I don’t want to read too much into this. 

“Leaving the crowd….”  I think most of the really significant, life-altering work that God does with us is not when we’re “in the crowd.”  Crowds of Christ-followers can be exhilarating.  They can be exciting.  You can have a really moving experience in crowds of God’s people.  But God’s deepest, most lasting personal work is usually done in private.  In private is where truth gets tried.  In private is where we must wrestle with our fears and demons and doubts.  In private is where teaching becomes practice, head-knowledge becomes heart-experience.  We need both the crowd experiences and the private storm experiences to grow us up in Christ. 

            Secondly here, “…they took him along, just as he was….”  Just how was Jesus that day?  Well, he was obviously very tired.  Those of you who are teachers know how being in front of a lot of people while seeking to engage them in truth is a bit draining.  Clearly, the Jesus they took into their boat was not the life of the party.  He didn’t seem to want to hoist the sails or put his shoulder to the oars with them.  He wasn’t even the answer-man Jesus they may have wished he would be in the moment.  He was the “I’m-exhausted-and-want-to-curl-up-in-the-back-of-the-boat” Jesus.  But they “took him along, just as he was.” 

            How many of us want Jesus along on the journey as long as He acts like we want him to?  Are we really happy to have Jesus in the journey “just as he is” rather than as we want Him to be? 

ILL:  How well does it work out for a couple when they get married thinking, “Oh, I don’t really like that about my spouse.  But don’t worry.  I’ll change them!”???  In case you’re unsure about the answer, let me tell you, IT WON’T! 

            Neither does it work real well when we, the imperfect sinners, only want Jesus in our boat on our terms.  We need to invite the perfect God into our boat “as He is”, not as we wish He were.  As such, He won’t do things the WAY we would always like Him to.  He won’t do things WHEN we think He should.  He won’t even DO what we think he should many times.  But it will be the best of all possible journeys when we embrace Him in our lives just as he is.  Are we willing to have Jesus in our boat as He is, not as we want Him to be?

APP:  call to invite Jesus into your ‘boat’ just as He is—Savior, Lord, Teacher, Master, God.  Expect His presence, will, actions, direction, leadership to be different than what you would normally choose.  He’s God and we are not!

Mark goes on to tell us that “There were also other boats with him.”  It’s not hard to imagine what was going on in those “other” boats. The same gale was hitting them.  The same waves were breaking over their bows.  The same darkness was engulfing them …and probably the same fear. 

            But Mark says these boats were “with Him”, Jesus.  They were there, in the storm, because they were part of His party. 

Life storms are rarely isolated to just the boat we’re in.  They usually affect other people, people Jesus is aware of and concerned about. 

            How the disciples with Jesus in their boat handled this experience impacted more than them.  What they did had ramifications for other boats. 

APP:  And so do the storms of our lives. 

  • If your family or marriage is going through a storm, the boats of your children and even friends surrounding you are going to be impacted by how you work through that storm with Jesus.
  • If you’re going through a health storm, you’re not the only person Jesus cares about who is at that oncology treatment center…or on the medical team…or in your circle of family and friends who are struggling with it.

How you and I relate to Jesus IN our boat IN the same storm is going to change the experience others have of Him in that storm.  How soon or late the disciples woke Jesus with their request impacted other boats.  What they requested of him impacted other boats.  And so it is with each of us in our seemingly ‘private storms’.  How we related to Jesus IN the storm will impact other people’s experience in their storms too. 

ILL:  Sharman C.’s storm of post-polio some 25 years ago was the same storm missionary Evelyn Young was in.  How Evelyn was handling her own storm and relationship with Jesus led Sharman to faith in Jesus. 

 

37 A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 

I don’t know about you, but I actually enjoy a good storm… depending on where I am.

  • I enjoy a good thunderstorm just as long as I’m on the covered porch deck and not in a pup tent or hiking the side of an exposed mountain.
  • I enjoy a good snowstorm as long as I’m in a cozy mountain cabin or my warm home with a stocked fridge and good books.

But what makes storms frightening is when the effects or elements associated with the storm are out of my control and threatening.  Life storms create their own ‘swamping’ effects. 

  • Medical storms create financial hardships.
  • Financial storms create relational conflicts.
  • Relational storms create waves of stress and anxiety and grief that threaten to swamp us.

We all try “bailing” our boats with various buckets when the waves are crashing over the bow:

  • taking a second job for more income.
  • Changing treatment time and again
  • Going to counselors
  • Moving
  • Changing careers…or friends…or churches.

Those aren’t necessarily wrong.  But storms have a way of showing us just how little of life is in our control.  Life can, quite often, be much bigger than we are able to handle.  (Remember the young mom in the opening video?)  Storms can have a really good effect IF they drive us to God.  If they move us to cry out to Jesus, storms may be the best thing to happen to us. 

            In this story, Jesus’ response was immediate once the disciples cried out to him.  But don’t expect every storm to be silenced that quickly.  Longer life-storms usually develop deeper life-change.  Too often immediate relief only results in temporary growth.  God knows just how long to let a storm rage in our lives so that it will have HIS desired effect and growth.  

            God’s seeming inaction in the midst of our storms is not indifference.  It’s His timing for what He knows really needs to be done in our lives.   

38 Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”

You and I know that God above never sleeps.  He’s always working (Jn. 5:17).  Jesus was human.  So, he needed to sleep.  Now He is constantly “making intercession for us” at the right hand of the Father (Rm. 8:34).

            But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t feel like He’s asleep when we’re in our own storms.  God’s delay in answering on our schedule is not evidence of his inaction or absence. 

            That’s the danger we all face in the storms of life:  storms skew our perspective of reality, especially spiritual reality. 

Q:  How did the disciples interpret Jesus’ inaction in the moment?  As lack of love/care/concern.  “Don’t you care if we drown?”  Of course Jesus cared!  Even if the boat had sunk, would Jesus have cared about them drowning?  Of course.  (God let Paul’s boat sink in Acts 27.) 

Neither the storm nor the filling boat nor the waves nor the danger of ending up in the drink were in any way proofs of God’s disinterest.  But that’s how the disciples interpreted it. 

APP:  And isn’t this where we go with our storms?  “God, why don’t you care?  Why don’t you hear me?  Why don’t you move, answer, get me out of this right now?  You must be…. (fill in the blank with things that aren’t actually true about God). 

            The interesting thing about life storms is that sometimes the people around us who should be there to provide real support and encouragement can be equally in error about what God is up to. 

EX:  Job—every one of his friends had faulty presuppositions about what was happening and why.  NOTE to us:  we need to be very careful about the counsel we give to people being swamped by the storms of life. 

            While Satan will want us to question basic realities about God in the midst of life storms (love, care, compassion, kindness, generosity, etc.), God has a very different agenda.  Just what is that?

Vs. 40 gives the answer, after he calmed the storm.

40 He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”  Here we have the core reason for storms in the lives of God’s children:  the testing and building of FAITH in God.  Storms will either move us to run to Jesus or turn away from him.  We see it every day in the body of Christ.  The issue isn’t IF God will allow storms in our lives.  The issue is, “Will those storms push us towards Jesus OR will we allow them to drive us further from Him?” 

            None of us handle life storms perfectly.  Faith is an up-and-down journey.  But I want to be found looking up to God more often than I’m found looking down at the storm.  That doesn’t happen perfectly in any of us.  Our fears tend to take control of us.  Rather than patiently looking for how God is going to carry us through the storm, we start panicking about how we’re sure to drown if we go in the drink. 

            Imagine what a “faith-filled” response to this storm might have looked like among the disciples:

  • Peter to John--“Do you think we should wake him up yet…or let the water do the job?”
  • Thomas to Nathaniel--“Do you think Jesus even knows how to swim?”

Actually, I think faith would probably not have questioned Jesus’ care for them and might, in fact, have led to them waking him up earlier.  Faith would have put the problem in Jesus’ hands and left the results up to Him. 

  • “Jesus, I hate to disturb you. But we have a situation here that needs your attention.  What would you like us to do?”

Or maybe they would just have let him keep sleeping while they kept rowing, trusting that he wouldn’t let the storm take them to the bottom. 

            Life storms are faith-testers and faith-builders.  Faith-building is a journey.  We know that Peter, at least, took something to heart here.  In both Matthew and Mark, this story comes before the other storm where Jesus walks on the water and Peter actually asks if he can join him.  In that story, Peter’s fixation on the waves eventually chips away at his faith.  But I’ve got to say, he demonstrated a whole lot more faith than any of the other disciples still sitting in the boat!

            We’ll never run out of storms that can build our faith.  The forecast for every Christian’s life is “Chance of storms, 100%.”  That’s actually good news if we love to please God.  Because “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6).  But with faith we not only walk with God in places we never imagined (like on water) but through storms we never thought we could survive.

            This passage ends with references to different kinds of fear.

40 He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

41 They were terrified and asked each other, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!”

Mark uses two different Greek words translated “fear” and “terrified” here.  The first (Gk: deilos) only occurs 3 times in the N.T.  It really carries more the sense of timidity or faithlessness.  Jesus is not addressing their fear of the waves as much as he is addressing their timid faith.  That is clear by his follow-up phrase about having no faith. 

            But the more common Greek term translated “terrified” in vs. 41 is the root from which we get “phobia” in English (Gk: phobeo).  The emotional response of fear at Jesus commanding the wind and waves to calm down more than eclipsed the fear that their lack of faith in Jesus had engendered during the storm. When we see Jesus for who he really is—Lord of all including the uncontrollable forces of the natural world—his presence in the answers to our life-storms will be far more overwhelming than the storms themselves.  Living by the truth of Christ in the calm of life is always more powerful than living under the faithlessness in the storms of life. 

APP:

  • What are you afraid of right now in life? Do a quick inventory.  What are the waves and wind of life that are chipping away at your faith in God who is in the boat with you right now?  If you have put your faith and trust in Jesus, he has promised “Never will I leave you.  Never will I forsake you.  I will be with you until the end of the world.”  God is wanting to use whatever storm you are in to strengthen your faith.  Why not tell Him you choose faith over fear today?  Christ’s presence over whatever is threatening your calm?
  • What storms might God have invited you into right now? Are you having faith-filled conversations with Him about it, asking Him to show you how to handle it?  Waiting for Him to provide the solution that will carry you through? Growing in your respectful fear of His awesome power in and over the storm? 

I’ve got a life forecast for all our futures: 

Chance of Storms…100%. 

Possibility of growing faith… unlimited.  See you in the storms. 

PRAY