I love a good story, especially one that challenges my thinking.
You are probably familiar with the Biblical account of Jesus calming the storm: He and the disciples are boating across the Sea of Galilee when a storm comes up. A nasty storm, one that has this group of veteran fisherman in a panic. The Sea of Galilee is well known for these sudden and violent storms, which arise from a combination of geographic and thermal characteristics of the lake and surrounding hills.
The storm is real. The threat is not imagined.
And yet, when they awaken Jesus, sure they will die, he scolds them for being afraid. And for not having faith.
In the novel A.D. 30, author Ted Dekker takes this story and expands on what Jesus meant when he scolded his fearful disciples. The problem was, they were trusting the boat to keep them safe. Instead of believing their sleeping master would take care of them, they believed in the roaring wind and the crashing waves, and they knew the flimsy pitch-covered boards under their feet would not get them through the storm.
They were right about the boat, but wrong about the chances of survival. Because it wasn’t the boat that saved them, it was a single command of the master.
As a character in the book explains, they were afraid “because we did not trust the Father to keep us safe as he sees fit. Our trust was in the boat instead! We put our trust in wood and pitch and flesh and blood and wind and water, and so the storm had dominion over us.”
What a vivid picture.
What a challenging thought.
My natural instinct is to trust my senses, to believe in the reality of what I see and touch and hear, and to expect that reality will always follow the laws of physics. When I face a storm I am likely to put my trust in the boat.
But boats can sink.
Isn’t it much better to remember that I have a powerful God who has promised to care for me, and to “work all things for good” even in the midst of the storm.
Storms will come. If we put our trust in the boat, we’ll fear the storm every time. But if we trust in our God, who is bigger than the storm, we do not need to be afraid—even when wind and waves hit us in the face.
Do you believe that God always works everything for our good? Even the storms?
What “boats” are you trusting in?
Maybe it’s time to get out of the boat and trust the master instead.
It is easy to trust in what you can see, because it’s real and present to us. Whether I trust the people I love for security or the things around me, Jesus is the only one who is completely trustworthy. Every day I need to rethink and adjust my gaze from the temporal to the eternal—trusting in His strength and not my own. In my weakness I will fail, but He never does! Thanks for the powerful reminder, Lisa.
It is so easy to trust what we can touch and see, but this story helped me understand how frail that kind of trust can be. No wonder we are so easily afraid. As you say, there is only one source of true security.