Stronger than Our Fears

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Matthew chapter 8. Matthew chapter 8. We can sometimes be absolutely crippled by fear, can’t we?

Before I had kids, I had a crippling fear, and now that I have kids, I have many crippling fears. But before I had kids, I was really bad with my fear of germs. Now, I still don’t like them. But I was getting to the point where it was so bad I couldn’t even touch doorknobs in public places.

This fear of germs and being around germs had really just sort of made it difficult to live my life and do much of anything. And then kids come along and they eat things off the floor, and life has a way of getting you over those things. Not quite as bad as I used to be.

But, you know, there are other things, like waking up in the middle of the night, you hear a noise, and you just lay there frozen in bed listening for it to happen again. You can’t move. Or sometimes my wife wakes me up and I’m not expecting it, and I fly out of the bed.

What’s wrong? What’s wrong? But, you know, we have fears that sort of cripple us, and they paralyze us.

They keep us from being able to move or do anything or live our life. We talked about earlier in the month taking the kids down to the Bigfoot Festival. And that didn’t happen because we saw pictures where they had a guy in a Bigfoot suit that you could take pictures of. And I thought, my daughter melts into the floor when she sees the Chick-fil-A cow come out in a costume at the restaurant.

So just total fear and panic. And so we didn’t go to the Bigfoot Festival. But folks, sometimes that’s how our fears really do leave us, is that moment of I’m just glued to the floor, I’m hiding behind anything I can, I am not moving, I am stuck right here. Our fears have a way of crippling us, even little things.

Guys, I was afraid of germs, which granted, germs are microscopic, but they can’t hurt you, but most of the ones around us that we come in contact with every day don’t cause us that much problem, and yet I was terrified of something I couldn’t even see. We can be crippled by fear even of something small. And that’s where the disciples found themselves.

They found themselves gripped by fear, and it was not necessarily fear of something tiny, but it was something that was tinier than the God they serve, if we can put it that way. We serve a master, ladies and gentlemen, who is stronger than anything we fear. And it doesn’t matter if it’s something as microscopic as a germ, and it doesn’t matter if it’s something as massive as we were talking in the 5 o’clock class about the book of Revelation and sort of a trailer for the book of Revelation as we get ready to approach that soon, and talking about how scary all of this is and how scary it sounds with the Antichrist and everything else.

we could spend our life living in terror of the end of the world. But whether it’s something as tiny as a germ, or if it’s something as large as the end of humanity, the end of civilization as we know it, God is still bigger, and God is still more powerful. As we start these next few lessons that I’m going to do on Sunday nights, I’ve gone through and I’ve looked at some of the miracles that Jesus did.

Actually, I sat down and made a list of all of the miracles that Jesus did, and found that I could put them into six different categories of things that he came up against. And the first one I want to talk to you tonight about is things that we fear. And we have a lot of fears. Even those who seem pretty brave have something that they’re afraid of.

We all fear something. And on some level, our fears can keep us from living our life. I’ve already hit on that.

But you think about the things that we fear from time to time, the things That Keep Us From Serving God, the things that keep us from stepping out on faith, the fear that something bad is going to happen to us, the fear that something bad is going to happen to somebody we care about, the fear of rejection, the fear of what’s going to happen with my children, The fear of being alone, the fear of falling apart financially, And there are more of the things that we fear that keep us from stepping out on faith and doing the things that God has called us to do. God is bigger than any of those. God is bigger than any of the things that we fear.

So we look at Matthew chapter 8, and we’re going to start in verse 23. It says, and when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him. Jesus has just been teaching.

He’s been teaching his disciples. And as he did on occasion, he got onto a boat to go across the sea, sometimes to get to where he was going, and sometimes just to get away from the crowd and have some quiet time where he could talk with his father and reflect on the mission that the father had given him. But it said, when he got onto the ship, his disciples followed him.

So keep this in mind over the next couple of verses as we look at the trouble, and you all will be familiar with this story, but as we look at the trouble that the disciples find themselves in, Keep this thought in mind that when they end up in trouble, they’re only there because Jesus led them. They’re only in trouble because they followed Jesus. And so it’s not like they, and I don’t, please don’t take that as, oh, I shouldn’t follow Jesus.

It’ll lead to trouble. You’re going to have trouble one way or the other in this life. But I think momentarily, it seems like they forget that, wait a minute, we’re here with Jesus.

They get into this trouble. You follow Jesus onto the boat. and so it’s a reminder to us that the Christian life as we know is not one of only sunny days.

It’s not one only of smooth roads and calm seas there’s a lot of trouble involved in the Christian life but there’s a lot of trouble involved in life period but for Christians we’re going to have trouble we’re going to have struggles in this life we’re going to have bad things happen to us as we try to serve Jesus but we can’t forget that if we’re in the middle of that storm we’ve followed him into the middle of the storm, and he’s there with us. So they have gotten on the boat with him, the ship with him, and verse 24 says, and behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the ship was covered with the waves, but he was asleep. So they’re out on this ship in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, which on maps looks like a lake, and yet based on where it is, from what I understand, it is known for the ability for storms to just come up out of nowhere.

And that was certainly one of these instances this time. But they’re out on the ship in the middle of the sea, and this storm spins up out of nowhere. And it is a huge storm.

I was listening to the radio today where they were talking on the news. They were laughing at some of the news media, on national news media, about their coverage of Hurricane Matthew. And some of the people saying, oh, we’ve never seen a storm like this on record.

And the question was, wait a minute, there are only five categories. It’s a category four. I’m not saying it’s not dangerous.

But they had Shepard Smith at Fox News. They had a quote of him. I heard the audio of him saying, if this moves to the west even a little bit, you and everyone you know will die and your children will die.

What is wrong with you people? I mean, I get wanting to get people to evacuate, but scare the living daylights out of people. So evidently this is a storm of the centuries.

We’ve never had a storm like this. People were going to die. They really were in a situation, though, where it’s not hype from the media.

It’s not that the weathermen got them all stirred up. They were out on the ship, and the storm came up out of nowhere, and the winds were so strong and the waves were so tall that they were crashing over the deck of the ship, and they were threatening to sink the ship and break it apart. And what happens in that moment, when they’re out of reach of land, and the ship sinks and the ship breaks apart and they’re out there in the storm, they’re probably going to die.

And yet in the midst of this, we find Jesus asleep. And I’m beginning to understand what my pastor meant when I was a teenager and he said sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap. I take that to heart every Sunday that I can.

Jesus was here resting in his faith in his confidence and the power of his Father. And not only that, but during the mission that the Father sent him, the power of the Father, Jesus has not stopped being God. And so it’s not that Jesus is being lazy.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t know about the storm. It’s that Jesus can sleep in confidence, knowing that everything is well in hand. So they’re all running around like crazy, trying to figure out how we’re going to save ourselves.

The ship is sinking. And meanwhile, you see Jesus over on one part of the ship, and he’s asleep. Sleeping through this storm.

And verse 25 says, And his disciples came to him and awoke him, saying, Lord, save us, we perish. They were convinced they were going to die. And we don’t know how long it took them to get to Jesus.

We don’t know how long they ran around on the deck of the ship trying to figure out what to do. But we know at some point, they came and found Jesus and said, You think somebody ought to wake him up? Maybe he can do something.

Now, we give the disciples a lot of grief because we have 2,000 years of hindsight to look back through and say, come on, guys, are you that stupid? Didn’t you know who you were with? And not just now, but in so many circumstances.

You really denied him three times? Come on. Okay, we’d have probably done the same thing if we’d been there.

So we give the disciples a lot of grief for their lack of faith, forgetting that we would probably do the same thing we would probably run around like crazy on the ship, and then finally somebody thinks of, let’s wake up Jesus. But the fact remains that in spite of their panic, they actually did the best thing that they could possibly do, which was to run to Jesus. In a moment of peril, they did the best thing that they could do, which was to run to Jesus, and they woke him up, and they asked him to intervene, because they realized that unless something drastic happens, they’re going to die.

And again, I’ve already made the point that I don’t know how long it took for them to do that. The Bible doesn’t say. But I know human nature, I know how I am, I know how we are, and I know that a lot of times we wait to turn to Jesus until we’ve exhausted every resource at our disposal. We wait to run to Jesus until after we’ve done everything we can do.

See, we try to fix it, and a lot of times just make it worse. Whatever the storm is, we try to fix it, and it just, it doesn’t work out. I’m not good at stopping storms, figuratively or literally.

And so, a lot of times storms rise up in life, and I’ll try to do everything I can fix it, and just make it worse, and then when there’s no other alternative, when there’s no other recourse, then I turn to Jesus. Really, he should be our first thought. I’d be much better off in life if at the first sign of trouble I’d say, okay, Lord, can you handle this for me, because it’s way, way bigger than I can handle.

But whether they did it immediately or whether they waited a little longer than they should have, ultimately they did the right thing by taking it to Jesus. They woke him up and they asked him to intervene where only he could. And verse 26 says, And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?

Jesus wakes up and says, Why are you afraid? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because there’s a Category 5 hurricane out here on the lake?

Why are you afraid? Oh, ye of little faith. Why are you afraid, you doubter?

Then he arose and rebuked the winds and calmed the sea, and there was a great calm. And I may have told you before that a lot of the things that happen in the Bible, I picture in my head, and I picture how they play out, and I picture them a lot of times like movies. I guess that’s how we’ve been conditioned to see things in America in a time long before meteorologists.

But in my brain, as I picture Jesus interacting with the disciples, there are so many of these stories where I picture him doing something and them all standing around afterwards going, I mean, just mouth agape. And then there’s a laugh track in my mind that goes on. These men are completely dumbfounded when Jesus does the things that they knew he could do in the first place.

But he says to them, why are you afraid? Why are you doubting? And he gets up, apparently without any attempt to answer on their part, he gets up, and he goes and gets on to the wind.

I wish I’d thought of that. But he can do that because he made the wind. He’s in charge of the wind.

He’s God in human flesh. It says he rebukes the wind and the sea. He looks at the wind and the sea, and he tells them to knock it off.

How incredible is that? And it’s mind-boggling to think that he would be able to do that. It seems far-fetched that he would be able to do that.

And you remember back all through Bible history, you might remember an event thousands of years before where he spoke everything into existence. We call that creation. And Jesus was there.

When God says, let us make man in our own image, God is not schizophrenic. That’s the Trinity. That’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit talking amongst himself.

And the New Testament tells us of Jesus that nothing was created without him. So it’s not like Jesus came later and God the Father did all this. Jesus was there and was part of speaking everything into existence.

And when you start with the premise and when you accept the fact that Jesus spoke everything into existence when there was nothing, and I say all the time that he didn’t go down to Lowe’s and get the equipment to build a universe, he spoke the atoms into existence when there were none. Those waves, that wind, that water, he created all of it. He spoke into existence the molecules and bonds of that water that were about to swamp the ship.

And he spoke into existence the gas molecules that were about to blow the ship over. So why would we be surprised when the things that he made obeyed me? And there was a great calm.

There was a great calm. And this is where in the movie in my head, I picture them standing there with their mouths hitting their feet. I can’t believe that went.

I can’t believe what I just saw. And it says in verse 27, that’s not just me putting my own experiences onto them. It says right here, they marveled.

Now, sometimes the Bible is so wonderfully understated. Oh, they marveled. Oh, what a marvel that was.

They were shocked. That might be how we would put that into words today. Okay, I’m not saying anything’s wrong with the Bible.

I’m just saying that the Bible understates sometimes. They marveled. You bet they marveled.

You better believe they did. I think they probably marveled for the rest of their lives. Because later on, when they’re writing down the things that they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears, this is one of the things that makes the cut.

They remembered this forever. The men marveled, and why wouldn’t they? Because they just saw this man step up and get onto the wind and tell it to knock it off, and it did.

You and I would marvel, too. You and I would go into town and wouldn’t be able to stop talking about what we had just seen. The fire downtown was still smoking this morning, or this afternoon when I drove by.

People were still talking about that fire. People were still standing around marveling about that fire, and that wasn’t even miraculous. Now look at something miraculous that happens like that, and you wouldn’t be able to stop talking about it.

So they marveled, and they said, what manner of man is this? What kind of man is this that even the winds and the seas obey him? what kind of man indeed the kind that’s fully man and fully God the kind of man that is the God of the universe who stepped into human flesh they were absolutely amazed at what he was able to do and the fact that even nature been to his will so they’ve been in this circumstance where they were terrified that they were really about to die that they were about to drown and their bodies were going to be washed up on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

We’re talking dead here. They were fearful. They were terrified.

And in that moment of panic, they cried out to Jesus. Whether it was their first thought or whether it was a last resort kind of thing, they cried out to Jesus and asked him to do what only he could do. And boy, did he finish the job.

He did what only he could do. He demonstrated his total power over that massive storm that threatened them that they were terrified of. Whatever they were afraid of, whatever was coming to hurt them, Jesus was bigger.

Maybe not in physical stature, but Jesus was bigger. And folks, as I looked at this miracle story and as I looked at several others that are kind of like it where he’s dealing with similar circumstances and he’s doing things that just totally amazed people, it reminded me that our problems are big, but our God is bigger. If you take nothing else from this message tonight, I want you to, as you go through this week, you are going to, somebody in this room is going to run into some problem that at least for a moment feels like, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the next few minutes.

I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this. I don’t know how I’m going to survive this. Somebody in this room in the next few weeks is bound to go through a circumstance like that.

It’s just life. And we need to be reminded that it doesn’t matter how big our problems are, our God is bigger. Our God is bigger.

And when we’re in the middle of the storm, it seems huge. Well, I say this one all the time because I’ve lived this one. When you’re standing in the eye of a hurricane, when you’re standing in the middle of a storm, and all you can see around you is storm, then it looks like the whole planet is a storm.

It looks like the whole world is that storm. But nowadays we have things like weather satellites and computer models where they can zoom out, and you can see it’s really kind of a small storm in comparison to the whole globe. When you’re standing in the midst of it, it seems huge.

When you step back and look at things from God’s perspective, look how tiny they are. They’re big to us, but they’re small to Him. Our problems are big, but our God is bigger.

So when you come up against a fear, when you come up against something that terrifies you, something that cripples you, because you’re gripped by fear of what’s going to happen to me, what’s going to happen to my loved ones, what’s going to happen to my bank account, What’s going to happen when you’re crippled by that fear? Stop and breathe and realize that no matter how big the problem is, that God is bigger. We serve a God who can speak to the storms, and they have no choice but to listen.

We serve a God who can handle any storm that comes up in our lives and do what the disciples did. Cry out to Him. Cry out to Him.

And sometimes his answer will be to stop that storm, just like he did here. Sometimes his answer will be just to carry you through the storm. There’s a song I’ve sung before in church.

It came out a few years ago, several years ago, probably older than I was. It says, sometimes he calms the storm, and other times he calms his child. We cry out to him when we’re crippled by our fears.

When we’re too afraid to follow him. When sometimes we get in the middle of those storms and we forget how big God is. We know that God is powerful, but we get so focused on the storm that we forget just how powerful he is.

We cry out to him and we expect. Don’t act surprised. Don’t be surprised when he steps in and does whatever he can do.

Don’t be surprised when he steps in and shows his power. and sometimes he’s going to show his power by taking that storm and telling it to knock it off and I’ve seen God do that in my own life not with physical storms but I’ve seen God do that in my own life where I think where did that storm go it’s just gone all of a sudden he calmed the storm but other times his response is going to be no the storm needs to happen but I’m going to pick you up and carry you through it you see God is bigger Jesus is bigger than any problem we face. And if we look to him, instead of looking at the storms and looking at the struggles and looking at the problems, if we look at him, we’re going to see amazing things.

We’re going to see storms stopped and we’re going to see storms overcome as he carries us through. We’re going to be amazed. If you keep in mind that he’s bigger than any problem you face, you’re going to be amazed at what you see him do when you ask him.

But as much as we’re amazed and should be amazed by the power of God, we should also trust him enough that we’re not surprised by what he does. I want to be the one. And I don’t feel like I’m there yet.

So don’t feel like I’m playing super spiritual up here. I don’t feel like I’m there yet. But I want to be the one.

I don’t want to be the one standing there. I can’t believe he just did that. I want to be the one standing there.

I knew he could. And we don’t see any of him doing that story. But that’s how I want to react to these things.

Wow, I’m amazed by what he’s done, but I knew he could. When the world goes dark and the storms are all around us, we need to quit looking at the storm and look at him instead. Focus our eyes on him and realize that he’s bigger than any problem that we can face.