Mark 4

Again this week I will share my sermon notes as rough as they may be for our look into Mark.

 Mark 4:1-3, 35-41

Again, Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water’s edge. He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching.

That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. 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?”

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

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

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

Resting in the Storm

Mark 4

As we begin today’s message, we find Jesus by the seaside again and the crowds have become so great he begins teaching from a boat. From this boat, he is going to begin to teach the word. An interesting note here is that this section of teaching begins with Jesus teaching the parable of the Sower and his explanation to the disciples is that the seed is the word of God.

If we should consider that Jesus is sowing from the sea onto the shore and the seed is going into the soil.

Side Note: If you want to know what kind of heart you have the answer is found in how you receive the Word of God.

Hard – No impact

Rocky – No Depth

Weedy – Worldly Concerns

Good – Good Soil - Growth happens

What happens to the seed tells you the condition of your heart.

How you receive will directly affect your faith for later we learn Romans 10:17 “Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ.”

Next: Three of the four parables all address seeds. Jesus we will see in verse 34 that Jesus explained the parables to his disciples. If anyone should have faith it was them.

I want to note the third parable about the Growing Seed:

Mark 4:26-29 “He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

It shows there is a time to rest/sleep and trust. This parable teaches us trust that the seed will do what God intended it to.

However, it will also mirror what is about to happen.

Now we come to the passage we read today.

1.   Jesus tells his disciples that they need to go over to the other side and went to sleep.  

2.   A storm came

3.   Disciples woke up Jesus – They wanted help

4.   Jesus rebuked the storm then the disciples

5.   The disciples were afraid.

a.   Though we can assume the discples were afraid when they woke Jesus up the text doesn’t say they are, they aren’t really afraid until they see the miracle.

What changed?

        Now they were confronted with the question? What do we do with Jesus?

He isn’t just a good teacher or a miracle worker, this is God power.

Just a side note: Mark loves to use parallel teaching. We see this lived out at the end of Mark 16:8 when the women learn Jesus has been raised from the dead, they are afraid according.

There will come a time for every person who comes face to face with the truth about Jesus. There will be fear. Fear because Jesus calling us to surrender. As CS Lewis said in his book Mere Christianity, ““I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

There comes a time and I think as Christians in this world it is more than once when we have to have the fear of God in us. The fear that we are still trying to be god in our own lives but Jesus, the God of the universe the controller of the wind and waves is here and we need to surrender again some part of who we are.

But let’s go back and look at this again in light of who Jesus truly is.

1.   Jesus said Let’s go to the other side.

If God says that something is going to happen it’s going to happen.

God says We’re going there; we’re going there.

Side note: I don’t like this because Jesus said we would suffer, and I don’t like it. However, Jesus does promise that it will be worth it and in Romans 8:28 we are told he will work everything to good.

But note, Jesus didn’t say let’s sail gently to the other side to the disciples.

If the disciples understood that Jesus was God then they could have followed his example and sleep.

Jesus gave a parable that after sowing the farmer slept and that is what Jesus is doing. He is sleeping and trusting.

2.   The storm came

The disciples are up and panicked.

It is very possible that their very activity made the effects of the storm worse.

We do that sometimes. We see trouble and instead of trusting God we try and fix it. We get the word the expert will be in tomorrow, but no we can’t wait we have to fix it ourselves and often make things worse.

The show Home Improvement, Tim Taylor, played by Time Allen, was always trying to fix things and give them more power. It of course never went right. When it comes to our lives we are too often just like Tim the tool man Taylor and believe we can not just fix it but make it better. Except it isn’t funny when we wreck our families, ruin our relationships and do things that we may end up paying for, for the rest of our lives.

The Disciples problem is seen when they wake Jesus, they call him “teacher.”

They didn’t see him as Lord, as Master or as God. They saw Jesus as just a teacher.

Until they saw Jesus as more they failed.

Until you see Jesus as more than just a God teacher and until you’re willing to submit to him as CS Lewis said, you “fall at his feet and call him Lord and God,” then you are going to fail in life.

The problem in our lives is that we are afraid of the wrong things. We don’t have the fear of God and we are afraid of the communist, the other political party, radical Islam, the economy failing, war, our boss, or if our kids are going to eat their vegetables.

If the disciples would have really understood who Jesus was they never would have been afraid. They would know they were going to survive.

3.   Jesus stilled the storm.

Jesus always had the power to stop the storm. He could have prevented it, but he didn’t?  This storm showed the disciples what kind of faith they had. NONE>

I want to say again I don’t like this but Jesus said we would suffer. However, Jesus does promise that it will be worth it and in Romans 8:28 we are told he will work everything to good.

The storms in our lives are an opportunity to see what kind of faith we have and to strengthen it.

If the disciples would have had faith and people in the other boats would have yelled over in fear what example would it had been if they yelled back, It’s okay Jesus is here and he said we would make it.

By the way, after the day of Pentecost this is exactly what happened. The struggles they faced confirmed their faith and actually can strengthen ours.

At this time, not so much.

For us we need to remember that storms will come, but remember Jesus is with us.

Psalm 41:1-3 says Blessed are those who have regard for the weak; the Lord delivers them in times of trouble. The Lord protects and preserves them—they are counted among the blessed in the land—he does not give them over to the desire of their foes. The Lord sustains them on their sickbed and restores them from their bed of illness.

We need to remember God is with us we don’t need to be afraid.

Isaiah 51:12-16 “I, even I, am He who comforts you.

Why should you be afraid of mortal man,

of a son of man who withers like grass?

But you have forgotten the LORD, your Maker,

who stretched out the heavens

and laid the foundations of the earth.

You live in terror all day long

 

because of the fury of the oppressor

who is bent on destruction.

But where is the fury of the oppressor?

The captive will soon be freed;

he will not die in the dungeon,

and his bread will not be lacking.

For I am the LORD your God

who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—

the LORD of Hosts is His name.

I have put My words in your mouth,

and covered you with the shadow of My hand,

to establish the heavens, to found the earth,

and to say to Zion, ‘You are My people.’”

 

There is a song that says that Jesus sometimes calms the Storm but sometimes he calms his child.

 

I would say that more times than not Jesus is interested in calming us than the world around us. If we are calm in the storm then we have nothing to fear.

 

I don’t know where I remember hearing a story of men at sea in a storm and all the passengers were afraid except one. Someone asked why he wasn’t afraid. The person pointed to a grizzled old sailor out walking the deck, perfectly calm and the person said, “I figure when he gets scared that’s when I should.”

 

The good news is the person we can point to: Jesus is never scared so we don’t have to be (there were times he was distressed and concerned but never do we see Jesus afraid).

 

Jesus calmed the Storm but what he really wanted was to see faith in his disciples.

 

The difference between the Jesus and the disciples here is that Jesus didn’t let the environment dictate what was in his spirit.

 

The storm brough chaos and that is what we see here in the disciples.

 

Jesus wants our faith to grow so that we don’t mirror our environment, but we mirror Him.

 

Perhaps when it seems like God isn’t doing anything, if Jesus is sleeping as it were. Maybe we should be resting too.

 

Note: Jesus wasn’t just sitting down all the time, he worked and there is a time for us to work also. The key is to know when it is. When they got to the other side there was work to do and the disciples missed out on the rest they could have gotten by focusing on the storm and not resting in him.

 

If you face a situation you can’t fix and God hasn’t given you directions or seems to be doing nothing perhaps you aren’t supposed to.

 

Consider Elijah:

 

1 Kings 17:1-6 Now Elijah the Tishbite, who was among the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, “As surely as the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there will be neither dew nor rain in these years except at my word!”

Then a revelation from the LORD came to Elijah: “Leave here, turn eastward, and hide yourself by the Brook of Cherith, east of the Jordan.  And you are to drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.”

So Elijah did what the LORD had told him, and he went and lived by the Brook of Cherith, east of the Jordan. The ravens would bring him bread and meat in the morning and evening, and he would drink from the brook.

 

Disaster was all about and Elijah did: nothing- he trusted God.

 

So who are you looking to? Jesus or the coming Storm (there is always a coming storm in this world)

 

Trust Jesus who can calm you in the storm and promises to take you to the other side.