Meditation for the week of October 21, 2007
Matthew 8:25-26
Then His disciples came to Him and awoke Him, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” But He said to them, “Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?” Then He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm.
Life can be a lot like the Sea of Galilee. One moment everything is calm and the next moment the storms of life are so furious that we lose hope. The disciples must have forgotten Who the Lord was when they thought they were about to perish. The Lord is the creator of the heavens and the earth. He is the one who gives us life and breath. He is eternal. So if the Lord is in the ship, it simply cannot sink.
We are traveling from birth to death as we go from one shore to the other. We know that when we are saved the Lord makes promises that assure us that we cannot perish eternally, but sometimes we wonder if the Lord is with us in a practical way. In John 10:28 He says, “And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.” Yet when the storms of life blow there are times when we wonder if the Lord is sleeping instead of taking care of us as a good shepherd should. But if the Lord is traveling with us, how can storms of life sink our ships?
Many people seem to have lost their faith in Christ. It would seem that their ships have sunk. I suppose that it is possible that some of these people never really understood the power of the Gospel and have never realized that Who we have our faith in is by far more important than the quality of the faith that we have. I do not think that Satan can destroy our ship if the ship represents true faith in Christ because He cannot destroy Christ. He tried to do destroy Him by persecuting the Godly lineage of Christ so that there would be no literal son of King David. He tried to destroy Him by persecuting Him in the wilderness. He tried to destroy Him by persecuting Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. But He could not destroy Christ. The resurrection is the proof that Christ has been victorious. It is not faith that saves, but it is faith in Christ that saves. And the boat cannot sink if Christ is really in it.
The boat can also represent a fellowship or as a congregation of people who are in the same place at the same time because of their link to the Lord Jesus. We are told that as we travel through life we need to be in a boat where there is not just friendship but fellowship (See Acts 2:42 and Hebrews 10:25). Where there is true fellowship we are fellows in the same ship. But how many times have we seen fellowships buffeted and destroyed by winds of adversity? Maybe we have built our own churches and have left the Lord outside the door (Revelation 3:20) because the church that the Lord is building cannot be destroyed. In Matthew 16:18, the Lord says, “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock (that is, the truth that Jesus is the Christ) I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” We know that individual congregations have been destroyed. But the Lord’s work continues and the true universal church that the Lord and not man is building will never be defeated. There will always be groups of believers that are faithful to the Lord and who will be remembering Him “until He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:25). If the Lord is in the ship, how can it possibly perish?
As Christians, Satan may buffet us and he may growl at us and he may try to scare us. He may cause us to go through storm after storm. We may wonder why we seem to have all the problems while people who don’t have a conscience seem to be blessed. But if He is truly in our ship, our ship cannot sink. When the storms of life howl, confidence in the Lord and a little talk with Him will calm the storms. Even if the Lord seems to be sleeping we can be sure that our boat will not sink no matter how bad the storm gets.
Bruce Collins