Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Where is Your Faith? | Mark | Mark 4.35-41

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

Trials test faith. That's what happened to the disciples in https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+4.35-41&version=NIV (Mark 4.35-41). Learn what they learned from https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Pastor Keith Simon) as we continue our series on Mark. Interested in more content like this? Listen to https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/in-god-we-trust-david-in-22-2-samuel-511-13/ (In God We Trust?) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/when-belief-isnt-smart-davids-life-in-22-stories-1-sam-21-22/ (When Belief Isn't Smart) from our earlier series on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcast-series/david-in-22-stories/ (David's Life in 22 Stories). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TenMinuteBibleTalks (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO and @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to Tim Minna Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. My name is Patrick Miller. And I'm Keith Simon. You only trust people to the degree that you know them and believe that they are trustworthy. It only makes sense, doesn't it? And it's true of Jesus as well. If you want to trust Jesus with more and more of your life, then you've got to get to know him better. You'd be an absolute fool to trust your life to someone you don't. don't know. When we read the stories in the Gospels, we are often a little too quick to jump right to the application to our lives. In other words, how does this tell me how to live? But before we can ask what the story teaches us and how we should live our life, we probably need to ask, what does this story teach us about Jesus? In Mark chapter 4, verse 35, Jesus tells the disciples that they are going to go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. And so Jesus, along with them, they get into a few different boats and head off. In 1986, the whole of a fishing boat was recovered from the mud on

the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, about five miles south of Comperdam, which is one of the places that Jesus lived. This boat they found, it was 26.5 feet long, seven and a half feet wide, and four and a half feet high. Carbon 14 technology dates the boat back to the time that Jesus lived. Now, interestingly enough, for the story in the Gospel of Mark that we're looking at, the recovered boat had a deck where people could either sit or lie down. It looks like there was room for about four rowers, and the boat had a maximum capacity of about 15 people. So back to our story. We're told the furious storm rose up and almost sunk the boat. Now, whenever I read this story, I always kind of hear the Gilligan's Island theme song in the back of my head.

You know, the weather started getting rough. The tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the minnow would be lost. The minnow would be lost. Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember Gilligan's Island. Well, the idea of a sudden and severe storm scaring these experienced fishermen fits with the topography and the weather patterns in the area. The Sea of Galilee sits about 700 feet below sea level, and it's surrounded by hills and mountains. Occasionally, the cold air comes over the mountains and mixes with the warm air coming up off the water, and it produces intense and unpredictable storms. Now, apart from the fishermen, the Jewish people were not as seafaring people. The sea came to symbolize for them the dark power of evil. It threatened to destroy God's good creation, God's people, God's purposes.

In books like Daniel, the sea is where the monsters come from. So there's something more going on than just a rain and windstorm. The powers of evil rage all around. So what's Jesus doing in the middle of the storm? He's sleeping. The only time we hear of Jesus sleeping and all the Gospels is in this storm. It's kind of crazy. Jesus' trust in his father is so complete that he's at peace.

He can even sleep while others panic. Now the disciples, they don't have the same faith in God the Father. They wake Jesus up, and their anxious words, well, they're pretty revealing. They ask Jesus, don't you care if we drown? So in some sense, they think Jesus can do something about the storm if he wants to. That he's not doing anything about it indicates to them that he doesn't care about them. I know this. If I don't believe that Jesus cares about me, I won't trust him with the things that I really care about.

So Jesus steals the storm, and then he turns to his disciples, and he asks them, why are you so afraid? Why do you have no faith? The story ends with the disciples terrified and wondering who Jesus is because the wind and waves obey him. So what's going on here? The disciples are scared because of the storm, but then they're more scared. scared after the storm is stopped. It turns out that the winds and waves obeying Jesus is scarier than the storm itself. I think the reason it's so scary is because the Old Testament makes it clear that God is the one who can still a storm. Psalm 107 is a pretty long psalm, but he gives

pictures of ways that God's people rebelled against him and then how God graciously rescued them. And one of the images in Psalm 107 is that God rescued people in the middle of the storm. Again, Psalm 107, the people cry out to God and he calmed the storm. So the reason the disciples are terrified in asking, who is this that even the wind and waves obey him, is because they're starting to realize that Jesus is God. He's God's anointed Messiah and that the Old Testament story talked about. What else does this story tell us about Jesus? Well, it tells us that he trusts in his father so he can be calm even when chaos surrounds him.

And Jesus has the power over spiritual and moral darkness that the sea symbolized. The sea obeys Jesus, just like all the dark powers do. What do you and I need to learn? Well, when Jesus asked the disciples, where is your faith? I think we should hear that question directed to us. When I am afraid, Jesus asks me, where is your faith? When you are worried, Jesus asks you, where is your faith? When we doubt God's love for us, we should hear him asking us, where is your faith?

When I disobey God choosing my will over his will, I think Jesus would ask us, where is your faith? The more we know Jesus, the more we know that he truly loves us, he does. does care about us. He wants what's best for us. The more we know that Jesus has power over everything that concerns us, that he has power over the dark spiritual forces in the world, he has power over all the circumstances we face, that he is the one in whom all power and authority dwell in. Well, the more we know of Jesus' love, the more we know of Jesus' power, the more we want to trust him and surrender our lives to him. Thanks for listening.

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