When I talk, I tend to go on a bit. Blame nearly 2 decades of radio broadcasting and a family full of expert story tellers. I’ve learned over the years that keeping things short can help, but you lose such wonderful detail and opportunities to ignite the flames of the imaginations, so I say, take another minute or 2! I struggle with Twitter. I’ve always got too much to say but I’ve allowed this technology to shape the way I think so that I’ve become more succinct. This scares me a bit because now, instead of just thinking, for thinking’s sake, I’ve started to think for status updates’ sake! This makes me a bit sad, in retrospect.
I was reading the Bible the other day and came across a response that Jesus gave His disciples. You can read the story in Luke chapter 8. Jesus and His friends were tired and it was late. They’d been with Him all day while he was preaching and while they were ferrying Jesus across the lake, He fell asleep and a storm arose. This is what it says from verse 22:
One day Jesus said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side of the lake.” So they got into a boat and set out. As they sailed, he fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger. The disciples went and woke him, saying, “Master, Master, we’re going to drown!” He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm.“Where is your faith?” he asked his disciples. In fear and amazement they asked one another, “Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.
Jesus had an opportunity to teach the disciples a valuable lesson that day, to let them ask questions and to wrestle out their belief in Him and His preaching about the Kingdom and the miracles that He performed. To me, this would have been a fantastic opportunity to extrapolate and draw the lesson out and inspire his 12, petrified friends. They seemed to me to be in need of some encouragement and a chance to vent their fear and bewilderment and on that boat it seemed like the moment. But, of course, it didn’t happen. He simply asked that rhetorical question that gets me every time: “Where is your faith?” That’s it. It was a rebuke and it was loaded! Those 4 words carried the weight of the Sermon on the Mount, the widow’s son being raised from the dead, and the healing of the paralysed man. The question held in it the disciples’ very own witness of all the sunset miracles we can read about in Luke 4. It would imply: “You’ve seen who I am, and what I can do, and yet you still carry so much fear and concern? Everything is under my control; was made by me and for me and through me and you worry about a storm? The Son of God with you in flesh and you fear for your lives despite what you saw me do an hour ago?”
When we start to consider that we have the Word of God at our disposal, loaded with thousands of years worth of testimony, it’s a shame that we allow ourselves to become so undone by what we experience. God’s presence now is as real as in that boat that day. His Spirit is in us and around us, and our ‘storms’ are raging, yet while Jesus remains in such a place of peace, we come unravelled.
Jesus would ask us a similar question right now. It is loaded with the revelations we now have through His word and the confidence we can have in it and in our own testimonies of today and the past. We know who God is and what He has done; in His Word and in our lives, yet we stress, worry and come apart. Jesus has just one questionfor you, in the midst of your struggles; your darkest hour…
“Where is your faith?”