Matthew 14:28-36
“And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt? And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased.”
Introduction
Call it the bridge book, the bridge between God and man. There is much controversy over whether this book was written first and why it is placed first in the New Testament. Was the book of Mark written first and then later the other Gospels followed? That does not matter, because the content of the book of Matthew is what is important. Matthew is the bridge book. It is the book where God reaches out to man. There is a popular picture by Michelangelo called The Creation of Adam. It shows God extending His hand to man, who is Adam. It is a depiction of the human meeting the divine. But the divine is the one who initiated that meeting. God is the one who initiated it.
The Divine Reaching the Human
I always look at the Old Testament to the New Testament like a person who has a grievance with a friend, but does not want to stay in that grievance. They actually try to settle it. And so can you imagine, as you were arguing with a friend, you had aught with a friend, and you called them up? That’s one thing. But if you loved that friend so much that you would actually put yourself in a vehicle and go to the house of that friend so that you can make your peace that is love. And that’s exactly what God did. He had a grievance with mankind. It was called sin.
It was called sin. We had missed the mark as His creation, and He did not want to stay in heaven and speak through the prophets anymore. He actually put Himself in the vehicle of His son, Jesus Christ, and He came to this earth as it was traveling, driving to us, intentionally to be God with us to settle this dispute. It could only be settled by Jesus on the cross.
And so He, Jesus, when He came, He went and He found others – divine meeting a human once again, and He found these disciples, and He walked with them, and He talked with them. And He offered them a shift. Yes, He did. He offered them a shift from humanity back to the divine relationship with God, and the place where we could be restored to that connected, close fellowship that was the shift. And the same shift, we were talking about this whole 21 days.
From Humanity to Divine Relationship
The whole 21 days was us leaving our humanity, reaching back to the God who loves us so much, and says, “I want this relationship, this restored.” Not that it was broken to sin per se, when we were separated from God because we are all followers of Christ, but it’s been broken because we are not consistently in His presence, and we are not living the lives that He gave us in connection with him. And that’s what’s happening on this boat.
Walking Through the Storm
Now, we are talking about S-staying in our ship, and and this shift is staying focused, keeping our eyes focused on Jesus as He calls us from the human experience to the divine experience with Him-H – having faith in Jesus, having faith in God, and I – identifying who is calling us, and ignoring the noise and the clamor of the storm around us, because guess what? It won’t destroy us. No matter what storm we’re facing in this life, we cannot be destroyed. And F-forsaking fear and forsaking failure, and walking fully in our calling. Walking fully in our calling, and then T – Thinking about our normal maturation as a Christian, and that we are born into God’s kingdom for a purpose, we must keep walking. This is the shift that we have been striving for by turning down our food, some of us, some of us turning off our television, because food is not that important, but that television is for my brother, who loves the news, his 21 days, he watched no news. I saw him yesterday. He said, I don’t know what’s going on in the world.
That was his shift, so that he could spend more time with God. So however you chose to spend these 21 days, and we are on our 20th day, and the theme is Salvation, however you chose to examine yourself before the Lord, to prostrate yourself and shift from your human, fleshly ways to divine ways God is going to honor you. So let’s talk about that shift.
Let’s talk about what that means for us. As you saw in the boat, Peter and the rest of the disciples, they were in that boat at the behest of Jesus, and they had just seen amazing things. The feeding of the 5,000, they were all witnesses, and when it came to that, they were the ones that Jesus used, because when Peter and the rest of the disciples talked about sending the multitudes home, because they had no food. Jesus told the disciples, “You feed the people.” You do it. So it was no longer Jesus trying to be in front. He was trying to push them in front of because this was their assignment to learn how to flow in God just as He did. And so they saw that great miracle, they saw how Jesus had multiplied the little boy’s fishes and loaves and how they participated in it, and they saw it so good that each of them had a basket for themselves as evidence of what God can do if we allow Him to use us.
And so they get into this boat at Jesus’ behest, and Jesus went to his solitary place, and He told them before He got to the boat that He would meet them on the other side. So He had a full assurance that they were going to get there, and with that storm, when it hit. They had no full assurance, because they got afraid. Like many of us. I love this video, and I actually love this series The Chosen, because it shows so much of what I think when I have my divine encounters. The expressions, those people have, but Jesus told Peter one thing that you can hear through all the music. He said, “Look at me. Keep your eyes on Me.” And that’s what He says to us when we are in our storm. “Look at me Psalm 84:11 says, “For the Lord God is a Son and a shield, and the Lord bestows favor and honor, and no good thing will He withhold from the blameless. God is our source. He is the one who gives us everything and gives us the ability to ride out any storm, and all we have to do, like Jesus was telling Peter to do, was, look.
The Psalmist also says in Psalm 168, “I have set the Lord continually before me, because He is at my right hand. I will not be shaken. Colossians 11:3 says, “For He has rescued us and has drawn us to Himself from the dominion of darkness and has transferred us to the kingdom of His dear Son.”
Final Exhortation
So we are not limited by our humanity. We are not limited by storms that rise in us. We just have to recognize who’s calling us while we’re in the storm, and we have to learn how to ignore the clamor of the storm, because really, this storm cannot destroy us. It cannot destroy us. If you look at John 6:68, Peter recognizes who Jesus was way before he got out of that boat, because at the end of a very hard saying, when Jesus says, “Will you eat my flesh and drink my blood?” And all the other people around were walking away, and only Peter and the disciples were left. And Jesus said, “What, will you not go away also?” And Peter said, “Who unto whom shall we go? For only you have the words of eternal life.” Only you have the words.
In the storm, we have to understand that there is no other help but Jesus, there is no other help but God. And when we get into the thick of it, we don’t have to be surprised, because we are also told in Job 14:1 that “Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble,” and we can expect Jesus to be right there in the middle of all of it.
Hebrews 10 and Hebrews 12 tell us something very important about the kingdom that we are now in, and we have we have named the name of Jesus. And it says that we have an unshakable kingdom, we are an unshakable kingdom, and that we should be thankful and live in awe because of that. I know there’s a lot going on in our lives in our families, in our jobs, in our world. As we look at the news and what’s going on around us, and even in our own bodies with sickness. But let me tell you something. Once we identify that everything that touches us is sifted by God’s hand, it makes it okay. It makes it okay, because God never destroys what He creates. He always wants us to flourish. He is always reaching out to us, just as He was reaching out to Peter on that water and that storm. That wasn’t nothing. That was a horrific storm. And the only time, you noticed that Peter is sinking is when he took his eyes off the Lord, and when he looked around and he saw the wind and the waves. And that’s why I said, “We have got to learn to ignore the storm.
I love when I watched our virtual service on Sunday, when Pastor Rod prostrated himself before the Lord. That’s storm behavior. That’s weathering this storm. That’s laying out and relying on your relationship with God to get you through this next thing, whatever that storm is. And when that’s reached up, when we do that, we are reaching back to Jesus, in that storm, and we are touching His hand. And guess what? We’re not going to be like Peter. We’re not going to be overwhelmed by the waves, because we have touched and left our humanity and gone into our divine. We are sons and daughters of the Most High King, and we are not made to go under. We are made to walk on the water with our dear brother and bring salvation to people He sends us to.
We are to forsake fear, we are to forsake failure, and we are to live and walk fully in our calling. Just like Peter walked on that water, walk over your stalk, walk over your storm. There are so many scriptures I wanted to go through, but the time fails me, so there are all in the in the chat, and I want you to read. I want you to read these scriptures, I want you to lay before the Lord and just read them out loud. And I want you to think about the normal maturation that you are experiencing as a Christian. We are all born, just like Jesus was born. We were not just birth. We were sent here for a purpose, and we were sent here for other people. When a child is born, it’s a beautiful thing. They are dependent, and they bring life to us and love to us, and they grow. Job 33:4 says, “The Spirit of the Lord hat made me, and the breath of the almighty has given me life.” We know where we came from. We are not orphans. God made us, and He gave us who life. And 1 Peter says, once we get that life, 1 Peter 2 says that we should desire the sincere milk of the gospel, the word, right? So we can grow thereby. And then we are sent out just as Jesus was sent out. And in Acts 10:38, your maturation as a Christian, it said that Jesus went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil. And that John 14:12, He said the works that I do, you will do, and, you will do greater works.” Listen, we are not, we are not to leave shift that we’re in and stop walking. We are to keep walking through our shift, not just today and tomorrow for this 21 day fast, but in the days to come.
I’ll say one more thing. While I was here, I had the pleasure of watching my little niece. And my nephew’s daughter. And, she was at the point when we were in church, when she put put her hands on the floor and stick her bottom up in the air, and she would just wiggle. And I told my sister, I said, “Look, look it’s over. She’s about to walk.” And I said, “Oh, my goodness, it’s going to be amazing.” So not too many days later, we witnessed her take her first stammering step, and it was amazing because she kept walking. No more crawling for her. She was walking. She was becoming more mature. She had left the stage of infant to a child, and she’s going to leave the stage from being a child to an adult, in not too many years. Before we blink our eye, we’ll be giving her away in marriage. That’s the normal progression of a baby. They are in the womb, and then they get out of the womb, they learn to walk, and then they are starting to live their life, and then they influence the world in which they were born in. How are you walking today? Are we still walking? Are we still crawling? Are we walking? After this fast, we should all be walking in our purpose. Not one of us should remain where we are. We have to grow. The world is depending on us to grow. The people God designs you to go to, just like Paul to the Macedonia, they are calling out for you. Are we still crawling? After this fast, are we going to go back to the same old thing, are we going to walk in our purpose? Jesus is reaching out today.
Yes, the storm is raging, but His words are the same to us as it was to Peter. Look at me and keep walking. God bless you.
Scripture References
Matthew 14 (Jesus walks on the water); Psalm 84:11; Psalm 16:8; Colossians 1:13; John 6:68; Hebrews 10; Hebrews 12; Job 33:4; 1 Peter 2; Acts 10:38; John 14:12