With Jesus in the Boat...

Jesus walks on water in Matthew 14. A hundred books and a million sermons have been done on this passage, and all for good reason. It's amazing! I've caught at different times the importance of prayer that Jesus shows by praying through the night. I've read "You Gotta Get Out of the Boat" if you want to make a difference. I've taught on how Peter sank when he quit looking at Jesus, and we do too.

But today, one little detail came up that I personally hadn't registered with before. Jesus gets in the boat with Peter at the end of the story and the wind dies down. Clearly, Jesus has control over the storms. There's the other story where He's asleep and the storm hits and He tells the wind to be quiet, and it is. So what's the deal here. His feet hit the boat and the storm is over. It would have been more impressive for Him to calm the storm while He was in the middle of it, standing on the water. That would have been a great sermon illustration. But He doesn't. He doesn't even speak to it in this story. Why?

I'm not certain, after all He IS God, and His ways are beyond me. But could it be that the storm was all for the disciples? I mean, it says Jesus immediately put them in a boat and sent them out, then He goes to pray, then the storm hits them. They go through all of this fear (storm, it's a ghost, Peter sinking, etc) but then it all just dies away when Jesus hits the boat. It kind of seems like the storm was engineered in a sense for their sakes. Jesus doesn't respond to a storm that happened to hit them. It kind of looks like He created it and put them in the middle of it.

This goes back to something I learned a while back. Jesus isn't afraid of pain like we are. He embraces it here on this planet as part of the good plan for us. He walks into the middle of it and redeems it. The storm wasn't His worry, the disciples faith in Him was His focus.

I wonder what storms around me right now are here so that I might learn better? Which ones will stop the minute Jesus steps in the boat with me? Never a boring moment with Him, that's for sure.