Jesus: Calm in the Storm

[00:00:02] Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our father, from our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:12] Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, let this blessed assurance control that Christ hath regarded my helpless estate and hath shed his own blood for my soul, it is well with my soul. [00:00:32] Brothers and sisters in Christ, no matter the waves or the wind that buffet your soul, you have Jesus Christ, who has shed his blood for you, who on the cross has won you everlasting peace and joy. [00:00:55] Those, well, the wind and the waves, they can take different shape. [00:01:01] That's actually kind of the point of the image of water. [00:01:06] It's shapeless, right? Unless you freeze it, I suppose. Right? [00:01:11] But water is shapeless. That's why in Genesis there, you know, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, okay? It was without form. [00:01:24] Darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. [00:01:31] The waters there, it's shapeless. [00:01:34] Water is shapeless. [00:01:36] So we see Jesus out there on the sea with his disciples and hear the shapeless, chaotic waters are starting to threaten. [00:01:49] The disciples are thinking that they're going to be enveloped in chaos, that they're going to lose themselves, that they're going to die. [00:02:01] And they look to Jesus, the word of God, through whom everything was made, right, that word that spoke everything into being, that brought shape and meaning to everything, that brought order out of chaos. They looked to the word in the flesh, and he restores calm with a word, peace. [00:02:31] Be still. [00:02:34] Jesus has power over wind and sea. [00:02:39] Jesus has power over chaos that would threaten to envelop us. [00:02:49] Now, sometimes the chaos that threatens to envelop us is external or threatens us physically. [00:03:02] Your health starts to deteriorate or you have an injury or something like that. That's a form of chaos here. Your body was working in an orderly fashion and was working toward your well being. And now something doesn't make sense anymore. [00:03:22] And death, then is the ultimate version of this. It's sort of a going from order into chaos. I mean, it's just like God formed Adam in the beginning from the dust and brought all these disparate parts into a meaningful whole and breathed into him the breath of life, and he became a living being. Then death is the reversal of that, this going from order from being created into back to the chaos from which we were created. [00:03:53] So one form of chaos, one form of wind and waves that we experience is. Is physical, just like there's physical life and spiritual life and physical life and physical death and spiritual death. Right. There's a spiritual chaos as well. [00:04:14] We're made to be an ordered whole body and soul together. And, well, this is maybe what we normally think of when we think of chaos, busyness or stress, or when we feel our thoughts conflicted within ourselves. [00:04:35] Maybe you hear a sharp word from somebody and the wind starts to circle. The thoughts get stirred up, and you can't think clearly anymore. [00:04:49] Wanting to defend yourself, wanting to attack the other, wanting to blame circumstances, wanting to get out of the situation and just be done with it all. [00:04:58] It starts to circle, and you end up in this windstorm, and it becomes unclear what's up and what's down, where you should be going, how you should be thinking. [00:05:10] You ever experienced that? [00:05:13] That can happen on a really small scale, like in a conversation with somebody about something that doesn't matter at all, or it can happen on a very serious level, maybe in a very close relationship. [00:05:28] It can threaten to destroy, to destroy a relationship or to. [00:05:35] Well, to propel you on a path that you don't want to go down. [00:05:40] The wind and the waves, they come, and they threatened to throw us into chaos. [00:05:47] But we have the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Lord of Chaos, who is above it all, outside it all. [00:05:58] He doesn't get stirred up like that so that he's blinded by fears or wrong desires. [00:06:07] He's beyond it all. He's got control over it all. Just look at him as he goes to the cross, boy. That's when the windstorm in his own heart would swirl things around. [00:06:21] But no, he went like a lamb to the slaughter without complaining. He went calmly to the cross amid insults and spitting and beatings and the like. And just knowing that he was about to be cruelly killed for something, you know, well, for nothing, right? [00:06:41] There he goes. It is well with my soul, you know, peaceful to the cross. [00:06:48] Jesus is above the chaos. He brings order out of chaos. [00:06:55] And when you wake him up, he's there to help. [00:07:00] That's the neat thing. I've mentioned this a couple times. [00:07:05] So I'm taking this from St. Athanasius, a bishop from the fourth century, you know, but he says the wind and waves always come, but when they do, don't forget that Jesus is there with you in the boat. You know, he's not. He's not far away from you, and he's in your heart. [00:07:21] So turn to him in prayer, and he calms the storm. [00:07:28] Job, our Old Testament reading is from the book of JoB, from a pretty neat part in the book of Job. It's kind of a turning point for 38 chapters, 37 chapters, Job is suffering. He loses everything he had, loses his health. His friends give him bad advice. And after 38 chapters, then God answers. But do you see what it says, how it starts there? This is the beginning of the Lord's answer. Then the Lord answered job out of the whirlwind. [00:08:04] What whirlwind are we talking about? [00:08:06] I think the kind of whirlwind that keeps job from seeing the meaning of all this. What's going on? [00:08:14] Losing everything, having friends give him words, or he's like, I don't think that's right. [00:08:21] They're trying to explain it to him. It's like I can't see in front of me. I don't understand. [00:08:28] There's a place in job where Job says that the Lord's hidden in darkness and he can't see him. [00:08:41] That darkness, I think, is, well, the circumstances of the world. [00:08:46] When you're going through suffering, you can't necessarily see why. And then in hindsight, maybe you look back and say, well, the Lord was teaching me this or that or whatnot. We can speculate. [00:09:01] But faith, you know, faith is. [00:09:04] Well, it's walking by faith, not by sight. It's following God wherever he leads, following God in the darkness in the absence of understanding. [00:09:14] And that's what job does. He just hangs on to the Lord through it all. Finally, here the Lord comes and says, yeah, job, you're blind. You don't get it. [00:09:25] But I'm beyond all that. [00:09:30] Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know. Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it, and set bars and doors and said, thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed. [00:10:11] God's saying, like, this is all a mystery to you, job. And this goes on for a couple of chapters, and it just gets neater. I mean, you should go back and read 38 and 39 and probably a couple more chapters. [00:10:29] God's saying, like, yeah, you're in the darkness. Like, you don't understand. And that shouldn't really be surprising. Look, I set limits for the waves, you know? Look, to me, the chaos that we experience can be. [00:10:47] Well, it's a daily struggle, right? It can be simple in a conversation, or it can be, like, very, very threatening. Like, immediately threatening. [00:11:02] I got to see Ken Brockett in the hospital on Tuesday. [00:11:07] And he couldn't get oxygen for himself. He couldn't breathe to keep himself alive. And so he was on a respirator, and he wrote on his piece of paper, if I talk, I don't get enough oxygen. Because he could talk through his respirator. But sometimes he would anyway, he just wanted to say something. [00:11:30] And after we had read a couple psalms and I said something to him like, you know, the Lord will take you through anything. Like, no matter, you know, no matter what the chaos, essentially, you know, you look to the Lord, and he'll calm your storm. I didn't use those words, but it was that kind of a thing. And he said through his respirator, I believe that there he was. I mean, talk about the whirlwind and the pressure, the worries or the, you know, whatever. Whatever would assail your mind in that moment. Like, talk about a whirlwind. [00:12:09] And there he was, looking to Jesus to calm his storm. [00:12:16] That's the struggle that you and I have. Maybe daily, in certain ways or maybe in certain seasons, especially difficult, or at the end of life, we are all in the same boat together as mortal human beings. And Ken and job and the saints of old, they're all sort of leading us on, following Christ. [00:12:46] We're not alone. We get to see not just job and Ken, but the apostles and saints, family members that, you know, you get to follow Jesus with them. [00:13:02] And they would all have, you know, look to Jesus. Look to Jesus to calm the storm when you don't know what to do. [00:13:11] Look to Jesus when you feel or see the whirlwind, when things don't make sense. [00:13:18] Look to Jesus who went to the cross for you, who endured chaos to the point of falling apart, right to the point of his own dissolution. Like, he died, but he couldn't stay dead. God raised him from the dead, and he is ruling and reigning over all things, including chaos. Nothing is not within his control. And he has your best interest in mind, better than you could imagine. [00:13:54] And he doesn't tell you why you suffer, except that he works. His power is made perfect in weakness, except that he. He takes chaos and he makes order out of it, no matter what it is. [00:14:08] So you can trust him, who endured such chaos for you and who promises to give you order and peace and joy forever. In Jesus name, amen.