Asleep By Faith: Daily Thoughts from Mark (Mark 4:35-41)

What are you afraid of?  I’ve had many nightmares of someone breaking into my house and threatening my family and I was helpless to withstand them.  We all have fears of losing relationships we value.  The world itself can terrify us.

Jesus had a lesson to teach his disciples about fear and faith.

And he told them that day when it was evening, “Let’s go to the other side of the lake.”  So they left the crowd and took him as he was in the boat, and there were other boats with him.  A great windstorm arose and the waves were beating against the boat so that the boat was filling up.  Jesus was in the stern sleeping on a cushion.  They roused him saying, “Teacher, don’t you care that we are perishing?”  He woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be quiet!  Be still!”  And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.  Then he said to them, “Why are you so fearful?  Don’t you yet have faith?”  They were terribly frightened and were saying to one another, “Who then must this be that even the wind and the sea obey him?”  (Mark 4:35-41, ESV)

At the end of a day of teaching from a boat because of the large, crushing crowds, Jesus and his disciples leave to sail to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.  The Sea of Galilee is 696 feet (212 meters) below sea level and surrounded by higher land, resulting often in violent downdrafts and sudden storms.  Sure enough, as they sail across, they are caught up in one.  They are terrified, but Jesus is calmly sleeping in the back of the boat.  They have to wake him to tell him what is happening.

Jesus’ ability to stop the storm with a mere command blows their minds and scares them further.  And he rebukes them in the same breath for not having enough faith.  Why should they have been as calm as him?  Well, he had taught them how great and powerful God is and how much He loves us.  They had seen how much God wanted to do through Jesus and that He surely would not let Jesus perish.

To their credit, they did the one thing they knew to do and that was call on Jesus to save them.  We are so prone to looking at the world and our problems in it from our limited perspective and fail so often to see things from God’s perspective.  That mighty storm is just a little temper tantrum that God can stop with a word.  Why are we so afraid?

Fear is a pervasive problem for us.  We see the great potential for this world to crush us and we’re scared.  We think that it is up to us to protect ourselves and we know we are not ultimately up to the task.  We want to believe we can take care of ourselves, but then things happen outside our control that slap us back to reality.  All our self-defense training, home alarm systems, strategies for keeping people at safe distances, and gathering of people around us to stand together against others, finally fail us.

But faith says, “I am not alone in protecting myself.  I have a loving Father who is more than capable of taking care of me.  God is my rock and fortress.  I don’t have to build my own fortress.  I can run into His.  That’s what Jesus did.  He was asleep by faith.  That is what it is like to live by faith and not in fear.  Oh, to live without fear!