“Jesus
made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him… Later that night,
the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he… saw the disciples straining at
the oars, because the wind was against them. Shortly before dawn he went out to
them, walking on the lake… When they saw him walking on the lake, they thought
he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified. Immediately he spoke to them and said, ‘Take
courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.’ Then he climbed into the boat with them,
and the wind died down. They were completely amazed” (Mark 6:45-51).
Why
didn’t the disciples recognize Jesus that night and why were they so scared of
him?
By this
point, they had spent more than two years with him. They had heard his teaching and they had seen
all kinds of miracles. In fact, just
prior to getting in the boat they watched Jesus feed five thousand people with a
little boy’s lunch. After all they had witnessed,
why do they assume it must be a ghost and not Jesus?
I think
the answer is simple: They did not see Jesus there because they did not expect
to see Jesus there.
The
truth is that most of us will get about as much of God as we expect to
get. In other words, when we decide that
there is an area of life that God cannot touch, it is quite likely that we will
never see him working there. By trying
to confine and control God, we actually miss out on the blessings that he
wishes to bring to us. How many of our
storms could have been calmed by Jesus, but we kept “straining at the oars”
ourselves because we did not believe that he could get to us?
The
temptation is always to limit God, to define him and put him in a box that
makes sense to us. We like a God that is
on a leash and only goes as far as we want him to go. However, a God on a leash is no God at all.
Ephesians
3:20 says that God can do “immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine”.
Do you
believe in that kind of God?
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