Tag: Walking on water

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When life gets hard, we often want to know where God is. When we hurt, we want to know why God didn’t stop it. When circumstances threaten to completely overwhelm us, we want to know if God is big enough to really help. As we continue our journey through the seven signs the apostle John identifies in his Gospel as helping us to better understand who Jesus is, we are looking today at a sign that didn’t seem to benefit anybody when it happened. But when we look past the miracle itself to the thing at which it is pointing, we find reason for great hope in hard times. Let’s dive in and see what happens next.

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About fifty years ago, a man named Harold Kushner lost his fourteen-year-old son to a rare disease. It was a tragedy. All such losses are tragic. Parents should never have to bury their children. That they do is a symptom of the brokenness of sin in the world. Kushner happened to be a Jewish rabbi. As part of his efforts to deal with his grief, he channeled his emotions into writing a book. The book, released in 1981, had a major and immediate cultural impact. The title promised an insightful look into a challenging question that people have been asking for a very long time. It was called, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The question of course is why. Why do bad things happen to good people? We’ve all seen it happen. We’ve seen people who seem to us to be good and faithful, kind and generous with others, conscientious citizens, and so on and so forth, but who nonetheless face tragic situations that their character seems like it should preclude as far as we reckon such things. How can there be a good and just God presiding over creation if things like this happen to people like that? 

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Morning Musing: Mark 6:49-50

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“When they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified. Immediately he spoke with them and said, ‘Have courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever experienced that moment where your hero became human? Some people have; some people haven’t. It’s a tough moment if you’ve lived it. You were looking up to someone as a model for how you wanted to be living your own life and then they did something to reveal they were nothing like you thought them to be. That can be devastating to a person’s entire worldview. Now, I hope you’re not expecting me to somehow say this is somehow Jesus. It’s not. Ever. But what we see in this next part of the story of Jesus’ walking on water reminds us of how good and wise the Scriptures are. They keep our focus on picking the right heroes over the wrong ones.

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Digging in Deeper: Mark 6:47-48

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“Well into the night, the boat was in the middle of the sea, and he was alone on the land. He saw them straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. Very early in the morning he came toward them walking on the sea and wanted to pass by them.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever tried to clarify something for someone, but your clarification itself was so unclear to them that it just prompted more questions? Occasionally when I’m helping one of our older boys with their homework, I’ll try to explain something in terms that are beyond what they’re ready to understand. The result is that rather than making their lives easier, I wind up confusing them more. In those times it is usually mom who comes to the rescue. She knows just how to put things in a way they’ll understand. What we see here is a little like that. Jesus was revealing Himself in a significant way to the disciples so that they would understand Him better. Unlike me, though, His messaging was on point. Still, like the disciples, we sometimes struggle to grasp what He was saying for the details fogging up the picture. Let’s talk through some of those together.

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Digging in Deeper: Mark 6:45

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“Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go ahead of him to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the charges critics like to level at the Scriptures is that they are so riddled with contradictions that they can’t possibly be trusted to convey anything resembling the truth. In most cases this charge is fairly easy to dispatch. Occasionally, though, a thoughtful reading seems to suggest that some of these critics have a point. After all, when there are multiple versions of the same stories – as happens fairly frequently in the Gospels – and the versions seem to be contradictory at so many different points, what are we supposed to do with that? This morning we’re going to start talking about one of Jesus’ most famous miracles: walking on water. Before we get into the details of the event itself, let’s talk about why we think this really happened.

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