Hosanna Restoration Church

Have you ever wondered why the disciples waited so long to wake Jesus up? I started out calling this things like, “Why wait” and “Don’t wait to long”, but decided that, Call early,” sounded better. We already spend more time than we should wondering why we do the things we do and condemning ourselves and each other, so it seemed to be that it would better to just go with a good idea and that is to always call Jesus early. That said; let’s look at some possible reasons that they waited so long see if we can’t avoid making the same mistakes!

Mark tells us that it was Jesus idea to head over to the other side of the lake and so they took off. Most of the crowd was left behind, but there some boats following when the storm started coming up. Two things come to my mind when I look at this. Many of the disciples were fishermen. They had spent a lot of time on the water and had been through storms before. So perhaps they felt they could handle this alone. Add to that, the fact that there were other boats following and you could even throw in the possibility of pride having an effect on the situation.

These are two things that often affect us as Christians. We get to thinking that we can handle things ourselves. Then when we aren’t doing so well and may be on the verge of getting help, the enemy comes and adds to the fire telling us that we should be able to handle it ourselves. Can’t you just hear the conversations in the boat as someone says “maybe we should wake Jesus” and another says, “we can handle this, and besides there are others watching we need to do it ourselves.” Seems to me that Matthew would have been happy to wake up Jesus, since tax collectors were probably not much for sailing. Peter on the other hand would be likely to handle it himself. I am sure we all have areas where we feel like we should be able to handle it and other areas where we don’t want to try. No matter what the situation, we should just call Jesus early.

Well, back to the boat! Now the water is coming in, but still they must be figuring out how to handle it. It is not until the boat is nearly full and they are convinced that they are going to drown that they finally wake Jesus. Did they wake Him telling Him that they had done all they could, but they could not handle it? Did they tell Jesus they knew He could take care of everything? Nope! By this time, they were busy accusing Jesus of not caring about them. Still, Jesus wakes up and puts a stop to the storm and then asks why they did not have faith in Him.

The bottom line was that they did not think Jesus could do anything about the storm. I wonder if he was not just laying there waiting to see if they would bother to call on Him. I wonder if the reason we wait so long sometimes is because we are convinced that Jesus can’t do anything about the storm we are in. Or maybe we have the idea that He should do something about it without us having to ask. To be honest, I am certain that He takes care of lots of things that we do not even know about. I also think there are lots of things that He is just waiting for us to show Him that we have faith that He can handle them.

The final thought on this is that it does not matter how we have handled things in the past or how we are handling what is going on now; from now on let’s just call early.