Aug 26, 2022
Does faith in Christ make a difference in your day to day?
Hi, I’m Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks for joining me
again today on the Follower of One podcast. I’ve been thinking and
talking about trust and hope and faith for the last couple of days.
I came across this passage as a direct response to the two Psalms
that I read in the previous two passages.
You can check the episodes out that were before this one. Today. I want to read Matthew 8:23-26: “As he got in the boat, his disciples followed him. Ssuddenly a violent storm arose on the sea so that the boat was being swamped by the waves. But Jesus kept sleeping. So the disciples came and woke him up saying, ‘Lord, save us. We’re going to die.’ He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid you of little faith?’ Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea and there was a great calm.” That’s again Matthew 8:23-26 from the Christian Standard Bible. Jesus is in the boat, and he’s so tired that he’s sleeping in the middle of this storm.
This storm is bad enough to scare men who are fishermen. These men lived on that sea and they’re afraid. So, this is a bad storm and yet Jesus is asleep. His question to them was, "Why are you afraid you of little faith?” We talked a little bit about how our fear needs to trigger us, to put our trust in the Lord.
Here Jesus is demonstrating this by having rested, having slept right through the storm. He ranks this reference to “you of little faith.” That phrase, that Greek word that’s translated, “little faith” is used six times in the new Testament; five of them are in Matthew. One of those is a restating of Matthew 6 in Luke.
And so we have Jesus. We have record of Jesus referencing the disciples as “those of little faith” five times by two different authors. I think Jesus said it a lot. I think this was a kind of a cautionary reminder teaching tool that he used. We are people of little faith. We don’t have much faith. We have to work out our salvation. I believe that means we strengthen our faith by trusting God more and more. Jesus is basically challenging the disciples to relax in him. They’re with the God of the universe in a boat on a sea. This storm is subject to him. And it’s clear in the next verse, you can tell they hadn’t even considered that the winds in the sea might obey him.
They were not thinking of him as God. They were thinking of him as a man. But when he tells the wind and the sea what to do, they’re blown away. I want my fear to run from Jesus because I have this faith. My faith doesn’t measure up as much as I would like it to. As a result, I become afraid; but what can I do today?
Rather than going all the way back to the beginning of this week, what can I do today? I can put my trust in God. I can remember that I only have a little faith. Let’s put one more weight on the bar. Let’s try and trust God a little more. We have to build up our faith muscles. And today I want to challenge us as marketplace Christians:Ask God to show you where you can add a couple of pounds and trust him a little more.
Maybe it’s in praying for your coworkers and then doing the idea that comes to mind. If you pray for a coworker and the next day you get an idea of doing something for them, figure out how to do it. That’s a ministry opportunity. Ministry is just service, and so we can serve our coworkers because we follow Jesus, because we’re growing our faith. Our faith should help us rest in the difficulties and the challenges and the things that scare us. Our faith makes us rest, and then we’re free to do the work that Jesus has for us. Thank you for being a marketplace minister.
Thank you for serving the people around you because you follow Jesus. That’s all ministry is. In fact, you can join a community of us who are trying to do that every.
Go to www.community.followerofone.org and join us. We have a new marketplace mission trip starting in just a couple of weeks. You can join our online community and sign up for that next marketplace mission trip. It’s a two-week practice exercise where we practice lifting a little more faith and trusting God a little more.
Check it out at www.community.followerofone.org . Thanks very much.