Mark 4:35-41 - Sleep, Storms, & Our Sovereign Savior

A couple of years ago, Adam and I were over in Lane Acres, less than a mile away, passing out invitations and tracts. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this. Suddenly, the sky opened up in the nastiest storm I’ve ever seen. It came out of nowhere. It was beautiful and sunny one minute, and the next minute trees were snapping and shingles were flying off of roofs. I ran back to the car as fast as I could to go pick up Adam, and before we could even get out of Lane Acres, there were trees down all over the road. There were power lines down on the highway. I think it took about thirty minutes to find a way home that wasn’t covered in downed trees.

Storms are scary.

Last year, in the middle of the night, our old church in Tennessee, a beautiful church that had about six beautiful buildings on this nice country property, was completely destroyed in a few minutes by a tornado. Buildings were leveled; roofs were torn off; tree branches everywhere; decades of work and care destroyed in an instant.

We go through life with this illusion of control, and all of a sudden, nature just opens up and reminds us that in an instant our beautiful home could be rubble. That tree we think would be there forever snaps like a toothpick.

Our story today is one of the most famous in the whole Bible. It’s so famous that it’s inspired a whole slew of hymns:

• With Christ in the vessel I can smile at the storm
• Till the storm passes by
• Master the tempest is raging
• I’ve anchored my soul in the haven or rest
• A shelter in the time of storm
• We have an anchor that keeps he soul
• When peace like a river, attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll, whatever my lot thou hast taught me to say, it is well with my soul.
• Be still my soul the waves and winds shall know, His voice who ruled them while He dwelt below

That’s just a few. I did a search on the internet and found about 150 storm-themed hymns.

This morning, we are going to read the text that inspired all of those songs. It’s a super familiar story, but sometimes we need to be reminded of those familiar things.

Let’s read Mark 4:35-41.

”(35) And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let us pass over unto the other side. (36) And when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship. And there were also with him other little ships. (37) And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. (38) And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? (39) And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. (40) And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith? (41) And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him? (Mar 4:35-41 KJV)”

I’m calling my message this morning, “Sleep, Storms and Our Sovereign Savior.” If you haven’t figured it out yet, those will be the three main points of my outline this morning.

Let’s start with...

1. Sleep

For the last several weeks, we’ve been talking about all of the things Jesus was teaching and doing. We talked about how there were people everywhere and He had to teach from a boat. We talked about how He was so busy that He couldn’t even eat.

Well, the text says that Jesus is in this boat and the evening comes. It’s the end of the day, and Jesus says to His disciples, “Let’s just go on over to the other side.”

The Sea of Galilee is actually a lake. It’s shaped like a fiddle. Jesus and His disciples are at the northwestern edge of the lake, and the next story happens in the very southeastern part of this lake, so when Jesus said, “Let’s go over to the other side,” they literally are going as far across this lake as possible. From one corner to the opposite side, it’s about 13 miles.

And they are doing this spontaneously at night. They aren’t getting supplies ready. They were already in the boat, using it as a platform, so they just pick up the anchor and set sail for the other part of the lake.

And the Bible says in verse 38 that Jesus was in the back of the ship, asleep on a pillow. Jesus was exhausted, so He slept.

My old pastor, Pastor Scallions, used to tell me from time to time as kind of a joke that sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap.

Sometimes your body needs sleep, and Jesus had a human body. He had human emotions, and Jesus needed sleep. Jesus was exhausted.

This boat wouldn’t have been that big; maybe 25 feet long—so about from this pulpit to the back wall there—and maybe seven feet wide. It was shallow almost like a canoe, and Jesus is curled up in the back sleeping soundly on a pillow.

Jesus isn’t anti-rest. In fact, Jesus said in Matthew 11:29:

”Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.”

Jesus came to give us rest, but I want to point out something. Jesus’ rest came while He was serving God. His rest came while He was working.

When Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you,” that meant work. The yoke is what you put on farm animals to get them to pull.

I think the best sleep and the best rest is the rest that comes while we are doing something for God.

Let me put it another way: I think the best rest comes when we get in on what Jesus is doing—when we find what God is doing in this world and we jump in. He’s already in the yoke—He’s already doing something—so we just need to jump into the other side. When we are actively doing what Jesus is doing, we don’t just find rest for our bodies; we find rest for our souls.

We can rest because we are working, but we can also rest because we realize that the work doesn’t ultimately depend on us. It’s God’s work, and He’s far more capable than we will ever be.

So Jesus slept. He needed sleep. He was physically exhausted. Remember that the next time you are physically exhausted, when you feel like you just can’t go another step. We have such a Savior who ”can be touched with the feeling of our infirmities;” We have a Savior who was ”in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” (Hebrews 4:15)

So that’s the first thing: Sleep. The second point I want to talk about this morning is…

2. Storms

Verses 37-38 say:

” (37) And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full. (38) And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow: and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we perish? ”

You wouldn’t think that a storm on a lake would be that big of a deal, but you would be wrong.

Just a few weeks ago, there was a tour group out on a lake down in Branson, Missouri, and a sudden storm popped up out of nowhere and capsized that boat, killing 17 people.

One of the things I remember about my grandfather that was really weird is that he would never eat fish. That’s weird when you live in Boston and seafood is such a big deal. It’s also weird when you consider that he grew up in a little fishing town on Lake Michigan and his father was a lighthouse keeper.

So I asked about it one time. It turns out that my grandfather’s only brother, my great uncle, was a professional fisherman on Lake Michigan. He was working the lake one day when a storm whipped up out of nowhere and killed their whole crew. They never found his body. He was 28. That’s why Grandpa didn’t eat fish.

Storms on a lake are a very big deal, and storms in the Sea of Galilee were especially bad. The Sea of Galilee is the second lowest lake in the world. It’s way below sea level, but it’s surrounded by mountains. Those mountains act like tunnels for cold air that hit the warm air on the low lake, and it creates super storms out of nowhere.

And remember: The disciples knew this lake. They spent their whole lives on this lake. They were used to storms, but this one was something else. This one was some kind of super storm. I imagine waves like mountains tossing this little ship around, its shallow hull is filling up with water quickly. These seasoned fisherman know the end is near. They’re giving up.

And they look back in the back of the boat and there is Jesus. HE’S STILL SLEEPING! First, how is that even possible? Second, how is that even possible?

So now the disciples are terrified and annoyed. How can you sleep through this? So they wake Him up and say, “Master, carest thou not that we perish?”

I kind of empathize with these guys here.

But I want you to understand a few things about storms:

First, this storm came while the disciples were obeying Jesus.

Jesus said, “Go over to the other side right away,” and that’s exactly what these disciples did. They obeyed. They pushed off. They didn’t protest. They didn’t try to get supplies. They just did what Jesus told them to do.

• And yet they were fighting for their lives.
• And yet it seemed like it was all about to be over.

There is this really dumb idea that some people teach that if you just follow Jesus, then you’ll never have to deal with any problems—that you’ll never have any storms. Understand something: THE BIBLE DOES NOT TEACH THAT.

The Bible does not teach that if you just have enough faith, you can have “your best life now” and “make every day a Friday.” Nope. The Bible makes it very clear that sometimes when you are following Jesus, He leads you right into storms.

• Sometimes, in the middle of obeying Jesus, you get sick.
• Sometimes, in the middle of obeying Jesus, you lose someone.
• Sometimes, in the middle of obeying Jesus, one of your kids breaks your heart.
• Sometimes, in the middle of obeying Jesus, you get into financial difficulties.
• Sometimes, in the middle of obeying Jesus, truly terrible and terrifying things happen to you.

Just because you are going through a storm does not mean that you are out of God’s will, that you are a disobedient Christian, or that you just don’t have enough faith. Sometimes the storm is God’s will.

So that begs the question: Why? Why does God allow us to go through storms?

One of the guys on this boat, Peter, had something to say about that in 1 Peter 1:7:

”That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:”

You go through trials to try your faith. That’s a word that comes from smithing. The smith would take the metal and heat it up so he could get the impurities out.

So the second thing we learn about storms here is…

Second, God leads us into storms to strengthen our faith.

I know very little about weight lifting. To answer the t-shirts I’ve been seeing around: “No, I don’t even lift, bro.” But I do know this: I know that if you don’t stress your muscles, they never get stronger. That soreness you feel after a hard workout, that means something is working, and it only comes when you push yourself to the limit.

Your faith is like a muscle, and if you don’t ever use it, it’s not ever going to get stronger. If it isn’t stressed from time to time, it’s never going to grow. Sometimes God has to lead us into the storm so we have to trust Him to get us out of the storm. He does this to stress our faith so that we learn to trust Him.

Sometimes we imagine life without storms and life without stress, but we need to realize that no stress means no strength, and no storms means no learning to rely on our Savior.

Here is another example: How many of you know someone whose parents sheltered them from every trial their entire life? They provided everything they wanted. They were always helicoptering close by to swoop in and save the day. Then the kid grew up, and they had no strength. They can’t pay their bills. They can’t keep a job. They are allergic to responsibility. A lot of times, they end up living off of Mom and Dad for the rest of their life.

We chafe at the hard stuff; at the trials; at the difficulty, but it’s the hard stuff, the trials, the difficulty that gives us strength. That builds our character.

I’ll give you two examples of famous people tied to our area:

Abraham Lincoln was known as this wise and magnanimous guy who seemed unbreakable despite going through some of the hardest stuff any president had to endure, but Lincoln wasn’t just born that way. Lincoln’s strength came from growing up in abject poverty; losing his mother; then having to quit school; then having to educate himself; then going bankrupt and losing a business; then losing the love of his life as a young man; then marrying a woman who proved to be insane; then losing one of his children.

In other words, Lincoln was strong because he had to be strong.

Another example would be Ulysses S. Grant. We have the Grant flagpole at the library and the illustrious U.S. Grant Motel. Grant graduated from West Point and served briefly in the army, but there was no major war, so he was sent back into civilian life. For decades, the man lived hand to mouth. His family and he barely survived. I mean they had it hard. When the Civil War came around, he had suffered and been humbled for so long, he seemed like he’d go through anything. Unlike his peers, he didn’t seem to care at all about advancement and prestige.

But his strength came at a cost. Listen, folks: Strength always comes at a cost. Whether it’s muscular strength or strength of character, it costs something. You have to endure hardship. And spiritual strength is the same way. God uses the storms—God uses the hardship and the stress—to build up our faith muscles.

So we’ve talked about sleep. We’ve talked about storms.

Let’s talk last about...

3. Our Sovereign Savior

So they wake Jesus up in the middle of the storm, and Jesus is annoyed. He turns around and commands the storm:

”And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.”

If you’ve ever spent any time on the water, you know that waves take a while to settle down. I was blessed as a kid to have a lake house to go to with my extended family, and we did a lot of water-skiing and tubing. I remember my stepdad would take great joy in getting the water as rough and wavy as he possibly could, and afterwards, it took a while for the waves to settle down. The water would still be choppy for a bit.

After a huge storm, it’s the same way. Even after the storm stops, the waves still stay choppy for several hours. They have to settle themselves down. But here, Jesus just says to the wind and the waves, “Peace, be still,” and it’s suddenly deathly quiet. The waves are suddenly calm. The lake flattens itself out immediately.

Only God can do that. And these disciples, they are terrified. They were scared by the power of the storm, but they are now more terrified by the power of the Savior.

Verse 41 says:

”And they feared exceedingly, and said one to another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Psalm 89:8-9 says:

”O LORD God of hosts, who is a strong LORD like unto thee? or to thy faithfulness round about thee? Thou rulest the raging of the sea: when the waves thereof arise, thou stillest them.”

Think about what the disciples learned about Jesus in just a short time. They learned that He was fully human—that He needed sleep and rest like the rest of us. And they learned that He was fully God—able to quiet the winds and the waves and make the storm go away in a single word.

They learned this in a way that no theology textbook or sermon could ever teach them, and they would never forget it. This wasn’t their last storm. Every one of these disciples would face hardship again and again, but they went through those storms knowing that the Person who was with them understood what they were going through and could make the storm go away in a single command.

One of the last things Jesus said on this earth was:

”and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world”. (Matthew 28:20)

Some of you know what it’s like to go through storms with Jesus. You know He’s going to bring you through. You know He’s going to help you. You know He cares. And you know this, not because of a sermon, but because you’ve already been in storms with Jesus, and He’s used those storms to build up your faith and strengthen you.

Let me wrap this up with three admonitions for you:

1. Don’t shirk the storms. Don’t avoid them. Don’t hate them and despise them. God uses the storms of life to help you grow.
2. If you are going through a storm today, remember who is in the boat with you. Trust in Jesus. He knows what you are going through, and He knows how to make the storm go away, but if you are following Jesus, He might also know that you need this storm. Just trust Him.
3. Woe to the person who has to face the storms of life without Christ. If you’ve never accepted Jesus, put your faith and trust in Him.