Christ, Our Greater Jonah: A Gospel View of Facing Our Storms of LifeSample

Day 2 Devotional

The Inevitability of Our Storms

From Mark 4 verse 1 and verses 35-36, we know that, having taught the crowds the whole day on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, in the evening, Jesus said to His disciples: Let us go over to the other side of the lake.

Christ was obviously exhausted. He saw the need for Him and the disciples to get away for some rest. Christ and the disciples, therefore, left the crowd behind, and they set off to make the journey to the other side of the lake.

In verse 37, as they made their way across the lake, a furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat so that it was nearly swamped. A squall is a sudden violent localised storm. The disciples had not expected this, but here they were now, in this squall, fighting for their lives.

This is just like you and me, living our everyday lives, obediently doing whatever work the Lord has given us to do. Like the disciples in their boat, we expect to navigate our way through life as smoothly as possible.

Sometimes, however, like the disciples in this boat, we find ourselves unexpectedly facing the kind of storm we see the disciples facing in this passage.

We face unexpected storms involving our health or the health of our loved ones. We face storms that can include unexpected depressing financial challenges or intensely irritating sets of unexpected circumstances that can completely ruin our day or our work.

The storm the disciples faced on the Sea of Galilee, given the surrounding topography and the weather conditions of that region, could happen at any time; sooner or later, it was inevitable. Living in this fallen and broken world, sooner or later it is inevitable that these storms will come to us. We don’t live our lives looking for them, but they can come to us.

And the thing is, no matter how many storms you have faced in the past, every new storm has a life of its own; it always seems as though this is the one that will finally undo you.

So, we can summarise our first "I" by saying that it is inevitable that we will face the storms of life, even when we walk with the Lord in obedience, as we see the disciples doing in this passage.