Pastor Mike Chat December 15 2024

Sunday December 15
“Cross Over to the Other Side…”
Luke 8:22-26
22 Now it happened, on a certain day, that He got into a boat with His disciples. And He said to them, "Let us cross over to the other side of the lake." And they launched out. 23 But as they sailed He fell asleep. And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water, and were in jeopardy. 24 And they came to Him and awoke Him, saying, "Master, Master, we are perishing!" Then He arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. 25 But He said to them, "Where is your faith?" And they were afraid, and marveled, saying to one another, "Who can this be? For He commands even the winds and water, and they obey Him!" 26 Then they sailed to the country of the Gadarenes, which is opposite Galilee.
For the next several days we will be looking at these amazing verses in Luke 8:22-26. In the previous verses in this chapter Jesus has been preaching to the crowds and His disciples on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee near the city of Capernaum. In Matthew’s Gospel, you will find the larger version on His message that uses parables to teach what the “kingdom of heaven is like” (Matthew 13). Luke uses only one of these parables, the Sower, the Seed, and the Soil, that leads us into what takes place in this section of verses (vv. 22-26).
You can only imagine that by the time the Lord had finished giving "the Parables of the Kingdom" (Matt. 13:1-52), the disciples must have felt like postgraduate students in the School of Faith! They now understood mysteries that were hidden from the scribes and rabbis and even from the Old Testament prophets. What they did not realize (and we are so like them!) is that faith must be tested before it can be trusted. It is one thing to learn a new spiritual truth, but quite something else to practice that truth in the everyday experiences of life.
Satan does not care how much Bible truth we learn so long as we do not live it. Truth that is only in the head is purely academic and never will get into the heart until it is practiced by the will. "Doing the will of God from the heart" is what God wants from His children (Eph. 6:6). Satan knows that academic truth is not dangerous, but active truth is.
Remember the Lord finished this message telling us that the most important thing we can do with the “Seed”, the Word of God”, is to obey it and do the will of God! That is when and how we enter into a personal, intimate, heart and spiritual relationship with our Lord! “We become His mother and brothers” (v. 21). It is now that Luke gives us this account of Jesus “getting into a boat with His disciples” and telling them, "Let us cross over to the other side of the lake."
For weeks Jesus has been ministering in the region of Galilee, working out of the fishing village of Capernaum. He has been preaching and teaching the message of the kingdom of God, and doing marvelous miracles of healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But there are people on the “other side” of the lake that need to experience Jesus and His miraculous saving grace! So, after Jesus has prepared His disciples, He is about to give them another lesson they will never forget. There are people on the “other side”, so they must get on the “boat of life” and navigate the “storms of life” to accomplish the will of God in taking the Gospel to the “uttermost”.
After the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus about a year and a half later, Jesus would give His last words of instructions to the disciples for forty days concerning the kingdom of God (Acts 1:1-8). In His final words here, and in all the Gospel accounts, Jesus gives them the Great Commission. They are to Go into all the world and be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part of the earth. I can’t help but think that maybe when they heard Jesus give them this message that their minds went back to the day they got in the boat with Jesus and were told to “cross over to the other side”.
I want to remind you that we need to still be getting into the boat with Jesus and going to the “other side”. Today, there are over 8 billion people on earth. According to Joshua Project, there are approximately 17,446 unique people groups in the world with 7,391 of them considered unreached (over 42% of the world's population)! The vast majority (85%) of these least reached groups exist in the 10/40 window and less than 3% of missionary work is done among these people.
This means there are over 3.5 billion people who have little or no access to the Gospel, while we speak 97% of mission money and efforts in places like America that is saturated with the Gospel.
Don’t you think it is about time for us “to get into the boat with Jesus and cross over to the other side”? Are you praying, giving, and participating in going to the “unreached people groups of the world”?
God bless!

[@houstondeweese6737]

Great challenge to get in the boat and our responsibilities to getting The Gospel to the billions that have never heard.