Jesus Walks On The Water

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida, for more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. Pastor John and I are in the Gospel of Matthew talking about following Jesus, I love that last song, I will trust you Lord Jesus, right? Well my guess is as we begin to unpack a section of Matthew's Gospel, which is Peter walking on water, my guess is every person here has wrestled with this thing called failure of one sort or another. Some of you may actually sadly be wrestling with it right now, and one of the hard things I think about wrestling with failure in our lives is that we can feel isolated, like we're the only one going through this. I mean you come into a place like Thrive, yeah you know, look at the other people, they look like they have it pretty much together, well at least most of them look that way. And so just to kind of level the playing field at the start of this message, here is what we are going to do together. We are going to do a mass confession of failure, and I'm going to give you a few categories and then I'll ask you to, if you have ever failed, I'm going to ask you to actually raise your hand at the end, just as a way of letting other folks here know that you are a fallible, fallible human being, and that we all do really wrestle with this stuff, but keep your arms down until I get all the way through, okay? Well here we go, if you have ever failed a test, ever been cut from a team or auditioned for something and didn't make it, if you ever went after a job and didn't get the job or you've lost the job, if you have ever been inappropriately impatient with a three-year-old, if you've ever slept through a message and wished you'd stayed awake or you stayed awake through a message and wish you had actually slept, if you ever said the wrong thing with the wrong fork or wore synthetic fibers, if you have ever experienced moral, athletic, academic, social, financial, vocational, relational failure of any kind, would you please just raise your hand, just mass confession here at Thrive Church. Thank you for your honesty, God already knew. Well we're gonna walk through a series of observations, there will be five of them, about this, about Peter based on, if you want to look at the reference later, Matthew 14, Matthew 14, 22 to 33 is the section of Matthew we're looking at, and we need to unpack this because it is a reality in our experience of being called to follow our Lord and Savior Jesus, and here's the first observation. We cannot grow in our following of our Lord and Savior as his disciples, as his followers without risk, and we cannot risk without failing like Peter sometimes, and therefore a life that is primarily about avoiding failure, friends, is just a form of slow death, and so we have to decide, because the boat is safe, and secure, and comfortable, and the water is rough, and the waves are high, and the wind is strong, and there quite honestly is a storm out there, and if we get out of the boat, whatever your particular boat might happen to be, if we get out of that boat, there is always the possibility that we may sink, that we may fail, but brothers and sisters, if we never get out of the boat, there is guaranteed ironclad certainty that we will never walk on water, because here's really the theme of the whole message. John Ortberg actually wrote a whole book on this theme, if you want to walk on water, you've got to get out of the, you got to get out of the boat. You see friends, there is something, actually there is someone inside of us that tells us that our life is about more than just sitting in the boat, that wants us to walk on water as we follow the call of our Savior. It is the Holy Spirit who indwells us, who calls us to leave the comfort of routine existence, and abandon ourselves to this great adventure of following Jesus, and saying yes to his call, and then sometimes in doing that, we experience the power of God holding us up in our lives, and in essence we walk on water. So our Lord Jesus comes to his friends, this is the context of Matthew 14, and the Bible says they're all afraid, and Jesus says what he often has to say to us, stop being afraid. Why? Because the storm is not so bad? No, the storm is really bad sometimes, Matthew uses the word seismic, it was a huge storm, but stop being afraid, Jesus says, because it's me, you know me, you can place your life and your destiny in my hands, and friends if you have been led to do that by the power of the Holy Spirit, then you do not need to live in fear. So in that text Peter says all right, Peter says just command me, and you know I think that is at the heart of a follower of Jesus, and our Lord says all right Pete get out of the boat, come to me. Now again you have to kind of picture this, Peter goes over the side of the boat, there's a storm going on, we're told it's three o'clock in the morning, everybody is exhausted and terrified, he's by the side of the boat, ...