How to Thrive in the Storm

“The righteous will thrive in uncertain times.” – unknown

We were in prayer last Sunday and this line kept coming back to me.  

In Jeremiah 33:3, God says, “Call unto Me, and I will answer you and show you great and mighty things which you do not know.”  I’ll never forget the conviction with which Dawson Trotman quoted this verse and challenged the prayer habits of his audience.  “Are we asking God for great and mighty things?  Or are we asking God for peanuts?” 

Perhaps we find ourselves ‘falling asleep at the wheel’ of our prayer lives and setting our sights too low.  Or worse, perhaps we don’t even engage in regular intentional prayer with our Creator, and as a result we fail to recognize the potential power in prayer.  

A people walking and living only in their own strength are settling for peanuts.  Their focus is either tragically inward (me me me) or distractedly outward (I’m powerless to do anything).  When attempting to encourage one another, they’ll say “There there” and “Life is hard.”  They may pray “help us just get through this.”  They may even pray “Lord, give me strength,” but they end it there.  

Strength for what?

Strength to do what?

Survive?

Merely exist?

Shouldn’t there be more to it than that?  Would we find more specific answers to prayer if we prayed with more specific requests?  “Lord, give me strength to grieve and mourn properly, and the will to move forward and minister to others when the time is right.”

But I’m not even so sure that meaningless ambiguity in our prayers is the biggest problem (although it certainly is A problem).

I think our biggest problem is focus.

“In the fourth watch of the night, He (Jesus) came to them, walking on the sea.  When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified, and said, ‘it is a ghost!’  And they cried out in fear.  But immediately Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.’

Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, if it is You, command me to come to You on the water.’  And He said, ‘Come!’  And Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came toward Jesus.  But seeing the wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’

Immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’  When they got into the boat, the wind stopped.  And those who were in the boat worshiped Him, saying, “You are certainly God’s Son!’”

There are so many rich insights bound up in this passage, but I just want to emphasize two right now.  

The first is focus.  When the disciples first saw Jesus, they were viewing Him through the lens of culturally conditioned mysticism “it is a ghost!”.  When Peter saw Jesus properly, he was able to walk on water!  When Peter took his eyes off Jesus to focus on the wind (ie – storms), he began to sink.

The application to our own lives is clear.  When we focus too much on the storms of life and their uncertainty, or when we view/treat God as an amorphous blob of spooky mysticism, we will invariably fail to live and walk in power, and the most we can hope for is to merely survive – to merely “weather the storm”.  

But when our focus is on Jesus, and we walk faithfully with Him, we will see and experience what would otherwise be impossible.  We may just find ourselves walking on water in the midst of a storm.

The second insight I want to briefly emphasize is that Jesus was walking in the storm long before Peter ever did.  When we’re in a tough season, or even an impossible season, we can be tempted to believe we’re all alone in the storm when in fact Jesus is already there, offering to save you from sinking.  Salvation is about so much more than just having hope for the next life/afterlife – salvation is so much about us finding life, hope and power in this life.  “Today is the day of salvation.”

And it wasn’t until after Peter had joined Jesus in the storm, and experienced the impossible, that they got in the boat and storm subsided.

Jesus didn’t cause the storm, but He wanted Peter to experience a miracle in the storm before it ended.  And I wonder if perhaps He wants the same for us in our own storms – for us to focus less on the storm and how much we want it to end; for us to focus on Jesus, to call unto Him and see great and mighty things which we do not know; for us to thrive in uncertain times, and not just survive.