WHY SIT WE HERE TILL WE DIE? – 7
“WHERE TO FOCUS IS JESUS”
There are situations that threaten to wreck your life as a person, the church, the Body of Christ or the nation. For God to intervene, He needs a man who is willing to arise, who is willing to risk his life. Those great things and eternal things that took place in the past had always taken place because someone somewhere decided to believe God, and to arise. Most men that God ever used were not men that had great resources in themselves. But there is one thing they did: they believed God and arose. They refused to sit where the devil was putting them. They refused to agree to dwell in the place of their predicament.
“And there were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate: and they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die? If we say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there: and if we sit still here, we die also. Now therefore come, and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians: if they save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die. And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the Syrians…”
2 Kings 7:3-5 KJV
They arose and God stood with them.
One of the things that keep men lower than what God wants them to be is the fear of death, the fear of failure, the fear of losing out, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the unfamiliar ground. Any man that is not willing to take a step of faith will never experience divine intervention. A step of faith is often a step of risk. Many times your intellect, your human sense tells you that what you are doing is unreasonable and very risky. People who discover the ability and the provision of God for their lives were those that were not going to allow themselves to be glued to their familiar experiences. They were men who were willing to say, “Lord, if it is you I will come.”
Peter took such a step of faith in Matthew 14:24-33. The Bible says they were in the boat and a great storm was blowing and there was nothing they could do to calm the storm. They tried all their expertise and some of them must have felt that the end had come. Even if you know how to swim, how do you swim in turbulent water, in a stormy and confused situation? Suddenly that night, the Lord Jesus began to walk on the water towards them. As He was approaching them, they began to fear again, thinking He was a ghost. But the Lord Jesus said, “Be of good cheer, it is I.”
Peter, right inside that confusion, spoke, “Lord, if it be Thou, bid me come unto Thee on the water.” Thomas Didymus must have been shivering and saying “Peter, Peter, Peter you are too daring. You like to take useless and unreasonable risks. We said that thing that is coming is a ghost; you want to compare yourself with a ghost? And you are married; you want to die for nothing? Andrew must have said, “Peter, we are from the same family; what do you want me to go and tell our father at home?” But Peter said, “If it is you bid me to come.” The Master said, ‘Come’. As long as it was the Master who told Peter to come, Peter had every reason to arise, to arise from that confusion, from that gloom, to arise from that storm and to step out in faith. Others were calling, others were shivering, some were saying their last prayer because they knew that any moment, they could perish. But Peter seemed to have said, “even if that boat is going to capsize, it is not going to meet me there. Since the Master says, come, I will go to meet Him.”
The man took the first step, not on a bridge and remembers that by the time he arose, the storm had not stopped. The wind was still blowing. But he heard only one word from the mouth of the Master, which kept him going: that word, “come.” Others might be shouting ‘Peter! Peter!! Peter!!!’ Peter could have said, “Leave me alone. The Master has said ‘come’ and I go to meet Him.” He took the second; the third step and he did not sink because he was acting on the word from the Master. He must have been repeating that word in his heart, and as he was doing that he was focusing on Jesus. As long as he focused on what the Master said, even if the storm became twenty times stronger and the wind more boisterous, it could not overcome the word of command from the Master.
The moment you learn to walk by the word of God and not by your feelings, not by environmental conditions, you are bound to prevail. Others must have wished they followed Peter when they saw the confidence with which he went especially as the storm had not subsided in the boat. But when Peter decided no more to look at the Master, the Author and the Finisher of our faith, he began to sink.
A great lesson God must teach us is never to shift our focus from Jesus as soon as we take steps to arise from our present situation. One thing is certain: that we can also arise. We can refuse to sit here yet, without being presumptuous. My prayer is that the Holy Spirit will particularly speak to your heart. He will speak to your spirit and cause you personally to arise. As you arise things will change concerning you, your family, your business, the work of God, the Body of Christ and concerning our nation in the name of Jesus Christ (Amen).
