Matthew 14: Jesus Walks on water
Passage (NIV): Matthew 14:22-36
Preacher: Mark Kingston
Picture yourself in a small boat in the middle of the night. You're exhausted. The wind is against you and it has been for hours. The shore you left is long behind you and the shore you're heading for is nowhere in sight.
That's where the disciples were when Jesus came to them - walking across the chaos, in the dark, at three in the morning. Not at a convenient moment. Not when they had themselves together. At their lowest point.
It turns out that's a pattern. The wilderness, the barren desert, the fourth watch - these are the places where everything we normally lean on runs out. Our competence. Our self-sufficiency. Our capacity to manage our own lives. And it's precisely there, when we've run out of our own resources, that we become most capable of encountering God as he actually is.
Because here's the thing about this story: Jesus doesn't wait for the disciples to sort themselves out and come to him. He compels them into the boat, goes up the mountain to pray for them, and then walks across the very thing threatening to overcome them to reach them. He wills the encounter. He arranges the conditions. Seeing God is almost never something we achieve. It's something that is done to us.
And when it happens, it changes everything.
Moses encounters God in a burning bush and goes from fugitive to liberator. Isaiah sees the throne room and goes from a man of unclean lips to a prophet with a message. Peter steps out of the boat toward Jesus, sinks, is caught, and ends up face-down on the floor of that boat confessing for the first time who Jesus actually is - and it's that Peter who will later be told: on this rock I will build my church. Encounter with God doesn't just comfort us. It reorganises us. It opens our eyes to what is actually true about our circumstances, about ourselves, about what we're for.
Which is why we need it so much. Not just correct ideas about God. Actual sight.
And here's something else this story shows us. Sometimes God uses people to will that encounter for someone else. Two elderly sisters on the Isle of Lewis - Peggy, 84 and blind, and Christine, 82 and bent double with arthritis - couldn't get to the prayer meetings or reach the young people they were burdened for. So they prayed. Tuesdays and Fridays, ten until three or four in the morning, week after week. Until one night in 1949, people were drawn from the pubs and the dance halls and their beds and found themselves on their knees outside in the early hours, desperate for God - before they quite knew why.
There is always a will behind an encounter with God. Sometimes it's His alone. Sometimes it moves through the prayers of people who love someone enough to keep interceding for them.
So is there something in you that is hungry to see God more clearly - not just to know about him, but to actually encounter him? And is there someone on your heart whose eyes you long for God to open? Your prayers might be as simple as these: Lord, show me your face. And: Lord, let them see you.
Reflection Questions
Knowing and seeing
Is there a difference between knowing things about God and actually encountering him? What does that difference feel like in practice?The fourth watch
Where in your life right now does everything feel hardest and most out of your control? Is it possible that's exactly where God might want to meet you?What changes
If you can, think of a time when you had an encounter with God. What shifted as a result - in how you saw Him, saw yourself, saw your circumstances, or understood what you were for?Praying for others
Is there someone on your heart who doesn't know God? What would it look like to commit to pray faithfully for them, over time, for their eyes to be opened?
