So across the page from the hymn is our scripture, Mark 6 verses 44 through 53. Hear then God’s holy word.
And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men. Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd. And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land. And he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them. And about the fourth watch of the night, he came to them walking on the sea. He meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out. for they all saw him and were terrified. But immediately he spoke to them and said, take heart, it is I, do not be afraid. And he got into the boat with them and the wind ceased, and they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened. When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored to the shore.
Thus far, God’s holy, inspired, and infallible word. It will please the Lord to take his word and by the power of his spirit to transform it in our lives into service for himself. Thanks be to God.
Heavenly Father, bless our study now. Come in your power, focus our minds and hearts, speak to us individually, speak to us as group. Help us, Lord, to know you and serve you. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
After the disciples had completed their itineration through Galilee, and while Herod was dealing with John the Baptist, the Lord Jesus told them, come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while. But there was not a place so desolate the crowds could not find them. And thus ensued what we looked at before, the feeding of the 5,000. I take this circumstance to mean that Jesus wanted to show the disciples that the needs of the kingdom sometimes outweigh one’s need for rest and that God’s grace is sufficient even when we are worn out. We pick up today just as the 5,000 are dismissed And at his command, the disciples departed by boat and left Jesus to find them later.
We have four points to think about this morning. First of all, the end of the miracle of the loaves. Second, the Lord’s solitary prayer vigil on the mountain. Jesus’ unexpected walk on the sea is our third point. And finally, the Lord’s agenda on land and sea.
So we begin with the end of the miracle of the loaves. I suspect most of us have enjoyed a time at the amusement park and that we find rides that we enjoy. I know that when I was younger and could bear it, I used to enjoy the roller coaster. But that ride eventually came to an end. And no matter how much I was enjoying it and would like to ride, I had to get out. The ride was over with. Now, there were others waiting to get in line, so I couldn’t say, oh, I’m going to stay on. I had to get off. Somebody said one time, all good things come to an end. And on another occasion, but I think it’s applicable here, one of the disciples said, Lord, it is good for us to be here. And I’m sure it was good to see that miracle, to see all those people fed. And even though we’re told here that their hearts were kind of hard, still, it must have been heartwarming in a way to see what the Lord was able to do. Most miracles do come to an end The dead are raised, but they die eventually. The sick are healed, but they get sick again. The loaves disappear, and the people will have to find other loaves that the Lord might supply. But everything comes to an end in this life anyway.
Now, there are exceptions. Things having to do with eternity, for example, the new birth. The new birth is one thing, it takes place, but it has ongoing, everlasting consequences and ramifications. Oh, there are things like the Christian life itself. which is marvelous to have and to live, and it goes on, and when death comes, we just pass on into eternity and continue with the Lord.
So there are exceptions, you see, to this statement that all good things come to an end. One day there will be a new heavens and a new earth, and that will never end. That’s what it means to live in eternity.
But when miracles end, And may I say when prayers are answered, because we’re not so much in these days looking for miracles to happen, but we can pray all the time and rejoice that God does answer our prayers. But when miracles end and when prayers are answered, then earthly life goes on, does it not? People still get up, wash their face, go to work, engage in whatever things happen after work and come home and go to sleep again. Life goes on, in other words.
So that yes, miracles or answered prayer are realities, but we have to keep on living, keep on facing new challenges and new things in this life anyway. Normal life involves just keeping on, but how much better it is to keep on with the Lord. Because he said, I’ll never leave you. I’ll never forsake you. Yes, the miracles, the answered prayers may be completed, but the Lord continues on with us in all that we do.
Jesus did not go straight on to the next miracle, although the next one actually happens in fairly close proximity. I’m talking about his walking on the water, came not too long after the miracle of the loaves. But what I want you to see is that Jesus himself then went on with his life, at least for a while, before he did something else that was extraordinary. He didn’t go on right to the next miracle, but he did go on to pray. He went to the stillness of the mountain in order that he might seek the Lord for all the things that lay ahead of him.
Now, the fact that Jesus prays is really a head-scratcher. Why did He need to pray if He was God, if He was Emmanuel, God with us? It’s one of those mysterious things. And yet Jesus, as a man, He was God and man, He had to pray, he needed to pray, he did pray very often.
Which brings us to our second point this morning, that the Lord’s solitary prayer vigil on the mountain was necessary for him and a great blessing for him and for others for whom he prayed. Just quoting from the Gospel of Luke chapter 5 verse 16, but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. Did you ever hear that verse? Did you ever remember that verse? Luke 5 verse 16, Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
And we may say, well, why did Jesus send the disciples away? Why didn’t he get in the boat with them and move on across? Well, there are multiple reasons, as we’ll see, but one of the reasons was he wanted to be a part in a lonely place that he might pray because that was so necessary in his life.
One of the memories that I have of a movie called Sergeant York. You ever see that movie? It’s on television every now and again. But he was Sergeant York, he wasn’t Sergeant Thin, but Alvin York had become a Christian and he didn’t know whether it was the right thing to join the Army or not. He’d gotten conscription papers. He didn’t know whether he should resist that or go ahead and obey the government telling him to come and to be a part of the army. He went through a lot of anguish about that, but one of the pictures, at least in the movie, is his sitting up on a mountain, very lonely place. There was someone with him though, and that was the dog. His hound dog was with him there on the mountain, but for all intents and purposes, he was alone there trying to go over this, praying, Lord, show me the way.
Well, I won’t go into the whole story of the movie, but let me just say that I think his prayer was effective, and that’s a good picture to have in your minds of a fellow struggling, trying to understand what to do, and there alone on the mountain, he was praying, and it kind of fits in with what we read about the Lord Jesus Christ here.
I think it would be fair to say that the Lord, we’re talking about Jesus now, that the Lord accomplished more by prayer than by miracles. Did you ever think about that? That He accomplished more by prayer. He often went to lonely places and prayed. And was His prayer unanswered? Did nothing happen? No, I believe His prayer was very effective. More things were accomplished by His prayer than by His miracles, if you will, even though this feeding of the 5,000 brought in a lot of people into the whole matter.
But Jesus was a man of prayer, and certainly that’s an example for us also. Why did He even need to pray? Well, we might say it’s one of those mysteries of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God. and yet in three persons. Why did He need to pray? Well, if we can’t answer that completely, we can say that He needed human strength, because He was human at that point. He needed human strength and He needed divine help. And those things, of course, were His to claim in prayer.
Did you know that they’re ours too? That we can claim The need for strength. Lord, give me strength for my labors. And we can say, Lord, I can’t do this on my own. I can’t do this at all unless it’s Your doing. Unless I have Your divine help in the matter. So, yes, Jesus did these things and it’s mysterious. We say that He needed human strength and He needed divine help that God could provide. But we need it. We need it worse than He did. We need it now. And God says, well, you’ve got it. You can have it. Just come to Me in prayer, and I’ll grant it to you.
For one thing, of course, He needed the Holy Spirit. He needed the Holy Spirit to change hearts. He said, if I do this or that by the Spirit, It meant that the Spirit of God was at work in him, even though the three persons of the Godhead are all equal and so forth. But he said, I need the Holy Spirit. I need Him to change hearts. I can preach to 5,000 people, and He did. We think all He did was feed them, but before the feeding, He preached to them, He taught them. And how did that succeed? We can only say that it succeeded according to God’s purposes, but it succeeded because he needed the Holy Spirit. And God granted him that Spirit.
For one thing, the hearts of everybody, you just have to look at the passage to see, the hearts of everybody were hard. What does hard heart mean? It means we’re resistant to the will of God, resistant to what God has to say to us. Now, His heart wasn’t hard, but our hearts are indeed hard. Even the disciples, here we read, their hearts were hardened. Instead of waiting for miracles, hard-hearted as we are, instead of waiting for miracles, we can learn what Jesus says in another place, that men always ought to pray and not to faint.
What happens when we come up against difficult things in our lives? Should we faint? That is, should we give up? Or should we say, Lord, help me? Now, one of the men who got out of the boat and actually walked on the water with Jesus was Peter. And Peter was doing okay for a while, but he took his eyes off Jesus and he began to look at the waves. And he had one word at that point, help, help Lord, I’m sinking. Well, here’s a lesson for us. Instead of waiting for the miracle, just ask God for help, all right? We always ought to pray and not to faint.
And Jesus set an example, not of what we can’t do, but of what we can do through Him. Isn’t that a wonderful thought? Jesus doesn’t tell us what we can’t do. He tells us what we can do through Him. I can do all things, said the Apostle Paul, through Him, through Jesus, through Christ.
Well, let’s get to the walk, the walk on the sea. By now you’ve figured out that I watch television and see movies, okay? But remember the old Gomer Pyle show? Gomer Pyle would talk like this, and then he would sing like this. Now, as far as we know, this is the only time that Jesus walked on the sea. There may have been other times, but they’re not recorded. When Jesus finally showed up, got in the boat, and so forth, people asked Him this question, Lord, how did you get here? Because they had seen the boat leave the other shore, and He wasn’t in it, and then suddenly He was there with the disciples again. So they said, Lord, When did you get here? John 6, 25. So we would call it an unexpected walk on the sea.
The unusual thing here is that Jesus was separated from the disciples, bodily separated from them. Now they weren’t separated from God, and they were really separated from Jesus in the sense that He knew what was going on always, and how to get to them, and how to help them. But the unusual thing is that they were separated physically, and that He needed to catch up with them if He was going to be in the boat, if He was going to be there when they needed Him. And we’re separated from Jesus, aren’t we? Physically, bodily. But Jesus is in heaven. He rose bodily there, and He’s doing stuff there. He’s looking after us. He is our King and Lord. And we might say, and I’m just, forgive the human illustration here, but he has his fingers and everything. He’s with us always. He said, I’m with you always. This is in the last part of Matthew. He said, I’m always with you to the end of the age. He’s always with us in what we need, ready to help us.
Now, seafarers are somewhat famous, I guess, for tales that they tell about apparitions. You know what an apparition is? It’s a ghost. They’re famous for the tales that they tell about apparitions that they see, especially in the evening mists. Oh, they saw a woman, or they saw a king, or they saw something on the waters that scared them, really. And it certainly scared these disciples when they saw Jesus walking on the water. And so Jesus fits this concept that mariners, seafarers, often see unusual things. Probably for the most part, they’re just in the mind. They see things and they get scared about them. But now Jesus fits right in. He really is walking on the sea, but he’s no stranger. He’s no unrecognizable ghostly sort of figure, although they said they thought he was a ghost. No, He was their Savior and Lord. What did He say? Three words. It is I. It is I. Don’t be afraid. It is I. All these other things that seamen may have seen here and there, none of them are going to say, it is I. But Jesus said, yeah, you know me, don’t you? It is I.
The wind tossed sea. had dismayed the roars. They were roaring. They were roaring. They were probably doing that too. They were rowing against the wind. The wind was pushing against them. I’ve rowed a few boats, but I’ve never really had to row against the wind. I’ve had to row against the tide a few times, but the wind, that’s something else. The wind tossed sea, dismayed them. In other words, I think what Mark is telling us here is that they were tired. They rode, and they rode, and they rode, and they weren’t getting very far.
But in contrast, you see, this was an easy path for Jesus. He just stepped into the water, And whatever wind there was, it just kind of parted for him. And he walked right onto their boat. I don’t know how far out they had gotten, but they were a good ways from the land, even though it was hard to make any progress. And here’s Jesus coming to them, not held up at all, not saying, you know, the waves were a little tough, I’m sorry, I’m late, or the wind got me and slowed me down. He came walking on the water. And as I say, this is only recorded time that we have Him doing such a thing. Jesus walked on the water. But then as I said, Peter was there, so He enabled Peter to get out of the boat and walk on the water. And then ultimately, He calmed the wind and the sea, and may I say, He also calmed the disciples. because their hearts were turbulent at that point. He was a calmer of situations. Ah, there’s another wonderful thing for us to know. Jesus is the great calmer. He can calm us down. I was watching these riots on television, and there were one or two other people saying, calm down, calm down, calm down. They weren’t very successful, I may say. But Jesus is able to calm things down. Are you feeling turbulent today? Is your soul restless? Are you not sure what’s gonna happen? Look to the one who calms our restless hearts. That’s what he does.
Now there’s another place, I just want to point this out, that when it came to the sea, Jesus seems to have had a lot of fun in all these things that we’ve talked about, walking and having other people walk and calming things down. And there’s one other thing, he had the fish go where he told them to. We haven’t caught anything all night, Lord. Throw your net on the other side. And then they filled up with fish because the Lord directed the fish. All these things have to do with Jesus and the sea. That’d be a good sermon topic sometime. Jesus and the sea. He really knew what He was doing when it came to the waters.
Well, these examples show us that all authority had been given to Him. This is one of the last things He said before He was taken up into heaven. He said, all authority in heaven and in earth is given to Me. And what He meant by that is, I’m with you so you’ll succeed. I know we say to ourselves, I just never have succeeded in anything much. The Lord says, I’ll succeed. You just follow me. You can have a part of my success. He enabled them to succeed. Well, we come to our final point here, and that is the Lord’s agenda on land and sea. And what I mean by that is that He went from A to B to C to D. He had an agenda that He followed.
Now, again, going back to me and the television, you know, sometimes I watch these skaters, ice skaters, they have the ice skating, you know, and you always have a little bit of concern for them. They’re doing these flips and salchows and lutzes and all these things, but there’s some announcers that really bug me. I usually turn to another channel, but there’s a guy skating along, he’s doing great, and the announcer says, and this is where he always falls. That spoils the whole thing, doesn’t it?
The Bible says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That’s the gospel. We have a Savior, who when it looks like here’s where we always fail, We have a Savior who comes to our rescue, and the greatest of all needs is while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. What do you need to have the fullness of the Lord in your life? You need to believe on Him. You need to repent of your sins and say, Lord, save me. Don’t let me sink. Lord, hold me in your care and take me to heaven.
Well, let me follow this Procedure, if you will, for land and sea. You don’t have to be in a boat and you don’t have to be in a car. You don’t have to be on a mountain or in the desert. Here’s the first thing. Jesus came to the rescue as He does for us in all our struggles. First thing, we need to be rescued. Jesus says, I’m here to rescue you. Jesus put the disciples at ease. They were fearful, they thought they had seen a ghost. He says, don’t be afraid. It is I, it is I. He put them at ease, how? By identifying himself. He didn’t say, I’m Neptune of the ocean. He said, it is I, I’m the Lord Jesus, your Savior, the one that you’re following. Just relax, be at ease, for I am with you. And this itself, you see, is a promise of their being safely taken care of. Promising their safety.
Well then, now we’re going from A to B to C here, and then he got into the boat. He came to the rescue, I’m here. He said, now you be at peace. And he said, move over and let me in. He got into the boat. And I think the most obvious thing, and we go back again to those last verses of Matthew. He said, lo, I am with you always. I am with you. Why should we move over? Because He’s with us. Why should we let Him in the boat? Because He’s with us. Because He’s real. Because He cares. And because He’s here.
Now Jesus says, you folks, you lack understanding. Your hearts are hard, but let’s work through this, because I am also a wise man. I give understanding to those who are thinking, what is this all about? I’m a wise man. And he said, hard hearts? He said, I’m a melter of hearts. However hard your heart is, if you have the hardest heart on the face of the earth, it’s not too hard for Jesus to melt down. And what happens when your heart gets melted down? It means you receive Him. Instead of saying, I can’t go along with this, or I won’t go along with this, say, Lord, I receive what you have to give me. That’s what you and I need to do today. Lord, take my hard heart and melt it down, that I may say to you, Lord, whatever you want, however you want to do it, I receive you. I used to have a hard heart that was virtually impenetrable, but now, Lord, it just takes you in and receives you.”
Jesus finished the trip. That’s the last of these points to follow. He finished the trip. He didn’t go with them for a while in the boat and say, okay, it’s time for me to get out now. He continued with them. He finished the trip just as he will finish the trips that we have. He sent us on different journeys and different ways to get there and give us different things to do, but he’s always going to finish the journey with us.
To all our present destinations, yes, he’ll get us there, but the most important thing is that he’ll get us to heaven. He came that we might go to heaven, that we might not perish, that He might bring us to God, that we might live with Him forever and ever. And He doesn’t say to us, you guys go on, I’ll see you later. He says, I’m going with you.
And he sort of said that at the beginning of the journey when he said, you know, you guys get in the boat and let me pray. But now that he’s with them and traveling across, he says, I’ll be with you all the way. I’ll finish the journey with you. And take that with you this morning, that the Lord will take me where He wants me to go and keep me in safety and use me like He wants me to. If only I have that melted down heart that receives Him and say, not my will, but Your will be done.
Let’s pray. Lord, we ask that we would first of all have softened hearts to receive You and that having received You, we can walk on through this life with You. And when we come to the end, when we come to that river that seems uncrossable, Lord, carry us across. and let us be with you forever and ever, world without end. Amen.
Let’s sing a hymn to close. It’s on the back of your book. Now blessed be the Lord our God.