“Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him … Later that night, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he … saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. Shortly before dawn he went out to them, walking on the lake … when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost.
“They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified. Immediately he spoke to them and said, ‘Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.’ Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed” (Mark 6:45-51).
Why didn’t the disciples recognize Jesus that night and why were they so scared of him?
By this point, they had spent more than two years with him. They had heard his teaching and they had seen all kinds of miracles. In fact, just prior to getting in the boat they watched Jesus feed 5,000 people with a little boy’s lunch. After all they had witnessed, why do they assume it must be a ghost and not Jesus?
I think the answer is simple: they did not see Jesus there because they did not expect to see Jesus there.
The truth is that most of us will get about as much of God as we expect to get. In other words, when we decide that there is an area of life that God cannot touch, it is quite likely that we will never see him working there. By trying to confine and control God, we actually miss out on the blessings that he wishes to bring to us.
How many of our storms could have been calmed by Jesus, but we kept “straining at the oars” ourselves because we did not believe that he could get to us?
The temptation is always to limit God, to define him and put him in a box that makes sense to us. We like a God that is on a leash and only goes as far as we want him to go. However, a God on a leash is no God at all.
Ephesians 3:20 says that God can do “immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine.”
Do you believe in that kind of God?
