Mark 4:35-41

So I'm working on this thing for the College Group at Church which has made me go back over information concerning Mark 4:35-41. Mark, actually John Mark, you know the guy who ditched Paul and Barnabas which actually caused the two to split ways is the writer of the Gospel of Mark. Well so Mark is writing his Gospel to be told to the church in Rome which has undergone extreme persecution and lost a lot of people due to Nero's crazy persecution where he would light Christians on fire and let them burn in his garden for lanterns. There was also a mass killing of a group of slaves, something like 400, where the church most likely lost brothers and sisters. So needless to say these people know what it is like to endure persecution. Also along this time it seems like some people might be faltering because of what is going on. So as Mark writes his Gospel he has this whole idea in his head that he needs to affirm the Christians to endure what they are going through each and every day. He is telling them to endure. So he takes an actual story, Mark 4:35-41, and emphasising his point of enduring. In Mark 4:38 we see that a great storm has come up and Jesus is chillin in the back of the boat where he is suppose to be steering the boat. As the storm gets worse they, the disciples, come to find out Jesus is asleep in at the helm. At this moment the disciples are thinking to themselves "what the heck is this guy doing" (most likely they used words that were worse or at least I would have). So they wake Jesus up and he gets peeved at them for waking him up, they obviously don't know who this guy in the boat is. He rebukes the storm using language a person would use to cast out a demon in their day and then gets in their faces for waking him up. He asks why they have so little faith and then they think to themselves "Who is this guy?" To which we should respond "He is the Son of God." But thats not the point. The point is that even when we are undergoing the worst storm of our lives we should have faith. We don't need to wake Jesus up because if Jesus is with us nothing else matters. If Jesus is in your boat you know its not going to sink. So the next time you think your boat is going down I encourage you to trust that Jesus is with you. Now may you have the faith to trust Jesus when persecution is going on around you.

"It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man." - Psalm 118:8