For the next several days we will be looking at these
amazing verses in Luke 8:22-26. In the previous verses in this chapter Jesus
has been preaching to the crowds and His disciples on the north shore of the
Sea of Galilee near the city of Capernaum. In Matthew’s Gospel, you will find
the larger version on His message that uses parables to teach what the “kingdom
of heaven is like” (Matthew 13). Luke uses only one of these parables, the
Sower, the Seed, and the Soil, that leads us into what takes place in this
section of verses (vv. 22-26).
You can only imagine that by the time the Lord had finished
giving "the Parables of the Kingdom" (Matt. 13:1-52), the disciples
must have felt like postgraduate students in the School of Faith! They now
understood mysteries that were hidden from the scribes and rabbis and even from
the Old Testament prophets. What they did not realize (and we are so like
them!) is that faith must be tested before it can be trusted. It is one thing
to learn a new spiritual truth, but quite something else to practice that truth
in the everyday experiences of life.
Remember the Lord finished this message telling us that the
most important thing we can do with the “Seed”, the Word of God”, is to obey it
and do the will of God! That is when and how we enter into a personal, intimate,
heart and spiritual relationship with our Lord! “We become His mother and
brothers” (v. 21). It is now that Luke gives us this account of Jesus “getting
into a boat with His disciples” and telling them, "Let us cross
over to the other side of the lake."
For weeks Jesus has been ministering in the region of Galilee,
working out of the fishing village of Capernaum. He has been preaching and
teaching the message of the kingdom of God, and doing marvelous miracles of healing
the sick, giving sight to the blind, casting out demons, and raising the dead.
But there are people on the “other side” of the lake that need to experience Jesus
and His miraculous saving grace! So, after Jesus has prepared His disciples, He
is about to give them another lesson they will never forget. There are people
on the “other side”, so they must get on the “boat of life” and navigate the “storms
of life” to accomplish the will of God in taking the Gospel to the “uttermost”.
After the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus about a
year and a half later, Jesus would give His last words of instructions to the
disciples for forty days concerning the kingdom of God (Acts 1:1-8). In His
final words here, and in all the Gospel accounts, Jesus gives them the Great
Commission. They are to Go into all the world and be witnesses in Jerusalem,
Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost part of the earth. I can’t help but think
that maybe when they heard Jesus give them this message that their minds went
back to the day they got in the boat with Jesus and were told to “cross over
to the other side”.
I want to remind you that we need to still be getting into
the boat with Jesus and going to the “other side”. Today, there are over
8 billion people on earth. According to Joshua Project, there are approximately
17,446 unique people groups in the world with 7,391 of them considered
unreached (over 42% of the world's population)! The vast majority (85%) of
these least reached groups exist in the 10/40 window and less than 3% of
missionary work is done among these people.
This means there are over 3.5 billion people who have
little or no access to the Gospel, while we speak 97% of mission money and
efforts in places like America that is saturated with the Gospel.
Don’t you think it is about time for us “to get into the
boat with Jesus and cross over to the other side”? Are you praying,
giving, and participating in going to the “unreached people groups of the world”?
God bless!
