Anyone here ever went sailing? Few of you. I don't know why, but I've always been kind of infatuated with sailboats. To me, there's nothing more tranquil than watching a sailboat go across the horizon as the sun sets, and imagine the warm wind blowing, pushing the sailboat across the ocean.
Well, I've had one opportunity to be on a sailboat, I was in college, and one man at the church that we were at, he had a sailboat. And if you know anything about sailing, you know, there's really big sailboats that you can fit dozens of people, and there's really tiny ones. This one was on the smaller side. It was a 22-foot sailboat, and you could fit maybe two people underneath for a night on the lake, and maybe 5-6 up top.You could spend the night on a lake, and that was about it. But we had five or six of us riding in the sailboat on top, and this was in Upper Wisconsin. In April. So if you think of that, the water probably recently just got done thawing. It was cold. And the captain of the ship assured us that he was an able-bodied captain, and that was something that we would eventually come to question. But we decided to go sailing with this guy, and all of a sudden, we were out in the middle of this lake enjoying the breeze, and the wind changed. And we caught a crosswind, and our boat started to kind of turn up on its side. I think I have a picture up here of something what this might have looked like. I was on the top side, and as I'm going up, I'm looking down, and our sailboat, the bottom side, starts to dip underneath the water. And water starts flowing in, and I'm starting to question, what am I doing out here? At the same time, the captain, who was the only one who had any sailing experience, he was on the bottom side, and he was on the bottom side, he fell out. And so I'm starting to get just a little bit worried. Fortunately, before the boat left him, he was able to grab on. I think he grabbed onto a road or a guideline or something, and we pulled him in. The boat leveled back. Everything was okay, but we couldn't get off the water soon enough for my liking.I was done, and I've never been sailing again in my life, though I might be willing to try it.
Sometimes our lives can seem like an episode on my sailing adventures. Sometimes it can seem like things are just about ready to capsize into the dark, icy waters. Maybe you've had experiences like that, where you feel like you are falling out of the boat, and you're grasping for something. You're trying to reach, to pull yourself back in. I wonder, when life seems to be that way for you, when life seems to be getting tough, when things seem to be going bad, maybe you feel like you're about to capsize in life. Where do you turn? What is it that you reach for, like the captain of the boat that we were in reached for whatever he could grab a hold of to pull himself back into the boat?What do you reach for?
In the passage we're going to look at today, we see the example of the Apostle Paul and we see what he reached for. What he grabbed a hold of when his life got tough, he turned to God. He turned to God when things were difficult, when he felt alone. When he literally was alone, as we'll see in our passage, he turned to God, he reached out, and he found hope in God. And so as we look at this text this morning, we're going to learn a really practical example from the Apostle Paul of how he reached for God and found God as a source of strength and hope when things got tough in his life.And so as we begin to unpack this passage, there's one truth that I want you to remember today. It's our big idea for this morning.
Big Idea: When the waters of life overtake you, reach out for God. He'll keep you afloat.
