Where Is Your Faith?

Luke 8:22-25

Where is Your Faith?

Woodlawn Baptist Church

May 23, 2004

Introduction

In April 1988 the evening news reported on a photographer who was a skydiver. He had jumped from a plane along with numerous other skydivers and filmed the group as they fell and opened their parachutes. On the film shown on the telecast, as the final skydiver opened his chute, the picture went berserk. The announcer reported that the cameraman had fallen to his death, having jumped out of the plane without his parachute. It wasn’t until he reached for the absent ripcord that he realized he was freefalling without a parachute. Until that point, the jump probably seemed exciting and fun. But tragically, he had acted with thoughtless haste and deadly foolishness. Nothing could save him, for his faith was in a parachute never buckled on. His faith was in the right object, but he had never appropriated it. He had never moved from an intellectual faith to an application of that faith, and the results were terrible. The same is true when applied to the spiritual realm. It doesn’t matter how much faith we claim to have in the Lord Jesus Christ, or how much we’ve investigated the claims of Christianity and have found them to be true if we never do anything with them.

Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ: true, radical, living faith is always best expressed through our actions, not in our words. Think about what James wrote in his letter. He said, “faith without works is dead…” In other words, if you’re all talk and no walk, then it’s useless.

Had you asked the disciples in Jesus’ day if they were men of faith, you would have undoubtedly been told yes. Every one of those men who followed Jesus believed themselves to be men of faith, but their actions often proved otherwise. The account we are going to study today is one such time. Jesus had been teaching on the shore of the Sea of Galilee for several days. The Bible tells us that this time spent teaching dealt mostly with parables about the kingdom of God. According to the multitudes that came out to hear Jesus, the people were hungry for the things He taught, but as time wore on, Jesus wanted to get away for some rest, He instructed His followers to get in the boat from which He had been teaching and go to the other side of the lake, but during that trip, something went sour. In Luke 8:22, Luke relates to us the following event:

“Now it came to pass on a certain day, that he [Jesus] went into a ship with his disciples: and he said unto them, Let us go over unto the other side of the lake. And they launched forth. But as they sailed he fell asleep: and there came down a storm of wind on the lake; and they were filled with water, and were in jeopardy. And they came to him, and awoke him, saying, Master, master, we perish. Then he arose, and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water: and they ceased, and there was a calm. And he said unto them, Where is your faith? And they being afraid wondered, saying one to another, What manner of man is this! For he commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him.”

In Mark’s account, we are given some additional information. Look at Mark 4:35 and following:

“And on that day, when even was come, he saith unto them, Let us go over unto the other side. And leaving the multitude, they take him with them, even as he was, in the boat. And other boats were wth him. And there ariseth a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the boat, insomuch that the boat was now filling.”

This was no little white capping going on that day! Jesus and the disciples were about to go under, and apparently so were all the other little boats that had come out for a show. As the boat was filling up, the disciples went into a state of panic, so they woke Jesus up and pled with Him for intervention, but then when He did intervene, they acted so surprised that Jesus turned and asked them the question we’re considering today: Where is your faith? Why are you so fearful? Don’t you have faith? As I think about what it must have been like for those penetrating eyes to have been looking me in the face and wanting to know where my faith is, I think that they must have been so ashamed. Where was their faith in the Lord, and when He does work, why do we act so surprised? Where is our faith today?