Surviving a Storm

Thank you, Cora. I'm Bruce and Murray. If you have your Bibles, would you turn with me to John, chapter six? John, chapter six. Been going through the seven signs that John writes about how God touched his life through Jesus Christ.

And these are kind of times that stood out, and they made a big difference in his life. And so we started with the marriage that happened in Cana of Galilee, and they ran out of wine, and Jesus made new wine, and it was an empty place. But when he gave it his touch, it was a different kind of place. And as we move forward, we're going to go to the seventh sign, which is going to be the resurrection of Lazarus and how Jesus spoke to a cemetery and Lazarus came forward.

It had to been an awesome kind of day. But here's the fifth and sixth kind of sign, or excuse me, the fourth and fifth kind of sign that he gives us in John chapter six. And John chapter six is the longest of the chapters. And Jesus has his greatest appeal, it looks like. But then the more he speaks, the more he demands, the more people leave.

And all of a sudden his approval rating goes down. And it gets down to the point where it's just the 12 disciples. And one of them is a man named Judas. And so it's a big high point, and yet it became a low point. But here's a sign that he gives his disciples, and probably this is what made them stay while the others went away as he told them about the crowd that's there.

And the crowd always shows up. They're always showing up, but the crowd has no commitment. We all need Jesus, and we come to places where there's nowhere else to turn. And people will show up. They've never showed up before.

So there's always a crowd. And the crowd keeps coming. But what's happening is the disciples are leaving.

And as the disciples leave, the more Jesus puts out commitment, the more he speaks of himself being from the Father, the more he speaks about his going to the cross. And everybody wants to follow Jesus until they find out where he's going. And the more he speaks, the more the disciples leave. And it gets down to the church is down to 12 people, and one of them is a Judas. So as we look at the fifth, the fifth kind of sign that he gives us is.

You can also connect with it. In the middle stained glass window that's over here, it's Jesus when he walked on the water. And he, as the gospel singer says, he left footprints in the water. Amen. So you can see him.

And I like that stained glass, I think that's the oldest room. And here it's not that old people sit over there. It's just that it's the oldest place in the church here. But I like that stained glass window. You can see the boat and how Jesus is crossing.

As he comes to the disciples when they need him the most. So if you have your Bibles. Would you stand and look at verse chapter 6, verse 15?

The crowd wants to take. They want their Messiah to be like the Messiah that would do away with the Romans. But he didn't come to be that Messiah to do away with the Romans. He came to win the Romans to the Lord. But that's not what the crowd wants.

And so it says, when Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force to make him a king. He departed again into a mountain by himself. That was all alone. Verse 16. And when evening was now come.

That is, the dark time kind of moved in. It has a way of moving in. As the dark time kind of moved in. They decided they would go without Jesus. And so they went over the sea towards Capernaum.

And it was now dark. There is no darkness at God. But when the dark comes, Jesus made the light come into the darkness. And Jesus was not come to them. So they're by themselves.

They come up with their own decision. They're going to choose to go across the lake without him. That is a bad decision. And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. And all of a sudden they're in the middle of a storm.

Kind of comes out of nowhere. It's that part of the world that's kind of really low. And all of a sudden the winds grow across. They ignite that dry, hot air. And all of a sudden the lightning comes and the thunder comes.

And the waves rise up. And they're in the middle of a storm. So when he had rode about the wind. They had rode about five or 20 or so many miles. They got to the middle of the Line Lake and the sea.

And drawing great into the boat. And there the sea is in the sea, but it's also getting in the boat. And they were afraid. Have you ever been afraid? Fear appears in the Garden of Eden.

When Adam says, I was afraid. I hid myself.

So he saith in the boat, and they were afraid. And he said Jesus came to them. And he said unto them, it is I. Be not afraid now. It comes all the way back in.

When Moses asked God what was his name? And he said, it is I. I am. I am. What you need, I am there for you when you're looking for something to fill that void in your life. I am.

Be not afraid.

Then they willingly received him into the boat and immediately they were on the land where they went. They went over to the other side, got to their destination.

Put Jesus in your boat. Amen. Now be seated for just a moment.

One of the things that kind of shakes me is when it says you buy these things and they say some assembly required. You ever had one of those? Some assembly required. My mom worked for Sears. Started back here and then went out to the other side of town.

But they would. Sears would have these inventory that you paid a little bit on something that was a prize or something you bought. And then you take that down payment and you pay them throughout the month. Some people didn't meet their payments. And so Sears would take charge of those and pay.

Pay them to the Sears employees for about half price. And so that's where we got a lot of our Christmas toys and presents to other people is when they didn't. When the Sears foreclosed on the Christmas toys. But mom gave me a. Gave us a drum set and I gave it to my son for his.

And it disappeared. I don't know where that drum set ever went. But they got rid of that drum set quite, quite soon. But also they gave us a swing set. And if you ever want to make somebody mad, if you want to hurt somebody, give them a swing set that has some assembly required.

The directions are in Japanese and you can't read them anyway. And besides, they don't work. So my brother and I were going to put together this swing set for our kids when I was pastor at Thompson, Alabama. And so we put it together after we threw away the directions. You just.

Let's just do it by intuition. Isn't that the way you do? Just whatever feels right, just do that. And so we did that. And the top of the swing set was upside down.

It was going in this direction and not this direction. And so we tried to take it apart. Things just got worse. And so finally we just left it upside down. Now you couldn't swing in that thing, but you could sit in it.

So that way, watch out when you throw the directions away. Some assembly, all the parts we had left over, we just kind of threw them away in the trash can. No wonder that thing didn't work. Some assembly required. You might end up upside down.

And what God does is to put us right side up. And we were all born with some kind of assembly required. And Whenever we get to the different segments of our life, some assembly is required. And God keeps working on me and keeps working on me until he is finished with me. But until that time, I. I'm an unfinished product.

And you are too. Now look at somebody next to you. Do they look like they are some assembly required? Just look at them for a minute and look like they need some assembly that's acquired right there. John needed some assembly required.

He was in the John the Baptist movement. He didn't fit in his fishing business that his father had. And so he joined the John the Baptist movement. But as he joined the John the Baptist movement, he was saying, there's something kind of missing in me, and I want to find that that's missing in me. And so he joined the John the Baptist movement.

When he watched John point to Jesus and said, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, something moved within him. And he and Andrew followed Jesus in Capernaum. And they followed him to a place and they said, Jesus turned around and looked at him and said this.

What are you seeking? What is it that's missing? What is that place in your life that needs to be fulfilled? His invitation was to come and see. And that's his invitation to me and to you.

Come and see. It's in the present tense. It is a continuous kind of thing. You keep coming and you'll keep seeing. But there's a lot of times that we want to quit along the way and we stop where we are and we miss out on that invitation to come and see.

Come and see. And Jesus helped him to see. John had this problem. He had a very bad anger problem. He was a kind of Son of Thunder.

That's what Jesus called him. And he struggled with that anger problem all of his life. And it got him in wrong places and doing wrong kind of things. Come and see. So Jesus takes John, who starts out, he's the youngest of the disciples, and he takes John and he takes him to places and lets him see things that he would not have seen anywhere else but with Jesus.

And the Son of Thunder becomes the disciple of love. Nobody writes about love more than John writes about love. Not only wrote the Gospel of John, he wrote first, second, and third John. There's a lot of johns. And if you would go to New Orleans Seminary, in the men's bathroom, they've got the stalls labeled first, second and third John.

There's a lot of johns.

But John was becoming a different kind of person. Didn't happen overnight. It happened in process.

And to prove his discipleship and to show him some things that he would not see otherwise. Jesus took him through a storm. Because storms come to everybody. It's part of being in life. And everybody will go through a storm.

Maybe you're coming to a storm, maybe you're in a storm, or maybe you've just gotten out of a storm. But storms are coming. We watch the tropics this time of year in Faro, But Susan and I just went in 2024, I think, went through a storm. And. And everybody.

The people that have been there for a while in Fairhope know that what hurricanes come through, you just let them come through. And so we went to sleep in the back room. And the next morning we woke up and we had trees all in our roof and we had all this stuff on the outside. But it was a storm. Storms come.

Sometimes there are storms that are kind of physical storms. Sometimes they're kind of emotional storms.

Lady named Nancy Clancy is in Massachusetts, and she's on trial. She's a nurse, and she's on trial for killing her three children and trying to kill herself.

She had a psychosis problem, and she said she would go to sleep at night and try to sleep at night and just close her eyes. But there would be voices that would come to her. And these voices were loud, and they would get her attention, and they would tell her these kind of things she needs to do. And one was to strangle her three kids and then to take her own life.

Psychologists who talked about her said she heard the voices because we all hear voices, but we don't have to listen to our voices. She heard those voices, and now she's on trial. The voices kept telling her she needs to kill her three children and then take her own life.

She's now on trial and she's going through a storm.

Storms happen and they're going to be a part of your life. And do we have the resources to help us as we walk through these storms?

If you look at that scripture that we just read, the disciples were in that middle of that storm. It was on the lake, but there was a storm on the outside. But there's this storm that's running strong on the inside. And all of a sudden, in the middle of that, Jesus kind of appeared walking on the water. And as he's walking on the water, they're much afraid of Jesus walking on water as they are the storms that are coming through their.

But Jesus calms it, and he said, it is I be not afraid. I'm with you.

I have a couple in our Sunday school class is going through a rough time. He's all of a sudden had seizures. He's a highway patrolman. He looks to be the picture of health. You wouldn't think he having seizures, but he has these seizures.

I married he and his wife at a golf course. Of all the places to get married at a golf course. I said, they teed off with each other. Isn't that cool?

Now they got two children. She's a schoolteacher.

And he's having these seizures.

He went to his doctor, and his doctor said, you need more help than I've got.

And this week he's in MD Anderson. He's there in MD Anderson, and he's taking his treatments every single day. They've done surgery on his brain several times, but the cancer is still there. So he's got to come for deeper treatments. And as he comes for those deeper treatments, he has to be there kind of by himself because his wife is there taking care of their two kids.

And she's kind of torn between the fact of, I want to be with my husband. We also have our kids here in school. And every now and then she flies out there. But it costs a lot. It's a lot that they're going through.

It's a lot of plans that they have. They never been in that kind of storm ever before. And it's a storm. They didn't ask for it, they didn't want it, but here it is. And before they went out to Texas at Houston, Susan and I went over and had prayer with them.

We held hands with them and asked God to bring them a solution to their situation, but not only help them as she stays at home, but she wishes with her husband. And with her husband, she thinks about her children that are back at home. She's torn on all sides, but she said this. She looked at us and said this. I've never been closer to the Lord than I am now.

And our marriage has never been closer than it is right now.

And I don't know how that's going to turn out.

But God's with them.

And when you find him in the storm, you find him speaking to you in not the wrong kind of voices, but in the right kind of voices.

Storms find their way into relationships. Storms find their way into jobs. Storms find their way into health situations. Storms can even find their way in the church.

Storms are that way.

But when you're in the middle of that storm, you listen to the right voices, not the wrong voice. So much wrong can happen if you listen to the wrong voices.

Just three things that I want to share with you. Just quickly this Jesus comes to us in the storm.

They were in the middle of nowhere. They started out without him, and they were out there in that storm. And the lightning and thunder and the wind and the waves and all that was there in the middle of that. Here's the Lord doesn't always feel like he's there, but he has promised to be there. And when you can't feel him, you can't feel his presence.

Hold on to his promise. And somehow another in the middle of that storm, the Lord finds His way to show up. And he shows up in some of the places you would think he would never be there, but he shows up. So when you're in a storm and I'm in a storm because they're coming, then we look for the Lord to be there with us because he's there. Whether the circumstances tell us that they're there, he's there.

When he comes, he stays. He stays with us where we are.

You wonder where he is. And sometimes he just gets us kind of alone and speaks to us and has that kind of moment where he just stays with us. Because some of those storms are deep and they've caused some deeper problems inside of our soul. And we need something to hold on to us in the middle of those storms.

My son Rusty, is when he was three years old. He's a Marine now. And when he was three years old, he would run, run, run, run here and there, run there, run there. And so he got up one morning, ran out of his bedroom and hit the wall.

And when he hit the ball, he bounced back and he started crying. It's hard to think of him as crying now, as a Marine where he is. But he hit it and started crying. So I picked him up and he warned his mama. There's something about a mama's hug that's so much better than a father's hug.

And so Susan picked him up and held him close to her, and she said this. I know, I know, I know. Now, I can't say that like she said that.

I know, I know, I know. And all of a sudden he regained his strength, took off again.

And 23rd Psalm, he puts new life within me. I mean, there's some times that when I would come home from church, like one of those times I was talking about this morning, and Susan would hold me and she'd say, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. And she's available this morning after church, if you need to come.

I know, I know, I know.

That's a mama's touch, but it's also the Lord's touch.

But not only does he come with us where we are, and he stays with us where we are, but he goes with us wherever we go. And when I think about that, I think about a lady who was like a Choctaw Indian. She was in our church in Fairhope, and I went to see. Her name's Nicole Teigen, husband's name Matt. And I went to the hospital.

I was praying with somebody who was in the hospital, and this couple was there, both of them probably in their mid-30s.

And I said, why are you guys here? And he said, well, doctor seen something, and he wants to do some tests. And when they did the test, there was all this cancer inside of her.

A beautiful lady. And they had a great relationship. Had two girls in their home. She was a Choctaw Indian, and she would sing bluegrass. I don't ever seen a Choctaw Indian sing bluegrass.

But it's kind of like I heard this morning at Cracker Barrel. They were really working out on the bluegrass. But she could do that. She had this beautiful voice. And I would go see her when she was at the Mitchell center, which is a big center in Mobile.

And you look at a whole section is devoted to cancer patients. And most of them do not have hair. Most of them had lost a lot of weight there. The help was there, and they called the helpers there. Chemo sabes.

Think about that. Later on, you'll understand what a chemo sabe is. I think that's the long ranger goes back anyway. And so what they do, they bring candy and give the patients there while they're going through the chemotherapy.

As I prayed with her, I felt God's presence. He's there. He's there in a cancer ward.

Our church would go see on Wednesday night when she was up on the third floor, and they would hold up candles and let her know, and she would come to the window and look out at all those candles that were there praying for her.

One of the last times that I saw her was in the hospital room and just almost to the point where we were praying for God to take her home. It's a Gethsemane moment when it looks like she's not going to get better.

And God comes and he comes that he's there. But one of the last times I saw Susan and I visited her, and so I said this, Nicole, if when you come back to church, you and I will sing a duet. Is that okay? And so I'm trying to get some humor, that is some real humor when I sing a duet with her. But as I was there, she said, yes, that'll be okay.

And she smiled. And then she said this because she loved high heels. She said, we'll sing in high heels. And I don't know about singing in high heels. That is not my most comfortable moment.

But then she added this. Red high heels.

And, you know, I was caught. I couldn't back down from that. I had to say, okay. So when she came back to church, she and I sang Jesus Loves Me in the best voice that she could muster up. And right before we sang, we got the microphone up close to us.

Member of my staff came up and he brought these red high heels.

And they were size 12. They must have got them off some big woman out there in the congregation, size 12 high heels.

And Nicole and I sang Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.

And she took her last breath several weeks later, and she went on to be with the Lord. And I wonder if she's still wearing those red high heels.

Came time to say, by this world, I'm ready to go home.

She wrote out to her two little girls who were like 6 and 7. She wrote out a notebook for them. When you come to your first prom, know that I'm there. When you go down on your first date, know that I'm there.

When you walk down the aisle with the guy that you've chosen to live your life with, know that I'm there. I won't be there bodily, but you're still my girls, and I'll be up there cheering you on.

Because once you get him and once he comes, then he stays with us and he goes with us wherever we go. Now, if you have your Bibles, in chapter six, which is the longest verse, longest chapter in the Bible, Jesus, who is the master asker, look at verse 66. From that time, many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him because there's a lot to turn around going the other direction.

Then he asked a question. He asked this question. He's a master asker. He knows exactly what question to ask. He's not asking for information.

He's asking for encouragement. Will you go?

Are you going to walk away also?

And they're down to 12 disciples. That's a tough place to be. Everybody else is walking away and they're holding. It's not easy to hold in that place.

What makes you Stay when everybody else leaves because he has the words of eternal life and you can't find that anywhere else. That was his answer. One of them was a Judas that even if Judas leaves eventually, Lord, I'm staying strong with you.

We're going to see this storm through the other side. So let me just share one other story. When I was a lieutenant at Fort Gordon, Georgia for about a few weeks in Augusta, Georgia. Augusta, Georgia is a golf capital of the world. You know, when you're there on your weekend off, you go play golf.

That's what you do. And so my brother was there and Susan and I were to celebrate our first year anniversary, the great, great time together. So my brother brought the top of the wedding cake and, and he was going to share with us as we celebrate our first year anniversary. The problem was my watch broke and I came home to that one bedroom apartment and to a co wife. Have you ever seen that co wife?

Have you ever been to that co wife kind of station? So I walked in the door three hours late for our first year anniversary.

That could have been the end of our marriage. And you go in there. So when I walked in to that front door, we didn't have that many doors. And all of a sudden she went in the bedroom door and closed the door.

So I'm not the sharpest knife in the world, but I knew I was in trouble. It takes men a while to figure it out that they're in trouble, but I knew that I was in trouble. So I wrote a letter. I figured that was the best thing to do. I wrote a letter and I said, baby, that's a good way to start your help me letter.

And I said, I am so sorry. I'm trying to learn how to be a husband.

And then I signed it. I wanted to know who it came from.

Jerry m. Henry.

Saw the second pause for a minute and then she opened that door and came out and hugged me.

And all of a sudden there was a calm in the storm. And this is why I got that calm in the storm, because she forgave me.

That's one of the greatest gifts God can give us when we forgive somebody who has hurt us. It's the hardest gift to give, but it's the greatest gift.

Our marriage survived a storm because I know a lot of marriages that have not survived a storm, maybe because they haven't forgiven as God has forgiven us. Now would you bow your heads for just a moment.

And would you ask God to say or would you ask God to help you? God give me staying power when everybody else is running away, Give me staying power.

You never go through a storm by running away.

It's as you face it, with God's help, he can get you through.

So would you ask for God to give you staying power? Would you ask for God to give you a gift of forgiveness to give to somebody?

Anger has a way of working itself and it's a voice that tries to express that anger and it leaves its hurt.

Forgive others as God has forgiven you.

Be kind to others as God has been kind to you.

Only the Holy Spirit can let us give us to face that and fulfill it. Father, I thank you for each one that's here today. It is such a blessing to look out and see this congregation together. I thank you for the future that you have for this congregation and I pray that you'd help this church as we go through a storm. I pray for all those that maybe you're about to go into a storm.

You never know when that storm can show up. Some that are in the middle of a storm.

Thank you for those who have gone through the storm with your help and have come over on the other side. Take care of us in your will, Father. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. Amen.

If you get your hymnal, would you turn? I think it's 6:22. Would you turn to 6:22?

Our invitational hymn is Invitation for you. I think this hymn kind of speaks to our heart as we sing it. So would you stand? And if God is moving you to. Jim's going to be down front here.

You need to make a decision for Christ. God's got a future for this church or something is awesome, man. So you might want to be with it. Sometimes it goes through some hard times, but it's in those hard times that God really blesses us like we've never been blessed before. So, Bruce, would you lead us now?