Weathering No.7 Sailing home - harbour in sight

A very famous man was known as Dr. Johnson, and he had a servant whose name was Boswell. And Boswell was a sort of secretary as well as a servant, and when Johnson, who was known to say pithy things, released something that was of great significance, Boswell would write them down. And as a result, we know of Dr. Johnson and his wisdom, his sagacity.

On one occasion, Johnson said, we make friends of people without really knowing who they are and what they're like. We make friends of people without always knowing who they are and what they're like. I had the great pleasure of going to London by train yesterday.

Actually, I do that so frequently, I think that if you put all the fares together, I could have bought a train over these years. And I had a very warming experience. I was there a few minutes before the train pulled out, which is unusual for me, and somebody came and said, which is the Little Hampton train? So I said, well, actually it's not this one.

You need to go across to the platform. It'll be through in about a few minutes. And another guy came to me and he said, does this train pointing to the one I was going to get on, does it stop in Lansing? So I said, sure.

It's a London train, it'll stop in Lansing. Then a bit later on, a lady came to me and she said, well, they've been putting more carriages on this train. So I said, yeah, they generally put more carriages on the train.

So I thought, you know, this dynamism that's part and parcel of being in Yorkshire was obviously making its own particular testimony on Worthing Station as people were attracted to me. And I got on the train and it pulled out and the ticket guy, he came along and I realised that his coat was very much like mine. And I suddenly appreciated that it wasn't a sort of charismatic warmth that was exuding from me.

They thought I was part of Kenneka, whatever they call the French corporation's staff. I said to this guy, you know, you should give me a 50% discount. He said, why? I said, I've been doing your job for the last 10 minutes.

But I wasn't able to convince him. And at that point, the train was about to go through Lansing. Unfortunately, it didn't stop.

So I took my coat off and let him go further down the carriage and said a prayer that he'd negotiate that situation well. Well, I mean, the guy could get off at Hove and come back on the next coastal train. We sometimes make friendships with people without really knowing who they are.

Going through life is even more precarious than taking a train trip to London. Far more precarious. In fact, if you were reading notes and news before this service kicked off this evening or earlier this morning when we met together some hours ago, you'd have seen a comment from Richard Wurmbrand who said, human life has been given to me as a boat to cross the sea from nonexistence to heaven.

This is a spiritual sense of the many episodes in the Gospels of the disciples traveling by ship across the Sea of Galilee. Jesus is a good navigator who also stills contrary winds. To resist being totally unconsciously a member of his body is like committing suicide.

In other words, to go to anybody else and ask for advice is really being even more misled, misguided than people who came to me yesterday. I don't know too much about London and Little Hampton and what have you, trains. But going through life, one thing is sure, and that is that Jesus, he does know.

He knows about life, he's negotiated it, he's charted the seas, and he really is the master of storm and tide. And we've been looking for several weeks now at the concept of life as a journey, of a sea journey, and the necessity of recognizing that God gives life in the first instance. And the necessity of coming to the Lord at every part of life to ask for his help.

Of course, the most difficult journey is the last one. And it's most important that when you take your leave from this world, you finish up in the harbor of heaven itself. Our Lord on one occasion was with his disciples and things were a little rough as far as they were concerned.

I think occasionally Jesus engineered the circumstances so that they might be difficult and that he might test them and tease out faith. And sometimes the most dangerous escapades actually took place on the Sea of Galilee, which sometimes is a calm and sometimes is a very treacherous stretch of water. And here we find them in the 6th chapter of Mark's Gospel and it's evening and they've had a good day.

Jesus has done some remarkable miracles. He's fed 5,000. But he removes himself from the disciples because, well, they've got to be tested when he's not around.

They've got to be able to cope later on when he won't be in a bodily fashion with them. So Jesus is on a mountain praying and the disciples at night are in the boat and it gets rough. We're not told what Jesus is praying for but I wonder, because he controls the climate, whether he's asking that the Father will send a storm just to shake the disciples up a little bit.

I can't prove that, but I think it's a fair deduction from the passage. And we're reading in the 47th verse. When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake and Jesus was alone on land.

He saw the disciples straining at the oars because the wind was against them. About the fourth watch of the night, he went out to them walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them.

But when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, as you would have done if it had happened on Worthing Beach. They cried out because they all saw him and were terrified.

Immediately he spoke to them and said, Take courage, it's I. Don't be afraid. Then he climbed into the boat. Here's the punchline.

Then he climbed into the boat with them and the wind died down. They were completely amazed. For they had not understood about the loaves.

Their heart was hardened. They didn't understand why Jesus had fed the 5,000 and his teaching that followed that. And then in the original, you get the impression that they're moving into the harbor of Gennesaret, was also another miracle that Jesus sort of tucked in at the end of this one, of walking on the water.

When they had crossed over, they landed at Gennesaret and anchored there. Jesus brought them safely through this particular storm of life. And he harbored them, as he wants to harbor you, as he wants you to know security, this side of eternity, and be prepared to meet with him eventually in his father's house.

In Calcutta, there is what's known as a skeleton shop. You can read of it in a book that's called The City of Joy, which book was taken in terms of its main story. And set into a film.

The skeleton shop is a novel concept. Some of us would find it quite obscene. If you're sick, you can go to the shop and they'll check you out.

And they'll estimate the length of life that you've got left. And how much your skeleton would sell on the open market. And they would give you a down payment.

And when you get worse, so you could go back, and you'd get more money. And then when eventually you die, they'll send a wheelbarrow. And they'll pick up your body, and eventually, as a result of the process that they've refined, your skeleton will be made available for purchase.

That's the cheapness of life. Not only in Calcutta, but in so many places. Because you and I in Worthing, by and large we live in an unreal world.

An unreal society. The connectivity between life as it really is, and what we experience on the south coast of England, is relatively slight. That's not suggesting, of course, that no one has difficulties here.

I'd be the last person to argue that in this congregation. But when you're faced with the brutality of death, and the difficulties that some people have, in the environment in which they find themselves, it's then, I think, that you've got to look into the Christian faith, and ask yourself, does it really speak to this sort of situation? I was looking at a book written by Richard Wormbran, just before I came into the service this evening. He has something to say about death.

Are you ready to die? That's the chapter. 69 is the page. Why am I reading it out? I'm going crazy.

You haven't even got the book. No wonder the railway line wouldn't employ me down on the south coast. When you're quite as confused as I. When the communists took over in Cambodia, they entered a church during the Sunday service.

Taking the Bible from the pulpit, an officer put it on the threshold. As his men stood by with rifles ready, he ordered the people to leave the building one by one, and spit on the Bible. Whoever does so will be free to go home, he said.

Whoever does not will be shot on the spot. Imagine for a moment, says Wormbran, imagine for a moment that you were a member of the congregation. What would you have done under the circumstances? As one who had passed through similar situations, I know the thoughts that flash through the mind when put to such a test.

For Wormbran in Bucharest was jailed by the communist regime there in Romania. The flash through my mind when put to such a test was this thought. I have a bride, her heart would break if I were to die.

My time has not yet come. I have old parents who are invalids. They depend on me for support.

They're doomed if I die. Love obliges me to spit. So what if I spit? Jesus knows that I have done so under duress.

He forgave Peter who denied him without being in such danger as this. He understands human weakness in any case. I will spit only a little bit.

These were people who had come to church to worship God and study His Word, but they had never decided to die for Christ. One by one, Christians who ten minutes before had praised Christ in song, left the church and spat on the Bible. Then came a girl of sixteen.

When challenged at gunpoint to spit, she began to weep and said, I cannot do it. I love God. The Bible is His letter to us.

No child spits on his father's letter. She knelt down and wiped away the spittle from the cover of the Bible and fell dead of the holy book shot in the head. What would you have done? How would you cope with immediate death if that was just around the corner for you? How would you cope with Sargent and Anita's assignment in life in which they stare into the face of death every day? Mother Teresa, when I was talking to her, she said, you have a responsibility to go to people in Calcutta and similar cities where they are dying, physically dying, not just to go to the poor, but to go to the poorest of the poor.

Malcolm Bugridge, he told me on one occasion that he got this mystical idea that when you minister to a dying person, in one sense you're ministering to Christ. I think that his theology needed qualifying a little bit, but I understand where he was coming from, because Jesus on one occasion in the gospel says, inasmuch as you've done it to one of these, the least of my brothers, you've done it unto me. Did you notice the poster that's outside the tab? If you don't like it, blame me, I'm responsible.

I hunted it out. Have a look as you go outside this evening. It says, preach the gospel.

Use words if necessary. There are ways in which you express the love of Christ by what you do as well as by what you say, which is the reason why I am a backer of Emmanuel Ministries and other related ministries in various parts of the world. We have a message to speak to people who are dying.

We have a responsibility to the poor. Isn't it interesting that when the Lord Jesus was walking on the water towards the disciples and they were scared, it followed a day of heat-up activity as far as Jesus was concerned. He had spent His time teaching, but not only had He been teaching, He also fed the 5,000.

And He had a lot to teach the disciples further in terms of commitment, in terms of discipleship. Because it's Jesus and Jesus alone who has the answer to the problems of people's spiritual needs as well as who can activate relief so that their physical needs also shall be met. You see, when you make friends with Jesus, you make friends with someone who you can check out.

The people who contacted me by mistake, the railway station yesterday, they didn't check me out. I may have looked the part, but I wasn't the part. I didn't have the information that they assumed I had.

But Jesus has got all the information. I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me.

I am the resurrection. I am the life. When Jesus speaks, He speaks the word authoritatively.

He speaks to the soul as well as to the body. And so He's going to use these disciples eventually to reach the world for Him as He uses men and women today who stand direct descendants of those disciples using us to minister to men and women, boys and girls, who are in desperate need. In a moment, I want to gather some of the thoughts that I've already shared this evening together.

Can you give us two more songs at this stage, please? If you'd like to turn to number 229 in the supplement, Thank You for Saving Me. There's always something special about being able to say thank you to somebody. And there's nothing better than to say thank you to our great God and Father for saving us as Christians.

And it's one of the great things that as Christians we can say and we can boldly say thank you. Shall we stand to sing? Thank you for saving me. What can I say? You are my everything.

I will sing Your praise. You shed Your blood for me. What can I say? You took my sin and shame.

A sinner called by name. Great is the Lord. Great is the Lord.

For we know Your truth has set us free. You set Your hope in me. Mercy and grace are mine.

Forgiven is my sin. Jesus, my only hope. The Savior of the world.

Great is the Lord, we cry. God, let Your kingdom come. Your love has let me sleep.

Thank You for saving me. Great is the Lord. So great is the Lord.

For we know Your truth has set us free. You set Your hope in me. Great is the Lord.

So great is the Lord. For we know Your truth has set us free. You set Your hope in me.

Let's turn to 243. Jesus, take my life and lead me on. Lord, You have my heart and I will search for Yours.

Jesus, take my life and lead me on. And I will praise You, Lord. And I will sing of love come down.

And I will sing of love come down. And as You show Your face, we'll see Your glory here. Lord, You have my heart and I will search for Yours.

Jesus, take my life and lead me on. Lord, You have my heart and I will search for Yours. Let me be to You a sacrifice.

And I will praise You, Lord. And I will sing of love come down. And as You show Your face, we'll see Your glory here.

We'll see Your glory here. We'll see Your glory here. To be seated.

Let me try to bring this evening's theme and thrusts together. Having taken you to Mark's Gospel and the sixth chapter, here is our beloved Lord and He's coping with a situation that I've had to attend to in a slightly but not too dissimilar context on so many occasions. He's involved in a funeral, involved in a death, and the mourners are really very heartbroken.

A beloved brother has died and Jesus was late in arriving and He is rebuked because of His seeming lack of concern, His unusual insensitivity. And Jesus says in the 11th chapter of John's Gospel in the 25th verse, addressing one of the two women, Martha, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live even though he dies.

And whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this? You see, here is the captain of life and death sending a signal to two women folk. And in so doing, He's reaching back into the Old Testament as well as pointing forward into further revelation that's going to be contained in New Testament Scriptures.

He's flagging every instance that there has been in the category of death in the Old Testament. And He's bringing them all together. For the interesting thing is that when you read the Old Testament Scriptures, you discover that they too totter, teeter on the bridge of faith in terms of the resurrection and eternal, immortal life.

You take, for instance, the death of Abraham. Or take the death of Jacob. These were great men.

And it was most important to them that they were buried back in the land that God had given to the Israelites. And with not a little ceremony, Abraham's body is placed alongside that of his beloved Sarah. And though Jacob has been displaced from the Promised Land and is in Egypt at the point of death, his request to Joseph is that he be taken back to the cave of Machpelah where Abraham and Isaac and all the patriarchs have been buried.

And you discover that Jacob's concern, along with Abraham's concern, is to be gathered to his people. Because in the Old Testament, although the idea of life after death is shadowy, compared with the full revelation in the New Testament, it is there in principle. When King David hears of the death of the child that he has fathered through Bathsheba, he then stops his mourning and he makes this declaration.

He will not come to me, but I will go to him. And when the psalmist Esau pens the 73rd Psalm, he says that he will be glad when he wakes in the likeness of God. Afterwards, you will receive me to glory.

And in the 23rd Psalm, back to David, he says, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. So when our Lord is looking back into the Old Testament, there are so many scriptures that he can build on in order to make this grand declaration that those who trust in him, even though their earthly life comes to a conclusion, their spirit goes on eternally to exist with him in what he calls his father's house.

Now, when you know this, when you are assured of this, when this is basic to your conviction, it enables you to cope, not only with the challenge of death yourself, but also with the challenge of ministering to other people who likewise physically are dying. I'll come back to that in a moment or two. I was addressing a meeting in London yesterday afternoon of a Christian organization, and I said I don't really like the word organization.

What I prefer to use to describe a company of Christians is the term organism, because organism means something that pulsates with life. Now, Jesus will say to his disciples after this event marking the death and indeed the remarkable resurrection of Lazarus, he will say to them on one occasion, I'm going to depart from you physically, but I will come back. And what he was promising was this, that by the power of the Holy Spirit, he would so indwell their lives that the very life of Jesus would become part of the lives of the disciples.

That's why the word Christian was given as a description of the followers of Jesus. They are Christ ones. Something of Jesus lives on in them.

This means to say that when there is a connectivity between you and Jesus Christ, you are connected to something which is imperishable. You are connected to a force, to a power that is indissoluble. Jesus Christ is the eternally existent one.

I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. Now when a Christian appreciates this, he can cope with wiping spit off a Bible and risking a gun being fired into his head because he knows, she knows, that even though their physical life comes to an end, their soul goes into the presence of God to live eternally. This is the great basic truth which Jesus Christ came to establish.

And once you appreciate this, it shifts your focus in life. You begin to realize that you should have your gaze not just on time but also on eternity. When I had to conduct a funeral service, at least a preparatory service that led to the funeral of a young Korean girl in Bombay who was killed on the first evangelistic trip that a young team of Koreans engaged in as Dulos came into that port, when I conducted that funeral, I could conduct it with a sense of faith and of hope and a realization that her life, which had been so tragically ended at the human level, had not been lived in vain and that she was going on into a greater understanding and a greater experience of Jesus Christ in an eternity which beggars description.

And something of what we shared at that memorial service was relayed back to Korea. And when her parents heard of what had been said and what this girl had given her life for, instead of being angry and annoyed and resentful, they too came to a realization that the most important thing in life was to follow their example, the example of Prisca, and to put their trust, their faith, in the Lord Jesus Christ also and her death not only stimulated young men and women in India also to hazard their lives in the cause of Jesus Christ, but it won a family back in Korea for the cause of the kingdom. When you appreciate that at the helm of the boat of your life is Jesus Christ, then you can go through life with a sense of peace within, knowing that the direction has been fixed by him, knowing that inevitably you will finish up in the harbor of heaven itself.

But this is only possible by you inviting the Lord Jesus Christ to take control of the helm, inviting him in to direct you in your life and through all the many changing circumstances that it may bring. The life of faith is a hazardous life. During these several weeks as we've opened up this subject, we've gone into the Old Testament, we've gone into the New Testament, I brought to this pulpit people, men and women, from different areas of life and they have shared with us, our contemporaries, as well as the ancients from the Bible, something of the challenge, something of the difficulty, something of the disappointment.

We've heard the winds, we've seen the waves, but there has been this common denominator, whether we've looked in the Old Testament or New Testament, or heard from men and women from England and from abroad, that to sail on the ship where Jesus Christ is in control is to sail through life in the most exciting and fulfilling way. I know of nothing that answers the mystery of death more than the Christian faith, which tells us that our mortal bodies, when they decay, they cause our spirits, which are eternal, to be released, returning to God who gave us life in the first instance. So I ask you this question.

When Abraham died, when Jacob died, when Joseph died, when Moses died, when King David died, they used to describe their deaths, the Hebrew expression, they were gathered unto their people. And we have a chorus that says we are coming to the gathering of the people. And the reference in the way that we use it is that as Christian people we come together, we gather together.

But in the Old Testament, the concept was of someone passing from this world into the next life. And I want to ask you, when your earthly course is through, will you be gathered amongst the people for whom Jesus died? Is your eternal destiny secure? The poor people who asked for my help on Saturday were misguided. It was their own erroneous conclusion.

I do not work, never have had even a desire to work for the British railways or any of the privatized companies. I know very little about the railway organization. But when you come to Jesus Christ, he is the man who's got all the information.

He is the captain of salvation. He is the one who wants to take over control of your life so that when the end comes, there needs to be no fear. Whether you are 18 years of age or 80 years of age, the connectivity between you and him will hold.

So the Apostle Paul could say, absent from the body, present with the Lord. So that small, bald-headed pioneer missionary, William Carey, on the banks of the Ganges, with everything against him, staring death in its face, could write in his diary, the Lord is with me, and that is enough. Last year I stood by his grave in which the inscription has been written by his request, God's plodder.

And I acknowledged again the grace of God in his life that enabled Carey, a missionary from 200 years ago, to leave this country and give his life for the cause of Jesus Christ in India. Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life. If you believe in me, you will never, never, never die.

If he is at the helm of your vessel, you're safe in time and eternity. There is no force in heaven, on earth, or under the earth that can take away your salvation. It's guaranteed in Jesus Christ.

So, as we've looked at the subject, weathering or mastering the storms of life, we come back finally once again to this notion, the God who gives you life wants your invitation to ask him to take over and to guide you through the roughest weather, the most dangerous seas, until the time comes when you stand before him. Let us pray. Father, we thank you that mastering the storms of life is not something that you leave to our ingenuity.

There is an offer of help. The pilot is glad to come on board. So, by your grace, and through the price being paid of the shed blood of Jesus, we ask for him to come into our lives and to take control, to be in our boat and to show us which way to go until the moment comes, sooner or later, when our sailing is through and when we're in the heavenly harbor.

Father, we thank you for the guarantees of the gospel of Jesus, your Son, and our Savior. Amen. Men of faith, rise up and sing Of the great and glorious King You are strong when you believe In your brokenness complete Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth Let's hear the ladies sing verse two.

Let the women of the church Stand and sing to broken hearts We can know that he is found Of the glorious King of love Everybody together. Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth And just so the ladies don't feel that we've left the men out, we'll sing verse one again, just the men. Men of faith, rise up and sing Of the great and glorious King You are strong when you believe In your brokenness complete Everybody.

Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth We've been through fire We've been through fire We've been through rain We've been refined by the power of his name We've fallen deeper in love with you You've burned the truth on our lips Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth Rise up church with broken wings Fill this place with songs again Of our God who reigns on high By his grace again we'll rise Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth Shout to the North Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth Shout to the North and the South Sing to the East and the West Jesus is Savior to all Lord of Heaven and Earth