Last of three parts of a picture of a quiet time going from blue (fifteen minutes) thru green (another thirty minutes or so) to red (another thirty minutes or so). Your times and mileage may vary. For the rest of Gary's musings on this, see the five previous posts.
--------------------------------
Now I go to Luke 8 -- in the New Testament I've been reading thru Luke. See how easy it is to know where to read when you follow a little schedule? I read thru Psalms and the Old Testament in the order they're written, and the Proverb numbered for that day, and I choose a book in the New Testament to read thru several times to get to know it better. I keep track of where I am, four different places in the Bible, so whenever I read I just pick up where I left off in one or more of those places. On a good day I'll read in all four places. Like I said earlier, it's been a few weeks since there's been a good day.
Jesus is in a boat with his guys during a big storm. If I hadn't read the previous things (see previous posts on blue and green) I would be starting over fresh here. But I HAVE been reading and thinking for about an hour, and those other things have sensitized me to the idea of "fearing the Lord." So that's in my mind as I turn to this next place in my reading "schedule." It's amazing how often it seems that schedule has been designed and, like, preordained, for that day. If I'll just read it.
So Jesus is in the boat, "And a windstorm came on the lake, and they were filling with water and were in danger." His guys wake him up -- the danger is not just in their minds, the boat IS filling with water! "Master, we are perishing!"
And Jesus rebukes the wind and the waves -- don't you love that? "Rebukes!" Like he corrects the wind, tells it it's wrong, tells it to knock it off. And the rage turns to calm. And he says to them, "'Where is your faith?' And they were afraid, and marveled, saying to one another, 'Who is this then, that he commands even winds and water and they obey him?'"
And I think, their fear of Jesus is not the same as their fear of perishing. It's more like the kind of feeling you have that makes you say, "Oh, my God!" It's an awesome respect of someone who is beyond fully understanding. You don't fool around with him. You don't treat him like just another person. He rebukes the wind! There is this sense of, what effect could this have on my life if I ignore him? I don't know, but I'm not going to mess around and find out.
Jesus calming and controlling the waves leads to them being afraid of him -- they know what he can do.
And here's where over an hour of reading and thinking and listening add up. And I think for me, this day, it added up in a way I would not have noticed, if I had started here cold. But since I had gone thru blue and been sensitized to the fear-the-Lord idea, and had kept reading and noticed more, it was like the Lord was leading me to something he wanted me to realize:
If his friends in the boat had been afraid, in awe, of him BEFORE the storm, they would NOT have been afraid of the storm. If they had known "who then is this," their reaction to the danger and the storm would have been radically altered.
Now for me, I say I do know 'who then is this,' and that I have faith in him, but my reaction of insecure nervousness in even small, undangerous circumstances betrays what I say I believe. So now what? I don't know.
This is a different, and more uncomfortable reaction than I had in the first fifteen minutes of my quiet time (blue), when I had a nice, true observation about wisdom and fear of the Lord. Now it's personal and challenging, and for me, a place I would not have arrived without the little journey from blue to green to red. Which may be why I don't take that journey all that often.
Comments