“Come,” he said. Then Peter… walked on the water and came toward Jesus.’
Matthew 14:28,29 NIV
This is going to take longer than 2 days. Transformational knowledge is so important in my life as a Christian, more and more keeps coming to light for further investigation.
Transformational knowledge is: where the head meets the heart;
the knowing of self transects the knowing of God;
It is the moment where the reality of Christianity meets the depths of the soul;
It is where self is actualized in the Spirit of God as actions of faith are moved by God.
I believe this is what happened to me this summer. The soul and the self met the spirit and God moved in ways that could not be explained in human terms. This is what Peter experienced in his encounter with Jesus his faith was brought to the place of impact.
Faith Waits On the Lord
After Peter sought His will in asking the Lord for permission he didn’t immediately jump out of the boat. Peter didn’t presume upon the Lord’s answer, but waited for it.
I would rather have a puff of smoke and be done with it.. It does not happen this way.
This brings us to the next point:
The faith that walks on water is faith that waits on God until He answers.
This passage of scripture is a popular one among preachers who love the vivid metaphor it provides for believing God for great things. We love to hear about the action, the excitement of taking leaps of faith and ‘walking on water’. It’s highly visible and empowering. It suits our busy, externalized culture and modern temperament.
But the waiting aspect of faith taught in this passage of scripture is often overlooked. There is a lot of ‘faith’ teaching around these days telling people to step out on promises and take risks. To many such preachers, Peter’s waiting would have looked like unbelief, and no doubt if they had been on that boat they would have been encouraging him to ‘have more faith’ and jump.
But Peter didn’t jump into the water until after he had waited on the Lord and heard from Him, and this is precisely where many Christians go wrong in their faith. They ‘jump out of the boat’ without sufficiently waiting on the Lord, and end up in troubled waters.
Satan literally tempted Christ to take a similar leap of faith. Luke 4:1-13 gives the account of Christ being tempted in the wilderness. In the last temptation, Satan took Jesus to the top of the temple and challenged Christ to jump off, based on a promise of protection in the scripture. Satan even quoted chapter and verse. Satan was challenging Christ to step out on the promise of God. It is a legitimate promise in Psalm 91:11,12 that God will protect us and keep us from harm. Now, there is nothing wrong with God’s promises and every Christian knows that we are to trust those promises. So what’s the problem here? Sounds pretty scriptural, doesn’t it? But instead of jumping, Christ responded by quoting another verse, from Deut.6:16 - “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”
Testing God means deliberately putting ourselves in a situation where He has to come through or we end up in trouble. The temptation here was twofold: to cherry-pick certain promises from the word of God without heeding the entire written word, and to test God by deliberately putting Himself in a risky situation so that God is forced to prove Himself.
This is a common pitfall Christians fall into. We cast ourselves down on a single promise.
We take a rash stand on a certain promise, without taking the whole counsel of scripture into careful consideration and waiting upon the Lord.
This may result in placing ourselves in a risky situation where God has to respond in a certain way or we end up in trouble. If Peter had jumped before receiving Christ’s word to step out, instead of it being a legitimate step of faith, he would have been putting God to the test.
Faith waits on the Lord, and takes the whole of God’s word into consideration. It requires that we heed the entire counsel of God in His written word and not simply cherry-pick the parts we like. Notice that Christ looked to the rest of scripture for the right response to this temptation, and didn’t make His decision based on a single promise.
Faith isn’t about naming and claiming the promises, or insisting that God honor some ‘step’ of faith we’ve decided to take. It is about looking to Christ and seeking His will, and humbly waiting on Him that He may guide us.
The faith that walks on water is the faith that waits on the Lord as my faith is waiting as the Adventure in Middle Grove moves on to another week.
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