THE MAIN IDEA
We can have courage in the storm when we live to bear witness to Christ.

STORMS ARE COMING, READY OR NOT
Paul was on that ship as a prisoner, being transported from Palestine to Rome to face trial before Nero. Sailing the Mediterranean at that time of year was dangerous, but the pilot and the owner decided to sail on. It didn’t take long for a storm with hurricane-force winds to come swooping down on them. The storms of life will always come. And we can prepare as much as we want, and we should, but we never know how severe the storms will be or how long these storms will last. The Bible tells us that without enduring through storms, our Christlike character cannot be built up. And without Christlike character, we cannot have Christ-centered hope (Romans 5:3-4; 15:4). In a nutshell, this kind of endurance that builds our Christ-like character and increases our Christ-centered hope is called faithfulness. Faithfulness means being full of faith in Jesus Christ and Christ alone.

JESUS IS GOD, AND WE ARE NOT
Because of sin, the default mode of every human being is NOT faith in Christ but faith in ourselves. Faith in Christ—faithfulness—needs to be learned. And we learn faith in Christ when we learn to completely lose faith in ourselves. And the place where we learn to completely lose faith in ourselves is in those storms that take us beyond our limits. This doesn’t mean to hate ourselves. In fact, the opposite. We can’t learn to love ourselves until we come to fully understand the love that Christ has for us. The experienced sailors did everything they could to make sure that the ship at least could float. But it was when they lost all hope of saving themselves that they could now be saved by God. When we lose faith in ourselves, that’s when we can hear the voice of God. The voice of God is always calling us to faith in Christ and Him crucified for the forgiveness of our sins, Christ and Him resurrected for the hope of eternal life, and Christ and Him returning to judge the living and the dead and to fix this broken world.

JESUS IS COMING, READY OR NOT
When all hope had been lost, that’s when the voice of God came, and the voice of God came through the apostle Paul. An angel of the Lord told Paul that God would make sure that Paul fulfilled the purpose for which he had been sent to Rome. And not only that, God promised that the lives of every man on board would be spared. God’s purpose in this world will always be fulfilled. And God’s singular purpose is to fill the earth with the His glory in Jesus Christ through God-fearing, God-honoring, God-worship, God- loving communities and families—the church. There are at least two implications to this unshakable truth that God’s purpose will always be fulfilled. First, Jesus is most surely coming back. And second, we then ought to devote our lives to living for the purpose of God. At some point in our growth as Christians, we will come to the humbling realization that there is something much more important and significant at work in our lives than just pursuing personal blessings. And that much greater work is the purpose of God—in particular, the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth beginning right here where we live. Jesus’s command to be His witnesses was not just for the first disciples and the first church. This command establishes the purpose of God for all believers and His church throughout history until Jesus returns. The raging storms of life may be driving us to the very heart of God’s purpose for our lives.

DISCUSSION: Discuss some of the storms you have experienced in your life. How have these storms driven you to God’s purpose to be a witness of Christ?