Holy Ground | Week 4 (6-21-2026)

Dr. Woods Lisenby preaches on the subject, "The Sea."

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Transcript

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Comes to us from Mark chapter 4. And as you do, I don't think there was a bigger uh Father's Day smile seen than uh over on wheelburn over here and that face of that dad right there, proud dad Molen right there. That was cool, that was fun to watch. That day, when evening came, he said to his disciples, disciples, let us go over to the other side. Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along just as he was in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, Teacher, don't you care if we drown? He got up, rebuked the wind, and said to the waves, Quiet, be still. Then the wind died down, and it was completely calm. He said to the disciples, Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith? They were terrified and asked each other, Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him. This is the word of God versus the people of God. And together we say, Thanks be to God. You may be seated. Yeah, a lot of exciting things today, as uh Pastor Sarah's saying. It's I think it's like somewhere like eight, nine uh children that'll be uh under the age of one. If you had in all the one-year-olds will have be more than that, too. I mean, it's just crazy to think how our church continues to grow and this new life is exciting. And yeah, Kaitlyn Kelly, um, and Ashley Garbett, and uh we found out about two more coming in the fall. And it's just I I love I love I love this excitement. But that also means uh that Elizabeth is gonna need some help in the nursery. So if you're looking for a place to serve, um that is gonna be a place. We might, I think we're opening a second nursery for our worship services and Sunday evenings because nursery is four and under, right? Uh it goes straight up to four, and uh, and there's some you know need to separate our two-month-olds from our wiats of the world, you know, they'll go around like just watching out. So uh we pray with me. Lord, we thank you for your word, may it all just be a lamp to our feet and a light unto our path. May the words of our mouth and meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer. And all God's people said, Amen. You know, when when we write sermons, um, we plan out where we're going way in advance. Um, we all of our series are planned for the rest of the year. We've already started thinking about 2027, and so in a series, you have a certain amount of weeks, and then we'll pick like the scripture we're gonna use and kind of like the direction, and we'll give the worship team like here's a paragraph on what I think the sermon's gonna be like and about. And then we'll name the give the title of the sermon, and then whenever we sit down to write each individual sermon, we'll put together like the structure or the outline and then kind of flesh it out as we go. And either the first thing or the last thing for me to write is the beginning, the opening. Am I gonna pull a story that's from like my past, or am I gonna go to like a movie? Am I gonna use something from one culture or whatever? Just how do we get into it? Because you always want to use a story that sets up the text, right? So we're gonna be talking about a certain thing. And so what am I gonna say to kind of bring us all to set the stage? And it's kind of one of my favorite parts because I love telling stories. I'm a big fan of uh storytelling in general. And normally, uh by the time we get to the weekend, you know, I've got the sermon all pretty much done. But but this weekend, I got to Friday and I've got the whole rest of the sermon written. But as far as the opening, I've I got nothing. I didn't know how to start. I didn't know what I was gonna say. I didn't like how I don't know where to, and uh it hit me on Friday night. Uh that actually the reason why I couldn't kind of pick a a starting place, I couldn't figure out exactly is because uh the text that we're talking about today, this the sermon, it's it's kind of like everywhere in my life right now, so it's hard to pick just one thing, one thing that might fit. Because uh it turns out that as we've been going through this series about holy ground, we'll talk more about in a second. Today we're talking about the sea. And the sea in the Bible represents chaos. And I have a two-year-old, a five-year-old, and an eight-year-old. And my life is nothing but chaos right now. I I can't just pick one thing to tell you about because I could pick a moment from every single day. Normally they're not even in here during the service, they go to children's church, but I guess today they decided not to, and I can show you some of it right there. We recently moved into a rental house and we're grateful for it. It was so appreciative to be 45 seconds from the church, but it's smaller than our last house. There's not enough, there's not a lot of space between to separate the kids from one another, but not so much of the size. We can deal with the size, that's not a big deal. It's how loud it is because like the floors are all solid, there's no carpet, the walls, we didn't put anything on the walls because we don't know how long we're gonna be there. And when we first moved in, the kids were off in Montgomery. And Brianna are like, actually, this is kind of nice, downsizing a little bit. We have too much stuff, this will be fine. And then the zoo moved in, and you can't stand anywhere in this house and hear yourself think for a moment. And uh case in point, Friday night, uh, my parents came into town, my grandmother, they're staying with my sister because there's not you know room for them to stay. And uh they came in. Uh, and if they had been there a moment earlier, they might not have come in the door because it was so loud. Because Wyatt, our two-year-old, has decided that he just wants to be naked all the time now. And so he's running around just butt-necked through the house, screaming. The other kids are chasing him, they're fighting with each other, and they're yelling at each other, and then it's just like knock-knock on the door, and the dog starts barking and going crazy. And I can't explain chaos any better than this. Like, this is this is my our life right now. The the whole time they were there visiting, it was my dad, I think he turned his hearing aids off. Because we're screaming at each other just to be heard over the baby, you know, just doing, well, he's not a baby, he's a toddler now, you know, just making all the noise and the the big kids biting. And I just I have realized that when we talk about the sea, when we talk about the chaos, I don't have just one story for you. I have just me, our life as an example. Sometimes chaos is is all you can see. No pun intended, because we're talking about the sea. That was an accident. I did on an accident. You know, for four weeks we've been talking about holy ground, about how the Bible uses the geography of the land to help tell the story, about how God can move through the earth in such a way that it brings these uh topographical, topographical features into uh how God is moving in our lives. And so we started on the top of the mountain, Mount Hermon, where the dew collects, the snow falls, and it comes down and gives life to the valley. But some of the valleys that we end up in are the shadow valleys of Psalm 23, the darkness is closing in around us. But we realize that even before there was a threat, there was God, and God is with us, and God walks with us through the valley. Last week, we got out of that valley and we ended up on the riverside. And the riverside has uh water underneath that even in the droughts, our roots go down, and we want to be planted by the river to have God's faithfulness in our life all the time. Well, today we see that most rivers end up in the sea. We travel along throughout the Gospels with Jesus around the Sea of Galilee. It's not the entire version of each of the gospels. So, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the first half of the gospel is called the Galilean ministry, and it's happening all around this area. And later uh in uh John kind of pops up, and now Jesus goes to Jerusalem, he comes back, goes to Jerusalem, comes back. But the first half of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus is around the sea. And in the Bible, uh, the sea was not only the source of food and life, but it also carried with it the threat of death. The Bible uh treats the sea not like we do. It's not a place for vacation, it's a place for either sustenance or a place to be wary of. For those who wrote the stories in the Bible, chaos was one of the most frightening powers in the world, and the sea is where that power lived. I mean, listen to how the Bible opens. In the beginning, the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, of the sea, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Before there was light, before there was land, there was the sea, dark and churning without shape, formless, void of chaos. And what is the first thing God does in the Bible? He orders the chaos, he calms the sea, he brings forth the land, he separates the waters. Well, and then a couple of chapters later, there's a flood, and waters come up from the deep, and waters come down from the top, and again the sea rises, and the sea represents chaos, and it wipes out humanity except for this family of Noah and his people. God pushes the sea back down, he orders it again, and he promises not to do that again, not to bring that amount of chaos into the world. Jonah runs from God, he ends up in a storm while he's on a boat on the sea, but when he's thrown into it, the water's calm. So when we get to the Gospels, when we find Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke in this Galilean ministry, we see that Jesus spends a lot of time around the water, and so we need to once again pay attention to the sea. Uh the Sea of Galilee is uh roughly uh about 13 miles from top to bottom, seven miles across. It's about the the length of Mobile Bay, but it's uh a little bit longer than the run from uh Point Clear to Fowl River. And so you can imagine the size of this body of water. It's not as big as the Gulf, but it is large enough to where you don't want to get caught in the middle of it in a storm, right? If you're in a there's some small craft advisories to where you don't want to be out in the boat that's 14 foot, like my kayak in the middle of the bay if things get a little choppy. And neither would the people who lived in Israel want to be in that kind of situation out there. They they fish in the water for many of them for their living, but they know to treat the water with respect. And so we read about a moment ago a storm in Mark 5, but it's not the only storm on the sea. If you read in Matthew 14, you find another one. And I think both of these are important stories. So let me tell you uh after uh feeding thousands of people in Mark 14, or sorry, Matthew 14, uh Jesus puts his disciples in a boat and says, Y'all go on ahead, I'll catch up. He doesn't actually say that. I just kind of imagine him like thinking that, right? Because he's got a plan. So he puts them on the boat and he goes up somewhere else. In Mark, Jesus says, Let's go across the other side. He gets in the boat with them, he falls asleep in the front, and a furious squall comes up and the storm rages. And I got to give Jesus mad respect because uh he he can take a nap anywhere in like the hardest of storms. He's over there to nap it on the boat. I I I'm I'm getting close to that. I'm working on that in my old age. That's the thing I'm like trying for the hardest. Napping is like my it's like my Olympic sport. So this is, you know, we all want to be more like Jesus. This is how I want to be most like Jesus, right here, right? All right, so he's up there asleep, and the disciples, they are terrified, and they go up to him and they wake him up. And did you notice what they say? They don't say, Save us. They say, Why don't you care about us? Why don't you care if we drown? And so Jesus stands up, he speaks to the wind and the water, he says, Quiet, be still. And the sea goes completely calm. And the disciples are now more afraid of him than they are of the water, and they say, Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? Now compare that to the other story. So in Matthew's gospel, he sends the disciples in the boat after feeding the thousands of people, and he goes up on the mountain to pray. And the boat gets a long way from the shore, and there the winds turn against them, and the waves start beating the boat. Uh, but this time Jesus is not asleep in the stern. He isn't actually in the boat at all. Sometime before dawn, he comes up walking on the water. Now that phrase, sometime before dawn, is important because Jesus puts them in the boat in the evening. He doesn't come walking to them till sometime before dawn. And that same scripture says, and they were only about halfway. So they've been rowing all night long. The winds and the waves are against them. In the middle of the night, all of a sudden they are terrified because they look up and out of the chaos, out of the sea, they look up and they think they see Patrick Swayze. Get it? Because ghosts. That's a dated reference. It's a movie technically before my time, but sometimes I get in trouble for making movie references that are only for millennials. So I'm just trying to help you Gen X and Boomers with a ghost reference. They say, Oh no, it's a ghost. God Michael on that one. Peter says, Uh, Lord, if it's you, at first he says, It is I, do not be afraid. And Peter says, If that's you, tell me to come to you and I will. And so he says, Come. Peter climbs out the side of the boat, and he can then walk on water too. Until he looks at the wind, gets a little scared, he starts to sink. But Jesus catches him. And only then they get in the boat, and then the sea is calm. Do you see what's different about these two stories? In Mark, Jesus is there in the storm. He calms it immediately. If that was the only story we had, we just assume, okay, well, if things are bad, if things are scary, if that's Jesus, he'll stop it. But in Matthew, Jesus doesn't calm the storm first. He walks out in the middle of it, he meets them where they are, and he tells Peter, you've got to take a step. You've got to get out of the boat. Even while the wind is still raging, you have to take a step of faith. The wind doesn't quit until they're back in the boat together. I think both of these are stories we need to hear because they're not the same story, but they both tell us something about who Jesus is. Because when I talk about chaos, I I want to be precise. A few weeks ago we talked about the shadow valleys, and next week we're gonna talk about the wilderness. Chaos is neither of those. The valley has order, but it has no life. The wilderness has no order and no life. The sea is something else entirely. Chaos, it's power. It has life, it has tremendous power, but it has no order. Chaos is when there is real energy loose in your life, but none of it is arranged. None of it is purposeful. It's energy without shape. I mean, think about a bunch of kids: a two-year-old, a five-year-old, an eight-year-old, how much energy they can generate in a small living room. The power isn't the problem. The problem is that nothing's happening with purpose. It's a swirling mess of destruction. And I bet you you know that feeling in your life when it feels like you've got a lot of power, a lot of things pushing you in a direction, but you can't tell if there's any purpose, any order to it. Like it's like uh chaos is when your kid leaves for college the same month that you lose your job that was going to pay the tuition. That's chaos. It's when your parent has to go into the hospital while your spouse has the flu and your children have to go away to camp. And you're trying to be at three places at once. Chaos. It's when uh the water heater comes through the ceiling the same week with a dog has to be sent to that farm upstate, and then you find out that your teenager's been hanging out with the wrong crowd. It's when every phone call from every person that you have on your client list needs something immediately. There is no shortage to chaos in our lives, to these seasons, to these places where there is power pushing us. The shortage is in the order side of the ledger, right? If I had to guess, every person in this room knows what it's like to have the water coming over the side of your ship. The water, the chaos of life, it comes up, and we end up trying to reach for something to save us. And the problem is we tended to reach for one of three things. The first is we try to turn the boat around. I mean, think about the disciples. They're halfway, they've been rowing all night long, but they just fed thousands of people, they just seen this miracle. It was like the coolest thing they'd ever seen in their entire life. Just imagine if you look back at the back of the boat and you see the shoreline, it's like a beach party going on back there. And they got the bonfire and they got the volleyball and they got the food. Let's just let's just go back there. How much of our life is spent remembering how things used to be? Man, can we just go back to the way it was? Can't we just just go back to whenever you know we were all together under one roof? Or can't we just go back to whenever I had that job or we lived in that place? Can't we just go back to whenever we were younger and things were easier? Can't we just go back? Nostalgia is a powerful force. It's just pushing us in the wrong direction. And the other temptation is to go in the exact opposite direction. One of my favorite songs is by John Hyatt. It's called Through Your Hands. And in it, he sings this line that says, uh, we scheme about the future and we dream about the past. A lot of our time is spent dreaming about the past. But when we're not dreaming about the past, sometimes we are scheming about the future. We are imagining that everything is gonna be perfect just beyond this next wave, right? That the grass is always greener on the other side. We think if I can just get past this, then everything will be calm, everything will be stilled. If I just get myself from here to there, I've got to make it through this season, right? For everything to settle down. If I can get through this whole week of meetings and get to the bottom of my to-do list and get my house in order and make sure all the laundry is folded and all the dishes are washed and my kids are exactly where they need to be. If I get past this week, then everything will be perfect. But guess what? Next week, you gotta do all that same stuff again. It's like another wave just comes up and it's trying to come over your side of the boat. We think all we need is like the right productivity video, if we get the right life hack, if I get the right planner, the right system, then all of this is gonna be clean, ordinary life. But whether we're dreaming about the past or scheming about the future, the truth is both of those are illusions. And so sometimes we fall into the third temptation. Sometimes we just pretend like it's not even happening. We like to be like them ostriches, just put our head in the sand. We like to pretend like there is no storm at all. I'm gonna go up there and take a nap next to Jesus, just you know, sleep my life away. I'm gonna uh pretend that it's somebody else's problem, right? We we've gotten really good at looking away, at turning off our attention. Whether it's because we're blaming other people, it's their problem. Their fault, they did that. Or if it's because we're trying to numb ourselves and escape, right? I'm just gonna watch a little more Netflix, I'm just gonna, you know, reach for whatever I need to to make sure I don't think about that stuff anymore. I'm never gonna have to address these things. Or maybe we we have to blame the schools or blame the church. They didn't fix our kids the way they want. That's right, it's not my problem, it's their problem, you know. We blame anyone we can. We reach for whatever we can so that we can keep our head down. That's not peace. That's just being asleep in the stern because everything just feels too big to deal with. Sometimes chaos feels so big to deal with that we just don't want to have to even think about it. But look back at these two stories because they both have good news for our lives. Notice that in both boats, the disciples' real trouble is not actually the weather, their trouble is believing that they are alone. In Mark, uh, Jesus is right there with them, close enough to touch, and they they still say, Don't you care about us? Don't you care if we drown? They're looking at Jesus as if he is absent. And in Matthew, Jesus comes to them from across the water and they can't even recognize him. They look at the one thing that can fix their problems and they call it a ghost. The storm does not separate them from Christ in either story. The only thing that makes them think they were alone is their fear. Fear is the thing of chaos, it's the part that is the most destructive in our lives. But the truth is the sea cannot do the one thing the disciples are most afraid of. It never actually separates them from Jesus. He is always with them. Whether he has to walk out on the water to meet him, or whether he wakes up and calms the storm, they are never separated from Christ. And listen, for when for what he says, whenever he comes to the dark, I don't know if you heard this or not. This is this is one of my favorite parts. When he says, take courage, it is I, do not be afraid. In Greek, he says, when he says it is I, he says, ego in me. It means I am. It's the same name that God speaks to Moses at the burning bush. I am who I am. The figure who walks out onto the chaos through the chaos, goes in the middle of the night, is speaking the very name of the one who ordered it all from the beginning. The disciples in Mark, they ask, Who is it that even the winds and the waves obey him? Well, Matthew says, Let me tell you who it is. It is the one who created it all who is walking on the sea. Both texts speak the same truth. The cause Was never the main point. God can and God will calm storms in our lives. The point that these two stories have for us when he holds them together is this: the way God calms storms might not always be the same. Sometimes God says, be still, and the water goes flat, but sometimes God doesn't. Instead, he comes and meets you where you are and invites you to take his step. Invites you, like Peter, to walk out onto the water. The content is never the weather. The constant is Jesus. It's him who orders the chaos so that we can meet him in it, so that he meets us where we are. Which means of those three temptations, they all have the same mistake. Whether we're turning the boat around, whether we are scheming about the future, whether we're trying to go numb and pretend like the whole thing is not happening, every one of those are our efforts to just row harder. How much of your time is spent just trying to row harder? I can do this myself. I can get out of this situation. I can get beyond this grief. I can get beyond this pain. I can get beyond this problem. I can get out of the chaos. If I just row harder. But that's not how this story goes. God doesn't wait for the sea to settle. God doesn't wait until they've made it to the other shore. He doesn't say, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and get clear of this mess, and then I'll show up. He walks out on the water. He wakes up and he's there in the boat. He meets them in the middle of the things that they cannot control, and he calms it for them. Sometimes meeting Jesus in the chaos looks like Peter. It looks like saying, I still have faith, even though this is not a calm sea. It means taking a step towards Christ even before things have gotten easier. Ultimately, uh, what the disciples show us is that to get to that calm that we're all looking for, don't the big thing they had to do, you know, to not quit, to not give up, not turn around, not daydream about what it's gonna be like, to not put their heads down and let go of their oars. To keep doing what God has called them to do and know that God will always be there with them. So hear me this morning. Whatever sea you are on, don't turn the boat around. Don't spend your life wishing things were the way they were. Don't pin your hopes on the season that may or may not come. And don't go to sleep in the stern to pretend like none of it's going on, that nothing is happening. Look instead to the one who's already walking to meet you where you are. Look to see that there's something unexpected happening. They did not know Jesus was gonna come walking around that water. No one had ever seen that before. Sometimes Jesus shows up in your life in such a surprising way that you're like, wait a minute, is this real? Yes, God can meet you no matter what is happening. And I want to end by telling you a story about this. It's a very short one. And it's one that if you've been in church for a minute, you've probably heard it before. We preachers really like to tell it. That's why I don't tell it too often, but I always assume there's somebody who either has never heard it before or somebody who needs to hear it again. It's a story about a man named Horatio Spafford. Spafford was a lawyer in Chicago in the 1800s, a church man, a businessman, a father. He and his wife Anna had four children, and they lost a young son to uh they have five children, actually. They lost a young son to scarlet fever. And then not long after that, uh, there's the great Chicago fire of 1871, and it wiped out almost everything that he owned. A couple years later, they were down, everything was tough, so they need some rest. They were going to go to Europe to get away for a little while. And then he had some business dealings that kept him back, so he sent his wife and his four girls on ahead of him. Well, on the way there, their ship ran into another ship and it sank. Two hundred people died, they drowned. Four of those were his children. His wife was the only one who made it, and she sent him a letter from Wales. Said two words Safe, alone. Horatious Spafford took the next boat he could and got across the Atlantic and picked up his wife. On the way there, though, the way that we have the story told to us is that while they were going across the sea, the captain came to him and found him the moment they were passing over the spot where his family's ship went down. And right there, over the water, in the middle of the night, in the same place that had taken his four daughters, Horatio Spafford took out a pen and wrote these words that you know. When peace like a river attendeth my way, when sorrows like seas, billows roll. Whatever my life thou hast taught me to say, it is well, it is well with my soul. Did you hear that? He didn't write those words once he was safely home. He didn't write them after his grief had lifted, because it probably never fully did. He wrote, It is well with my soul, out in the in the darkness of an open sea, directly over the worst thing that had ever happened to him. That is not a man whose storm got calmed. That is a man who God met him in the middle of it. That right there, in the hardest moment of his life, he experienced the peace of God that can be the most unexpected thing we could imagine for him. That's the sermon right there, friends. That peace wasn't waiting for him on the next shore. God met him in his chaos, because the one who walks on the water is always with us. So whatever is breaking over the sides of your boat, whatever chaos is going on in your world, uh, do not give up. Don't jump ship, don't turn around. Keep your eyes on the one who is walking through it all, walking towards you, and know that even whenever things feel like they are coming apart, you are not alone. You are never alone. That's why this church is holy ground. Because we are here with you. Just as God is with you, you are never alone. Even when you're out there in the middle of the sea, and it feels like everything else is coming against you. We are with you, and God is for you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.