In the sermon 'Sicknesses and Storms' by Scott Brown, the speaker expounds on Matthew 8:14-27, emphasizing Jesus' healing miracles and His authority over nature. The sermon highlights three main themes regarding sickness: the reasons for sickness (sin, dependence on God, and God's glory), the power of Christ over sickness, and His compassion toward the afflicted. The speaker discusses the importance of a proper biblical understanding of sickness to avoid misconceptions. He illustrates that while sin can be a reason for sickness, not all illnesses are directly linked to personal sin. The sermon also covers the narrative of Jesus calming the storm, showcasing His sovereignty over creation and prompting reflection on faith and fear. Furthermore, the speaker analyzes interactions between Jesus and those professing to follow Him, stressing the cost of discipleship. Ultimately, the sermon encourages believers to trust in God's sovereignty and compassion amid life's challenges.

Today's teaching is Matthew 8, 14-27. Now when Jesus had come into Peter's house, he saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever. So he touched her hand, and the fever left her, and she arose and served them. When evening had come, they brought to him many who were demon-possessed, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying, He Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses. And when Jesus saw great multitudes about him, he gave a command to depart to the other side.

Then a certain scribe came to him and said, Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go. And Jesus said to him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. Then another of His disciples said to Him, Lord, let me first go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him, Follow me and let the dead bury their own dead. Now when he got into a boat, his disciples followed him, and suddenly a great tempest arose on the sea, so that the boat was covered with the waves, but he was asleep.

Then his disciples came to him and awoke him saying, Lord, save us, we are perishing. But he said to them, Why are you fearful, oh you of little faith? Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm. So the men marveled, saying, Who can this be that even the winds and the sea obey him?" In the context of this great passage of Scripture, Jesus has just come down from delivering a sermon with authority and then he turns to one as having authority over the diseased world that we've been born into. It was a very, the day that we encountered the Lord Jesus here, it was a very busy day.

It was a Sabbath day. It included the healing of a centurion servant and leper, and he ends the day in Peter's home, and it was a very, very busy day. And so in this section in the sequence of our exposition, we continue to see what we have been seeing, his tender-hearted mercies toward those who are sick and who are in the throes of trouble. And this passage takes us to different categories than what we've encountered so far in chapter 8. The categories of spiritual calamity and warfare and actually control over the winds and the waves.

So This passage begins with healing of a fever, which is far less harmful in our own thinking than the things that we've already seen Jesus heal. You know, leprosy, pretty big ticket item. A paralytic being tormented, pretty big ticket item. Now we move to something that most of us would just think is mild. It's a fever.

Get over it. Take a couple of aspirin. You'll be fine in the morning type of way that we typically think about fever. So Jesus, you know, deals with something far less ravaging than he has dealt with in the previous sections. And there are, there are, there's, I'm just going to say there's three main themes that are being communicated here.

And many of them have to do with the whole doctrine of sickness and healing. We have to maintain a proper understanding of sickness and healing, or we begin to think wrongly about our sicknesses. And I think it's easy to see that in our culture, we think really wrongly about sickness. And there are three basic things that Scripture is teaching us here so far about sickness. To help us maintain a right view of sickness so that we're not always just a victim of our immediate impulses or the fads that are around us, but that when we feel sick, that we actually think rightly about that sickness.

And the first thing that we need to consider, and just to kind of bring us up to where we were last week, that there are reasons for our sickness. In Scripture, sickness happens typically for three different, for three reasons. One is sin And so when we're sick, our knee-jerk reaction isn't normally to seek God for the sin that we may have committed. We have a different reaction typically. It's often to drive us to greater dependence on the Lord, as did Paul's thorn in the flesh.

It's often for the glory of God, that God would declare His glory in the world. That's why a man was actually born blind. He and his parents struggled this from the very time of his birth, but it was given really for one reason, and that is that the greatness of the power of God would be displayed. So sickness has its reasons, and these are some of the reasons. Now when you think about this whole matter of sin and sickness, we have to recognize how important it is for us to continue to seek the Lord regarding any sin that's in our lives.

Somebody once said that if sin were blue, if sin were actually blue, and sin came out in your words, then most of our speech would have some blue in it. And it would show us, if it got really, really blue, then it would be a great concern. All of our speech would have sun blue in it. But think of it this way, if your sin immediately caused you pain, How would you view your sickness and your pain? For example, in the book of Proverbs, we're told that the sin of immorality is like taking coals into your body and actually your clothes burning up.

So what if you had a lustful thought and you just felt a burning? It was like you felt your clothes were on fire. What if it was like that? If you had this immediate reaction? Sin is meant to operate like that for us.

In chapter 7 in Proverbs, it says that the effect of immorality is like an arrow going into your liver. What if you had a lustful thought and you instantly felt like an arrow going into your liver. You would stop that. You would run to the Lord. You would not want your clothes on fire.

You would not want to have to pull an arrow out of your liver. But Sin is often the reason for our sickness. And so we should take sin very seriously until it actually does make us sick. For some reason, God gives a very slow response to our sins in that way. So there are reasons for sickness.

The second thing we learn from these texts about healing and sickness and the power of the Lord is our Lord's exclusive power over sickness. The greatness of the power of Christ is displayed in all these texts regarding sickness and healing. And this is how the world is wired. You can trust in the greatness of God's power to deliver from sickness. You will not be delivered from your sickness until God desires you to be delivered.

You can take whatever medicine you want. You can get any surgery you want. If God doesn't want you healed from your sickness, you're not gonna get healed from your sickness. And then the third thing is our Lord's compassion. In all of these, you see such enormous mercy and compassion toward those who are in pain.

And this should teach us about the heart of Jesus Christ, that we would have the same kind of compassion toward those who are suffering and who are sick. You know, he is a compassionate high priest. He understands our weaknesses. He has felt our infirmities. And that's his disposition in our times of helplessness.

You know, if you're sick today, you have some ailment that is persisting, just know the compassion of Jesus Christ. You have to know that He's not left you alone. You have to know that His eye is watching you. You have to know that he understands the pain that you're in and that it's not relieved yet. He was in the same place even as the Lord of the universe.

And so the compassion of Jesus Christ is always upon those who are sick in the same way, at least if we look at these as helping us understand the heart of Jesus Christ, we have to understand that when we are sick, we aren't left alone in a steely world without any help or mercy or soft-heartedness toward us in our sickness, because He's near the brokenhearted. So those are the things that we've encountered so far in this whole matter of building sort of a biblical doctrine of sickness and healing. Now, in verse 14 in chapter 8, we find the healing of Peter's mother-in-law. And we learn more of the same things here and the Lord Jesus' power. So he had come into Peter's house in verse 14, and he saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever.

So there she is laying down somewhere in the house, is Peter's mother-in-law. And then he touched her hand. He just touched her hand, imagine that, and then the fever left her. Now this had occurred on the Sabbath after a synagogue service that's recorded in Mark chapter 1. And what we learn here is, you know, Peter is married.

He has a wife. Later on in 1st Corinthians 9, we learn that Peter was taking his wife along with him in his missionary journeys because the Apostle Paul says, don't we have a right to take a believing wife with us? And so the apostles, some of them, were taking their wives along with them. We also know here that Peter owns a house. Even though Christ didn't own a house, his disciples seems to be a little bit better off than he is.

And Peter was from Bethsaida. Most people believe that he moved from Bethsaida perhaps to be near Christ, to be near the center of his ministry there. And he seemed to also have moved his mother-in-law as well. Others say that Andrew and others were also living in that house too by implication. So while Simon and Andrew left their nests, they did not seem to exactly leave their home and they also did continue to keep some of their extended family around them in that sense.

So we also learned that Matthew owned a house as well. Matthew owned a house, and that's where he was gathering tax gathers and sinners to hear the ministry of Jesus. And we also learned it was just a fever. And so the compassion of Christ is great enough to apply to all sicknesses. Now, you might say, well, maybe it was a fever and she was about ready to die of her fever.

That's possible. We just don't know at what stage this fever was, but we do know this, that Jesus had compassion on her in the time of her fever, and he touched her hand. The ailment of fever is mentioned several times in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. Now, I'll just give you sort of a quick summary of what we learn from the Old Testament about fever. In Deuteronomy chapter 28, verse 22, we learn that fever is often a result of disobedience.

I don't know if you've ever thought that before. You get a fever, and it's after the matter of Deuteronomy 28, 22. Ailments often come as a result of disobedience. It's also the result of breaking covenant in Leviticus chapter 26. Leviticus makes it very clear that there's a specific curse for breaking the covenant, and one of those is fever, amazingly.

And it's also the result of God's testing. We learn that Job, when he was sick, burned with fever. In Job 30 verse 30, the people in the time of Jeremiah also suffered from fever and from famine. With Job, his fever, as far as we can tell, wasn't the result of his sin. It was a result of God demonstrating his glory before the heavenly host, that Job really did love God from his heart.

And so God afflicted him in order to demonstrate His power in a man who loved Him with all of his heart, a man who loved Him whether he had everything or he had nothing. That's what God was doing. He was proving that man does not live by bread alone. He was proving that man can be satisfied, that man can belong to God even when he is on a bed of sackcloth and ashes, and that Job was that kind of man. So we learn from Scripture that fever comes upon people for different reasons.

So the next time your fever comes upon you, you just might think biblically about your fever. Think through what might be occurring here. And again, this just brings us back to this whole matter of how we ought to react when we are sick, how we ought to think about it. You know, if sin were blue, or if our sin caused an immediate pain, how would we think about it? I thought this morning, wouldn't it be wonderful if you did feel an instant stab of pain when you sin?

Just to turn you back, to turn you from the look, to turn you from that attitude, to turn you from your anger. Anger begins to rise up, and you feel that arrow in your liver. Would that we had that? Well, we have the Spirit of God. But often, we so quench the Spirit, we're so insensitive to his work in our lives that we just, we don't hear him because our minds are being cultivated on all kinds of things that disconnect us from the reality with the way that the world has been wired and the way that we've been wired in order to serve the Lord.

So Peter's mother-in-law is healed from this seemingly small malady, but it is another expression of the power of Jesus Christ to heal and to save. And the result is beautiful. You know, this is such a compelling story. Christ heals her for her own pleasure and also for her own service. Because when she immediately after she's healed, she is up and she's serving again, which is one of the blessings of being healed because now you can you can be observing there's someone listening to this message now who has had to be served for many days now because she has been in bed.

She had a very serious surgery on her hip and she has been served and served and served. Someday she'll rise. She'll arise just as if from the dead to serve. In fact, at this point, she is probably so longing to serve, she probably can hardly stand it. She may actually get up soon and begin to ruin, you know, the effect of the surgery because she wants to serve so much.

Well, that's what happened with Peter's mother-in-law. She got up and she began to serve. And there's something interesting about this. You know, faith is never mentioned. Often in the healing stories, there's faith that supported the healing.

Well, it's not so here. At least it's not mentioned. Now, she may have had faith and it just wasn't mentioned. We don't want to make too much about it. But this is in the class of healings in the ministry of Jesus where nothing of the recipient is required at all.

Jesus heals many people just indiscriminately. He heals them just for His own glory. And there's no faith, There's no belief, seemingly, that connects with His healing. Jesus Christ is so merciful. He causes His reign to fall on the just and on the unjust.

And so that's what we see here is that there's no faith that's mentioned. There's just the unbridled mercy of Jesus Christ for this woman. And it just brings out what Paul said in Romans chapter 9, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. That's what it is. And also, I just want to make a quick note before we leave this beautiful story that all of this happens in a home.

There are so many things that happen in homes in the New Testament. And it's really a beautiful picture. If you want to know the godly use of your home, look, do a study of homes in the New Testament. And you'll find that they are places of wonderful ministry. And my question is, is your home like this home?

Is it a place of healing? Is it a place of the mercy and the ministry of Jesus Christ? And we find Jesus eats at Matthew's house with publicans and sinners. Jesus enters into a home, and then two blind men come and ask to be healed. And then He touches their eyes, and their eyes are opened.

Jesus sends the multitudes away in Matthew 13, and He enters into a house with His disciples. And His disciples are there with Him, and they ask him the meaning of the parable of the tares. Well, we could go on and on and on about all the glorious things that happen in homes. But what happens in homes is worship, healing, prayer, questions being asked. And there are so many glorious stories of what happens in home.

One of my homes, one of my favorite is the home that lost its roof because there were some friends who wanted to get their friend close to Jesus, and they took the roof off of the house and lowered him down in the midst of that pack. Imagine a home so packed that just a few guys couldn't even get in, and they were so desperate to get their friend to Jesus in that home, that they lowered him down on ropes. Can you imagine that? Imagine there's Jesus speaking all of a sudden right down in front of him in this home. Well, homes are used for many, many glorious purposes.

So here in this home, Jesus had a very busy day and he was healing Peter's mother-in-law, but it was just about to get a lot busier than it was when he was there just with Peter and his mother-in-law. And that takes us to the next verse here in verse 16 and 17. And when evening had come, so there's this marker in time, this woman is healed and then evening comes and then something happened. They brought to him many who were demon possessed. People were just bringing their friends.

They were bringing people who had very pernicious, terrible, ravaging, spiritual, demonic possession. And Jesus begins to heal, he begins to heal them. He begins to heal all of them. I mean all of them. Imagine that.

Everyone coming into that house gets healed. Oh, it wouldn't be nice to have a house like that. Everyone who comes into your house gets healed. Well, that's what was happening. And here, what I love about this, Well, there's much to love about this part here as all of these parts, but you find you find friends taking action Here's someone who knows somebody who's demon possessed and that friend brings him to Jesus Here's another person that has another sickness, and that person goes and gets them out of bed and says, let's go and be near Jesus.

This is the mercy of a friend. Are you a friend like that? Are you a friend who's looking out for your friends who are having various, you know, kinds of maladies and difficulties, and you know that the very best thing you can do is to take them to Jesus Christ. And that's what these people were doing. Now in this section in verses 16 and 17, there are two categories of infirmities that are mentioned here.

There are physical diseases and there are spirits that are causing demon possession. Those are the two basic categories that Jesus is dealing with and He is healing all of them. And these diseases are, as we know, they have, all of these diseases have one single cause, and that is the fall. So all of these spiritual and physical maladies can be related to the fall of man. Whenever you're sick, you must think about the fall.

You must think about that fateful move of Adam and Eve in the garden. That whenever we are sick, that we remember the source of it. We remember how enormously significant sickness is, what has happened to this world as a result. And it should cause us just to remember the true doctrine of sin and death that all of it implies. And of course, as we said yesterday, while every single sickness comes from the fall, every individual sickness is not necessarily related to your personal sin.

That's an important distinction. And so here is this situation where the demonized are being brought into the home. Now, whenever you read scripture, you should always at least do this one thing. You should ask, who am I in this story? Which character am I in the story?

Or which character should I be? Or which character do I want to be? Which character should I not be? That's a that's a really important interpretive question to help us understand how it applies to us when you think about how you apply scripture there are always several questions that you should be asking of the text. And one of those is, who am I in the text?

Now here, you could ask, are you the owner of the home with the sick person? The person who has someone sick in the home and Jesus Christ comes to deal with that person. Are you the person bringing the sick? Are you the person bringing the demonized? Or are you the sick person?

Are you the demonized person? You always should ask yourself, who am I in the story? And just for a moment, let me just give a pause to help us consider that. Who are you in the story? There's nothing more important than understanding who we are.

And that's what that question helps us to see. Now, think about this for a minute. Remember, people are bringing demon-possessed people into your house. Okay? You got that?

So Is it okay to bring demon-possessed people in your house? Answer, yes. It's not okay, it's a blessing to do it. Now, if you're thinking too much of your own comforts, then it might be too much for you. But it wasn't too much for Peter.

Now, Peter had his family in that house. And our comforts should not be so important to us that we neglect those who have greater problems. Because if Jesus is there, then all is well. Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. And I don't want to pretend that we have no role in protecting our houses or anything like that.

But I think that this shows us the legitimacy of this practice. We should not be so inward and protective that we miss ministering to some of the most pernicious and difficult issues that are in our culture. And so, they brought him many who were demon possessed. That's what the text says. Now, as a congregation here, going through the Word of God, trying to be shaped by God, trying to be changed by Him, we should ask ourselves this question.

Are we dealing with the demon possessed? Now, when we, next week we'll deal in more detail with this whole subject, when we deal with the Gaterine Demoniac. We're not going, We're not going to focus on demon possession and unclean spirits here this morning, but we will deal with it next week in a greater level of depth. We're just going to graze over it here and recognize the great theme that's here. So here, Christ is disarming the works of the devil in this house.

That is one of the purposes of every house. Dedicate your house to the disarming of the works of the devil. And there was a purpose for all of this. This was happening in this house for a reason. And Jesus, He tells us why it was happening.

We're not left blind with why this situation was taking place. It was taking place because Jesus was declaring that He was the Messiah and that He takes our infirmities. And that's why he quotes Isaiah 53. In verse 17, you see he's quoting the Septuagint, that it might be fulfilled, which is spoken by the prophet Isaiah, saying he himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses. So this was to declare the nature of the ministry of Jesus, to take our infirmities and to bear our sicknesses.

This is what salvation is. This is what happens when Jesus Christ touches you on the hand and changes your heart. He bears your infirmities and He takes away your sicknesses. Now how did he do that? How did Jesus bear your sicknesses?

Number one, he experienced them. And this made him a sympathetic high priest. Number two, he had compassion toward them. Number three, he broke their power on the cross. Number four, he bore our sins and our sicknesses on the cross as a payment for that day when all of our sicknesses and diseases and our tears and our sorrows would finally be washed away for all eternity in heaven." Now, as we come to the end of this section, I just want to say a couple of things.

First of all, how beneficial it is, please don't forget this one thing, how beneficial it is to be a friend of a friend of Jesus. How beneficial it is to be a friend of a friend of Jesus. Because that's what was happening in this house. The friends of the friends of Jesus were bringing for the purpose of healing. You know, they were friends of the friends of Jesus.

Now, you have friends, you have many friends out there, and many of them don't, they've never been healed. Their sicknesses have never been born by Jesus. Their infirmities have never been carried by Him. And you're their friend for this kind of purpose. What a blessing it is to be a friend of the friend of Jesus.

And then the other thing here is just how reflective all of this is of the gospel. And that is, you know, every sickness is a reflection of the gospel. And first of all, it's a reflection of the Gospel because we're never ever made clean unless Jesus Christ has willed that we would be made clean. And no one can be saved unless Jesus Christ wills that be saved. Why?

Because when you're unsaved, you're dead in your trespasses and sins. You have no life in you. You are like a dead body. And you need something from outside of you to will you to life, to bring you to life. And physical sickness is just like salvation in that sense.

You cannot get well, you cannot be saved unless the will of God would make it so. It's not our choice, but it's his choice to sovereignly save us. And then he touches us and we are made clean. It's His cleansing blood, His water of life makes us clean. That's why we get baptized so that we can show a picture of what it means to be washed, to be cleansed, to be baptized, to go all the way under, to get completely saturated with that water, to demonstrate what has happened to you through the cross of Jesus Christ.

And then we find in the next section in verse 18, the cost of following Jesus. You know, with so many benefits of being near Jesus, there were so many who loved the benefits. They wanted to be the beneficiaries of such marvelous miracles and helps. And so Jesus is perceiving this because they're just flooding in and it's impossible for Him to do much else. He decides to strike out for the other side.

And just as he is getting ready to leave, he encounters two different people. And so let's talk about them. And in these encounters, we learn about the cost of following Jesus Christ. Now, in verse 18, we read, Jesus saw the great multitudes about him, and he gave a command to depart from the other side. So he needed to get away from this crowd.

And then a scribe comes to him first. He has two conversations before they get in the boat. I picture these as sort of rushed conversations because he's wanting to go. And they do seem that way because Jesus has kind of terse things to say, and then he's literally off to the winds. And so the first conversation our Lord has is with a scribe.

And he's kind of an unusual scribe, because he speaks really favorably with an air of respect and adoration. And the scribe comes and says, teacher, I'll follow you wherever you go. And then Jesus replies to him. First of all, he acknowledges Jesus as a teacher. Most scribes didn't do that.

They were the king teachers. And Jesus was messing with their territory. But this scribe acknowledges Jesus as a teacher. Jesus does two really pivotal things here in this conversation with this scribe, and also with the other fellow who comes after, who is a disciple and also has significant zeal for the Lord. The first thing I think that Jesus is doing is that he's teaching his disciples how to grapple with professions of faith.

And he's showing them how to detect people who want something different than what Christianity really gives. How to see who they really are. Now of course Jesus has a little bit of an edge here right? Because he knows their hearts. His response is the perfect response.

Now notice how just disconnected the response seems to the question, or I mean the proposition. But Jesus is wise. He knows what is going on in this scribe, so he answers him according to reality rather than the question that seems to bear witness to the reality. But he's teaching his disciples how to grapple with professions of faith. And often, you know, people make professions of faith because they go through a hard season in their lives and they want things to be better.

They want to be happy again. They want to be a better dad. They want to be a better worker. They look around and they see their friends who are Christians and they say, I want to be like that. I've seen something in you and I want that too.

Well unfortunately they're actually wanting the wrong thing. When someone sees something in you and they want that and they tell you, you should correct them because they're wanting something different than what is really there. They want to be filled with these exact same blessings, and so they want to go get their lives fixed. And so Jesus understands what's really going on in this man. Second, he's also confronting those who come with mixed motives.

He exposes them and he reveals to them that they do not want Christianity. They want the fruits of Christianity. They want something else. And so this just brings us into the whole discussion about making professions of faith. Teacher, I'll follow you wherever you go.

That's sort of a profession of faith. How do you grapple with professions of faith? Well, professions of faith aren't worth that much. They're worth something. They at least indicate that something has gone on.

But professions of faith are not enough. That's why Jesus earlier said, many will come to me and say to me, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name? Have we not cast out many demons in your name? Have we not done many miracles in your name? And he will say, I never knew you.

Depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. The heart of the matter is the desire to practice obedience before God. That wasn't obviously the motivation of this man here. So everyone should not just be admitted by a profession of faith. We need to be carefully discussing what that means.

And here's what it means. When someone makes a profession of faith, you must help them count the cost. That's what Jesus does here. You must help them count the cost. They need to understand the cross.

They need to understand the losses. They need to understand that it might destroy your family. It might completely break up your family. And father and mother are turned against one another because of the gospel. It may mean that you lose everything.

It may mean that you lose all of your institutional favor that you've enjoyed for so long. Even your occupation may be bound up in things that are bankrupt and wrong. And following Jesus means more than making a profession of faith and seeing something good in somebody else's life. So when we're dealing with people, we need to make sure that they have counted the cost. And Jesus is doing that here.

So he's demonstrating with how you grapple with the making of a profession of faith. And Jesus does that by saying foxes have holes and birds and birds of the air have nests. So Jesus is comparing his life with foxes and birds. And You know, these, you know, foxes and birds have at least some kind of stable existence. They have a place to go.

They have a place to sort of nest themselves and hide themselves. In the case of a fox in the ground, they can go down into this cave and be protected by all these things from threats and weather. But Jesus is saying that a disciple of Jesus doesn't even have that much. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. You know, this world is not His home.

This world is not the home of the believer. And you can see this all through the Gospels, where Jesus is being shunned. He's being pushed out. He came to his own and his own did not receive him. In other words, when someone comes to the Lord, they need to know that their own may not receive them as a result of that.

He came to Judea in John chapter 5 and they sought to kill him. In Galilee they wanted to cast him out. In John 6, 66, many of his disciples would not walk with him anymore. In Gadara, they beg him to leave. In Samaria, they don't even give him lodging.

I mean, they don't even give him a place to sleep because of the nature of his message. And so Jesus here, he's declaring his poverty in the world, and that if one would be a disciple, he would have to understand that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. This is the possible end of it. And in many ways, Jesus, I don't know quite how to grapple with this, but Jesus is not like Peter, who does have a house. He's not like Barnabas, who does have some land.

But the potential for losing that house and that land is easily conceivable and also should be easy to take when it happens so that we're not wrapped up with these things that will rust and rot and finally burn. And so Jesus is tempering this man's zeal to help him count the cost by telling him that he could lose absolutely everything. And that's the cost of being a disciple of Jesus. You know, you have to walk away from so many things. You know, so many pet ideologies, so many relationships, and so many things.

That's what it means to be a disciple. So when people express such joy of the blessings that they might actually someday be able to be like you. Temper that with the fact that they have a Savior who has no place to lay his head. And you're a follower of that Savior. And you too may have that.

He says, the son of man. Now this is a very significant statement here. The son of man. Now there are 80 instances of the term son of man. He says, the son of man.

And then these things that we've just discussed. And you can trace this back to Daniel chapter 7 where Daniel was watching in the night visions and behold one like the Son of Man was coming in the clouds of the heavens, and he came to the ancient of days." This is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, coming to the ancient of days. That's the picture in the book of Daniel. And When we encounter the phrase, son of man, it always means something and there are several things that it means. And also, this fits into the argument that Jesus is making against these men who have not counted the cost.

So we're still talking about how you count, how you help people count the cost. You have to understand who the Son of Man is. And the Son of Man is exclusively Jesus Christ. The term is used in these kinds of contexts. I'll give you four of them.

In the context where the Son of Man is humiliated, that's one context. The other is when he has heavenly dominion and when he has being exalted after humiliation. And then it's also used of humiliation after being exalted. So that's how the term is used. In tempering the profession of someone who's very excited, they need to understand who this Jesus is.

He is the Son of Man. And so Jesus is declaring himself to be the Messiah here in this passage. He's the suffering servant. He takes all their diseases. He is the one.

So after dealing with his scribe, Jesus turns to someone else who's identified as a disciple. And I don't think this is one of the 12. That's my opinion. Some people think it is. There were the 12 and then there were others that were often called disciples as well.

And that's just my perspective. It's probably, it's not an important point really. But he is called a disciple, a follower, in verses 21 and 22. Then another of his disciples said to him, Lord, let me first go and bury my father. But Jesus said to him, Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.

So Jesus understands his motives and he says, let the dead bury their dead. Now, is Jesus saying, your dad just died, just let his body rot, come with me? You think that's what he was saying? It's possible. I don't think that's very likely what Jesus was dealing with here.

It doesn't say that his father was dead. He doesn't say his father's died. You can't really read that into it. And if his father had just died, he would most likely be at a funeral. But to bury one's father was kind of a standard term that you used in those days to talk about fulfilling your family obligations.

So if I were alive in that day, I said, you know, I'm going to bury my father. What I meant by that is something like what I'm doing now. I'm with my father, we're living together, he's going to die someday. But it also meant that to bury your father was to receive his inheritance. So you are in this window of time until you receive your inheritance from your father.

And that's what you're attending to. You're attending to your inheritance. And so even though he's not dead or he's not even close to dead, it could mean an indefinite postponement of service to Christ. It could take years. I believe what this man was saying is, you know, I've got a few more years on this before I'm ready to serve you.

And that's what he meant. It's, And even the closest family relationships cannot stand the way of obedience. That's one of the great, great points here. Now, you know, maybe you've heard people say, I've heard young men say this, and whenever you hear a young man say this, it should spark a conversation. Young men who say, I'm going to make my money now so that I can give to the Lord.

And then during that time, they spend 24-7 making money. And they care nothing about the church, they care nothing about evangelism, They care nothing about filling their minds with the Word of God. They're going to make their money so they can serve the Lord later. I think that's what this man was saying. Let me go bury my father, and then I'll come and serve you then I'll have this inheritance and I can really serve you so Jesus understands that whatever whatever he was exactly thinking he wasn't thinking He wasn't thinking about being a true disciple of Jesus Christ.

And so, he confronts him on that. And there are certain idols that people have that keep them from serving Christ. You might call this family idolatry. You might call it the idolatry of riches. I'm not sure which one it was, but it was probably one of those two where he makes a profession but actually he has greater loyalties.

Family idolatry is actually a big problem with human beings, and so is idolatry of possessions, and it keeps us from serving Jesus Christ. And so we are delaying the serving of Christ because we're doing something now that will make us so much better later. But we don't really have tomorrow. That's the problem. We only have today.

Jesus said, He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he who does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it and he who loses his life for my sake will find it." That's the issue that's on the table in this man's interchange with Jesus. Now, I think there's much that we can say about this whole matter of family idolatry.

Jesus says, let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God." That's what he says in Luke chapter 9. The parallel passage says, let the dead bury their dead, but you go preach. See, this man didn't want to preach. He wanted to do something else with his life. He had something better than to preach the gospel of the kingdom of God.

And that was a barrier. He didn't want to spend his time preaching the kingdom of God. He wanted something more long term, more involved in his family and in his inheritance. And I hope that none of these things would ever hold us back. And then in chapter 8, 23, we come to the final thing that we'll consider this morning, 23 to 27, where we find that the winds and the waves obey Jesus Christ.

Now we turn to the issue of fear. We turn to the issue of calamities that bring out fears in us. We can all relate to this. So Now he got into the boat and his disciples followed him. So, again, we encounter Jesus, now he's in the boat.

He must have been exhausted. He's been involved in nonstop healing and casting out unclean spirits. And now he's going to take a trip in a boat that's about five miles to the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. And so he gets into the boat, Mark says, without any preparation. He just gets in the boat and he just seems to fall asleep in the stern of the boat.

Now this section contains one of the most important questions that you'll ever consider. And I want us to consider this question very, very carefully this morning as a church. And the question is the question that Jesus asks. Why are you fearful, O you of little faith? Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?

Now, I know enough about men to know, and I've stood in the congregation enough times to know that there is fear in the congregation of God's people. And this question is relevant. Why are you fearful, O you of little faith? So I want us to just sort of relax and settle into this question between now and the time that we conclude. It's a wonderful question.

Hey, this, this, it was this question, it was this text that was the conversion text of John Owen. John Owen was 26 years old and he went to church to hear a great preacher. He was a Calvinist. He was arguing matters of religion. And he went to hear a great preacher, Edmund Calamy, at a church.

So he came to the church at age 26, and Calamy wasn't there. Some country bumpkin preacher was there. And he was there with his cousin, and his cousin said, hey, let's get out of here. Let's go to that other church where Calumy is. And for some reason, for some reason, John Owen kept his seat.

And this was the text of the morning and he and he and on that morning his doubts and his fears just slipped away from him and he was born again and he felt himself for the first time and adopted Son of God, even though he was a Calvinist and an arguer of the matters of religion. His heart changed. He no longer was involved in just having theological discussions. He had a Savior. He was a son.

He was born again. On this question, why are you fearful? Oh, you of little faith. Now we learn here that the storm was a tempest. Tempest, that word seismos, It's where we get our word seismograph, right?

This was a big storm. I mean, this was a timber-shaking storm. And Mark says the waves were, he uses words that indicate that waves are just attacking the ship. If you can imagine just waves attacking a ship, that's how it felt. And there was water coming over, you know, over the sides.

And then, of course, in verse 24, we learn that Jesus was asleep. And then his disciples awaken him and say, Lord, save us. We are perishing. And then he says, why are you so fearful? Oh, you of little faith.

That's the question. Why are you so fearful? Oh, you of little faith. Now, the disciples have done the right thing. They took their calamity and they flew to Jesus.

They did the right thing. Absolutely. That's what you should always do. They formed the right pattern. Fly to Jesus in times of calamity.

They pray. It's a fervent prayer and it's a real prayer. You know, calamity is so good. There's nothing like calamity to give you real prayers, real fervent prayers. You know, not those pasty, wimpy, stupid prayers, you know, that don't have any meaning that you pray so many times.

But I mean prayers of desperation. That's what they prayed. This is one reason calamity is good. It gives you real prayers. Gives you better prayers.

And that's what they had here. Now There are a couple things I want us to recognize. This is really important. Did you notice who Jesus addresses first? Well, He doesn't address the problem first.

He doesn't address the storm. That's the perceived problem. Often, the real problem is not the perceived problem. And Jesus is going to deal with the real problem here. And he deals with his disciples before he deals with the storm.

So, he doesn't do anything about the wind and the waves until he talks to his disciples. So because he's going to deal with the real problem. The real problem is not that threat. Now you have a, you know, you may have some big threat upon your life right now, and it seems so big, And you don't know how you're going to get over it, but that's not your biggest problem. You don't understand what the real problem is.

Now that's a problem, but it's not the big problem that you have to deal with. It's not the thing that you should focus on, necessarily, primarily. There's a primary focus, and Jesus shows us here by speaking to the disciples before he even addresses the problem. And that's so true of so many of our issues. They have sort of outward expressions, but there's something deeper there that needs to be addressed.

And so he addresses the problem with this question. Why are you fearful? Oh, you of little faith. That's what needed to be dealt with. These men were obeying Christ.

They were following Him. They were in the boat with him. And yet, and yet they were, they were faithless in the midst of this crisis. Now that happens to disciples. This doesn't mean that they were unbelievers.

This means that they were disciples of Jesus and they were struggling with their faith. You know, Jesus has already spoken to them about faith in 630. He said, now if God so closed the grass of the field, which today is and tomorrow is thrown into the oven. Will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?" He's already talked about worries about clothing and faith. He said it to Peter when Peter was sinking, when he was walking on the water.

And Jesus caught him and he said to him, Oh you of little faith, why did you doubt? In Matthew 16 the disciples were worried that they didn't bring any bread with them. And Jesus was aware of it. And he says, O you of little faith, why do you reason among yourselves because you've brought no bread? So this matter of little O you of little faith is something that Jesus repeats all the time.

You know, maybe your father or your grandfather always repeats something, he always says the same thing, you hear it over and over again. Well, that's what Jesus is doing to his disciples. O you of little faith. O you of little faith. He's doing that to be a blessing to them, to help them understand what the real problem is.

Their real problem is not that storm. He'll deal with that later. And so, but this is a gigantic storm. And the disciples are so worried here that they're going to lose everything and so they're worried. You know, there's a story that I read this week from the history of Scotland.

It's just a story. I don't even know if it's true. But a naval officer is at sea with his family, and there's a gigantic storm that breaks out. And his wife is in another cabin. And he's as cool as a cucumber.

And his wife cries out, What? We're perishing. Why aren't you fretting? Why aren't you doing something? He's standing like a rock, you know, at the helm.

And He grabs his wife's hand, takes her out of the cabin and onto the deck of the ship, and he draws his sword and he puts the tip of his sword on her breast. And he says to you, are you afraid? And she says, I'm not afraid. He says, why are you not afraid? Because you are my husband and I know you love me and you would never harm me.

And he says to his wife, that's why I'm not afraid. Because he is my husband and He has brought about this storm, and I'm not afraid. And so Jesus is dealing with His disciples on that whole level of lack of faith that makes them fearful. Because lack of faith basically is losing touch with the goodness and the mercy and the wisdom of God for your life. That He's arranged all this.

That He's numbered all of your hairs of your head. He keeps all of your tears in a bottle. He knows all of the steps of your feet before you take them. He knows the thoughts you have before you even have them. He knows you.

He loves you. He's hemmed you in behind and before. He's laid His hand upon you. But when you forget that, it means you've lost a sense of your faith. Oh, you of little...

Why are you so worried? Oh, you of little faith. So Jesus deals with the faith first, And then secondly, he rebukes the weather, he rebukes the winds. Now, he has rebuked the devil, he's rebuked the fever, same word idea used, and now he rebukes the winds and the sea. And this just shows us again that fear, you know, fear always has to be considered next to authority, the authority of God.

That God governs all inanimate matter. He says, let there be light. He causes the red seed apart. He brings rain and hail. And he brings everything through physical operations of the world by his own power and for his own glory out of his own wisdom.

He withholds rain. He makes a storm. He unmakes a storm. He is completely sovereign over all physical matter. Every single...

There's not a single molecule in the universe that is not controlled by the hand of God, not a single molecule anywhere. Every single leaf that falls off the tree lands in Exactly the same place that the sovereign Lord of the universe desires it to land Every tree in a hurricane comes down exactly where the ruler of the universe desires it to land And so we look around in our world and we notice, you know, things just seem to be hanging by a thread. My life seems to be hanging by a thread. I don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow. I don't know where I'm going to sleep tomorrow.

I have, you know, I'm going to be overcome by all these calamities that are about ready to come down. It's as if it's like living under the Damocles sword that is going to finally shred the thread and then come down and put you out forever. And that's why Jesus says, he asked this question, oh you of little faith, why are you afraid? So this storm, it's a parable of life. And it's a parable of the sovereign hand of God.

OK. I want to give you some applications here as we wind up. The fever, the unclean spirits, the insincere men, the storm, they all point to the sovereignty of God in sickness and spiritual forces and even nature. And there are many things that are sort of fixable in this world with surgeons and repairmen, but there's only one that can ultimately fix any problem, and that is God. Christ exercises exclusive control of every situation.

Second, getting rid of the storm is not the most important thing in your life right now. The most important thing is to have faith. Your greatest danger is not your storm. Your greatest danger is to forget the majestic, sovereign hand of God in the world. That's your greatest danger.

God wants to use storms to build you up. That's why He's given you trials. And He can stop fever and cast out demons and expose phonies and calm storms. That's what He does. I want to give you a series of statements that I've tried to carefully craft for this occasion.

God's wise actions are ordained out of God's gracious wisdom. The presence of your afflictions are not according to chance. The timing of your afflictions are all a part of God's ordained plan to sum up all things in Christ. The weight of your afflictions are carefully measured to bring you forth as a goal. The number of your afflictions are strategically appointed to buffet you enough to change you.

The length of your afflictions will be no shorter or longer than what God pleases in order to enlarge your patience to what He desires it to be. The outcome of your afflictions are designed to address a God-glorifying end. The arms which brought the afflictions hold you through them. That's why Fabius Winslow said, and I'll close with this, Welcome the discipline whose rod of correction blossoms into such golden fruit as this. Would you pray with me?

Lord, you send sickness and storms. Oh, Lord, that you'd help us to think rightly about them in this world. I pray for every child here that they would so understand what it means to have faith, and every adult, to teach it to them. Amen.