The Gospel of John: The Glory in the Darkness - Mar 16, 2025 (Myles Holmes)

Hello and welcome to the Redemption Church Podcast.

We're a church in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada that exists to glorify God through the fulfillment of the Great Commission and the spirit of the Great Commandment.

Thanks for joining us today.

If you have your Bibles, and I hope that you do, you can open them up to John chapter 6, verses 16 to 26.

John 6:16–26

If you don't have a Bible, the ushers are making their way to the front, and you can flag him down.

And he is a marathon runner, so he'll get over this side too and get you over there as well.

This past week, something extraordinary and rare happened.

We had a total lunar eclipse on Thursday night into Friday morning.

Now, just by way of hands, how many of you saw the total lunar eclipse at 2.30 in the morning on Friday morning?

Did anyone see it?

Okay, a few of you.

Now that's like a public confession of when you go to the bathroom, probably.

But if you didn't see it, you are in luck because my wife and I woke up for it.

Now, when I say my wife and I, what I really mean is my wife woke up for it.

I did wake up for it, but I didn't wear my glasses, so I went outside, I looked at the wrong part of the sky, I declared it was too cloudy, you can't see the moon.

I went right back to bed.

She looked at the other side of the sky and saw indeed blue huge, it was there a hundred percent.

And so you're in luck because we took a picture.

Now, when I say we, again, I mean my wife, but here it is.

Here's the picture of the blood moon, they call it the blood moon.

Now, this is what's fascinating about the total lunar eclipse, or really any stargazing in general, is that if you want to see it best, you likely know that you need to get to the darkness.

The best view only comes really in complete darkness, and in fact, even in this, we needed to get to the darkest darkness we could find.

Whether it's the moon or the stars, just the brilliance of the night sky, you cannot see it in the light.

Light pollution ruins it.

What is always there is unseen because of light pollution.

You need to get into the darkness.

And that's exactly why so many of us miss it.

Because we're unwilling to go to the darkest of the dark, the middle of the night.

And the same way, John 6, verses 16 to 26 teach us something profound that the spiritual sight of the beauty of Jesus Christ is best seen in the darkness of your life.

John 6:16–26

That is, if you and I want to see the fullness of the glory of Jesus Christ, we will have to allow ourselves at times to be dragged into the dark places that we really never want to go in life.

And I'm sure that even as I speak now, maybe you're in it right now, or maybe you can think back to a time in your life where it was just incredibly dark, maybe some trial, some sickness you were facing, but there was like this sort of spiritual adrenaline that that ran through your spiritual muscles, and you clung to Jesus like you could just never do it before.

I just talked to a pastor recently, actually, who told me that as funny as this sounds, he misses when he had cancer and he's completely healed of it, but he misses it because those that time that he spent with Jesus, he he he was clinging to him so closely.

That's in the storms of life.

The trials, the suffering, the emptiness, that we come face to face with the true nature of who Jesus is.

And without periods of profound darkness in your life, you may never see Jesus for who he is at all.

Now, this is the heart of John 6.

In fact, in verse 26, what we'll see is that while the crowd of 5,000 that Jesus had just fed missed Jesus and therefore eternal life, that the reason for that was because they were full from the bread that he had multiplied and given to him.

The disciples, on the other hand, find themselves in this story on a boat, facing a life-threatening storm, the closest, I'm sure, that any of them would ever be to death.

And when their life was threatened, in the darkness of the night, in the midst of the most brutal storm you could imagine, they saw Jesus clearer than ever.

Not in the comfort of fullness, but in the desperate, dark situation that revealed his glory.

Here's the question for you and I this morning.

The question for you and I is this Are we the crowd that misses Jesus because we're so filled with the stuff of the world?

Or are we the disciples?

And you know what really scares me, and I think you would agree with me, is that it's easy, it's much easier today than it's ever been in the history of humanity to be like the crowd than it is to be the to the to be like the disciples.

Today it's easy to be like the crowd, it's easy to be full.

I mean, you and I, we do not need a miracle, do we, to be full?

Whether it's physical, you you know, we pray things like give us this day our daily bread, but we really have no idea what it's like to be dependent on God for that because there's seven superstores within five minutes of here.

We live in a world where there is bread to fill us up everywhere.

We're full of comfort, full of success, full of entertainment, full of material things.

Now it is easier than ever to be filled with things and to be full in all the wrong ways so that when Jesus is presented, we miss him entirely.

And even as I look around this room, I'm so aware that so many of you are here because Jesus was willing to bring you to this dark place where all the things that once filled you up no longer did, and there in the darkness of that dark, dark night you would never want to go to again, you saw Jesus like never before.

It's his mercy, it's his love.

If we are full in the things of this world, we miss the depth of the glory of the life that he offers.

If we stay in the light, we miss the miracle in the dark.

And so this is what I want you to take away this morning.

That Jesus, the glory of Jesus, is seen clearest in the darkness of night.

If you will see Jesus as the satisfaction of your soul, if you can truly sing what we sang this morning, that everything we need is found in him, that will only be impressed deeply upon your soul through the darkest, hardest storms of life that you go through.

But in that darkness, there will be an incredible sweetness in seeing Jesus like you couldn't have otherwise.

Let's see this in the text together.

Would you stand with me as we read from God's Word?

John chapter 6, verses 16, reading down to 26.

John 6:16

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into the boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum.

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.

The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing.

When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were frightened.

But he said to them, It is I, do not be afraid.

Then they were glad to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat was at land to which they were going.

On the next day the crowd remained on the other side of the sea, that remained on the other side of the sea, saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not entered the boat with his disciples, but that his disciples had gone away alone.

Other boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks.

So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor his disciples, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernum seeking Jesus.

When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, Rabbi, when did you come here?

Jesus answered them, Truly, truly I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

Let's pray together.

Father, we bow before you.

And God, we pray that you would show us the greatness, the beauty of the glory of your Son Jesus Christ.

Yeah, Lord, that's an easy thing to pray, but it is an impossible thing to achieve merely by human effort.

Because, Lord, we need to see not with our physical eyes, but with the eyes of our heart.

And so it's our prayer, God, that you would do the miraculous.

God, we need you.

We're desperate for you.

So speak to us and receive the glory that you receive when we hear you and respond in faith.

God, we pray this in the name of your son.

Amen.

You can grab a seat.

When I first came to this text, I found it strange and maybe not, maybe beyond strange, a little frustrating.

It was frustrating to me that in John chapter 6, last week we saw this in verses 1 to 15, there's the feeding of the 5,000.

John 6 · chapter mention

And then from 6 to really 21, but it goes on further, the story.

There's Jesus walking on the water, and then Jesus comes back to the feeding of the 5,000.

And you need to know that as a preacher, that's incredibly frustrating because you say, well, when do I deal with the feeding of the 5,000?

And the explanation of it, was I supposed to do that this last week?

Was I supposed to clump it into this week?

To me, it puzzled me.

What connection does the storm that the disciples face and the hunger that the crowd has, what connection do those things have?

The answer is this.

Both of those things are life-threatening.

Both the crowd coming to Jesus in their severe hunger, and the disciples looking for Jesus in the midst of the storm face the same reality.

Their lives are threatened.

Hunger can kill you, wind can kill you.

And this passage, it has something to teach us about how you and I come to experience the fullness and the sufficiency of Christ.

It has something to teach us about what Paul speaks about in Colossians when he says, For in him, Jesus, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him.

What Jesus wants to teach us about this morning is that our insufficiency, the insufficiency that the crowds face, the insufficiency that the disciples face, are purposefully put into our lives so that we might see the sufficiency of Jesus Christ.

It's only in our desperate need that we are pointed to the one alone who can satisfy and deliver Jesus Christ.

There is, though, a significant difference between the hunger of the crowd and the desperation that the disciples experience in the storm.

The hunger of the crowd can be temporarily satisfied.

In fact, that's why when Jesus walks across the water and the disciples travel across the water, the crowd follows him because they're starting to get hungry again.

And there's a way to solve hunger.

You just eat again.

When you find yourself in a storm, however, there's no immediate remedy.

You and I likely could only imagine.

There's no way out.

And in that storm, the disciples, they have nowhere to look.

They are scanning the horizon in the midst of the night, in the darkness of the storm, looking for Jesus because it's only they they know only his presence can deliver them.

We have more control over our hunger, don't we?

And we can meet, especially our spiritual hunger, with a meal while our deeper needs remain unmet.

It's the disciples' desperation then that we just read about that we are after this morning.

That's what we want.

And as we look at the crowds and we look at the disciples, we want to be in the disciples' shoes because there are glories that can only be seen in the darkness, in the spiritual storm that the disciples faced.

And what I pray this morning is that the Holy Spirit would use the disciples' experience, that we would be immersed into the disciples' experience on that boat and in the darkness of the night, along with them, see the glory of Jesus Christ as He they saw it.

That there is a fullness we experience in Christ, that we only experience when we are emptied, not only of every worldly satisfaction, but of all self-sufficiency.

In light of that, then this morning, we need to understand this first.

We need to understand the danger of false fullness, the danger of false fullness.

We begin to understand this, don't we?

That the disciple situation is better.

It is better to receive treatment for the disease that you are facing than to just receive treatment for the symptoms, right?

In fact, if you broke your leg and you went into the doctor's office and they just said, okay, here's some painkillers, you know, you would be incredibly maybe happy in the short term, but upset that they didn't reset the bone and your leg, that they didn't deal with the problem.

That's incredibly frustrating when medical so-called professionals do that, isn't it?

We want to deal with the disease.

Numbing the symptom isn't the same as healing.

And in the same way, what I want you to see this morning is that temporary satisfaction in life, it certainly can numb our emptiness and it certainly can quiet our discomfort, but it doesn't deal with the disease that is causing the emptiness.

It doesn't deal with the disease that's causing the discomfort.

Loved one, this is what I want you to understand that there is a great spiritual danger in numbing our spiritual pain in a way that only temporarily solves our hunger.

It's incredibly dangerous.

There's a real danger in false fullness.

There's a danger in that we think we're full, we're full of comfort, we're full of success, we're full of distraction, so that when we see what Jesus offers, we are entirely unaffected by it.

It's a danger of false fullness.

It's exactly how Jesus diagnoses the problem.

Would you look with me at verse 26?

Look down at your copy of the Bible at verse 26.

It says, Jesus answered them, Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.

They weren't following him because they recognized who he was.

They were following him because he had filled their stomachs.

Martin Lloyd Jones says this.

He says, the worst thing that can happen to a man is that he have satisfaction apart from God.

Worst thing that can happen to a man is that he has satisfaction apart from God.

In fact, Paul says this in Romans 1.

Paul says that the greatest judgment of God that you can experience in this life is that if God gives you over to your desires and gives you over to your satisfactions, because then you have no hope of life.

Worst thing that can happen to a man is to have satisfaction apart from God.

Jesus warns about this exact danger.

In Revelations 3, 17, he says, this, for you say, speaking to the church, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.

False fullness, it blinds you to the truth of what is really going on.

And here's what needs to happen this morning is that you and I, we take our mirrors of self-examination, we look at ourselves and we ask ourselves this question Is it possible that we are masking deep spiritual symptoms by filling ourselves with worldly comforts or temporary solutions?

Instead of desperately clinging to Christ because He is all we have.

I don't know about you, I I rarely feel full in life.

Life often feels like I'm bringing out a sponge and there's just nothing left.

I don't know about you, but I often feel tired, exhausted.

I just like there most of the time I just feel like I don't know if I have enough to give.

That's my I mean I experience that every Sunday preaching.

I every Sunday I finish preaching, I have this dreadful feeling.

It's as soon as I close the door in my car to get home.

I have this dreadful feeling of like, I just preached all the material I have, and I it was a good run, you know, we're done.

I don't have anything left to give.

And yet there is this supernatural feeling that happens in our emptiness where God comes, the Holy Spirit comes and fills us with what we do not know we have.

If you've ever read the book of Ecclesiastes, you know that it is Solomon's great life experiment with perhaps more resources than anyone has ever had in the history of humanity.

Solomon does this sort of experiment to see that if anything can provide pleasure.

He looks at wealth, accomplishments, wisdom.

At one point, Solomon he even hires a choir of people to follow him around and just sing songs all day.

I don't know if that was like ancient Spotify.

To me, it seems incredibly weird and awkward.

But he was really grasping at straws.

He was trying everything.

What does he find?

He makes this declaration.

It is all vanity.

It is chasing the wind.

All of us, no matter what we do, are hungry in this world.

How else can we illustrate what vanity is?

It's the best way I can think about it, it's like this it's like Chinese food.

You ever notice this about Chinese food?

No matter how much you eat, seven seconds later, you are hungry for more.

And the nice thing about Chinese food is that there's always more in the fridge, and so you go back seven seconds later, you get more.

Now, between last week and this week, some of you guys are getting sick of the food illustrations.

And just a note, next week, Jesus says, I am the bread of life.

So these food illustrations are the yeast of your worries.

Nice.

Nice.

Seven people just left the church, I think.

There's a counter at the back.

Loved one, what's your spiritual escape food?

What is it that you turn to when you feel the emptiness, the pain, the sorrow of this life to distract you from the reality?

I'll tell you what it is for me.

I mean, years ago I would have never said that I was like this, but for me it's been control.

When life is hard, when life feels like a sponge that I'm ringing out, that I'm just not getting what I want from it, I turn to dreams of control, and I can fill myself up on just like a daydream.

I can fill myself up on what maybe tomorrow will look better.

Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up at this time and I'll work this way and I'll eat this food, and it's just a dream of control.

It's not even like having control, but after that sort of time of daydreaming, I can walk away feeling like, okay, yeah, everything's gonna be okay.

But the problem is that then tomorrow comes and everything's not okay.

The temporary soul satisfaction, and my question for you this morning is this what are you escaping with?

Is your thing attacking?

Achievements.

Like maybe maybe you dream with me, or maybe you even like put you know your hand to the plow and you work hard because you want that promotion, you want that degree, you want that recognition.

Maybe it's entertainment.

You look forward, like Fridays are the best thing because that's the time you have to entertain yourself, to watch Netflix, to scroll Instagram reels, to do your hobby, to game something to temporarily distract from the emptiness of this world.

Maybe it's comfort, it's food, it's shopping.

Maybe it's relationships for you.

Maybe that's your spiritual escape food.

You look for someone, or maybe you even look at someone and you dream of what they could be.

And just in dreaming of what they could possibly be, even though they're not that, you find this great pleasure.

Like maybe they'll be that someday.

The thing about hunger and pain and emptiness is that it actually has a design.

Pain, for instance, as horrible as it is, we can agree that pain is an incredibly good thing because it tells you that something is wrong.

In fact, one of the worst sicknesses you can have is called congenital insensitivity to pain.

I had to, by the way, Google that.

I don't typically know words that long.

That's when you don't feel pain.

And children with this, they'll have a broken leg and they'll go on playing, not even knowing that it's broken, and it can be it can be lethal.

Both the disciples in the crowd have pain.

For the crowd, it was hunger pain.

For the disciples, it was the pain of possibly facing destruction in the sea.

But the pain is not the problem.

The problem is in our solution.

And one of the things you and I need to see this morning is that our emptiness and our pain and our spiritual hunger and the trials that make us feel desperate and lack self-sufficiency, all of those things have a purpose.

God is using them.

What you and I need to see this morning is that God does his best work on empty.

What we need to see this morning is that the darkest clouds in your life will always have the richest reins of God's mercy.

There is a design.

It is providential in your life.

It is meant to point you to something, the source of true fulfillment.

This is what I want you to see, secondly, the design of deep darkness.

We must understand the design of deep darkness.

Look down at verse 16 with me.

Looking at the text with me, with your eyes on God's word, his written, true, inerrant word, look at verse 16 with me.

When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernum.

It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them.

The sea became rough because the strong wind was blowing.

Notice that in these verses, there is a lot of repetition going on.

Whenever you repeat darkness, evening, see, see, see, see, four times, it's like, you know, wives, you do this, you do this with your husbands, right?

You like you repeat it over and over and over again because you want them to get something.

And John is trying to signal us to something here.

Once would have been enough.

Like saying it was just dark would have been enough to set the scene for us, wouldn't it?

But John says twice, it was dark, it was evening.

John is painting here a physical picture, but in the Gospel of John, we've seen this already.

Whenever he talks about darkness, there's always something beneath the surface.

Darkness is never just a detail.

From the very beginning, John, the gospel writer, has drawn a stark contrast between light and darkness.

In John 1.5, he tells us Jesus is the light of the world shining in the darkness.

And the darkness cannot overcome him.

See, for John, darkness represents more than just the absence of light.

It symbolizes a spiritual blindness, a separation from God, a rejection of Jesus Christ, so that throughout John's gospel, this theme of the darkness comes up over and over again and again.

We saw it in John 3, when Nicodemus comes to meet Jesus, we are told that he met him at night, which is a clue given to us that Nicodemus is trapped in the spiritual darkness, unable to see the truth.

In John 8, 12, Jesus will declare, I am the light of the world.

Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.

Again, in John 13, 30, when Judas leaves to betray John, John tells us, and it was night.

It's not just a timestamp for John, it is a symbol of the deep spiritual darkness that Judas had chosen, that Nicodemus was living in, and now that the disciples found themselves in.

So here then in John 6, when John repeats that it's dark, he's signaling something more than the absence of light, he's signaling the presence of darkness.

Loved one, that without Jesus in your life, there is no direction, there is no security, there is no hope, there is only fear, struggle, uncertainty.

And this is the condition of all, every soul that is apart from Christ.

We're lost at sea.

We're blind to the truth.

We are powerless against the waves.

There's another detail here that we can't ignore.

I'm sure you heard it as I tried my best to over-emphasize it in the reading, and that is that four times John repeatedly mentions the sea, four times in just five verses.

Why the obsession with the sea?

It was the boogeyman for the Israelites.

It really was.

It represented chaos, danger.

Most significantly, though, it represented the judgment of God.

Think about it for a moment.

In Genesis 1, the waters are formless and chaotic.

You imagine like the middle of the raging sea, sloshing around until the Holy Spirit brings order.

Do you remember when Jonah runs from God?

Remember when Jonah experiences the judgment of God, where is he thrown?

Into the depths of the sea.

This is what parents would tell their children when they, you know, when they wanted them to behave.

Listen, I'm gonna throw you in the sea if you don't start acting right.

Israelites knew what the sea represented, but no story about the danger and judgment of the sea would have been more relevant to them than the crossing of the Red Sea.

Where they looked back and in time and space, as real as you and I are, they saw the Egyptians, the ones that they had been working for for so many years, swallowed up in judgment by the walls of the Red Sea coming crashing down on them, and they were no more for all of eternity.

John 6 is loaded with references from Exodus 16, so we can be sure that this is on the disciples' mind.

In fact, Jesus in verse 32, if you look down, we'll see that he makes a connection to Exodus 16.

He says, Truly, truly I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven, but my father who gives you the true bread from heaven.

And now the disciples find themselves not just hearing echoes of Israel's wilderness provision, but also of their deliverance through their the water.

Jesus had just provided the manna from heaven, and now they are on the water and they're facing the reality of judgment, and the presence of God that was with Israel is nowhere to be seen.

They look out on the waters.

Can you just imagine the tension?

Like, put yourself in the text for a moment.

They look out on the waters and Jesus is nowhere to be found.

And they begin to wonder in this story, are we the Israelites or are we the Egyptians?

In these, this story, are we delivered on the water or are we consumed by the waters of judgment?

Loved one, if you are not in Christ, God's love for you this morning is for you to see your standing.

That you are now on the boat with the disciples on the precipice of not only eternal destruction, but eternal judgment.

The Bible says hell is a real place.

It was Jesus who spoke of hell more than he spoke of heaven.

And speaking to those who were resurrected in unrighteousness, he said, these will go away into eternal punishment.

The Bible symbolizes hell.

It says it's a lake of fire and a fiery furnace.

And I want you to understand that you cannot just make that into a symbol and an illustration, that they are symbols, but they are symbols that are not overstatements of the reality of hell, but understatements of the reality.

You understand if you are outside of Christ, you are closer to hell than the very seat you are sitting on right now.

You know that life is a vapor.

You know how pat how quickly people can pass from life to death.

Life goes quickly, and before you know it, if you are outside of Christ, you will find yourself facing an eternity of God's wrath.

Nothing separates you from that, but a vapor that is life itself.

Love when we stay here, not because we delight in it, but because unless you know the reality of what is coming, you will never, like the disciples, see the storm and look for a savior.

You need to understand the realities of the hell that awaits you.

You need to understand this that the hell that is talked about in scriptures is not just the absence of God's presence.

We so often try to make it seem, we kind of try to double it down like that.

The hell is just the absence of God's presence.

It is not the absence of God's presence, it's the absence of God's grace, it is the absence of God's mercy, it is the absence of God's forbearance, but it is the eternal presence of God's judgment and wrath being poured out on you because of the way that you have lived.

And I want you to understand that in that moment, for all of eternity, you will not question justice.

You will know that all the righteousness in the world stands on the side of God.

And in the scales of justice, you are as light as air.

You do not have a leg to stand on.

You will face the wrath of the supremely just God as he pours out on you all that you deserve because of the way that you live.

It was the thief on the cross who said to Jesus, he looked at his life and he said, This is our reward.

And listen, that is just a taste of what you will understand.

That the eternal judgment that comes is the root.

It's just the reward of the way that you've lived.

Listen, I don't say this as a joy.

I don't love the reality.

We never delight in this and I say it because I love you, and unless you feel the heat of the judgment that is coming, if you are not in Christ, you will never look for a savior who is Jesus Christ.

Unless you know the bad news, you cannot see the good.

Unless you feel the terror right now.

Like my prayer is that right now, if you're not in Christ, or that even if you are just like messing around with sin, or you're just living an apathetic Christian life, or you're living in disobedience, my prayer right now, honestly, is that you would be shaken with terror to the core of your being, that you would be sweating right now, feeling spiritually the heat of hell that is you are running a hellbound race towards.

Because unless you feel that heat, you will never lift your eyes from it to see Jesus Christ.

And praise God, we do not need to stay there.

If you are in Christ, you must have this constant memory of the way Jesus has rescued you from the storm.

I imagine this storm that the disciples faced with something they talked about time and time again.

I mean, certainly the crowd never heared it, but I think this would be the kind of story you tell your friends all the time how close you were to death.

And listen, you must not stop telling the story either.

You were as close to eternal judgment as the chair that you are sitting on right now.

And for all of life, we must declare this story.

That because we took Jesus into the boat, we found eternal life.

John Piper is so helpful here.

Look what he says.

It says, The keener the memory of our awful rescue, the more naturally we pity those in a similar plight, the more deeply we feel how undeserved and free was the grace that plucked us from the flames, the freer will our benevolence be to sinners.

We must remember.

Listen, there is only one way out.

You must take Jesus into the boat.

That's exactly what the disciples do.

Facing the judgment, they do not look at their own works, they do not even look at their own life.

They are not even in the picture at all.

They know they can't do anything.

And so what they do is they look for Jesus and they see him there.

However, when they see him, they're filled with fear because they don't know if they're the children of God right now, the Israelites or the Egyptians.

What they needed was God's presence, but they did not have it yet.

When did they receive God's presence?

It wasn't until Jesus was in the boat that fear dissipated.

And look at what happened in verse 21.

Gladness.

Gladness.

Listen, my hope is that you're filled with the terror of the reality that awaits you outside of Christ.

But I want you to understand this that your heart can be filled with gladness because today is the day of salvation.

Jesus reaches out his hand to you, and if you take him into the boat, if you declare that he is the captain of the ship, you will find life.

Everything changes with Jesus in the boat.

This leads to our third point.

You gotta understand the deliverance of powerful presence.

You must understand the deliverance of powerful presence.

Everything changes when Jesus steps into the boat.

And I want you to see something crucial here.

The order of events matters here.

Jesus doesn't first calm the storm and then come to the disciples and say, hey, look what I did there.

He meets them in the storm.

The waves are raging, the wind is howling.

But Jesus is walking on top of the water, unshaken, untouched, miraculously, completely sovereign over it all.

And you need to understand this, loved one, that Jesus' goal is to not remove the storm.

It's not to remove the storm so that you can see him after.

If he did that, I can promise you what would happen.

We would forget him.

The design of the storm is that Jesus wants to meet you in the midst of the lowest valley you will walk in this life.

He wants to meet you on the darkest night that you will have in life.

He doesn't wait for the chaos to settle.

He steps into it.

He's greater than it.

And so you need to understand this.

What Jesus offers you is so much better than just relief from your circumstances.

That is probably the worst thing he could do for us.

What Jesus offers you is himself this morning.

In the deepest pain, you're not given a little medicine.

In Christ, you are given the great physician himself.

In the moment of your deepest and severest emptiness, Jesus doesn't simply give you bread.

He gives you the giver of the bread himself.

In your darkest moments, he's not a little light to show you the way he is the light of the world.

John G.

Patton was a missionary.

His life was constantly threatened.

It's fascinating to read his biography.

Constantly, his life was threatened by indigenous people as he sought to share the gospel with unreached tribes.

One night he was literally running for his life.

He was being pursued.

This happened quite often in his life.

It was very regular for him.

Being pursued by these hostile warriors, he found nothing to hide in but a chestnut tree.

Cling to those branches all night, surrounded by danger, fearing for his life.

And later he would write this.

Says, I climbed into the tree and was left there alone in the bush.

The hours I spent there live all before me as it were but of yesterday.

I heard the frequent discharging of muskets and the yells of savages.

Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe as in the arms of Jesus.

Never in all my sorrows did my Lord draw nearer to me and speak more soothingly in my soul than when the moonlight flickered among the chestnut leaves and the night air played on my throbbing brow as I told all my heart to Jesus.

Alone, yet not alone.

If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior's spiritual presence, to enjoy his consoling fellowship.

Love one, you know this morning, Jesus is not afraid to bring you to the chestnut tree.

Only God knows what you're facing right now.

And if you're not facing anything right now, he knows what you have and what you certainly will face.

And what he wants you to understand this morning is that it's not meaningless.

Jesus meets you there.

He wants to feel your presence.

He loves you.

He loves you.

And if the chestnut tree is the place where his mercy meets you in the most significant way, he feels the same way that John G.

Patton felt.

He will bring you to that tree, he will put you in that furnace, he will bring you through that valley time and time again, because he longs to experience a nearness to you.

And the question for us this morning is this do we long to experience a nearness to him?

The only reason that you and I can experience that nearness is because one day Jesus would not just walk on the waters for you.

One day, Jesus would not deliver himself from the storm.

Jesus would enter into the waters and he would walk into the storm alone.

John 6, he stands on the water, he stands sovereign over the sea, untouched by the chaos that shook the disciples with fear.

When he steps onto the boat, the storm ceases.

But one day, without the disciples, he would be like Jonah.

On the cross, Jesus, because of the judgment of God, the wrath of God poured out on sinners, Jesus would be cast into the depths of the sea.

Like the Egyptians, he would be swallowed up in judgment.

Jesus would willingly enter those waters for you and I this morning.

Jesus faced the judgment of God.

And though in that moment on the cross, everyone knew it, everyone knew that if he was really Jesus, he could command the angels to come down and take him off, but he did not.

Instead, he held himself under the waters.

He drowned in the sea of God's judgment.

It was a supernatural darkness.

Because in that moment, Jesus was facing your darkness.

He was facing my darkness.

He was taking our judgment, and in that moment, he was sinking beneath the waves of God's wrath, drowning under the weight of divine judgment, abandoned by God, so this morning you and I can say, We never will be.

Jesus already entered the storm, and the storm didn't win.

Jesus rose to life, and the Bible says that he rose with glorious light.

Was victorious over the eternal darkness that you once faced.

He was victorious over judgment.

He was victorious over the eternal storm.

Loved one, listen, you and I this morning, the storms that you faced in life, the storms that you are facing right now, we do not need relief from them.

We need rescue in them.

And Jesus has defeated the greatest storm.

And he invites you this morning.

He invites you this morning to experience that victory with him.

He's already endured the darkness.

So that today, if your faith is in him, we can say, no matter what darkness comes, it is well with my soul.

Did you pray with me?

Father, I know in this room, with as limited knowledge as I have, the deep darkness that your people are walking through right now.

And Lord, as much as I long for them to be delivered from it and to see a glory that they could otherwise not see, Lord, you long for it even more.

And God, in this moment, by the power of your Holy Spirit, you long to meet with us.

In a way that, Lord, we cannot see you apart from the darkness.

And so, God, as we respond to you in song, as we declare, Lord, that no matter what comes, no matter what we face, in good and bad, and in the presence of the condemnation that we rightly deserve because of our sin, Lord, we can declare this that it is well with our soul because Jesus has conquered the storm and he's defeated the darkness.

God, we give you praise and we pray this in the name of your son.

Amen.

Could you stand and worship with me?