Jesus Walks On Water

Today's scripture is from Mark 6, 45 to 52.

Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Besseda, while he dismissed the crowd.

And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray.

And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land, and he saw that they were making headway painfully, for the wind was against them.

And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea.

He meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified.

But immediately he spoke to them and said, Take heart, it is I, do not be afraid.

And he got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased, and they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Made the rookie mistake of sitting all the way in the back.

Long walk.

But I'm an elder here at Redemption.

Um and welcome to church.

We're glad that you're here.

I'm filling in for James Rathman, our lead pastor, and I'm excited to be able to preach this morning.

James is in the last leg of finishing his seminary degree, which means he's starting to take Greek classes.

So in addition to leading our church, leading a young family, taking intense theological classes, he's now also learning a second language.

So we as the elders wanted to give him the best shot to succeed at that.

So over the next year or so, you're gonna see a lot more preachers appear that aren't James.

And I'm really excited about that.

I think aside from caring for James's mental health and studies, I think that there's some other great benefits for us as a church.

I think it helps us as a church to refocus or focus on the authority of Scripture and our access to it as Christians.

It's clear that the Lord has gifted James.

He's a wise and a wonderful preacher and teacher, but we don't need him to understand the Bible.

James's authority, or whoever is up here preaching, our authority comes from the authority of Scripture.

And we we all have the very same access to this scripture.

So you don't need a theological degree to understand what God is communicating to us through his word.

Although I do think it's very wise for our lead pastor to get as much education training as he can.

I also think it's encouraging for James to be with us worshiping together.

In a similar way, it helps us to see that we're all under God's authority.

This point is a little less effective because James is with his wife uh and kids today, which is but that's also it's also a great thing for him to be able to help out with the kids and um to see Megan uh do her work.

Um and finally, I think it's also an a great opportunity for us as elders to step out in faith and do something that um is actually pretty hard.

Um and to kind of have a learning opportunity right in front of everyone and practice something that the bot the Bible calls us as elders to do, which is preach and teach.

Um and finally, if I totally bomb up here, it makes James look better.

So, yeah, I continue to pray for James, um, that God gives him courage and wisdom as he leads our church.

Um, and also pray for his sanity as he is learning Greek.

Um, so that's kind of a long introduction.

Have a few quick announcements, and then we can um get into our text for this morning.

Uh first we have uh members' meeting.

Hopefully you already knew about this, but we have a members' meeting right after the service today.

So if you're a member, stick around.

Uh child care will be provided.

Um, and if you're interested in becoming a member, let us know.

Um, two, we have been doing a toy drive for the Denver Children's Advocacy Center.

Um, and we as Christians have been given much in Christ, and so we also we can and should be generous givers.

So if you'd like to um contribute, you can drop off art supplies.

There's a box by the front door.

Um we're getting close to the end of that drive, so you can also uh give online through the app.

And and then the uh our last announcement um for the the past three years, I think we've offered a Bible reading plan in the app that kind of goes through the Bible in a in the year.

Um we're gonna continue to do that same thing.

Uh we're making a few changes though.

Uh previously, you there is you kind of covered like the Bible in half.

You did a couple parts twice, so we're kind of simplifying things a little bit so it shortens the amount of uh reading that you have to do that it's just one time through the Bible, which means I think it's one reading on the weekend instead of two, so you have a better chance to catch up.

Um all right, so that's all the announcements that I have.

So let's get into the uh passage in Mark.

We've been going through the book of Mark for the past couple of months, and if you've been with us, we've been we've walked through story after story, demonstrating who Jesus is and what his life was like.

And that's one of the main concerns of all of the Gospels, but especially of the Gospel of Mark.

The Gospel of Mark is the account of the apostle Peter, and it was written down by his friend and apostolic assistant Mark.

That's why it's called Mark.

Uh yeah, just want to make sure you understand because this morning I'll probably switch between saying Peter and Mark, use those interchangeably, they mean the same thing.

Uh just remember, the Gospel of Mark, authored by Peter, written by written down by Mark.

So today we're looking at one of Jesus' most famous miracles, through the Apostles Peter recounting.

And if you've heard this story before, you may remember that after Jesus walks in the water to the boat, Peter then gets out of the boat to join him.

But we obviously didn't read about that today.

That's found in the Gospel of Matthew.

Peter leaves his own part in this story out.

And you might remember that Peter's adventure ends in embarrassment.

He gets scared of the waves, takes his eyes off of Jesus, and starts to sink.

But I don't think that he left it out of his recounting to save himself embarrassment.

He included many other of his own missteps throughout the Gospel of Mark.

The most memorable being when he denied Jesus three times when Jesus was on the cross.

Rather, I think Peter is zeroing in on Jesus and forcing us to focus just on him, on who he is.

And this is often how the Gospel of Mark is written, simple and straightforward, with Jesus' life and mission clearly in focus.

So today we'll look at this wild story in detail.

But before we get too far, let me pray for our time this morning.

Then we'll look at what this passage is revealing about Jesus.

Lord, thank you for this morning.

Um, thank you that we get to gather as a church and worship you and hear from your word.

Um we know that your spirit is here with us this morning.

Would you um soften our hearts to hear uh what it is that you have for this morning?

Would you use um my limited and imperfect preparation and words um to uh speak to our hearts this morning?

It's in your name that we pray.

Amen.

All right.

So if you haven't figured it out by now, preaching is not my day job.

Uh I'm actually an architect.

And um, yeah, nice.

Uh woo.

Uh but uh so as part of schooling, um one some of the classes I had to take was architecture history.

And um in architecture history, it wasn't definitely one of my favorite subjects, but you had to memorize uh buildings and their who the architect was, the date that they were uh built.

And architecture history pretty much started with the Greeks and then kind of moved on to the Romans.

So I have a quiz for you guys this morning.

Um does anybody know what building that is?

Colosseum.

All right, nice, well done.

Does anybody know when it was built?

Uh yeah, nice.

Um so it uh sorry, that this is kind of dumb, but it was built around uh 80 AD.

Um can you go to the next slide, Matthew?

How about this building?

Does anyone know this one?

Nice, that's pretty good.

I don't think I would have recognized it from just this picture.

There's two more pictures of it.

Um now, yeah, so Pantheon was built uh under uh Caesar Augustus around 65 AD.

Um and both of these, like a lot of the other Roman uh structures, are just engineering marbles.

The Pantheon, especially, um, is it still up there?

Yeah, that dome is 165 feet across, which is still holds the record for the largest unsupported span of a dome uh in history.

And um yeah, and so uh actually we we didn't really even know how it was standing up until like the last, I don't know, 30 years when we could x-ray the building and and understand the engineering.

So just super advanced engineering.

Um the Romans used uh an early form of concrete, which I I distinctly remember learning about in my architecture history class, because um what we learned is that they used this concrete, and then uh as the fall, as the Roman Empire fell, we kind of we lost the knowledge of how to make concrete.

And uh it's actually I I looked all this stuff up on Wikipedia this week in preparing.

So that's not totally true.

We we they kind of we kind of knew how to do it, but it was just like not widespread at all for basically 2,000 years.

Um and I I just but I remember being just totally blown away by that in my class that like we had this technology that is you know what every building uses concrete nowadays, and for 2,000 years we just we didn't know how to do it.

Um and that there's these these engineering marvels that we didn't understand how they worked until recently.

Isn't that interesting?

So you may be wondering now at this point what this has to do with uh Mark chapter 6.

Mark 6 · chapter mention

Well, the Gospel of Mark was written around 50 to 60 AD, just about the same time that the Colosseum and the Pantheon were being completed.

And I think humans of history are more intelligent and sophisticated than we often give them credit for.

When Peter is describing his experience of seeing a man walking on water, he's speaking not to bumbling cavemen.

He's writing to people whose jobs could have been engineers, architects, painters, maybe even on the pantheon.

He's not telling a children's story of make-believe.

He's saying that he saw a man walking on the water, and he expected his hearers to believe him, not because they're stupid or ignorant.

This is what our passage is showing us today.

A miracle that isn't directly related to healing the sick or feeding the poor, but rather it's just laying out a crazy story.

There's a man just like you and me, and he has the power to walk on water and then calm a storm.

So we're gonna first look at this event in detail.

Second, we're gonna look at the why of Jesus performing this miracle.

And then third, we're gonna try to decipher what the implication should be for today.

So our passage picks up from last week when Jesus performed another famous miracle, the feeding of the 5,000 in verse 45.

Immediately he made his disciples get into the boat and go before him to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dismissed the crowd.

And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray.

Now we we aren't exactly sure of Jesus' intentions here, of why he sent the disciples away and stayed behind himself.

Um, last week we learned about this crowd of five thousand being political zealots that wanted to make Jesus a a king.

And so maybe Jesus was worried that the disciples would get caught up in that idea, and he wanted to get the disciples away from that as quickly as possible, away from that idea that he was his purpose was to establish an earthly political kingdom.

Or maybe similarly, he Jesus was getting caught up in that idea, and he was being tempted by the glory offered by the crowd, and he needed, he knew that he needed to be alone with his father to gain strength and conviction to seek his father's glory and not his own glory.

Or maybe there's just some kind of simple logistical thing that the they wanted to get to the next town as quickly as possible, and this was the fastest way to do it.

We don't really know.

But regardless, the disciples head out in the boat, and Jesus stays alone to pray.

Verse 47.

And when evening came, the boat was out on the sea, and he was alone on the land, and he saw that they were making head headway painfully, for the wind was against them.

Now, remember that last week in this the section right before this, when Jesus feeds the five thousand, we saw Jesus and the disciples searching desperately for rest.

They were bone-tired, and they were planning on finding solitude, but instead they had to feed a rowdy crowd of five thousand zealots.

Now, this is happening on the that exact same night.

So you can imagine how tired they must be.

And the disciples would have been in a sailboat.

They were practice sailors, many of them were professional fishermen.

And we can see from the other accounts that they were rowing in the Gospel of Matthew and John, which tells us that the disciples are caught in a storm.

Mark says here that the wind is against them.

And to our ears, it may sound like that just means that the wind is blowing in the wrong direction.

But a sailboat can move as long as there's the right amount of wind.

If there's not enough wind, if there's no wind, or if there's too much wind, then there's problems.

But the or so the oars being out indicate that they're caught in a storm.

And this is almost an identical scenario to one that we covered about a month or so ago in Mark chapter 4.

Mark 4 · chapter mention

So I'm gonna sort of recycle some of the points that James made.

As he described previously, the geography around the Sea of Galilee is such that strong storms can blow up very quickly.

Kind of similar to what happens here on the Front Range.

The mountainsides create this environment where storms spring up very quickly.

And also, like James said last time, I think this scenario can be seen as a picture of our own lives.

It's easy for us to imagine ourselves in situations where we're in the midst of a storm, where we're vulnerable or exposed, facing a situation or a problem or a relationship that's out of our control and threatening to destroy us.

And this is where the disciples find themselves again.

Only this time, Jesus is not with them in the boat.

Verse 48.

And about the fourth watch of the night he came to them, walking on the sea.

He meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out, for they all saw him and were terrified.

The disciples have now been battling this storm all night.

In the Gospel of John, it says that they're three to four miles offshore, which is not very far in their planned journey across the Sea of Galilee.

And it also says by by this time it was at least three o'clock in the morning.

Last time we saw the disciples in this scenario, Jesus was with them.

He was asleep, but he was in the boat.

Verse 50 But immediately he spoke to them and said, Take heart, it is I.

Do not be afraid.

And he got into the boat with them, and the wind ceased.

Earlier that day, the disciples saw a man, their friend, feed a crowd of thousands with five loaves and two fish.

And now they see him walking on the waves through a raging storm, arriving at their boat and calming the winds.

I think it's really easy to hear stories about Jesus and to think that we know who he is.

If you've been around the church for a while, it's easy for us to become kind of immune to Jesus.

We get so used to hearing about him that our wonder evaporates.

But even if this is your first time in the church, our culture has been familiar with Jesus for so long that everyone has an idea about Jesus.

It may not be a right idea, but everyone has an idea.

And it's so easy for us to hear stories about him and just sort of gloss over them.

But Peter is writing his gospel to show us who Jesus is and what he's like.

And he's saying, look, there's this guy I met.

I was in a storm in the Sea of Galilee with waves and wind, and this man walks on the waves, and the wind obeys him.

This is the Jesus who we believe in.

And it's insane.

It's totally crazy.

A human walking on water.

But that's just what the disciples saw.

And just as today, they would have been labeled as crazy for saying it.

So why did Jesus do this?

And why now?

The disciples are tired, but unlike the other story, they don't seem to be fearing for their lives.

And if Jesus wanted to demonstrate his power, why do it in the middle of the night when only his closest friends can see it?

What does Jesus want his disciples and us today to know about himself?

Now this this is the part that gets really good.

And it's why it's wonderful for me to have to get up here and preach.

It's hard, and it's the definitely not always fun preparing.

But I get to learn things, and we get to learn things and see things in the word that I usually just gloss over.

So ready to find out why Jesus walked on the water?

Verse 51.

And they were utterly astounded, for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.

Just like us, the disciples did not understand who Jesus was.

Their hearts were hardened.

And Jesus is working in their lives to soften their hearts, to reveal himself to them.

He goes to great lengths to soften his disciples' hearts, to show them who he is.

So he walks on the water.

But when you think about it, this is just as strange to the disciples as it is to us.

I think we've kind of been become trained to think Jesus walks on the water, must be God.

But is that how you would think if you saw somebody walking out on Sloane's Lake?

Would your first thought be, hey, there's God?

The disciples certainly didn't.

As Jews, they would have not had a category for God coming so clearly to them in human form.

And throughout the Old Testament, prophets performed many miracles.

Or rather, God performed miracles on behalf of the prophets.

And many of those miracles were much more impressive than a man walking on water.

But here Jesus is helping the disciples to see that he is the prophesied Messiah, that he is God incarnate, Emmanuel, God with us.

Jesus cares so much about the disciples that he wants to show them intimately his power and his care for them so that they may come to understand and trust in him.

He's doing two things at the same time.

So much of the Bible is like this.

It's both symbolism and real-life miracle together.

He walks in the water to calm the storm, to show the disciples his heart is one of care and compassion.

But he also walks on the water to show that he is God, and he's giving them signs so that their hearts may be softened.

He's not just walking on the water as a way to show his power, impressive as it is.

Throughout Mark, Jesus has been demonstrating his deity.

And this passage is full of these signs.

Easter eggs, if you will.

Yeah.

Let's look closer and we'll see these signs.

First, the Hebrew Bible refers to God as Yahweh, which is built on the Hebrew word for I am.

So every time we hear the word Yahweh, or every time you see the word Lord in all caps, depending on what translation you have in the English Bible, you should think this is a name built out of the word for I am.

And it reminds us each time that God absolutely is, that he is the beginning and the end, that he is absolute reality, that he has no end, and he is constant.

So this idea, this name for this name for God is uh first introduced when Moses encounters the burning bush in Exodus 3.

Then Moses said to God, If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, What is his name?

What shall I say to them?

God says to Moses, I am who I am.

Now look back on Jesus' introduction to the disciples.

Take courage.

It is I, don't be afraid.

Now, I I don't know Greek, which is what Jesus is speaking here.

Nobody at our church does.

I'm up here so James can learn it.

But so clearly I'm not speaking on this from like my own personal translation.

But as you might imagine, translating is a difficult thing.

The translators have to decide how much context to use or how literal to be.

And here, when Jesus says, it is I, he uses the Greek words a go, a me.

And Jesus' words are not an ordinary, hello, my name's Jesus, here I am.

It's an awkward phrase that literally is translated more similarly to I exist or I am.

See, Jesus is echoing the Old Testament name that God gives Himself.

I am who I am.

But it gets better.

There's more signs.

Did you notice there's sort of a curious thing about how Mark describes this event?

It seems that Jesus didn't want his disciples to see him.

He meant to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the sea, they thought it was a ghost and cried out.

But I think there's actually something different here than Jesus trying to stay out of eyesight of the disciples, trying to sneak around their boat without being seen.

The language of passing by is also used in many other places throughout the Bible.

And it's always referencing a special revelation of God.

When Moses requests to see God's glory on Mount Sinai in Exodus thirty-three, Moses says to God, Please show me your glory.

And he, God, says, I will make all my goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you my name, the Lord, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.

But he said, You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.

And the Lord said, Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by.

Or another time, the prophet Elijah is on Mount Horeb.

He is anticipating his own death when God saves him, and reveals himself to Elijah.

In first Kings chapter nineteen, God says to Elijah, Go out and stand on the mount before the Lord, and behold, the Lord pass by.

And a great and strong wind tore the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.

And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire, the sound of a low whisper.

This language of pass by is always related to an Old Testament theophany.

If you're not familiar with this term, it's just a fancy word for a visible manifestation to humans of God.

And so here, for Jesus to pass by is another theophany.

But for Jesus to pass by is not for him to walk past us in hiding.

Rather, it's just the opposite.

It's for him to reveal himself to us fully.

Previously, God the Father could not reveal his full glory to us humans.

Yahweh, the Holy One, could just give us glimpses of himself to Moses and Elijah and the Israelites.

But Jesus has come to bridge the gap between the holy God and sinful human by becoming just like us.

Rather than passing by while we hide our face in a rock or pass by in a low whisper, Jesus gets into the boat with his disciples.

A third passage in Job continues to show us this link in symbolism that Peter is making between Jesus and God.

In Job chapter 9, a passage where Job is recounting the awesome separation between God and humanity.

Job 9 · chapter mention

It's showing that God can do what humanity cannot do and cannot conceive of doing.

His wisdom is beyond compare.

Job is describing a God that is wholly other and can never be confused with human beings.

In verse 4 he says, He is wise in heart and mighty in strength.

Who has hardened himself against him and succeeded?

He who removes mountains and they know it not when he overturns them in his anger, who shakes who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble?

Who commands the sun and it does not rise?

Who seals up the stars?

Who alone stretched out the heavens?

Get this, and trampled the waves of the sea.

He is wise in heart and mighty in strength.

Behold, he passes by me, and I see him not.

He moves on, but I do not perceive him.

Again, I don't know Greek, but commentators agree that the Greek used by Peter in our passage today for walking on the water and passing by contains the same wording as the Hebrew used here in Job.

So you see what Jesus is doing here.

The disciples don't understand about the bread.

As we learned about last week, Jesus provided bread to many to show that he is the true, eternal bread.

And yet the disciples' hearts are still hard.

They don't understand.

And so Jesus passes by.

And he doesn't leave them there.

In the dark, in the storm, he will walk across the water to be with the disciples.

And this is how Jesus works.

He wants to help us to see him clearly.

It may feel like he's asleep in the boat as we travel through a storm.

It may feel like he's not there at all.

But he's more powerful than the storms in our life.

In fact, he's using the storms to realign our priorities and to help us to trust in him.

One of the main themes of the Gospel of Mark is to show that Jesus is God.

And today we're looking at a story of Jesus displaying supernatural power.

A wild, crazy story.

But the full story of the gospel is crazier even than a man walking on water.

It's not just a claim of a supernatural event.

It's a claim that a man is God.

So I want to leave you with some implications.

First, this is a picture into the heart of Jesus.

He loves to rescue.

In Isaiah 46, he says, I am He, I am He who will sustain you.

I have made you and I will carry you.

I will sustain you and I will rescue you.

Psalms 34 says, The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

In Colossians 1, he says, For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son, He loves.

God loves to rescue.

He sees us struggling with the oars, vulnerable, scared, tired.

And he comes to us and he gets in the boat.

His heart is for the poor and the needy and the downtrodden.

And I know you know what it feels like to be rocked by storms.

I know you know what it feels like to be tired and not to be able to get any rest.

And Jesus loves to work just in those circumstances.

But that's not the whole picture.

Obviously, I think it's it's much too simplistic to say that as soon as we let Jesus take the keel, sorry, wheel.

Channeling my uh inner James there.

Uh sorry.

Obviously, yeah, it's too simplistic to say that as soon as we let Jesus into our lives, that all of our storms in life are calm.

So this isn't just a story of Jesus solving the problem of the disciples.

It's easy to look at the story and think disciples had a problem, Jesus solved it, I have problems, Jesus will solve my problems too.

And this is true, but not in such simple terms.

Look, what I'm about to say might sound even crazier than a man walking on the water.

But the message of the gospel is that our biggest problem is not the storms in our life.

Rather, it is our standing with God.

God is holy, but our lives and our hearts are full of sin.

And so our biggest problem is not whatever uh issue your Twitter feed wants you to be upset about.

It's not your frustrating coworker.

Your biggest problem is not even when the diagnosis comes back positive.

Or when the doctor says that your baby's not gonna make it, or your spouse says they found somebody else.

Our biggest problem is our relationship with God.

Just as the disciples' biggest problem was not the storm or their tiredness.

Jesus walked on the water and passed by, not just to save them from a storm.

He passed by because they didn't understand about the bread.

They didn't understand who Jesus is and why he came.

Just like our disciples, just like the disciples, our biggest problem is the chasm caused by our sin between us and God.

And that might sound crazy.

Our hearts, our culture, everything is telling us that's not the problem that needs solving.

That's not what needs our attention.

But it is.

And Jesus is the solution to that problem.

He walks in the water and he gets in our boat.

He goes to the cross, he went to the cross to die for our sin.

And when we understand and believe this, that when we put our hope and our faith in Jesus as the Son of God who lived a perfect life and died on our behalf, it begins to reorder our problems.

It changes how we look at our storms, changes how we perceive them and how much weight we give to them, how much they rock us.

And as we go through storms, we learn over and over again to put our trust in Jesus.

And it is over and over again.

It's hard.

It doesn't always come naturally.

We have to remind ourselves and each other that Jesus is trustworthy, that he is in control, even when it doesn't feel like it.

Jesus sees us in our deepest need.

Just like he walked on the waves to be with the disciples, to get in their boat, Jesus came to us, to humanity.

He laid down his glory and came as a naked, helpless baby, born just like you and I, of a woman.

And just as he demonstrated his power in this passage, by walking in the water and calming the storm, to save the disciples, not just to save them from their immediate circumstances, but to soften their hearts so that they can trust in him.

Jesus does the same for us.

He looks at our lives, full of rejection of him, full of worry, anxiety, anger, lust, not just bobbing on the waves, but already dead and drowned in our sin.

He went to the cross to take the curse of our sin, my sin and yours, to die the death that we deserve.

So trust in him.

That's all I got.

Do we have any questions?

Do we know why the disciples thought that Jesus was a ghost?

Relatedly, are ghosts something we should take seriously?

Or is it that they don't exist and the disciples didn't understand this yet?

Yeah, so I think um I think the disciples, I think one one thing that um this shows us, the disciples thinking that Jesus is a ghost, um, and then being terrified of a ghost, is that um they sort sort of similar to related to um them being more sophisticated than than we often think, is that um seeing a ghost or seeing somebody walking on the water is not something that they would expect to be seeing because they're scared of it.

And so um they probably had a different framework than we do as 20th century Westerners in terms of their relationship with the supernatural and um and you know, ghosts and that kind of thing.

But at the same time, it's not like they were expecting every day to be out on the Sea of Galilee and see see ghosts all the time.

And so um this was a supernatural event in their mind.

And I I think that would be uh something that you if you were out in the ocean or on the sea and you saw somebody walking on the water, I think our minds would go to something crazy, just like their minds went to a ghost.

Um, as far as whether we should believe in ghosts, um uh yeah, I yeah, you can email James.

Yeah.

No, I I the I think there, I think um I I'm not gonna say whether we should specifically believe in ghosts or not.

I think probably the the ghost that we think of in uh is very much informed by popular culture.

Um, but so so it may not be exactly the way that we think.

Um at the same time, the Bible, there is a lot of supernatural things that happen in the Bible.

And so I I think the the answer, I don't know exactly what the the answer is.

I don't know that James does either.

Maybe he does.

You can email him, but um that we we should not be so quick to just dismiss everything that does that we don't understand the mechanism of how how it happens.

Um and we could should leave space for um yeah, for the supernatural.

Um yeah, so if you have uh any more questions, James at redemptiondenver.com.

Um let me let me pray and then we'll take communion.

Lord, thank you that we can celebrate this Christmas season you entering into to humanity, you um coming as a baby, and then living a perfect life, and not just leaving us stranded, but coming to us so that we could know you, that we could understand who you are, we could understand your heart.

Would you help us to trust in you, to put our faith in you, even as um our lives uh are rocked by the waves and the wind, that we would have a firm foundation in you.

We pray all this in your name.

Amen.