Christ, Our Greater Jonah: A Gospel View of Facing Our Storms of LifeSýnishorn

Day 5 Devotional:

Facing Our Storms with Christ

So, as Christians, what do these two passages from the book of Jonah and Mark’s Gospel teach us about how we should deal with our storms of life? How do we face their intensity so that our Christian lives are not just a long miserable, unpredictable experience of facing one storm after the other?

It was only after His death and resurrection that the disciples would come to understand Christ’s real identity as God the Son, who had complete control over nature, and over all events and circumstances always, especially in the lives of His people.

The disciples would later come to understand that although Christ could easily have chosen to avoid being arrested and crucified on the cross, it was out of His great love for them that made Him still choose to go to the cross for them.

For example, in John 10:17-18, Jesus said this: I lay down my life, only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have the authority to lay it down and the authority to take it up again.

For you and I, the fact that, on the cross, Christ Jesus willingly faced the ultimate storm of God’s wrath over sin, and endured it for us, assures us that the Lord will certainly not abandon us in our storms of life, even when we have prayed, and prayed, and prayed, and it looks like God has gone to sleep on us. He is not asleep. In Psalm 121:4, for example, the Psalmist reminds us that God, who watches over us, neither slumbers nor sleeps.

God is always with us, wide awake, through our storms of life, and He will, in due course, rebuke the storms that come to us into stillness in one way or the other, as we continue to look to Him in faith.

These 3 "I’s" mean that when a Christian goes through the storm of some serious ailment and does not recover, or when the business of a Christian fails, or when the marriage of a Christian ends in a painful divorce, it is not because the Lord slept through those storms.

Instead, it simply means that, for the Christian who passes away, the Lord has allowed them to cross over from physical death into eternal spiritual life (John 5:24). It means that the Lord has other journeys ahead for the divorced Christian, and for the Christian family who has lost their business.

So, today, let us take courage from the fact that the identity of Jesus Christ as our redeeming greater Jonah enables us to navigate our inevitable storms of life, no matter how intense they may be.