Light on the Hill

Guest (Male): Storms come and go in our lives, and some of us do whatever we can to avoid them. But Pastor James says that’s a big mistake.

James Kaddis: We are so conditioned to comfort in this country, and we’re so conditioned to comfort in this society and in this culture that we look at storms and we often times not just loathe them or despise them or hate them, we actually do everything that we can to avoid them. We live our lives in a way that seeks to avoid every single storm that may come our way.

But here’s the problem with storm avoidance. When you avoid the storm that may come your way, you will never progress to the place that you need to go to to become the person that you need to be. The more you avoid entering into the storm, the more you increase the possibility that you’ll never get to the other side.

Guest (Male): Life is hard enough, but when the big storms come, it gets much more difficult and fast. You can be sure storms are coming. And today on Light on the Hill, you will learn how to prepare for them. Pastor James Kaddis is in Mark chapter four. We’ll finish up the chapter today. Here he is now with his message, "A Nasty Storm is Coming."

James Kaddis: All right, verse 35. Now, as we get into this verse, the one thing that I want to tell you is that life is hard. Isn’t that right? And when you get older and you begin to experience more and more of the complexities of life, then that statement becomes more true than it ever has been. I remember just a moment of time in my own life when I was a kid, not realizing that I had not a single care in the world.

The only care that I had was being able to play with my siblings, maybe play with my friends, get my dumb homework done so that I could go on and do the next thing. We loved the games that we would set up among siblings every single night. Running around the house, going crazy, making tornadoes, having that kind of fun.

And as a father, one of the greatest joys that I have is watching my children live the same exact way. They live these literally carefree lives. Sometimes you think careless lives, but they're really more carefree lives. And all they do is just run around and go hog wild. And actually, it's kind of fun. They're obviously very good kids and they're relatively disciplined. I say relatively considering the age category here. You've got a two-year-old, a three-year-old, and a six-year-old. That term relatively is a very nuanced term.

But the one thing that I will say that I find with exceptional joy is when they’re running around just carelessly having fun and just enjoying themselves. My son is probably the... I’m gaining more joy out of watching him in many ways just because he reminds me so much of myself when I was little, except a whole lot faster and a whole lot stronger. That's my boy right now.

And it's funny because I like setting myself up in my office getting ready to study for the evening or maybe it's a morning time where I wake up. And I leave the office door open so that they can run in and out of the office. Sometimes I want them to run in and out of the office. And one of my favorite scenes is when he’s on his little internal little scooter that he’s just riding through as fast as he can and ramming into stuff and everything.

You just see the joy on his face. You see the happiness. He gets up and he just runs around because he sees his sister coming across the hallway or something like that. And you just think in your mind, it makes it all worth it as a father. Because your children don’t go through storms and trials and troubles like we do.

My children will never know, at least for the first 20 years of their lives, hopefully they’ll never know it ever because I’ll teach them, but they’ll never really know or understand what the cares and concerns are of a moment when you don’t know where your next dollar is going to come from to pay your mortgage. It's funny they’re never going to understand those cares. They’re never going to understand those concerns because they get to live a life where they don’t worry about that.

They open the refrigerator, food appears. If the food’s not there, "Baba, we got to go to Costco" or "Mama, let’s go order this" or that kind of thing. They don’t know what it’s like to have to work and what it means to actually, no matter how tired you are, no matter how lazy you might feel, you can’t just walk away from your obligations because you have a family to feed. They’re never going to know that.

They’re never going to understand that. I remember when I was 16 years old. This is the first time I ever experienced this. No, 17 years old because I just graduated from Bible College. I’m my first year on staff at the church. And as I’m on staff at the church, I remember being so brutally sick, and I never get that way. But I’m so brutally sick that I can’t even get up out of bed. And I called my mom and I said, "Mama, can you please call the administrator at the church and tell them I can’t show up there?"

And my mom said, "Yeah, no problem." And so she called and you could hear the conversation. I knew everything was okay. Tried to go back to sleep but just went through the whole day being sick and miserable. But I had this thought in my mind, and it was for the first time it struck me. At 17 years old, 18 years old, the first time I ever had a thought like this, and that was this. If I get sick and I don’t go to work, and let’s even pretend I don’t get a paycheck because I don’t go to work, it’s inconsequential to me.

I’m living in a beautiful home. I have everything at my fingertips. My biggest struggle is whether or not I’m going to make it to the toilet in time if I’ve got to vomit because I’m sick. But I’ve got no concerns, I’ve got no worries. But I have a dad who at one point while he was here in the United States of America, if he was sick out of his brain, he would still have to go to work.

Because if he didn’t go to work, there’d be no food on the table. If he didn’t go do the things that he needed to do to take care of us, we wouldn’t have the security that we had. We wouldn’t have clean clothes, we wouldn’t have food on the table, we wouldn’t be able to live freely, we would never be able to understand what it means to not experience the threat of eviction.

We weren’t the type of family that experienced any of that stuff because my dad and mom went through the types of hardships that I had no ability to truly appreciate. And it wasn’t until I was 17 years old and I remember calling in sick for the very first time like that, recognizing at that moment, oh my goodness, I have it good and I had it good.

And I think the thing that's remarkable is that when you get a little bit older, your perspective begins to change. Why? Because you run into what are called the storms of life. And what happens is we are so conditioned to comfort in this country, and we’re so conditioned to comfort in this society and in this culture that we look at storms and we often times not just loathe them or despise them or hate them, we actually do everything that we can to avoid them.

We live our lives in a way that seeks to avoid every single storm that may come our way. But here's the problem with storm avoidance. When you avoid the storm that may come your way, you will never progress to the place that you need to go to to become the person that you need to be. The more you avoid entering into the storm, the more you increase the possibility that you’ll never get to the other side.

The more you choose to avoid experiencing difficulty and hardship, the sooner you will get to the place of mediocrity. If you want to get better, if you want to grow, if you want to experience things you’ve never experienced before for the benefit, if you want to grow stronger, you can never gain strength without resistance. It doesn't work that way.

Sorry, there's no such thing as doing anything that involves a reward where there is not some kind of disruption involved. And you cannot get anywhere in life unless you express foundational intention to do exactly what it is that you’re going to do. But your intention will never be met. It will never be met with openness. It will always be met with resistance. It will always be met with disruption. You will always run into the storm.

And if you choose to avoid the storm and the disruption by removing intention, you’re never going to grow. You’re never going to get better. You’re never going to find yourself in the position to have the strength to do the things that you do on a day-to-day basis. What you consider to be unbearable right now in this moment will be the place of vacation and catharsis for you in two years.

The area that you look at as impossible today will become the stepping stone that you step on in order to achieve what appears to be insurmountable in the future. The things that you look at today and say is impossible, and so you seek to avoid the impossibility, the low-hanging fruit, every single time it will put you behind. Every single time.

I watched a video. It was a really cool video of these two kids, I think they were from Nigeria. And they had a party game that they were playing. They had these rocks that were set up. There was a bucket in front of them. You have to imagine this. There's two kids. They’re each side-by-side and they’re standing in front of a bucket. The bucket’s right behind them.

And there are something like eight big equally shaped rocks. One is painted blue, the other one is painted green or something like that. I don't remember what the color was. But those rocks were spaced about six to eight feet away from each other. When they start at the very beginning where the buckets are, they’re spaced about three to four feet. And then it looks like the spacing increases.

One guy starts... now the objective is you’ve got to pick up the rock, put it in the bucket, and then run back to the next rock. Put it in the bucket, run back to the next rock, put it in the bucket, run back to the next rock, put it in the bucket. Two guys, equal age, equal strength, equal speed. One guy decides that he’s going to start by doing what is obvious to the average Joe.

And he starts for the rock that is two feet away from the bucket. He grabs that rock, throws it in the bucket. Grabs the next rock, throws it in the bucket. Grabs the next rock, throws it in the bucket. Grabs the next rock, throws it in the bucket. He puts four rocks in the bucket before the guy to the right of him runs to the farthest rock away, picks up that rock, and puts it in the bucket.

Now the average person, because you could see in the comments, the average person said that the guy who was smarter and the guy who was going to win was the guy who picked up the rocks closest to him. Because in the time that the guy picked up the rocks closest to him, bucketed four rocks, the guy who went to the rock farthest away is the one that did one rock.

Now I looked at that and without knowing what the outcome would be, I said the guy picking up the furthest rock was the smart one. He was the one that I believed was going to win. Why? When you get to the point where you learn how to meet the path of least resistance, you will recognize very quickly that without resistance there is no strength. And without strength there is no endurance.

And without endurance there is no capability of finishing what you start. The guy who started by getting the closest rocks didn’t take a lot of effort to get the first few. Why? Because there wasn’t much effort required to do the first few. But as he started running further and further and further away, he was getting more and more tired. It was taking him longer.

The guy who started farthest away first, oh, he was slow. And he ran and got the first one and put the second one in the bucket by the time that five other rocks were in the other bucket. But by the time that that man or that little boy that was running the long way that started out first got to the fourth rock, that young man over there had two more rocks to put in while this guy who started on the furthest away had five more rocks to put in.

Well, guess what? The guy that had two more rocks to put in didn’t win. He lost by a very large length. Why? Because he chose to put himself in a position where he did not allow himself to anticipate the necessity for conditioning. And because he did not anticipate the necessity for conditioning, he chose to take the easy road and when things got harder, he quit.

Because he started with the intention of the harder, the other guy, he won and he did it with ease. He wasn’t winded. He wasn’t exerted. Because he allowed the exertion to happen on the front end. And that's why I want us to stop and carefully consider what Jesus does here in verse 35 at the end by the way of an extraordinarily long day.

As a matter of fact, the day that Jesus had at this moment had to have been grossly draining. He had spoken to thousands and thousands of people. People were pressing up against him on the shore of the lake. And he backed up, got in a boat so that he could continue to talk to them. Then he does this. The same day, when the even was come. We're talking about nighttime folks, okay?

Verse 35. He saith unto them, "Let us pass over unto the other side." By the way, I just want you to understand something. When Jesus said, "Let’s go to the other side," I promise you there were certain things that Jesus knew already in his heart. The first thing that he knew is he knew that him and all of his disciples were tired. Guaranteed he knew that.

The second thing that he knew was that if they were going to go to the other side, they would undoubtedly meet lots of resistance in doing so because there would be a storm and Jesus knew there’d be a storm. He’s God. Of course he’s going to know there’s going to be a storm. You know the other thing that he knew?

The other thing that he knew is that he had a responsibility to do what the Father had called him to do on the other side of the lake. He knew he had to go there. And he knew that he couldn’t do anything unless he got to the other side. So knowing that a storm was coming, knowing that he was tired, knowing that he had just finished doing an immense work, he says, "Let’s go to the other side."

By the way, Mark gets it. Mark is about to note the fact that all of this is happening. Because look what he says. "And when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as he was in the ship. And there were also with him other little ships." So the situation was getting tenuous. There were even little ships that were following him as he was seeking to go to the other side. This was not going to be an easy trip. This was going to be very difficult.

Verse 37. "And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full." Think about this for a second folks. Think about the significance of this statement. Because God is going to always require that we show intention. And when we show the intention that God demands that we show, there will always be resistance. There will always be disruption.

And as a matter of fact, that resistance and that disruption can be so unbelievably overwhelming that it can create a sinking effect. Understand the situation that was happening here. It was literally creating what I believe to be a very, very difficult situation. It had gone from reasonable and manageable to now completely insurmountable.

The Bible tells us that the waves were beating on that boat. The boat was going to sink. It was taking on water. I cannot, by the way... you ever watch those fishermen shows? I cannot, what's the big one that they always used to show? Anybody remember? *Deadliest Catch*. I got dizzy just watching that show. Like how do those... like you're a captain you go out to get lobster or whatever it is you're fishing for.

In my mind at what point do you just think, I’m just give up, I’m going to die. I mean if you're looking at that boat and how much it gets air and it's like it's you... of first, is this computer graphics? This is crazy. I would be in that boat and I would just be like, "Lord, I don’t want to die." That would be it. It would be a wrap.

And understand Galilee is not a pleasant place. They called it the Sea of Galilee, not because it was a sea. But they called it the Sea of Galilee because of how rough it actually got. It was not an easy place to be cruising. By the way, I’ve been on the Sea of Galilee where the weather got disruptive. And you better thank the good Lord when that starts to happen that you are near the other side.

Because if you're in the middle of that sea, that is not going to be pleasant. I was on one boat ride where it was that way, and it honestly felt like we were jet skiing. I kid you not, it was that weird. Like those boat guys are so good at what they do. One wrong move, that boat capsizes. And you better hold on for your life because it is a terrible feeling when it gets that crazy.

It’s terrible. It’s almost like somebody just picked up the bowl and just started shaking it. That's exactly how it feels. It’s wild. And how fast it goes from zero to insane is unbelievable. So, look what happens. "And there arose a great storm of wind... so now it's full." Verse 38. "And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow. And they awake him, and say unto him, 'Master, carest thou not that we perish?'"

"Do you even care that we're about to die? Wake up!" Now there's a couple things I want to bring up here. First of all, I love the fact that he's sleeping. Because the fact that he is sleeping shows a couple things. Number one, it shows the fact that he's expecting to happen what's going to happen, and it shows that he has peace in the midst of it actually happening.

And it's amazing to me because he acts like a literal pro because he is, he's the ultimate pro. The way he's behaving is as though he's been there a million times. Of course he's the creator of the universe, you can't be surprised by something like that. You guys help me with this and I was thinking about this the other day because I'm not a sports guy at all, I'm just not.

I think it was Chicago, I don't remember, it may have been Mike Ditka, I don't remember. But there was one NFL coach who would fine his players and he would fine them a lot of money. He would fine them thousands of dollars anytime they danced when they got a goal. If they danced in the end zone, he fined his players for dancing in the end zone.

And they would ask him all the time, "Why do you fine your players if they dance in the end zone?" He says, "Because players that dance in the end zone are losers because they’re celebrating because they act like they’ve never been there. The ones that are there all the time don’t react. And I don’t want them to react because I want them to get accustomed to being there all the time."

Look, coaches like that are once in a lifetime, right? The mentality is incredible. And I love the picture. The picture here is why is Jesus even reacting? He masters it all. He’s been there and done that before. There's something we can learn from that by the way because here’s the thing about maximizing the effect of the disruption and the resistance when you choose to be intentional.

When you want to maximize the disruption or the effect of the disruption or the resistance, the best way to do it is to be prepared when you walk into it. To know what it is that you’re dealing with and know where to go when it happens. Because if you’re prepared in the midst of dealing with it, you don’t even blink. It's just that simple.

Guest (Male): This is Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis and on the weekends we’re going through the Gospel of Mark together. Listen to this study and more at lightonthehillradio.com. Pastor James Kaddis's teachings are also available through the Light on the Hill app and at oneplace.com. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts too.

When you have a moment today, send us an email. We’d love it. It’s encouraging to hear what the Lord is doing in our listeners’ lives, and it’s an opportunity to thank the Lord for what he’s doing. There’s a place to contact us at the website lightonthehillradio.com. If God is leading you to support this radio outreach, there’s also a place to make a secure donation at lightonthehillradio.com.

Throughout the week, you can watch our live shows and short videos, many of which relate to Bible prophecy and help you see current events through a biblical worldview. Look for those at jameskaddis.com. Let’s return now to Pastor James again. We’re at the end of Mark chapter four.

James Kaddis: Look at his response, and I love this. This is incredible. So he arose and notice this. He rebuked the wind. He rebuked the... can you imagine? "Quiet!" right there to the wind and the wind is just... come on, imagine that. He rebuked the wind and said to the sea, "Peace, be still." And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

And when he said unto them, "Why are you so fearful? How is it that you have no faith?" They feared exceedingly and said one to another, "What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?"

I don’t want anybody to take this the wrong way, but I’m going to go there, okay? And this is why I say this study’s going to be short because it doesn’t need to be long. I’m getting sick and tired of people telling me that God told them to do something. I’m not going to end the statement there. I love it when people tell me that God’s talking to them. I love it when people are hearing from God.

I love it when God speaks to people and I hear God speaking to people. I think it’s beautiful. But what drives me crazy is when people say that God is speaking to them, and then they act on what they believe is God’s voice without taking into account what’s really going on or choosing to put trust in the God that spoke to them. And when they hit resistance, they act as though their life is over.

See, people come to me all the time and they say things like, "Well, Pastor James, God told me." And I can’t say you’re wrong unless they tell me God told me to sleep with their girlfriend or something like that. Okay, yeah, you’re wrong. That's not God, dummy. The Bible wouldn't tell you that. God wouldn't tell you that.

When they come to me and they tell me God told me to do something, and then they go do it, and then they come back with their head down in defeat and they’re miserable over the difficult thing that they went through, my first question to them is, why did you not keep going on? I remember a guy who told me God had told him to go start a church out of state.

And he went to go start the church that he said God had called him to go start. Things got really difficult. That’s what happens when you start a church. Things got difficult. Six months later, he gave up. He walked away from the church. So many people were consoling him and, "Oh, I’m so sorry, it’s so hard to do that and we’re praying for you."

My statement was, did God tell you or did he not tell you? If God didn’t tell you, then don’t ever tell me God told you again because I can’t trust you. If God did tell you, well then you’re sinning being here right now because you have no faith. You see, we constantly hear the voice of God or what we believe is the voice of God telling us to do something.

But we’re not willing to step in faith, trusting him through the process, understanding that as helpless as it may feel and even in the moment where it looks like we're going to die, God is capable of standing up and saying, "Peace, be still." The number one reason why people fail is because they make the decision to fail by not following through with the intention that they usually seek to express.

Here’s the thing that I want to teach you guys, and I want you guys to get this because it’s really important. Don’t ever go where God is not. Let me say that one more time. This is the lesson from this passage. Don’t ever go where God will not go with you. Don’t ever go where you do not see God accompanying you.

If you go where God will not accompany you or where God is not, you can expect to suffer when it appears you’re failing. When you meet resistance, you will capsize and you will fail because God won’t be with you.

Guest (Male): More from the book of Mark is coming up next weekend on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis. This program is listener supported and brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.