In the first century, travel by sea was primitive. It was harsh. You took your life into your hands when you boarded a first-century sailing vessel. Yet the apostle Paul did just that. And he was shipwrecked three times.
Writing to the Christians in Corinth he said, “Three times I was shipwrecked. Once I spent a whole night and a day adrift at sea” (2 Corinthians 11:25 NLT).
Paul seemed to face every kind of adversity imaginable. He had many enemies who were jealous of his success and followed him around, trying to undermine and destroy him. He had numerous setbacks in life that involved beatings and harm. And he had a physical disability that he wanted to be healed of, yet God said no.
Five years before making his journey to Rome, Paul wrote the believers there and said, “One of the things I always pray for is the opportunity, God willing, to come at last to see you” (Romans 1:10 NLT).
Did God answer his prayer?
Yes. But sometimes people think that when they’re in the will of God, they’ll have smooth sailing. That wasn’t true of the apostle Paul. On his way to Rome, he went through a shipwreck. But he had a prosperous journey by the will of God because of what it ultimately accomplished. Of course, that is a different idea of prosperity than we might normally think of.
A lot of preachers love to focus on prosperity. Some are even known as prosperity preachers. However, I think they’ve hijacked a biblical word. Yes, God wants believers to prosper. But the problem is the meaning that people pour into that.
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For many, prosperity means they never will be sick. They think they never will have problems and that life will be just great. But the reality is that you can live a prosperous life in the will of God and still face conflict.
We all will face storms and difficulties in some way. That is why we need to find our sea legs and learn not so much how to avoid storms but how to get through them.
The reality of life is that we are either coming out of a storm or going into one. That is just the way it is. Yes, there are times when we will have smooth sailing. There are times when we will have beautiful moments in our lives in between the storms. Thank God for those moments.
But when a storm comes, you can either get mad at God and get bitter, or you can completely surrender to him and say, “Lord, I trust you, no matter what.” It is our choice as to what we will do when storms come our way.
As for Paul, he was going to Rome because he had appealed to Caesar. There was a plot afoot to kill him, and 40 Jews had taken an oath not to eat or drink until Paul was dead. Thus, Paul went to Caesarea under Roman guard, and as he stood before Festus, and later Felix and King Agrippa, he realized that he had to get away from the people who wanted to destroy his life.
Because Paul was a Roman citizen, he invoked the privilege of Roman citizenship and appealed to Caesar. So he was sent, presumably, from Caesarea to Rome. As they set out on their journey aboard a primitive ship, Paul knew that bad times were coming.
They hit some storms and stopped temporarily in an area called Fair Havens, but no one wanted to stay there. Paul, however, felt they should have remained where they were, because he thought it would get worse. But they continued, and then they hit horrendous storms.
It was so bad, the Bible says, that neither nor sun nor star appeared, and the storm continued raging. Eventually they gave up all hope of being saved (see Acts 27:20).
Interestingly, Paul knew that a storm was coming when the others did not. Initially the captain and the centurion in charge thought that Paul didn’t know what he was talking about. Paul had warned them about the journey, but they ignored him. But when the storm came, they suddenly began to listen to what Paul had to say.
In the same way, Christians know that things that non-Christians don’t know. We know things will get bad in our nation and in the world. We know that Washington doesn’t have the answers. We know that government doesn’t have the solutions. And we know that humanity tends to make a mess of things.
We also know the Antichrist will come on the scene one day with new answers for a global economy, with military solutions, economic solutions, and new religious ideas where people set aside their differences and pull together. We know what is coming down because we read the Bible. And we also know the world doesn’t have what we are looking for.
Yet God can take a situation of pain and hardship and use it as an opportunity for the Gospel. Storms can be opportunities for us as believers to minister to people and point them to Jesus Christ.
Paul recognized that. He told the crew, “Men, you should have listened to me in the first place and not left Crete. You would have avoided all this damage and loss. But take courage! None of you will lose your lives, even though the ship will go down. … So take courage! For I believe God. It will be just as he said. But we will be shipwrecked on an island” (Acts 27:21–22, 25–26 NLT).
Usually we want to avoid the storm or the shipwreck. But God wants us to get through it. And it’s better to be in a storm with Jesus than to be anywhere else without him.
Paul’s confidence and hope was built on the knowledge that God was with him. In the face of danger, he was conscious of God’s presence.
God is with us in our storms as well. He is with you regardless of what storm, or even shipwreck, you’re going through. You are not alone. It won’t always be smooth sailing. But you will have a safe arrival.
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