02/09/03 - "Water-walkers" - by Pastor Mike Baker

For the past several weeks, we have been reviewing that God has a plan for our lives. God really wants us to find out why we are here. Great are His thoughts toward us. Now we want to look at the necessity of faith in our life being applied to our walk.

Mt 14:22-33

• The walk that God has planned for us will not always be an easy walk.
  • we have to trust God that He knows what is best for us, no matter what is going on around us.
  • there are going to be times when He is going to ask us to do things that we cannot do on our own or will take faith to do them.
  • There are going to be times when God is going to call us to walk on circumstances, to walk on our obstacles, and to walk on our impossibilities.

Eight principles of water-walking:

1. Be discerning
   • Water-walking isn't just about risk, it is about discernment
     • He is looking for wisdom and spiritual maturity
     • He placed us in a body of Christ because we are susceptible to folly.
   • Need to ask God, is this really you (just like Peter)?
2. Water-walkers have to leave the boat
   • God has designed us to do more than simply avoid failure
     • parable of owner giving talents
   • In your life, what is your boat?
     • your boat is anything that stops you from stepping out in faith to walk with Jesus
3. Focus on Jesus, not on the storm
   • we know there are going to be challenges and obstacles... Jesus said it is guaranteed
4. Reject risk-lock
   • could keep us from fulfilling God's call because we fail to step out when God asks us to
   • we spend too much time thinking things through
   • staying in the boat does not necessarily guarantee safety
5. Accept fear as the price of growth
   • growth involves exploring new territory
   • we are always going to have to deal with fear
     • Satan wants us to be afraid
     • we must conquer fear with our faith
     • won't affect us as much over time because we will have past experiences
6. Water-walking breaks us out of our comfort zone
   • we can become addicted to comfort, routine, our life
7. Need to know how to respond when we come up short
   • we will stumble and the enemy wants us to think that we failed
   • just because Peter began to sink does not mean he failed
   1. failure is not an event, only a judgment about an event
      • Sir Edmund Hillary made several attempts to scale Mount Everest before he succeeded. One time after he failed, he shook his fist up at the mountain and shouted "I'll defeat you yet. You're as big as your gonna get, but I am going to grow".
   2. the real failures were still in the boat
      • the others had the same opportunity, but did nothing and watched Peter do something that no other human had done
      • he also knew what it was to experience the joy of being lifted by Jesus in a moment of despair
   3. only a failure if we fail to learn from it
      • Thomas Edison had six thousand experiments before he got the light bulb to work. He didn't fail six thousand times, he figured out six thousand ways how not to make a light bulb.
8. Stepping out of the boat, puts us where Jesus is.
   • Peter stepped out of the boat toward Jesus.