Take Heart! God Shows Up Matthew 14:22–33 & Psalm 107:23–32
Take Heart! God Shows Up
Matthew 14:22–33 & Psalm 107:23–32
Rev. Dr. Rhonda Abbott Blevins
August 9, 2026
Immediately he made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
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Some went down to the sea in ships,
doing business on the mighty waters;
they saw the deeds of the Lord,
his wondrous works in the deep.
For he commanded and raised the stormy wind,
which lifted up the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths;
their courage melted away in their calamity;
they reeled and staggered like drunkards
and were at their wits’ end.
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he brought them out from their distress;
he made the storm be still,
and the waves of the sea were hushed.
Then they were glad because they had quiet,
and he brought them to their desired haven.
Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love,
for his wonderful works to humankind.
Let them extol him in the congregation of the people
and praise him in the assembly of the elders.
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In C.S. Lewis’s story The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, there is an island that no sailor wants to find.
From a distance it doesn’t look like an island at all. It looks like a darkness sitting on the water . . . a blackness the ship sails into, the way you’d sail into a fog bank, except that fog is gray and this is nothing at all. And the sailors have heard the rumor about this place: it is the island where dreams come true.
Now, that sounds wonderful, amazing even. Until one sailor, whiter than the sail, says it out loud: not daydreams. Dreams. The ones that wake you up at three in the morning. Not dreams exactly . . . nightmares. And on this island, they are real.
The crew begins to come apart. Grown men, brave men, men who have fought sea serpents, come undone. Not by anything they can see, but by the dark itself, and by what each of them knows is waiting for him inside it. They frantically turn the ship around and row for their lives, but the darkness doesn’t end. It just goes on and on, and there is no way to know if they are rowing out of the darkness, it or deeper into it.
As the men row, up in the rigging is a young girl named Lucy. And Lucy does the only thing left to do. She whispers a prayer to Aslan, the great lion, the Christ-figure of Narnia: Aslan, if ever you loved us at all, send us help now.
And help comes. But it is not a lion. It’s a bird. An albatross. It circles the mast in the darkness, and as it passes Lucy’s face it whispers to her in a voice that sounds like the voice of Aslan:
“Courage, dear heart.”
And then the albatross flies ahead of the ship like a light. The ship follows it, the darkness thins, and the ship and everyone on board survives.
Now, I want you to notice two things about that bird . . . two things we’ll encounter several times throughout this series about courage:
First: the albatross does not make the darkness disappear. It leads the ship through the darkness. One ship-length at a time.
Second: only Lucy hears the whisper. Courage, we’ll find, does not come over the loudspeaker. It comes to one frightened person, in the dark, in a voice she recognizes as the voice of God. That person, then, steers for everybody else.
Church, for the next several weeks, we are going to follow that whisper through the Bible. We’re going to meet some midwives who stared down a Pharaoh. We’ll encounter a prophet of God hiding under a bush asking to die. We’ll discover three men in a fiery furnace, a woman bravely reaching through a crowd, a blind man hollering by the side of a road. I’m calling this series Take Heart, because when you look at everything Jesus says to frightened people, that’s the phrase he uses time and time again. Take Heart. And along the way, that little whisper from the albatross might show up as well: Courage, dear heart. Listen for it. It might just be God’s whisper for you.
Now. Let me tell you why we’re doing this series, and why now.
I’m going to guess that nobody in this room needed the Dark Island explained to them. Each of us has a Dark Island. I have mine. You have yours.
· For some of you it’s that MRI scheduled for next week, and the long dark between now and the results.
· For some of you it’s an adult child you cannot reach because of addiction or estrangement.
· For some of you it’s that gnawing dread of outliving your 401k.
· For all of us, it’s the 24-hour news cycle that never lets us exhale.
· And for those of us who live here in paradise, it’s the underlying knowledge that this paradise can become a Dark Island during hurricane season.
I don’t know what your Dark Island is but I bet you know it all too well.
Here is the strange math of our age: we have more security than almost any generation in human history, but less peace. More insurance, more medicine, more locks, more information . . . yet anxiety has become the background music of modern life. It hums under everything. Something is wrong with that math.
So here is the promise of this series: I want you to hold me to it. The Bible never says, “Do not feel afraid.” Our feelings don’t take orders; you know that. What the Bible says, over and over, is “Do not be afraid.” In other words, do not let fear set up camp in you. Don’t let fear establish a mailing address in your soul. And whatever you do . . . do not let fear drive. Not because I believe some empty cliché like “everything’s gonna be ok.” I don’t believe that platitude and neither should you. But I DO believe in the Presense. Fear not, for I am with you. In a few weeks, if you stick with me throughout this series, you’ll have heard many of the “take heart” passages throughout the Bible. And every one of them—every single one—is spoken into the fear. Never after it has passed. Always while the wind is still blowing.
Which brings us to a boat.
Matthew chapter 14. I want you to catch the very first thing the text says, because it will save you from a bad theology that a lot of good church folks carry around.
Verse 22: “Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side.”
He made them. This storm they are about to row into is not punishment. It is not the consequence of a wrong turn. They are in the storm because they did what Jesus said. Write that down somewhere in your heart: obedience does not mean we will avoid the storm.
Some of you are in rough water right now precisely because you said yes to something God asked of you, and maybe you’ve been quietly wondering what you did wrong to deserve the storm you find yourself in. Chances are, you did nothing wrong. It’s just that storms happen.
So the disciples row out into the evening, and Jesus goes up the mountain, alone, to pray.
Then the wind turns. Matthew says the boat was battered by the waves, the wind against them. And if any of those disciples had grown up in the synagogue (and they had) they knew the song for this moment . . . a song Israel had been singing for centuries. Psalm 107:
Some went down to the sea in ships . . . they saw the deeds of the LORD, his wondrous works in the deep. For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their calamity; they reeled and staggered like drunkards, and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble
At their wits’ end. The Hebrew there says something like: all their wisdom was swallowed up. Every skill they had, every trick they knew . . . gone. Now remember, several of these men were professional fishermen. This storm, however, was unlike anything they’d seen before. The disciples are living this psalm in real time!
And then, as if the storm wasn’t terrifying enough, they see something. A shape. Moving on the water. Coming toward them. And they scream.
Now here’s what fascinates me: the disciples don’t scream at the storm. They’ve been managing the storm for hours. The storm is a known enemy . . . you can point at it, fight it, row against it. What undoes them is the shape they can’t name. “It is a ghost!” they cry.
A theologian named Paul Tillich wrote a book about seventy years ago called The Courage to Be, and in it he drew a distinction I want to give you, because it explains that scream as well as that 3am angst you may feel sometimes. Fear has an object. Anxiety does not. Fear is the storm: you can see it, prepare for it, board up the windows against it. Anxiety is the ghost: the shapeless thing, the dread that can’t be pointed at, the fear of the nothing. You can fight a fear. You can’t fight a fog.
Tillich said our anxiety comes at us in three forms. See if you recognize yourself in any of these (unfortunately I recognize myself in all three):
· First, according to Tillich, is the anxiety of fate and death: the low hum that says, something is coming for me, and I cannot stop it. The MRI. The years vs. the bank account. Hurricane season. The unwanted visit from the grim reaper.
· Second: the anxiety of guilt and condemnation: the voice that says, I have failed (or worse) I am what I’ve done. Not “I made a mistake” but “I am the mistake.”
· Third (maybe the most modern one) the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness: the quiet suspicion, usually arriving late at night, that none of it adds up to anything. That you could disappear from the group text and no one would care.
Fate. Guilt. Emptiness. Every person in that boat was carrying at least one of these anxieties. (Spoiler alert): every person in this room is carrying at least one of these anxieties as well.
And now watch what Jesus does. Verse 27: “But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart. It is I. Do not be afraid.’”
Notice: Jesus does not still the wind first. Wait, what? Let me say that again. Jesus does not still the wind before telling his friends to take heart. The storm keeps howling for four more verses. The first thing Jesus does is answer the ghost . . . the anxiety . . . and he answers it the only way anxiety can be answered. Not by removing the threat, but by giving the darkness a face and a name. It is I.
You cannot fight a fog. But a fog can be spoken into by a voice you recognize. Lucy knew the albatross by its voice before she saw any light at all. That’s how it works. That is always how it works.
And then there’s Peter. Bless his heart. As for Peter, of the twelve men in that boat, exactly one gets out of it. Peter is also (let the record reflect) the only one who gets wet.
The church has spent 2,000 years being a little hard on Peter for sinking. Sermons about his little faith, his wandering eyes. Fine. Whatever. But I’d like to file a brief on Peter’s behalf this morning: eleven men stayed dry because eleven men stayed put. Peter is the only person in that boat who got wet because he’s the only one who stepped out in faith.
So I’ve got a new name for Peter this morning. I’d like to start calling Peter “the patron saint of the half-brave.” And I mean that as a compliment, because half-brave is most of us on our best day. Look at him: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” And Jesus says one word, “come,” and Peter swings his legs over the side of a boat in a raging storm, and he stands up, and he walks. Three steps, maybe four. On the angry sea.
And then, verse 30: “But when he saw the wind . . .”
Now hold on. You cannot see wind. Nobody has ever seen wind. You can only see what the wind is doing . . . the spray, the whitecaps, the chaos. Peter takes his eyes off the face and puts them on the forecast, and down he goes.
Friends, I do that roughly . . . every day. I suspect you do too. Most of us can muster about three steps before we focus on the wind.
But Peter’s sinking gives us a couple of gifts, and I don’t want you to leave without them.
The first is his prayer. “Lord, save me.” Three words. No address, no eloquence, no “we just really wanna thank you.” It may be the most useful prayer in the entire Bible, because it is the one you can pray with sea water in your mouth. Some of you have been putting off praying because you don’t have the right words. The patron saint of the half-brave would like you to know that three words will do.
And the second gift is one word in verse 31: “Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him.” Immediately. No lecture from the surface while Peter bobs. The rebuke, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” comes after the catch, and notice the posture: it is spoken while holding him. Even the correction comes from a grip that is not letting go. Little faith, it turns out, is enough faith to be caught by.
Tillich has a phrase for what Peter did in those three steps, and it’s the phrase I want to hang over this entire series. He said courage is not a feeling. Courage is acting . . . trusting, stepping, affirming your own God-given existence . . . “in spite of.” In spite of everything that pushes back. In spite of the wind you can’t see and the wave you can. Courage is not the absence of the storm. If it were, it wouldn’t be courage.
Peter’s steps were taken in a gale. That’s what makes them steps of faith and not a stroll. Half-brave, soaking wet, three words of prayer—in spite of—and that is exactly the material Jesus works with. Remember these words: in spite of. They will be back throughout this series, because they are where courage lives.
There’s one more detail in this story, and it’s the one I want to leave closest to your heart. It’s the clock.
Verse 25: Jesus came to them walking on the sea “in the fourth watch of the night.” The Romans divided the night into four watches. The fourth watch is three to six in the morning.
Now do the math with me. The disciples got into that boat at evening, maybe six, seven o’clock. Jesus comes between three and six a.m. Which means those men had been rowing against that wind for hours. Hours of pulling and bailing and getting nowhere. Hours of watching the mountain where they’d left him and seeing no one coming.
And Matthew does not tell us why Jesus waited. I have read this passage my whole life, and I will not stand up here and pretend to an answer the text refuses to give. I don’t know why the fourth watch and not the first. I don’t know why hour nine and not hour one.
But here is what the text does say, and I will stake everything on it. It says he came. And it says he came while it was still dark. And Mark, telling the same story, adds one aching detail: from the mountain, Jesus saw them straining at the oars. The whole time. He saw them the whole time.
So let me speak for a moment directly to the fourth-watch people in this room — and you know who you are. You’ve been battling the storm a long time. The treatment. The estrangement. The job search, the caregiving, the grief that was supposed to be lighter by now. And you have been watching the mountain, and no one seems to be coming.
The promise of this text is not an early God. I wish I could preach you an early God; the text won’t let me. The promise of scripture is a God who shows up — who has seen the boat the whole time, and who comes at last walking on the very thing you thought would drown you. Look at that. The storm becomes his sidewalk. The thing under Peter’s sinking feet is the same thing under Jesus’s steady ones. God does not always calm the water before he crosses it to get to you.
And when he climbs into the boat (v. 32) then the wind ceases. Psalm 107 again: he made the storm be still . . . and he brought them to their desired haven. The psalm was true the whole night. It just wasn’t finished yet.
So here is what I want us to do before we sing. I want to invite you, very gently, to name the thing. You know the thing. The biggest wave you are watching right now. The wind you cannot see but can feel bending everything in your life. Maybe it wears Tillich’s first face: fate and death (the appointment, the season, the diagnosis). Maybe it wears the second: the guilt (the thing you did or didn’t do that keeps introducing itself as your true name). Maybe the third: the emptiness (the 3 a.m. suspicion that none of it matters).
Whichever one it is: say it to God. Right now, silently, without dressing it up. You don’t need eloquence. Peter’s entire prayer was three words, and before he could barely utter the last word he found himself in the Savior’s arms.
Now hear the word of the Lord over what you just named.
The voice that found Lucy in the dark . . . the voice that came across the water at four in the morning . . . is not finished speaking. It does not promise you the wind will stop today. It promises something better. It is I. You are not alone in the boat. And you were never alone in the water.
You can take the next step this week. Not because the storm has passed. But in spite of.
Take heart, dear people. God shows up. God always shows up. Maybe not when we’d like. Maybe not how we’d expect. God always shows up.
I close today with a blessing written by John O’Donohue:
May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites me to new frontiers,
To break the dead shell of yesterdays,
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
May it be so. Amen.