Now this is not good, to fight against God, you realise that. You don't want to end up being vomited up by some fish up on a beach, covered in slime and seaweed. It's not really a nice place to be. It's where a lot of Christians get to somehow. At least if they come around and say yes to God, then things can only look better after that. So I wonder if God has been speaking in any area of your life, and the storm you're facing is just because God is wanting you to yield. Even Jesus faced His own storms. Think in Matthew 26, in the Garden of Gethsemane, He faced a storm. Now you see, the storm He faced was the cross; but it brought a storm in his emotions. You imagine if you know, if you knew that in twenty-four hours of walking out that door, you would face the most horrendous death. You've probably heard and seen of others, a terrible slow death, and then you know you're going to face that, what would you feel?
The Bible says: He was extremely sorrowful, but He didn't isolate. He gathered key friends around, and He asked them to pray with Him, and stand with Him through the difficulty He was facing. One of the things that people tend to do in a storm is isolate; and when you isolate, you're going to go down under a tree in depression, wanting to die like Elijah did. Isolation's not the answer, connection is, and then in the connection He asked His friends, even though they weren't able to solve His problem or change the circumstances, He just shared His heart with them, and gathered them in to stand with Him in prayer. He said: pray with Me an hour, and He shared His heart with them. It takes great courage and humility, when you're going through the face of a storm, and things are very, very difficult, to just share your heart with people; and say: could you stand with me in prayer? Not ask them to solve it, try and pray and fix it, prophesy some great thing. You just ask them: I just want you to stand with me in agreement. That's a Godly thing to do. No one should be alone. We should all be part of the body, and build connections; so when the pressure's on, you've got someone you can talk to, and say: can you pray with me? I really need prayer right now.
And then Jesus personally worked through, and wrestled through, to the place of surrender to the will of God; Father, not my will, your will be done. That's a huge challenge to go through those kinds of surrenders, but don't think He didn't have a storm with His emotions. It was a major storm, and the storm was about surrendering to what God wanted, when His flesh didn't want to do it. You may come across that in marriage, you can come across it in family. There's every area of our life we can face those kinds of pressures; and it's about: will you align with God, or not? When you're going through financial pressure, and someone talks to you about realigning your finances, that can be a terrible storm; and it takes huge courage to break through, and yield, and put your finances in God's hands; and then walk through the practical process of budgeting, and managing, and debt repayment, and getting yourself back on top again. Isn't that true?
Here's another one. There's just some natural storms that come in life. Now I hadn't thought about this, but I was thinking about it as I was praying, there are just some situations come. God didn't arrange it, the devil didn't arrange it, and you didn't do anything wrong. It's just because we live in a sinful world; like there's landslides happen, there's storms happen, there's earthquakes happen. There's things that happen. People do stuff. You drive down the road, and someone crosses the line, and there's an accident. It doesn't mean that the devil made it all happen, or that God was trying to get your attention and punish you. It was just we live in a fallen world, and in a fallen world - stuff happens. People are born with DNA issues, and it's a tragedy, and the parents grieve; where's God in this? And they go through all this whole thing. Sometimes it's just, we're living in a sinful and a fallen world; and God calls us - it says in Romans 8: the whole world groans, because of it's travail and it's problems.