If someone you deeply admired told you to step out of a boat into a huge lake during a driving storm without any apparent life support, would you obey without a protest? Is there anyone you know who would make such a commitment? A man once did make this commitment, and his story is told in the Bible, in the book of Matthew. See Matt. 14:22-32 .
What was it that motivated Simon Peter to take such an apparently extreme action at the bidding of his Teacher and Master, Christ Jesus? The Biblical account of that event records that Peter himself initiated the idea to walk on the water to Jesus. When Peter stepped out of the boat that night, he was willing deliberately to defy accepted laws of matter and physics. Wasn't this taking an unreasonable risk? Or could it be that he was actually much more secure than it might have seemed?
I have often thought about what an exciting new door opened for Peter as he stepped out of that boat! He was leaving behind a boatload of terrified disciples and a world of limitation and restriction to demonstrate the dominion of his God-given, Christlike nature; he refused to be held back by the appearance of a turbulent, tossing sea. He must have felt some sense of security beyond what he was seeing with his eyes and hearing with his ears, which enabled him to reach out for the Master in the face of it all without any material means of support.
