Acts 27:30 “And as the shipmen were about to flee out of the ship, when they had let down the boat into the sea, under colour as though they would have cast anchors out of the foreship,”

Acts 27:31 “Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved.”

Acts 27:32 “Then the soldiers cut off the ropes of the boat, and let her fall off.”

In Acts 27, the apostle Paul is a prisoner on a prison ship bound for Rome.

However this ship gets caught up in a very bad storm… a storm that is completely beyond their capacity to control, ability to navigate and sufficiency to bear.

God tells Paul that they will be fine though , if they just stay with the ship, because the only way to survive will be to stay on board… despite how bad it looks as they face getting smashed on the rocks as the storm drives them towards land.

But when it does look very bad… the shipmen here in the scripture quoted above go to abandon ship while pretending they aren’t.

But Paul sees it happening, and tells the centurion in charge of the ship that if they abandon ship, they will die according to God’s word.

… Every single Christian will be tempted to quit and abandon ship at least once, and probably many more times in their life. And many do quit when it gets too hard or seems impossible, as the shipmen were about to do here.

Paul would later write in 1 Timothy 1:15 “Holding faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck:”

You wonder if he wasn’t thinking of this exact event when he linked the idea of “holding faith” and making “shipwreck” together.

If you are a Christian, you will surely be tested, and God will let it happen to prove to you what your faith is really worth and to build it into an unshakeable and precious faith founded and purified in patience and experience, a faith forged through the fiery trials of life.

And please note: the shipmen were trying to disguise what they were doing. When Christians abandon ship, they usually don’t say they are doing just that, they make it out to be something else, and even put some sort of religious spin on it… while all the time there is no mistake that they are abandoning ship.

… Whatever your personal path forward in life, abandoning the Bible and abandoning Jesus Christ and what’s true and right is never an option for the child of God… even when it looks hopeless. Hold fast! Hold on! Stand and see the salvation of the Lord!

May God give us all the grace to not be “man overboard” when things get really tough and we face the impossible on the choppy seas and through the great or even greatest storm of our life.

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