When You’re Close To Quitting
Focus Keywords: Steven Furtick, Peter walking on water, overcoming doubt, spiritual burnout, faith in the wind, close to breakthrough, maintaining focus, spiritual encouragement
This comprehensive summary and rewrite, drawing from Steven Furtick’s message, “When You’re Close To Quitting,” tackles the spiritual fatigue and self-doubt that often strike believers when they are closest to their breakthrough. The core lesson is drawn from the story of Peter walking on water: failure occurs not when circumstances worsen, but when focus shifts from Jesus to the persistent distractions.
The Spiritual Fatigue of the Journey
The message begins by acknowledging the reality of spiritual exhaustion in the demands of daily life, emphasizing that it is difficult for individuals to see the “big picture of all God is doing” between breaths. Many people arrive “winded, spiritually,” often finding church to be their “happy place” where their efforts feel meaningful.
The journey, however, is often marked by immediate resistance. For Christians who seek assurance that they are “in the will of God by the absence of contrary wind,” the story of the disciples immediately contradicts this. No sooner did the disciples get in the boat than “the wind was against them”. In fact, if they had turned back, the wind would have been blowing for them.
The Context of Delay: Why Jesus Waited
The setting for Peter’s famous walk was late and demanding. The disciples were already delayed after spending a long time distributing food to 5,000 family units (in Matthew 14) before setting out to travel three more miles against the wind.
When Jesus finally arrived, it was “shortly before dawn”. The rhetorical question posed is: “Why did he wait so long?”. Jesus, being on a mountain, could see their distress on the sea. He waited until the “last possible moment before the darkness goes away”.
This timing was intentional: Jesus waited so the disciples would have to trust Him by faith, based not on “what they saw with their eyes but what they heard with their ears”.
The Complicated Question of Doubt
When Peter stepped out of the boat and began walking toward Jesus, he famously fell. Jesus immediately reached out and caught him, asking: “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”.
The sermon insists this is a “complicated question”. Spiritual struggles are rarely solved by simplified solutions like “Just trust the Lord”. Doubt can stem from deep-seated trauma that makes trusting anyone, especially an invisible God, difficult. Insecurities are often masked by external strength and talent. The wind “gets windy for Cindy too”.
People struggle with internal questions like:
- “Does it really even matter what I do?”
- “Does anybody really care that I do it?”
- “Am I even really good at it?”
The speaker notes that he faces the same doubts the Devil instills. It is hard to pinpoint the exact psychological or neurological factors that cause one to doubt, especially when they are successfully maintaining spiritual disciplines (diet, Bible reading, positive thinking).
Since the text never explicitly answers why Peter doubted—because the reason is too complicated for a simple story—the focus must shift.
The True Moment of Failure: When Focus Shifts
Instead of asking “Why did he doubt?” the sermon focuses on the simpler, more actionable question: “When did he doubt?”.
The answer is found in Verse 30: “But when he saw the wind…”.
- The Wind Did Not Change: The text does not indicate that the wind grew stronger, gained momentum, or that the circumstances got worse. Peter had already walked a “long way against the wind”. In fact, when circumstances get worse, faith often “locks in and gets stronger” because the need for God becomes undeniable.
- Focus Changed: The wind blowing against Peter was the “same wind that had been blowing against him the whole time”. Peter fell because his “focus changed”. For many steps, he had been “locked on Jesus,” paying no attention to the rocking water, the waves, or the wind’s velocity.
- Looking Past Jesus: Peter started looking “past the one he was walking toward”. He became “winded” and forgot that God had brought him a mighty long way.
The doubt came when he started “looking at what was against him”. This is the spiritual danger: becoming fixated on those who didn’t love you, becoming hard-hearted, or letting the Devil steal your song in the storm.