Luke 5:10 (NKJV) — 10 and so also were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.”

The phrase “catch men” comes from two Greek words:

ζωγρέω   zōgreō and ἄνθρωπος   anthrōpos 

“Zōgreō” means to “catch alive.” “Anthrōpos” means men.

It the most literal sense it means to catch men alive.

Jesus is saying to Peter, “Peter, what you are doing for a living is not what you are going to do with your life.  You catch fish for a living.  You are going to catch people for life.”

“Peter, you are spending your life catching fish to kill them so that you can earn a living.  However, you are going to now spend the rest of your life catching people so that they may live!”

Don’t let this go past you: What Jesus is telling Peter that he is going to do, is the exact thing that Jesus had been doing.  The reason that Jesus could tell Peter to catch people is because Jesus had caught him.

“Peter, you have been caught so that you may go out and find others.  You were lost…but now you are found so that you can go out and rescue other lost people.”

From now on Peter’s life was going to be built around two things:

Finding lost people and making them into committed, reproducing disciples.

That was God’s will for Peter and all of the early disciples and that is still God’s will for every follower of Jesus and every church.  That is why the mission statement of Grace Baptist (my church) is: “To reach West Tennessee, America, and the world with the Good News of Jesus Christ.”  Why?  It’s simple.  Jesus said so.

Whenever you walk into your church and see an empty chair, you shouldn’t see the chair, you should see a missed opportunity–a lost person far from God–or a saved person that is not being discipled.

How do “catch men alive” and get them on the path to discipleship?  The answer is incredibly simple and may sound trite…you have to do exactly what Peter did:

Surrender to the call of God on your life.

Look at what they did:

Luke 5:11 (NKJV) — 11 So when they had brought their boats to land, they forsook all and followed Him.

If you are being honest with yourself, that will make you pause and swallow hard.  These men basically signed their names to a blank papyrus and Jesus hadn’t even spelled out the terms of the contract yet.

Christianity is so much more than simply accepting Jesus and His death, burial, and resurrection for your sins so you can go to heaven when you die. That’s the beginning.

As a follower of Jesus, you are also called to live out His purpose for your life and make that life count…for Him!  We should be willing as once lost people to live our lives on a rescue mission to find other lost people.

Catch people like you were caught.

Is it scary? Yes, it is.  Is it costly?  Yes, it is. 

Read any news article…it is a risk to live the Christian life in 2017.  Make no mistake about it and don’t listen to anyone who tells you different: Christians are becoming one of the most persecuted religious groups in the world…and our nation.

It is a risk to share your faith with people you know.  It could be embarrassing or strain relationships.

It is a risk to stand firm for your beliefs when the world around you says they are out of date and you are a bigot or a hypocrite.

When you decide to step out and follow Jesus, He takes responsibility for the journey.

We need to follow Jesus, not because He needs us, but because we need Him to take life from the monotonous to the momentus.

Pastor Marcus

 

 

 

 

The steps that the first disciples took are the steps we must take if we want to get on the greatest journey of all – one that will lead us right into a God-filled eternity.

The first step of this journey is simple…to hear the Word of God.  The next step was to trust the Son of God.

When you hear the Word of God and you trust the Son of God – that is when you get to experience the Grace of God.

 

Notice exactly what Jesus said to Peter in verse 4:

Luke 5:4b (NKJV) — 4b …“Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”

Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “Let’s go fishing.”  Because all fishing is looking for fish.  Some of us may be better at that than others.

Jesus said, “Let’s go catch fish” which is a big, big difference.

Luke 5:6–7 (NKJV) — 6 And when they had done this, they caught a great number of fish, and their net was breaking. 7 So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink.  

It is one thing to know how to fish.  It is another thing to know exactly where to fish.  You talk about a catch!

Get the picture in your mind: A fishing boat was 7½ feet wide and over 27 feet long.  They were filled so full that they both began to sink.

We are talking about tons of fish – never before and never since has a catch like that been made.

“It is the first time in history that a fisherman came home and actually told the truth!”  “Yes – I really caught that many and yes – they were this big.  If you don’t believe me you can ask Jesus!” 

Put yourself in Peter’s sandals.  How excited would you have been?  Can you imagine what he was thinking?

He had to be thinking, “Wow!  What a huge payday!  Jesus, let’s go into business together!”  He probably began to add up all of the profit in his mind.

Then the thought hit him, “Why would Jesus, a poor carpenter, who didn’t own a home and had no money of his own, travel the countryside preaching, teaching, and healing for nothing?  In fact, He could have gotten into somebody else’s boat.  Why did He get into mine and why did He give me this catch?”

Then the reality of what was happening hit him: “Jesus doesn’t care about fish, or about business, or about money.  He cares about me.  He doesn’t care about prosperity.  He cares about people like me!”

Look at how Peter responds:

Luke 5:8–9 (NKJV) — 8 When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” 9 For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish which they had taken;  

Peter either knew at that moment that this man was God or he knew He was somehow in the presence of God.   He gets it right.

“Jesus, you are Lord.  I am a sinner.”  It is the first time the word “sinner” is found in the Gospel of Luke. 

Do you know what a sinner is?  It is a missing person far from God.

Jesus agreed with Peter.  No argument.  You are a sinful man, but as Peter is about to find out, Jesus is not going to leave Peter, but He is going to ask Peter to join Him:

Luke 5:10 (NKJV) — 10 and so also were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.”

 Seven times in the Gospel of Luke Jesus will say these words, “do not be afraid.”

What Jesus said to Peter Jesus says to us.  “I don’t care what you’ve done.  I don’t care who you are.  I don’t care how bad you’ve blown it.  I care about you.”

Jesus didn’t come to bring fear.  He came to bring forgiveness.

It is amazing to me that Peter wanted to send the Lord away, but Jesus wanted to draw Peter closer.  At the point you feel most far from God is the point that God wants to be most near to you.

“When you meet Jesus and you recognize who He is and you realize what you are, and you resolve to bring what you are to who He is, He won’t reject you with a closed fist, but He will receive you with open arms.”

When you experience the grace of God it will lead you to step #4…that we will look at in the next post.

When He had stopped speaking, He said to Simon, “Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”  Luke 5:4 (NKJV)

Trust me: The last thing that Peter wanted to hear Jesus say that day was “Let’s go fishing.”

You have to understand that Peter is the professional fisherman…and has to be looking at Jesus like, “Why don’t you stick to carpentry and I will handle the fishing?”

Remember what Peter and his fishing buddies were doing in that boat? Verse 2 says, they were “washing their nets.”

Why?  Because the day’s work is done.  He has clocked out.  They’ve pulled their nets in and are cleaning their nets so they don’t get damaged.

It was time to get home, get a bite, and watch a little T.V. before getting up and doing it all over again.

That is why Peter says this:

5 But Simon answered and said to Him, “Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net.” Luke 5:5 (NKJV)

Peter is exhausted.  His crew had fished all night and hadn’t caught anything.

“There was a reason they worked at night.  The fish in the Sea of Galilee feed at night.  In the daytime, they hide under rocks.

Even worse, they congregate around the streams and the springs at the edge of the sea, close to shore, not in the deep.  A fish can’t see a net at night, but he can see it in the daytime and avoid it.”

Jesus was asking Peter to fish at the wrong time in the wrong place.

If they did what Jesus asked with everyone watching, they would be the joke of the town and the only boats out there trying to fish.

This is how I imagine the conversation went, “Jesus, I really like you a lot and you are a cool guy, but I am a professional and you are a carpenter. I know rods and reels and you know hammers and nails. You don’t know anything about fishing.”

To this, Jesus probably replied, “Well, from looking at your empty nets you don’t know as much as you think you do!”

You need to understand that fishing is back-breaking work.  Jesus wasn’t asking him to hang out at the end of the boat and watch a bobber for a bite.

What they did in Peter’s day was to lay out a great net in a semi-circle, encompassing a radius of 100 feet, drawing it in hand-over-hand and repeating the procedure again and again and again.

Jesus is asking a man who had not slept all night, hadn’t caught one thing, who had just finished washing his nets to beach the boat, load a 1000 pounds of wet- nets, row out to deep water in broad daylight in front of a crowd and catch fish that won’t even be there.

Yet, Simon says, “nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net.”

Don’t miss the importance of what he said and what he did. What you are looking at is the first example of faith in the New Testament.

Faith is simply taking Jesus at His word and trusting what He says. 

Peter says, “I wouldn’t do this for just anybody, but since I have heard You teach and I’ve seen You work, (by the way, back up in Chapter 4 we read that Jesus had been to Peter’s house and healed his mother-in-law so Peter owed Him one!) I will do what You ask.”

God honors faith and faith is simply trusting Jesus and doing what He asks in spite of the:

• Feelings within you,
• the circumstances around you
• and the consequences before you.

It is this second step of trusting the Son of God that makes the first step of hearing the Word of God come to life.  If you hear the Word of God, but you don’t trust the Son of God, then your hearing won’t make a difference.

Peter has taken the second step of what will be a life-long journey, but now he is about to experience the greatest thrill of all – the third step.

We will examine that step next time!

Pastor Marcus

The first step on a journey with Jesus is remarkably simple:

We must hear the Word of God.

Luke 5:1 (NKJV) — 1 So it was, as the multitude pressed about Him to hear the word of God, that He stood by the Lake of Gennesaret,

When you read the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus’ public ministry centered on three things: teaching, preaching, and healing.

For three years, Jesus went about the countryside teaching what was right, preaching what was true, and healing what was wrong.

This story in the Gospel of Luke begins with Jesus teaching and people hearing the Word of God. This is exactly how every journey with Jesus must start.

You have to understand, however, that Jesus was not preaching or teaching from a Bible like the one that you probably own.  In that day, a Bible like yours did not exist yet.

Jesus was teaching the Word of God because He was God!  Every single time that Jesus spoke, what the disciples and others were hearing was the very Word of God…because He was the God of the Word.

As a matter of fact, John, who is in this story, would later write this:

John 1:1 (NKJV) — 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What was He teaching this crowd?  Luke records this in Luke 4:43:

Luke 4:43 (NKJV) — 43 but He said to them, “I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for this purpose I have been sent.”

He was teaching them about the Kingdom of God.

• Light had come to the spiritually dark.
• Sight had come to the spiritually blind.
• Freedom had come to the spiritually captive.

Now in order to make sure the crowds could hear Him and create some space between Himself and them, He does a wise thing:

Luke 5:2–3 (NKJV) — 2 and saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. 3 Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat.

He gets into Peter’s boat and has him push it offshore a short distance.  Why did He do that?  He was using the water to magnify His voice so all the crowd could hear Him.

He knew this would work because…well, He created water.  But more about that some other time.

The crowd is hanging on every word and so is Peter, because he has no choice.  He is in the boat with Him!

Jesus knows exactly what He is doing.  He knows the first step to becoming a follower of His is to hear the Word of God – that is step #1. 

And when we are followers of Jesus and we are trying to show others the way to salvation, this is where we must start also: with the Word of God!

In the next post, we will talk about step #2!

Pastor Marcus