September Reading from The Message
We fail at many things and in many ways. Failure can be accompanied by feelings of inadequacy and shame that make us want to quit. The uniqueness of the gospel is not that it gets us to do something entirely new, but that it sends us back to what we’ve been doing all along, but this time with Jesus. Here at the beginning of Luke 5 we see how this unfolds.
Once when he was standing on the shore of Lake Gennesaret, the crowd was pushing in on him to better hear the Word of God. He noticed two boats tied up. The fishermen had just left them and were out scrubbing their nets. He climbed into the boat that was Simon’s and asked him to put out a little from the shore. Sitting there, using the boat for a pulpit, he taught the crowd.
When he finished teaching, he said to Simon, “Push out into deep water and let your nets out for a catch.”
Simon said, “Master, we’ve been fishing hard all night and haven’t caught even a minnow. But if you say so, I’ll let out the nets.” It was no sooner said than done—a huge haul of fish, straining the nets past capacity. They waved to their partners in the other boat to come help them. They filled both boats, nearly swamping them with the catch.
Simon Peter, when he saw it, fell to his knees before Jesus. “Master, leave. I’m a sinner and can’t handle this holiness. Leave me to myself.” When they pulled in that catch of fish, awe overwhelmed Simon and everyone with him. It was the same with James and John, Zebedee’s sons, coworkers with Simon.
Jesus said to Simon, “There is nothing to fear. From now on you’ll be fishing for men and women.” They pulled their boats up on the beach, left them, nets and all, and followed him.
Scripture Insight
Go Out into the Deep
The uniqueness of the gospel is not that it gets us to do something entirely new but that it sends us back to what we’ve been doing all along, but this time with Jesus. God wants to be in command of our lives—our work lives, our family lives, our leisured lives.
All of us experience failure. We fail at many things and in many ways. These failures are painful. Sometimes they leave us full of guilt, sometimes full of shame, sometimes overwhelmed with inadequacy. And not infrequently they leave us determined to quit. We’ve proved sufficiently to ourselves and the people around us that we’re not good at love, we’re not good at parenting, we’re not good at the whole Christian thing. We draw back, live marginally, cautiously, safely.
And then we hear Jesus say, “Go out into the deep and let down your nets.”
We say, in plain truth, “But we’ve already done that, and nothing happened.”
And Jesus says, “But you didn’t do it with me in the boat; you didn’t do it with me giving the commands.”
Same boat. Same commands. Same nets. But now Jesus is in on it—and that makes all the difference.
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