Scripture: Luke 5:1-11
Journal: Where in your life, in spite of your best efforts, are your nets still
empty? Where in your life are you still
grasping for control rather than surrendering it up to God? How does a face-to-face encounter with Jesus
change that? How have you encountered
Jesus through this passage today? How
has that changed you? What does it look
like for you to follow him?
Reflection: It might well be that the
biggest enemy of our spiritual lives is our own self-sufficiency. For some reason, even if our “nets” are
totally empty, we hold onto, with dogged determination, our own ways of doing
and seeing and being. Kingdom living,
however, requires a total change in mindset.
So much of what Jesus taught (see the Beatitudes) was the exact opposite
of how we normally operate.
In the kingdom of God: the poor
are rich, the last are first, and the weak are strong. In the kingdom of God: small is big, down is
up, low is high, less is more, and empty is full. In the kingdom of God: the way you gain your
life is by losing it. The kingdom of God
is about dependence instead of independence, it is about fruitfulness instead
of productivity, and it is about powerlessness instead of power. In the kingdom of God we become more only by
becoming less. It is about following
instead of leading. It is all so
incredibly counter-intuitive to all that lies within our fallen hearts and
minds—a default that even after salvation runs deep within us. Thus, we have to be retrained; we have to
relearn the basic ways of life in the kingdom, ways of thinking and seeing and being.
But that does not come
easy. Partly because of how outlandish
it all sounds and partly because how resistant we are to actually moving in
that direction. We would much rather be
strong and independent and productive. We
would much rather ascend than descend, we would much rather be served than
serve, and we would much rather remain in control than have to surrender it. Our basic MO is to operate as often as
possible in the realm of our own self-sufficiency.
If you look at the fifth
chapter of Luke, you can hear it in Peter’s voice: “But Master, we have worked
hard all night and haven’t caught anything.
I know you want us to put out into the deep and let our nets down for a
catch, but that’s not how this fishing thing works. You don’t fish at day, you fish at
night—that’s how you catch fish. We
know, we do this for a living. This is
not our first rodeo.” It went against
everything he knew to be true about fishing to do what Jesus said, but
fortunately he did it anyway. He chose
to surrender.
And in the midst of that
surrender he had an encounter with Jesus that was life-altering, changing the
way he saw Jesus, changing the way he saw himself, and changing the way he saw
his life. Somehow, in that boat full of
fish, he saw the Divinity of the One who breathed him into being. Somehow, in that very instant, he saw who
Jesus really was—the One who measured the waters in the hollow of his hand and
with its breadth marked off the heavens—and it changed him. He went from “Master, we have worked
all night and caught nothing,” to “Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful
man.” From Master to Lord, that’s
a pretty big (and beautiful) leap.
But there was more
surrendering to be done still. “Don’t be
afraid,” Jesus said, “for now you are ready to catch men, your truest
vocation.” Almost as if to say, “This
life of ministry I am calling you to has a certain design to it. In order to catch men, you must first be
captured by me. And after you have been
captured by me, you must surrender. You
must pull all of your self-sufficiency up on the shore, leave it behind, and
follow me. Peter, your nets will always
be empty of anything of eternal value on your own. You must abandon your own self-sufficiency
and learn to follow me.”
Prayer
Closing
Prayer: Let me see you face-to-face today, Lord Jesus,
that my life might be transformed and that I might become all you desire me to
be. Amen.
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