Sermon Transcript

Our Current Series

So, currently we are in a series called “Who Is Jesus And What Does He Want?” The effort in this series is for us as a church to be able to faithfully dispatch the Great Commission. You see, the Great Commission begins with that Jesus is the Lord of heaven and on earth. And he has called us to make disciples of all the nations. And he wants us to do so by baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that he has taught us, specifically what he has commanded us.

So this series, “Who Is Jesus And What Does He Want?” Our efforts are to analyze, expound, dedicate, and resolve ourselves to follow them and be able to teach them. So today we are going to analyze, expand on, and ask, how does it impact our life, the command to “follow me” as Jesus said to the disciples.

So church, rise with me as we read Luke 5:1–11.

On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 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. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.” And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him. (Luke 5:1–11, ESV)

Jesus Breaks into Peter’s World

So we are going to be analyzing this command: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” This is the way the command appears in Matthew 4:19 and in Mark 1:17: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” And when you read these gospels, you look at them, and it seems odd and strange that you’ve got this guy—it looks like Jesus just steps on the scene and he’s like, “You, follow me.” And then they just drop their nets and they walk on and follow Jesus. I remember the first time I read this; it seems so strange.

Well, you see, there are four gospels. You’ve got Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Luke is by far the largest gospel in the New Testament. And Luke is actually just the first volume of a two-volume work: Luke and Acts together. These are the largest work in the New Testament by far. And Luke tends to give us more detail. And that’s why we’re in Luke today, because I want us to get the extra detail that makes it seem a little bit less strange why all of a sudden a man who just pops up on the scene and says, “Follow me.” And they just drop everything they own right there, their livelihood, and just start following this carpenter.

So, that’s where we’re at. We are in the book of Luke, and we’re going to see how he presents it. Now, before Jesus gives them the command to “follow me,” Jesus is starting to do ministry before he calls his first disciples. If you just read Matthew and Mark, you would think that Jesus comes out of the desert in Matthew 4. He’s just been tempted by the devil for 40 days and 40 nights. And then all of a sudden, he’s in town, and he just looks at Peter and he’s like, “Follow me.”

But you see, Luke has gone on and he’s done some deep investigative work. I recommend you look at the beginning of Luke. It’s really beautiful because Luke tells his people—he’s actually writing this gospel for a dignitary named Theophilus. And he tells Theophilus, “I went back to the beginning and I have interviewed all of the early eyewitnesses.” And we believe that he has included oral accounts, traditions that have gone into this work. And that is why Luke is able to provide us with details that the other gospels do not on this account.

So what are some of those details? Well, for one, we get to see that Jesus is actually performing some really cool ministry miracles and sermons well before he calls the first few disciples. So when Jesus pops up on the scene with Peter, Jesus is not actually a stranger. He is now an itinerant preacher, and he’s garnered quite the reputation.

So his pre-disciple details, they begin in Luke 4. Jesus—in 4:14—we see that Jesus is going into the region of Galilee, and he’s full of the Holy Spirit, and news about Jesus is beginning to spread everywhere. And in verse 15 of chapter 4, we actually see that Jesus, he’s teaching in the synagogues, and at this point they actually like him. But it’s not for long because Jesus has this awesome way of just making those who are in charge upset.

Very quickly, Jesus says some things in the synagogue that gets them upset. But what is pertinent, what is relevant for our passage today, is what Jesus does in 4:16–21. Jesus gets into the synagogue, and he grabs the Isaiah scroll, and he unravels it, and he starts reading this passage from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And then he rolls up the scroll, and he tucks it in, and he looks at everybody in the synagogue, and he says, “Today this passage has been fulfilled.” And everybody’s like, “Who is this guy? What is he doing? This is crazy.” Other people are like, “This guy’s got authority that we’re not seeing in our stuffy teachers, our ivory tower book-scroll studying teachers. This guy’s on the scene, and the scriptures are coming alive. There’s something to this backwoods Nazarene carpenter.”

Well, it gets even cooler because Jesus, after he leaves the temple, he starts doing ministry in Capernaum, and he’s casting out demons. We see that starting in verse 31. And not only that, we actually see that he gets his first encounter with Peter at the end of chapter 4. He goes to Peter’s house. So, this seems to be the first interaction that Jesus actually has with Peter. He goes in his house, and he heals Peter’s mother-in-law. He takes away her fever.

And then while he’s at Peter’s house, people are coming to get other sick people healed. But they’re filled with demons. And the demons are getting cast out in Peter’s house. And when they see Jesus, they tell Jesus, “I know who you are, Jesus, you’re the Son of God. Have you come to destroy us?” And Jesus tells them to be silent because he doesn’t yet want all the word to come out just yet. He’s got work to do. He has a mission. But that is the first interaction that Peter actually has with Jesus.

Now Jesus says, “I can’t stay here. I’ve got to keep moving on because I came to preach to a lot of towns.” So he leaves Capernaum, and he starts to preach in the surrounding areas. And while he’s teaching in these surrounding areas, we see in chapter 5 begins where now Jesus has a crowd that is really gathering strong. And he’s out in the open, and he’s teaching out in the open. Why? Because Jesus understands the importance of calling not just the religious [people]. Jesus is all about the normal people.

So he does his work out in public, and they are now so curious. They are so hungry to get fed God’s word that they are cramping in all around him, and it’s pushing him to the shore. Luke calls it Lake Gennesaret. This is another way of just saying the Sea of Galilee, and he’s being pushed to the shore. So Jesus sees two boats, and he hops in it. Turns out it’s Peter’s or Simon’s. And just like all other rabbis, he sits to do his teaching.

Now, what do we see here? If you’re following along with your bulletin, I want you to be following along with the bulletin because you’ll see that we have blank spaces to fill out. Starting in verse one, the main point of today’s sermon is that you need to follow Jesus so that you can catch people for a new life in Jesus.

Jesus is calling men-catchers and the people are hungry for God’s Word (v. 1)

What does verse one show us? Verse one shows us that Jesus is calling people to be men-catchers because the people are hungry for God’s word. We see it’s very clear that they are moving in on Jesus because they are hungry for his word. They are hungry, and people are looking for him. We saw this in 4:42. They’re hungry to the point where they’re getting up early in the morning, trying to catch Jesus to give them some more words, and he has to sneak away.

God sovereignly works out all details when he calls people to fish for him (vv. 2-3).

And then in verses 2-3, in the next point in your bulletin, I want you to notice God sovereignly works out all details when he calls people to fish for him. We’re going to talk about this idea of fish. Jesus, I mean, I’m sure he likes to fish. We know he likes to eat fish because he does that at the end of the Gospel of Luke (24:41–43). But when we’re talking about fishing for Jesus, we’re talking about catching men, women, and children. And when he calls you to that role, he works out all the details.

That’s what we see in verses 2 through 3. You see, I was having breakfast with Bob the other day, and we were talking about how much God had put people in our path before we actually became a Christian. This is how God works. He’s sovereignly putting his chess pieces and all of his markers into place so that when you come to Jesus, all of this has been put into place for that very moment.

This is what we’re seeing here in verses 2 through 3. You see, Peter had already had a run-in with Jesus in Capernaum, where he heals his mother-in-law. Then we also saw that God had sovereignly worked it out to where Jesus is doing ministry inside of Peter’s home, casting out demons, healing the sick, and then he goes off for a little while, and he returns. And then in chapter 5, verses 1 through 3 are primarily there in the book of Luke to show you how Peter is now getting involved with Jesus.

You see, if it was just you and me, and we’re out on a fishing trip, and we’re having a crummy day, we’re not catching anything, and then this Jesus just steps onto our boat, from our human eyes, it just looks like Jesus was just in the area. But that is not the way the Lord works. The Lord says that he knows those who are his (Romans 8:29; John 10:14). The Lord says that he predestined good works for us to do in advance in Ephesians 2:10.

All of these good things that we are called to do, we have been called to do even before we were born. Our works, our good deeds of men-catching, have been there since the beginning. God has had a plan of salvation from the beginning of creation. We know this because of Genesis 3:15 when God tells Eve, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

Jesus is already there in the beginning. He already knew there would be a church. He already knew that the church would be the embassy of God’s kingdom. He already was planning; we see this at the end of Isaiah [66:18-19], that he was going to send out emissaries to go proclaim the Lord’s glory. All of this was set in motion a long time ago.

So when Jesus is getting on Peter’s boat, it is not by accident that Jesus was there at the Sea of Galilee. He knew exactly what he was doing. He knew it. And what does that mean for us? That means that everything that’s going on in your life, none of it is by accident: your pain, your trials, your doctor’s appointments, right? There’s all kinds of stuff that’s going on. None of it is by accident.

The Lord wants you to understand that there is a purpose for every single thing we go through. How do we know? Romans 8:28: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purposes.” What is your Sea of Galilee? What is going on in your life? What pain and dark things are you possibly going through that the Lord is here to tell you, “you can give it all up and just become a fisher of men right now”?

That’s exactly what he’s calling us to do. Is the Lord bringing you to the end of yourself? Do you feel like he’s crushing you? Because this is exactly what Peter was going through. You see, the Lord could have actually gotten Peter the night before when Peter was still well-rested. When does he catch Peter? After he was up all night long. He had an entire evening of failure.

He caught nothing. He’s probably thinking, “I’ve got nothing to bring home to the wife. My bills are piling up. Everything’s going wrong. It’s all beginning to fail.” And Jesus shows up on the scene. And he doesn’t just say, “Hey, I’m going to help you.” He actually says, “Do something for me.” So, if it wasn’t enough that Peter’s already having a hard night, he’s now telling Peter, “Oh, Peter, can you start rowing for me? How about we row out even a little bit further?”

And then Jesus does something else that can be pretty shocking if you’ve had an evening of failure. Jesus looks at Peter, and he’s like, “Hey, Peter, why don’t you drop your nets?” And you can just feel the edginess in Peter’s voice here. He’s like, “I kind of just did that for 12 hours, and you’re giving me vocational advice. I’m the professional.”

But you see what Jesus was doing? He was not giving Peter advice on how to fish. When the Lord tells us it’s time to go fishing, he’s already got the fish for you to catch. And that is what Jesus had in mind. He already had the fish ready to go in the nets. He just needed Peter to be obedient. And that’s what I mean by he covers all the details.

When God calls you to work for him, he already has the fish in mind for you to catch (vv. 4-7)

That brings us to the next point. When God calls you to work for him, he already has the fish in mind for you to catch. That’s seen in verses 4–7. You see, Jesus says, “Lay down your nets for a catch.” That tells you right there that Jesus already has the fish in mind.

Now, why is this important? Because Jesus is going to come back to this at the end of our passage today in verse 10. He’s going to basically say, just like you caught the fish in the net, now I’m going to let you do that for men. Right? He wants Peter to take this real-life experience of fishing and understand that it is a visual lesson for Peter to run with. This is what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. He calls you to go out, find men. He already has men in mind, and he wants you to engage with them out in the open to catch them.

Now notice here that it’s not a few fish that Peter catches. It’s many fish. You see, our experience tells us that people aren’t crazy about God. I’m here to tell you that is not true. There are many sinners, and yes, we have a dark heart. Yes, we do not desire God by nature. But you know what I see when I read this passage? People are encroaching on Jesus so much that he’s forced to step back into a lake. People are hungry for the word of God.

I’m reading a book right now. It’s called The Great Dechurching. And it’s trying to analyze all these statistics as to why people are leaving the church. And do you know they also ask them, “What would it take to get you to come back?” Most of the time, the majority of them, do you know what they say? They said, “If I had a friend that looked at me and said, ‘Hey, will you come to church with me?’” People are hungry to belong to a community of life-giving attributes. Every single one of us wants to belong. And I believe that’s stemming from a place in our heart where we want to belong to the family of God.

People are hungry for God’s word. Peter threw down his net, and he got a bunch of fish. Why? Because, as Jesus says elsewhere, the harvest is plenty, but the workers are few. We spend so much time saying, “I don’t think people really want to come to church. I don’t think people really enjoy God. People don’t want to hear the gospel.” If that’s true, then Jesus is a liar because he says here that the harvest is plenty in Matthew 9:37–38: “The harvest is abundant, but the workers are few. Therefore, pray to the Lord of the harvest and send out workers into the harvest.” He wants us to fish, and he’s ready to overload our nets.

So, Peter reluctantly throws down his nets. And for those of you who have been in the church for a long time, you’ve heard hopefully Isaiah 55:10-11—the Lord’s word does not return to him void and empty. If the Lord is calling you to throw out your nets and go men-catching, I can assure you he has the fish that are ready to jump in. He knows who is hungry, who wants him, and who desires him, and they will come. They know. He knows they will come. The question is, are we willing to start casting our nets?

When Jesus calls you to be a fisher of men, you will feel eerily unworthy (vv. 8-11)

When Jesus calls you to be a fisher of men, next point, you will feel eerily unworthy. I have a friend of mine, Josh. He actually came and visited us last November. And there was this time in his life where he is just going to church every week. He’s teaching Bible studies. He’s a deacon at his church. And he just can’t help but shake this feeling that his experience with church is just very sterile. Like every time he comes to church, it just feels like he’s putting on those nasty gloves, fluorescent lights. Nobody’s truly filled with this love of godliness, passion to do something. And he’s just begging the Lord, “Lord, I’m reading your word, and I just see people are being healed, and demons are being cast out. I want that Christianity, Jesus.”

Well, he wrestles with this for a while, and the Lord actually answers this prayer. He starts being able to pray over people, and people are getting healed. Okay? And I know it’s real because he prayed over me. Now, I’m as skeptical as they come. But I couldn’t shake it because I watched his son who had a deadly disease. He was dying, and they were about to put him on a morphine drip because the doctor said, “We don’t know what to do for him.” They said it’s an idiopathic disease. They didn’t have anything in the textbooks to define it.

So he prays over his son, but he has a feeling that this is a demonic attack. He’s like one week away from getting a morphine drip installed on his body, and his son is what, six, seven years old. And he goes and he prays over his son in a way that he sees in the gospels. The way Jesus prayed over the sick, and he called out the demon that was afflicting his son, his son was healed right then and there. His son started running up and down the house. Yes. Hallelujah.

You would think, “Praise the Lord.” Except he goes to church, and he shares this experience with his people. And they said, “Nah, we don’t believe in that here. We don’t believe God works like that. He stopped that with the apostles.” And they gave him the cold shoulder.

Well, he’s at this men’s retreat, and one of the brothers who kind of sides with everybody else in the church, because this was the culture. Churches just have culture. I want our church to be filled with a culture that believes in the power and the majesty of God to move, and move mountains, break down barriers and strongholds.

My brother shows up at church. He’s going to this men’s retreat, and this culture of “God’s power is not real anymore” is at this men’s retreat, and he sees this one brother who is limping bad, and he says, “Do you want Jesus to heal that?” And he’s like at his wits’ end. He’s like Peter, right? He’s been up all night long. He’s dead tired. He feels like everything’s broken. He’s at that high level of pain.

And do you know what he does? He finally looks at my friend, and he says, “Yes, all right, come pray over me.” And so Josh has enough sense to say, “I know this is uncomfortable for you because you belong to a culture that doesn’t believe in this anymore. So let’s go in private.” And he takes him to a room, and he picks up his leg to pray over it. But before he even utters a word, the ligaments start moving in his knee. And he feels it under his hand.

And he looks at him, and he says, “You feel this?” And he gets angry with Josh. He says, “Of course I feel this.” And he’s angry because it’s defying the culture of the church that he was raised in, that God does not do this anymore. And he starts to feel shame in his heart for a lack of faith that God is still a miracle worker. And do you know what he tells Josh? “Get out.”

Because he was so ashamed, God healed him, and he does exactly what Peter does here. He asks him to leave. “Get away from me. I’m a sinful man.” The man was broken. This is what one pastor calls “the trauma of holiness”.

Okay? I experience this when I go to the gym. I walk into a gym, and you got these men that are like big, burly muscles everywhere. They got abs on their forehead, you know, that much muscle, and I’m just like, “You are living life the way I need to, right? You’ve got all the self-control. You know how to say no to donuts. You can do it all.” And I look at you, and I just go, “Man, I’m nothing.” Right? It’s that kind of trauma, right?

When we experience holiness, and we’re not walking with the Lord, instead of embracing it and saying, “Hallelujah,” we say, “You’re just reminding me of everything I’m supposed to be, and I’m not.” And so they want to run. In fact, I think some of us have this habitual absence in church because you come to church, and you feel the holiness that you’re supposed to be embracing, but it makes you uncomfortable. So, you don’t like to come as often. Some of you know who you are.

But you see, we want to embrace you the same way Jesus embraced Peter. Jesus looked at Peter, and he doesn’t say, “Yeah, sit on that shame, buddy. You deserve that. Nobody likes you, and for good reason. You are a sinner.” None of that happens. Jesus tells him, just like the angels and God looks at all the people in their encounters before, and he just says, “Don’t be afraid. I’m with you, and I want to do something with you.”

This is why our brother Bob read from Isaiah 6 this morning. He read from Isaiah 6 because, just like Isaiah, we saw with Peter. You see, Isaiah stands before God. He sees the Holy of Holies, God himself in all of his majesty. And the angels are singing, and all Isaiah can do is say, “I am a man with unclean lips. I am a sinner.” He has a wicked heart, and he knows it. And God’s response is that he atones for his sin. And then he puts him on a mission.

That’s what Jesus does to Peter. And that’s what Jesus is doing to us today. You see, we are disciple-makers. We are called to go out. The whole reason the church exists is for you to make disciples. If we are not making disciples, church, we are wasting space. I said that last week, and I’m going to say it every week during the series. A church that does not make disciples is wasting space.

Because the whole point of us still being here after the resurrection of Christ and before his return, this whole period is defined by building the kingdom of God through disciple-making. And I don’t care how much sin and shame and embarrassment you might feel; there is the forgiveness of sins to be offered to all those who come to Jesus. So yeah, fall at his feet. Get before his knees, just like Peter, and say, “Please, I’m sinful.” But do not run from Jesus. He has a sweet blanket of forgiveness to lay over you. And it’s available. Take it. Wear it. Put on what the revelator calls the white garments.

What does it mean to be a disciple of the Lord today?

So, what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? You see, Jesus had called Peter, and he said, “I want you to be a fisher of men.” One thing I want to point out to you, this word that he says, “catching men,” this is actually a different verb in Greek from the other two instances of catching. What’s cool is this word refers to catching alive.

In other words, the men-catching that we are doing as a church, we are catching men to new life. We’re keeping them alive. We’re giving them a life that they cannot have in the world apart from an encounter with Jesus.

So, what does it mean for us to be disciples today? Just like the disciples partnered with Jesus to roam the earth, they watched him do what he did, and they listened to his teachings. Jesus says the same is true of us. We need to abide in his word, and we need to do the works that he did. We need to do the works that he did. In fact, he says in John 14:12 that we will do all the works of Jesus and more, even greater.

So, we can lay hands on the sick, right? We can do all the great things that Jesus did. It is possible if the Lord wills it. Being a disciple of Jesus, where the disciples walked with Jesus, today we do with the church. Jesus says in Matthew 18:20, “Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”

He says in Ephesians 4:11 that God has given the church teachers, preachers, apostles, evangelists. He’s given these offices of the church to equip the church for the work of the ministry. So, where the original apostles got it directly from Jesus, Jesus has ordained us to get all of that same discipleship directly from the church.

So what does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus? You get to church. You get to church. And guess what? They didn’t walk with Jesus just on Sunday. They walked with Jesus every day. And church, being the church is a lifestyle. It’s not an appendage. It’s not a lapel pin. It’s not something you do when it’s convenient. “Oh, I’ll show up if it doesn’t coincide with my other planned things.”

But what I’m saying is it is a dedication to a lifestyle to be a disciple of Jesus, to learn with the church, to work with the church, to help grow the church, to serve your community, to serve the poor, to set free the captives, to preach the gospel, to tell them how they can have new life and encounter the true and living God.

In fact, at the end of 1 Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians 12-14, Paul is going through the list of the spiritual gifts. And in Corinth, they are prioritizing this gift of tongues. And Paul is saying it’s not doing anything for you. I mean, it might make you feel more edified, but you’re not growing in your mind, and you’re not growing anybody else.

And so, Paul says rather what you need is you need these other spiritual gifts that are going to cause your community to grow nearer to the Lord, to be edified, and become more like Christ. So when he is in there, he says at the end of chapter 14, if everybody is living in their spiritual gifts, an unbeliever will walk in their midst, fall to their knees, bow their face, and guess what he says? He says he will say, “Surely God dwells among these people.”

So how do people become a disciple of Jesus? They come to church, and the church has to be walking in the Spirit. That’s how people see God. Jesus says, “People will know that you are my disciples when they see the love that you have for each other” (John 13:35). We bleed the presence and the glory of God. And so come be a part of it. Okay.

And church, let’s go men-catching.

Let’s go to the Lord. Father, we thank you so much for being with us today, for showing us the love of Christ. It’s so gentle. Even though there is this trauma of holiness in your presence, you wrap your sweet and gracious arms around us, and you invite us to new life, and you put us on mission. We thank you for that, Lord.

Please continue to strengthen our body, to strengthen our church, anoint us with the Holy Spirit, and put the vim and the vigor and the energy and the zeal of the Holy Spirit because so many of our bodies are weak and frail, but you are mighty to equip. And I pray that we would take seriously the work of the Lord. Please be with us, Lord Jesus. In your name we pray. Amen.