Becoming Fishers of Men
Part 1
“The Call to Be Fishers of Men”
Matthew 4:18-22
Pastor Charles Price
Now let me ask you to turn in your Bible to Matthew’s Gospel and Chapter 4. Matthew Chapter 4; I am going to read from Matthew 4:18-22. And this marks an event at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
You remember that He was 30 years of age when He was baptized by John the Baptist and then He began His public ministry, which lasted for approximately three years.
And this event takes place by the Sea of Galilee, not Jesus’ home (His home was Nazareth), a little away from Nazareth. And it says,
“As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.
“ ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will make you fishers of men.’
“At once they left their nets and followed him.
“Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and they followed him.”
Now keep your Bible open there.
During the next 8 or 9 months, as many of you know, we as a church are going to be doing a lot of hard thinking about who we are, about what we are doing, about how we are doing it, about why we are doing it.
This is a process that many of the staff will be involved in; members of the Board will be involved in. And there are about 50 members of the congregation who have been invited to meet every week over about a period of 20 weeks in order to go through this whole process.
And it is a good and an important process for us to go through. It’s actually a biblical process for us to go through, to stop and think and review.
I was reading the book of Revelation recently. It’s not my favourite book to read, I have to confess. I have difficulty untangling all the many images and visions and creatures that appear in that book.
But in the early chapters of Revelation, Jesus sends seven letters to seven churches – one letter to each of the seven churches – all located in Asia Minor. All of them have done well and He commends them for the things that they have done.
But five of those churches have something that is fundamentally at fault with them. The church in Ephesus, for instance, had forsaken its first love. And they got into a situation where primaries had become secondaries and secondaries had become primaries.
The church in Pergamum had been so concerned to relate to the culture of their day that they had become synchronistic, mixing Scripture with other ideas and giving equal authority to both. And they are rebuked for that.
The church in Thyatira was tolerating false teaching, especially about sexuality. They found it difficult to stand against the tide of popular opinion and so they had begun to compromise and were teaching things that were not true to the Word of God.
The church in Sardis was told to wake up because it was coasting along on its reputation. It had a good reputation. “You have a reputation for being alive,” said Jesus in the letter He wrote to them, “but actually you are dead. You have got the outward forms and you think that means you are doing well, but inwardly you have become detached from life.”
To the church in Laodicea, He said, “You are neither hot nor cold. You are lukewarm.” And He says, “I will spew you out of my mouth”, which colloquially simply means, “You make me sick.”
And He says, “You have been so busy in what you are doing that you have left Me on the outside.” And it’s in the letter to the church in Laodicea that Jesus says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock” and He is talking about the church. “Open the door and let Me in and fellowship with Me. I will sup with you and you with Me.”
And so all of these churches were told to stop what they were doing, to review, to remember, to repent and to revive.
The interesting thing about those churches is that they were all relatively new churches. They had only been around for about one generation, founded after Paul had gone to Ephesus and a great revival had spread throughout that whole area of Asia Minor and churches were planted in many of these cities.
And now when John has this vision on the Isle of Patmos and he writes down everything he saw and everything the Lord said to him, it’s only about 30 years later.
These are not old churches that had got stuck in a rut; these are relatively young churches that you would expect to maintain the vitality of their early days. But they have gotten sidetracked into other things.
And we think it is time, for good and healthy reasons, that we take a hard look at what it is we are supposed to be and how it is we are supposed to function.
Now this is not a case, of course, of sitting around and pooling good ideas. Any such exercise must begin and must be governed by the Word of God. This is the manual from which we take our direction.
And this has to be a spiritual exercise as much as a practical exercise, because if it is just a practical exercise, we are just rearranging furniture and we’re not really connecting with the mind of God and with the Spirit of God.
And so I want for a couple of weeks just to talk about some things I think will be helpful to us as a congregation, not to pre-empt anything, but to go back to those things which are authoritative because they come to us in the Word of God.
Many of us will know the last words of Jesus to His disciples before He ascended. You find them in Acts 1:8. And He said,
“You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria and unto the ends of the earth.”
And then it says, “After He had said this, He was lifted up and He was taken back into heaven.”
Those were the last words that He spoke as a man on earth. And the rest of the book of Acts is an outworking of those final words, that great final commission of Jesus.
They received power in Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit comes. They are witnesses in Jerusalem. And then it spreads out in Judea and into Samaria and then out to the ends of the earth. And the book of Acts ends in the city of Rome, the heart of the greatest empire in the world at the time.
But I wonder how many of us know the first words of Jesus to His disciples. Not the first words that Jesus spoke as a human being that are recorded for us (because He spoke at the age of 12 when He said to His mother and to Joseph, “Don’t you know I must be about my father’s business?”)
And then there is the general statement He made: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” That was His message.
But the first words Jesus spoke to His disciples are in the verses I read to you a few minutes ago, and this will be my text for this morning and for the next couple of weeks as well.
It is in Matthew 4:19:
“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
He is talking to four men – Simon and Andrew initially – that is who this is particularly addressed to – two brothers. And then in the next verses: two other brothers, James and John. And they were fishermen. Galilee was their lake and so this was a very natural analogy to use with them.
“You know what it is to be fishing for fish. You’re good at fishing for fish. I am going to make you,” He says, “fishers of men, of people.”
Now there is an invitation and there is a promise in that statement.
The invitation is “Come, follow Me.”
“That’s your business,” He says to them. “You need to do that. Come, follow Me.”
And then there is a promise: “I will make you fishers of men. I am going to do something in you that makes you fishers of men.”
Now this may intimidate some of us. And I know the force of the intimidation of this verse because we think, “Oh, boy, oh man, I’m no good at that.”
But notice what He doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “I will make you all evangelists.” He doesn’t say, “I will make you all missionaries.” He doesn’t say, “I want you all to be in full-time Christian service and that’s your job.” He doesn’t say, “I am going to give you all the same spiritual gifts.” He says, “I will make you fishers of men.”
Now let me ask a question. How many people here this morning are fishermen or fisherwomen? That’s your hobby maybe, and you’re a fisherman. Just put your hand up if you are a fisherman or a fisherwoman. Put it up nice and high. There are a few over here – not many. There’s a few back here, there’s one down here. There’s a few here, one or two over here, two in the balcony. There’s probably less than a dozen altogether who are fishermen.
Okay, let me ask you another question now. How many of you here have ever caught a fish? Put your hand up. Wow, look at that! Keep your hand up a minute. Look around. This is fantastic!
Now Jesus is talking to those of us who don’t see ourselves as fishermen, but who actually know the fun of catching a fish.
I am not a fisherman. I don’t have the patience for it, or the skill. I have unexpectedly caught one or two decent fish. Some years ago I was up in the Northwest Territories and with a friend, we went to a little island on Great Slave Lake for a day to do some fishing.
And I couldn’t believe how eager the pike were up there to get caught. Now pike are a little bit boney, but you can eat them, but you have got to work hard with the bones.
But I had the most brilliant catch I have ever had at Great Slave Lake because I threw my line out, and we had spinners on it. And then you haul it in of course and it attracts the pike and they come for it. But I caught one that was especially difficult to haul in.
And when we hauled it in we discovered that the pike hadn’t actually taken the hook into its mouth. The hook had grabbed it just behind the gills, embedded in its flesh. And I was hauling this thing in sideways by a sheer fluke. But I got a nice one - it was that long… no…
I remember on one occasion being in British Columbia and we were on holiday on one of the beautiful Gulf Islands – Thetis Island. And Laura, who I think was probably about ten then, said she would like to go fishing.
And so we got hold of a boat and two other men and Laura and I went out to fish in the water there, the Pacific that flows through the Gulf Islands.
And Laura was the first to catch anything. We all had a rod each – a fishing pole – and suddenly Laura’s pole sort of doubled down and she just about fell into the – over the side of the boat.
And she said, “I got something!” We went and grabbed her pole, held onto it; and whatever it was, it was big.
And we slowly brought this thing in, little by little by little and we discovered she had caught a shark. This is absolutely true. It was a mud shark, about four feet long – not huge but about that long, but real shark nevertheless.
And when we got it up to the surface by the boat, one of the guys bludgeoned it over the head and that made Laura scream, “Don’t do that, don’t do that!” you know.
But we eventually got it up onto the boat, lay it down on the floor of this boat, and “Wow, Laura that is a catch for the first time you have ever been fishing!”
And then as the thing was dying, it suddenly gave birth to a little baby shark and then a second, then a third. It gave birth to eight baby sharks, which we kept in a bucket. They lived for more than 24 hours and they were absolutely, exactly a miniature version of the big shark.
So Laura caught nine sharks in one go, in one throw of the line. And she was so scared that we went back in and never went fishing again.
But the point is this: fishing, for those of us who are not fishermen, can be a very exciting business. And I trust that we will get hold of this vision and the excitement of this, that if we know what it is to “come, follow Me” (and I will talk about what that means), they will then experience what He promises: “I will make you fishers of men” in ways that may be completely unexpected, in ways you had never anticipated.
Let me talk first then about the invitation. The invitation is “Come, follow Me”. This is not an invitation to become a Christian; that is not an invitation to follow; that is an invitation to be born again. That is, to recognize our separation from God, to acknowledge and confess that, to know that Jesus Christ died and bore the consequences of our sin. And on the basis of forgiveness He then comes by His Holy Spirit to live within us. We become ‘regenerate’ is a good word for that; we discover new appetite, new desires, new motivation, new power.
Now sadly, there are thousands of people who will meet in a place of Christian worship today who are simply trying to follow Jesus without knowing anything of the indwelling presence of Jesus, and it’s very frustrating.
But having been made regenerate, the invitation then is to work with Him. You see, “follow Me” is a code for discipleship.
Discipleship is about working with Jesus, being in step with Him. Let me read you a verse in John 12:26. It says,
“Whoever serves me must follow me.”
(So serving Me is going to mean following Me.)
“…and where I am, my servant also will be.”
So He says, “Serving Me means following Me. Following means that you are so in step with Me that where I am, you are there where I am working.”
So the question is: “What is it that Jesus is doing? Where is He working?
Now many of you will know Henry Blackaby’s book “Experiencing God”, and in that book he talks about find out where God is working and join Him. He doesn’t mean by that, see that God is working in somewhere like South Korea, so get in a plane and fly there.
No, he is saying, keep your eyes and your ears open in such a way that where God is at work, you be working with Him, be available to Him in order that the work that He does there, He can be doing through you, you can be part of what He is doing.
Now this requires being prayerful and being sensitive about this. It’s how Jesus Himself lived as a man. In John 5:17 it says,
“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.’”
So, “My Father is working and I am working.” And then two verses later in John 5:19 He says,
“I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
“I am only effective,” says Jesus “when I am working with My Father.” As we are only effective when we are working together with Christ. “The Father has been working,” said Jesus “so I am working. I do nothing Myself. I am not acting in independence of My Father. But where My Father is doing His work, I am available to Him so that I can be a means by which He is doing it. So I am working too.”
And as Jesus said on another occasion,
“As my Father sent me, so I am sending you.”
So you live in fellowship with Me that where I am at work, I have in you, My disciple, My people, a means by which I can work in other people’s lives.
Notice, you see, that the invitation He gives is “Come, follow Me.” Not “Come, follow a program.” That would be a lot easier. We would know exactly what to do.
No, it’s not “come, follow a program”, not “come follow a method”, not “come, follow a system”, but “come, follow Me.”
“That is, this is borne not out of learning techniques but out of your relationship with Me that causes you to be sensitive to Me and sensitive to what I am doing – learning to be in step with Me, that where I am My servant also will be. Because if you serve Me, you must follow Me; you must be where I am.”
Now we have to learn how to keep in step with Jesus in this way. Remember when Jesus was going from Judea to Galilee? He passed through Samaria in John Chapter 4 and He encountered the Samaritan woman.
Jesus was tired and weary. He sat down on a well outside the city as His disciples went into the city to buy food. While they were in the city, this woman came to draw water. It was in the heat of the day. Jesus engaged her in conversation and said, “If you drank what I offer, you will never thirst again.”
And eventually she realized that this was the Messiah, went back into the city and said, “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.” And it says many Samaritans believed on Him because of the woman’s testimony.
But when this was all over, the disciples came back with the food. The woman was still there with Jesus and it says they were surprised to see Him talking to a woman.
And then when she left, Jesus said to them this in John 4:35:
“Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.
“I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you are to reap the benefits of their labor.”
In other words He said this (when the woman had gone): He said, “Do you know why I stayed here on this well and let you go by yourselves into the city? Because I wanted to see if you have got eyes that are open to where God is at work in people’s hearts. And you passed this woman on the road and you totally failed to see her.
Now of course they would have seen a woman. They may even have had discussion about her. They may have recognized she was a Samaritan woman. And they may have thought, well we have nothing for Samaritans; our message is only for the Jews. Samaritans, of course, were half Jewish, half Assyrian in their background.
They saw she was a woman. They may have adopted the stereotypical view of the day where the Pharisee would begin his morning by praying, “God, I thank You I am not a Gentile, I thank You I am not a slave, and I thank You I am not a woman.”
And they may have looked down on her in the way that was common amongst the culture, even though they had been with Jesus and seen that He treated women totally differently to the way they were treated in the culture.
They probably passed and said, “She’s just a woman.” They may have even discussed the fact she was going in the heat of the day to get the water. Well that probably means she’s an outcast. Why doesn’t she go in the cool of the day like everybody else? Well, probably because nobody else likes her.
They didn’t know her story that she had been married five times and was now living with a man she was not married to. We learn that because she told Jesus – or He told her that about herself.
But they probably guessed it was something like that and probably said, “You know, that woman going in the middle of the day. I bet she is an outcast. I bet she is sleeping around. I bet she has got a reputation.”
They probably discussed her but they never saw her, they never saw her as ripe. But the truth is where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.
And Jesus said to the priests and elders something which would have shocked them in Matthew 21:31:
“I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did.”
This was a slap in their face to their self-righteousness. They were used to the idea that there are certain types, you know, that are – well, they were the Jewish leaders.
But you know, it’s easy to have this view – there are certain types that are Christian – he’s not the type, she’s not the type.
You know, when we are willing to say, “Lord, I want to be in step with You”, sometimes we bump into people who we would never have expected to have hearts that are open.
Now sometimes it takes awhile. I talked to a lady this morning after the first service who has been in conversation with a neighbor about the gospel. And suddenly there has become a lot of opposition against her, not only from the neighbor’s family but from others in the community.
And she explained why, what united this community together and they come and they honk their horns outside her place and they ring her telephone all of the time, day and night, and they are just giving her awful turmoil. Even this morning she had somebody shouting after her as she went to the bus to come to the service.
Well, I said, “Whatever is going on, I’ll tell you this: something is going on that these folks have to fight against. God is doing something. Surely. Why else would they fight?”
But you know, it’s very easy to miss people. I have missed a lot of people. I say that to my shame.
We have a near neighbor – had a near neighbor – not on the same street, but actually his garden just touched a corner of ours, so across the other side behind us, the yard outside the back of the house.
I had never had a conversation with him, ever. But we knew a little bit about him. He had been in hospital for a while after an awful accident in which his sister had been killed – a road accident – and he had survived, but was in hospital for many months.
And we had prayed for him – Hilary and I. I did see him once on the street outside the front of my house. I was in the house and I remember thinking, “maybe I should go out and greet him but I thought, well, that would be a bit strange going out of the house to greet him.”
But I never had a conversation with him and then just not very long ago he was in hospital again and he died, relatively young. And the day he died, the chaplain (I think she was a chaplain from the hospital) telephoned me to tell me he had died. And I said, “Well, thank you for letting me know that. I didn’t really know him myself.
And she said, “Oh really, I thought you did. That’s why I called you, because he often talked about you.”
I said, “In what way?”
She said, “He used to watch Living Truth on Sunday mornings. And in hospital he talked to me a number of times when I would be in as a chaplain to his bed, found out I was a Christian and he talked to me about the fact that you lived near him and that he talked about some of the things you had said on the program.”
And I felt such a deep sense of shame that here’s a man who, certainly ripe, who I had never said, “Lord, should I go and meet with this person?”
It has caused Hilary and I to pray about people on our street in particular and to be actively proactive in building the relationships that we need to build in order to be able to share where it’s appropriate and when it’s appropriate, something of Christ with them.
When we open our eyes – and of course it’s a different method for her – the fields are ripe unto harvest, there’s a different method compared to fishing, but the same idea; we have to bury our natural prejudices.
You know, the places where God is at work is often not in the great cathedrals of Christendom but sometimes it is in the Samaritan community amongst a woman ostracized by most of the others.
“And I want you to come,” said Jesus “and follow Me. And he who serves Me follows Me so that where I am there My servant will be.”
It’s a day-by-day saying “Lord, I trust You in the right place at the right time to put me with eyes open to the right opportunities.” It won’t be everybody. There were many people who lived in Samaria. Those disciples were not supposed to reach the whole of Samaria – there was one person He had in mind for them, to meet that morning, and they failed.
And so this involves a daily relationship with God, a relationship of communion with Him, communication with Him, of learning to sense His leading. “In all your ways acknowledge Him. He will direct your paths.” Is a promise in the book of Proverbs.
And out of that invitation, which is our business, “Come follow Me” is a promise that is His business, “I will make you fishers of men.”
This is a work that Jesus will do. “You do the coming, you do the following; I will do the making.”
You can’t make yourself a fisherman. Some of us, you see, won’t even get started because we think “I’ve got to somehow make myself into this.” No, no. We cannot make ourselves fishers of men. That is the work of Jesus in the person who is in step with Him. And it will probably take you by surprise.
He uses this fishing analogy because of course Simon and Andrew and James and John are fishermen. This is the trade in which they grew up, their fathers before them, likely their grandfathers before them.
Jesus Himself was from Nazareth, an inland town, and His trade was carpentry. But the interesting thing is that Jesus takes the natural interests and natural gifts and natural skills that we have and He gives them a spiritual dimension and a spiritual function.
See, if I ask you what was Paul’s trade, he of course was trained as a Pharisee. But when he came to Christ, he turned away from that, went back to his home in Tarsus and he learned the trade of a tentmaker. It wasn’t that he went into camping as a business. These tents were these big things that people would make their homes in.
But isn’t it interesting that Paul, a tentmaker, becomes primarily in his ministry a church builder. I am not talking about buildings - stone and wood; I am talking about building churches, understanding the need for structure, for undergirding, for clarity about foundations, for mutual inter-support. That was Paul’s natural background. And those same interests and abilities and skills are turned into the ministry he was given as a church planter.
Peter’s trade was a fisherman. Now Peter was a great evangelist but you actually have no record of Peter founding churches. He was the preacher on the Day of Pentecost and 3,000 came to Christ. He led the first Gentile to Christ, a man called Cornelius. He was a great fisherman spiritually as well as what was his natural interest. But he didn’t have the structural skills that Paul had.
In fact, although Peter was a great personality in the church in Jerusalem, when in Acts 15 they all met together to discuss reception of Gentiles, the leader, the chairman of that meeting was a guy called James, a brother of Jesus.
What do you think James’ trade was? Well it doesn’t tell us but almost certainly he was a carpenter. His father Joseph was a carpenter. He had grown up and as Jesus was a carpenter, so His brother James is likely to have been a carpenter. And James is a man who knows how to construct and consolidate and build. So his skills are used there.
Go back into the Old Testament. Moses was a shepherd for 40 years in the Midian desert and then he becomes for 40 years a shepherd of the people of Israel as they go through the desert.
Joshua, when he first appears as a young man in his twenty’s, is a soldier, a very good soldier, put in charge of his own battalion. Joshua becomes the leader, the military man, who leads Israel in the conquest of Canaan. His natural skills and natural abilities are used by God to further spiritual ends.
You see sometimes we fear that God wants us to be people that we are not. He doesn’t. If you are an introvert, He does not want you to be an extrovert. Don’t pretend to be.
If you are an extrovert, He doesn’t want you to be an introvert. If you are quiet, He doesn’t want you to suddenly become loud. If you are loud, well, it might be good if you quietened down a bit but it’s your personality, it’s who you already are, it’s who you are.
And although we are taking this analogy as a fisherman and fishing for men, we want to apply it generally. Nevertheless we must understand that it has unique application and the principle behind it is that what you are and where you are gifted and where you are energized, these are the areas that God is going to take and work through.
You know there is a verse in Proverbs 22:6,
“Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
Now the meaning of that verse is train a child along the way he is wired, the way he should go. Train him in the area that he is gifted. Train him in the pursuit of his natural gifts and his natural interests. Train him in the things that energize him, not the things that exhaust him.
This is not about disciplining your child to behave. The meaning of that verse is find out how your child is wired and train him in that area.
But often we fear that getting involved in serving God in any way is sort of, it’s not me. But spiritual gifts are very often – not exclusively – but very often spiritual gifts are natural gifts, energized by the Holy Spirit for spiritual ends.
So Paul can write, when he wrote to the Galatians, he talks about how “God set me apart from birth to be an apostle.”
Well that’s very interesting because before he was an apostle, Paul was the archenemy of the church. He was a motivator of others to arrest Christians, throw them into prison, threaten them with murder.
And those very skills of mobilizing and leading and organizing were actually skills given him by God at his birth to enable him to become the great apostle that he was.
He is not a different person skill-wise after he becomes a Christian; he is a different person character-wise of course. But the very skills by which he opposed the church become the very skills by which he mobilizes the church.
Jeremiah, who shrank back from being a prophet and God said to him in Jeremiah 1:4,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
“That when in the womb you were being put together, Jeremiah, I put into you, into your mind, into your natural skill set the ability to be what I want you to be. I set you apart to be a prophet.”
If Jesus said to these fishermen, “Come, follow Me and I will make you builders of the kingdom of God”, it wouldn’t have been very appealing to them.
“Builders? Oh boy, I don’t know anything about building.”
No, “I am going to make you fishermen – fishers of men rather. I am going to take your interests, your personality, your gifts.”
And you see, understanding this and seeking to develop this way is what makes a missional church. Now that’s a fairly recent word. But I like it the more I explore what it means to be missional.
Tim Keller, who is the minister of the Church of the Redeemer in New York City, a great church that is planting churches not just in New York City but now in some of the great metropolitan cities of the world.
He points out there is a difference between an evangelistic church and a missional church. He says an evangelistic church normally has an evangelism department; possibly it has a pastor of evangelism and it has evangelism programs. Now all of that is good – nothing wrong with that at all – something very good about that.
But he says a missional church is one where its whole reason for being, its whole structure and ministry is for the purpose of reaching people with the gospel and turning them into genuine disciples who in turn are reaching others.
So it’s not there’s a department over here with a label on the door that says “Evangelism”, if you are interested, go and work with that department; it’s the very heartbeat of the church.
This means recognizing and taking seriously the fact that all of us are called by God and therefore equipped by God in the unique way that we are equipped by God to be part of that missional process, to be outward looking.
A missional church will always be an evangelistic church but an evangelistic church may not be a missional church. It may just be a church with evangelistic programs.
We have a great legacy here at the Peoples Church, founded in 1928 by Oswald J. Smith. And it began as an outward looking church. Its emphasis from the beginning was on global mission.
Oswald Smith himself had been turned down by several missionary societies on the grounds of his poor health. In one of his books he says he’s hardly known a week in his life when he wasn’t sick at some point during that week. He had frail health.
And the mission leaders considered it wasn’t worth investing and training, equipping and sending a man to the mission field who was going to not survive and drop dead because his health is poor.
And so he coined a phrase, “If you can’t go, send a substitute” and he began the Peoples Church with the mission and vision of not only reaching into this city but sending missionaries across the world.
And we have a wonderful history and a wonderful legacy. And the DNA of this church has been what it has been right from the very beginning.
By the way, for those of you who don’t know, Oswald Smith died when he was 96 years of age. So the mission leaders weren’t too great on the gift of discernment other than God wanted him here in Toronto.
But you know, if we are a missions church, a missions church can fail to be a missional church because a missional [missions] church can be content with a missions department and a missions program and a missions committee and sending and supporting missionaries.
But a missional church will still do all of that but will live missionally in the community and in the place where God has placed it.
And this is one of our big questions. If this church were to disappear into thin air, would the neighbors actually notice?
A missional church will and should be a missions church. But a missions church can fail to be a missional church. It may just have a missions program.
And therefore what we need to do is to be asking and sharpening how is it that we as a community – we’re not talking about what those in leadership do – we’re talking about what we as a community are and do as true disciples of the Lord Jesus.
And you know, nothing deepens our walk with God more than serving Him. I talked to a young lady yesterday. She is in her early twenty’s. She is married to a young man, similar age, 22 or something like that.
And they were camp counsellors this summer for a week I think it was. And the young man had never done anything like this. And I saw the young lady yesterday and I said, “How did your husband – how did he get on?”
She said, “It was an absolutely fantastic week for him. He had his own group of boys. And he said at the end, ‘I didn’t know that God could use me until this week.’”
And she said, “He has come home a different person.” She said, “God is fresh in his life in a new way. It’s fantastic.”
Well I know that in my own experience. I know as a young man in my teens, with some friends, we decided we would try and reach some of the young people in our area.
And we went into the places that young people hung out in and we had a questionnaire, which got us into conversation with them. And I tell you, before that, I read my Bible because I knew I was supposed to. It was kind of, if I read my Bible today I will keep the devil away, all that kind of stuff.
But now people were asking me question – I haven’t any idea what the answers are; I’m reading the Bible to find answers for people’s real questions. And whereas my praying used to be a very quick, “Lord please look after me, you know, and bless all the people I know and look after all the missionaries and save everybody, Amen.” My praying was as vague as that.
Now I was saying, “Lord, I am going to meet Pete on Saturday night, I am going to meet Dave next Tuesday. And we have got things that they are asking and I pray that You will show Yourself to them and come into their lives.”
And you know suddenly your praying comes alive and has an urgency to it. It’s opening our eyes to seeing that we are called to be fishers of men, not by some technique, but here’s your business: “Come, follow Me. He who serves Me must follow Me. Where I am there My servant must be. Get in step with Me. Be sensitive to where I am working. And if you do that, leave the rest to Me. I will make you fishers of men.”
You will start hooking pike in the side and hauling them in. You will start catching sharks who give you eight babies – nine fish in one go. You have no idea what’s going to happen.
And Matthew 4:20 says “At once” (speaking of Simon Peter and Andrew),
“At once they left their nets and followed him.”
Matthew 4:22, speaking of James and John, immediately they left their nets, their boat and their father and followed Him.
And when you read the rest of the story of course, it wasn’t suddenly everything wonderfully snapped into place. No, it was a long process for Peter and Andrew and James and John. A process whereby sometimes they made progress and other times they seemed to slip back.
Peter was in trouble half the time – you know all of that. It’s not going to be slick and smooth; it’s going to be a journey of growth. But when your eyes are open, “I am going to follow You, be in step with You. Where You are, I, Your servant, want to be.” God will give you opportunities.
If you accept the invitation, “Come, follow Me” (that’s your daily response), He will fulfill the promise, “I will make you fishers of men. I will, in you, through you, touch other people’s lives and will hook them in.”
Let me finish by offering you a little bit of bait – fish bait – to catch a few fish. It was announced earlier that Alpha begins a week tomorrow. One series will take place here in the church; another series is taking place in a venue outside of the church – same time, same dates.
And when you leave this morning, out on the grass area outside the front, there is a table and there will be folks there with this little card. This is a little brochure that generally talks about what Alpha is, just very general, but no details. This gives details of Alpha beginning here a week on Monday.
I want you to go by that table and pick up one, two, three, four of this and you have no idea that you might meet somebody to whom you can give this and it will be the right thing at the right moment because of where they are. Say, “Lord, who do I give this to? Who can I invite to this?”
Maybe you can invite somebody to come with you. It actually gives the two locations on here, the two addresses on here – here and another place. So you can invite people.
And if you normally exit out to the back doors because you are parking out there, just make it a point of going around that way, if you are interested and think that this is something that you could do and just pick up some of these.
And we are praying that God will do two things: one, excite each of us with the fact God can use me, you, me; not just them but me. And that we see a great harvest of people who this morning at this time wouldn’t have given a second thought to being in a place like this but their hearts are ripening through circumstances, through events.
And you and I can be the privileged people to be in the right place at the right time with the right word with the right whatever it is, the right gesture of kindness and love that enables their hearts to open. And we can help them on their journey to find Christ.
I am going to come back to this passage next week. I am going to talk about mending the nets. You have got to have decent nets.
I am going to talk the week after that about fishing in the right place because you know, the disciples were fishing one day and catching nothing and Jesus said, “Hey, put your net…” and gave them another place to drop their net and then they caught fish.
And then lastly, I am going to talk on the fourth Sunday from a parable Jesus told of some people fishing and they got a whole big net full of fish. And when they landed it, there was everything in that net – good fish, bad fish, edible fish, inedible fish, old boots – and they said to Jesus, “What in the world do we do with this net? It’s got all this junk in here as well as the fish we are looking for.”
Jesus said, “That’s fine, that’s fine, you’ll land some junk as well.” And then He told them what was going to happen to the net. We’ll talk about that. It’ll help us not to get discouraged when we see discouraging things (as we do), when we meet discouraging people (as we do), when we see things that show signs of hope and then seem to just go away.
It’ll tell us how to respond and how to live with that because the intention of Jesus for His people is still as it was, “Come, follow Me and I will make you – I will make you - fishers of men.”
Let’s pray. Father, we thank You this morning that You are still active in our world and thank You for the huge privilege of knowing You are active through Your people. You speak with our lips, You work with our hands, You walk with our feet, You love with our hearts. And we are Your agents in this world. And I pray You will raise in our hearts and minds an expectancy of those people in whose hearts You are already at work and as we are workers with You, in step with You, we may be Your agents in helping them come to know Christ, and in Him, to find life and life eternal. We pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Part 1
“The Call to Be Fishers of Men”
Matthew 4:18-22
Pastor Charles Price
Now let me ask you to turn in your Bible to Matthew’s Gospel and Chapter 4. Matthew Chapter 4; I am going to read from Matthew 4:18-22. And this marks an event at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
You remember that He was 30 years of age when He was baptized by John the Baptist and then He began His public ministry, which lasted for approximately three years.
And this event takes place by the Sea of Galilee, not Jesus’ home (His home was Nazareth), a little away from Nazareth. And it says,
“As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen.
“ ‘Come, follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will make you fishers of men.’
“At once they left their nets and followed him.
“Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father and they followed him.”
Now keep your Bible open there.
During the next 8 or 9 months, as many of you know, we as a church are going to be doing a lot of hard thinking about who we are, about what we are doing, about how we are doing it, about why we are doing it.
This is a process that many of the staff will be involved in; members of the Board will be involved in. And there are about 50 members of the congregation who have been invited to meet every week over about a period of 20 weeks in order to go through this whole process.
And it is a good and an important process for us to go through. It’s actually a biblical process for us to go through, to stop and think and review.
I was reading the book of Revelation recently. It’s not my favourite book to read, I have to confess. I have difficulty untangling all the many images and visions and creatures that appear in that book.
But in the early chapters of Revelation, Jesus sends seven letters to seven churches – one letter to each of the seven churches – all located in Asia Minor. All of them have done well and He commends them for the things that they have done.
But five of those churches have something that is fundamentally at fault with them. The church in Ephesus, for instance, had forsaken its first love. And they got into a situation where primaries had become secondaries and secondaries had become primaries.
The church in Pergamum had been so concerned to relate to the culture of their day that they had become synchronistic, mixing Scripture with other ideas and giving equal authority to both. And they are rebuked for that.
The church in Thyatira was tolerating false teaching, especially about sexuality. They found it difficult to stand against the tide of popular opinion and so they had begun to compromise and were teaching things that were not true to the Word of God.
The church in Sardis was told to wake up because it was coasting along on its reputation. It had a good reputation. “You have a reputation for being alive,” said Jesus in the letter He wrote to them, “but actually you are dead. You have got the outward forms and you think that means you are doing well, but inwardly you have become detached from life.”
To the church in Laodicea, He said, “You are neither hot nor cold. You are lukewarm.” And He says, “I will spew you out of my mouth”, which colloquially simply means, “You make me sick.”
And He says, “You have been so busy in what you are doing that you have left Me on the outside.” And it’s in the letter to the church in Laodicea that Jesus says, “Behold I stand at the door and knock” and He is talking about the church. “Open the door and let Me in and fellowship with Me. I will sup with you and you with Me.”
And so all of these churches were told to stop what they were doing, to review, to remember, to repent and to revive.
The interesting thing about those churches is that they were all relatively new churches. They had only been around for about one generation, founded after Paul had gone to Ephesus and a great revival had spread throughout that whole area of Asia Minor and churches were planted in many of these cities.
And now when John has this vision on the Isle of Patmos and he writes down everything he saw and everything the Lord said to him, it’s only about 30 years later.
These are not old churches that had got stuck in a rut; these are relatively young churches that you would expect to maintain the vitality of their early days. But they have gotten sidetracked into other things.
And we think it is time, for good and healthy reasons, that we take a hard look at what it is we are supposed to be and how it is we are supposed to function.
Now this is not a case, of course, of sitting around and pooling good ideas. Any such exercise must begin and must be governed by the Word of God. This is the manual from which we take our direction.
And this has to be a spiritual exercise as much as a practical exercise, because if it is just a practical exercise, we are just rearranging furniture and we’re not really connecting with the mind of God and with the Spirit of God.
And so I want for a couple of weeks just to talk about some things I think will be helpful to us as a congregation, not to pre-empt anything, but to go back to those things which are authoritative because they come to us in the Word of God.
Many of us will know the last words of Jesus to His disciples before He ascended. You find them in Acts 1:8. And He said,
“You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria and unto the ends of the earth.”
And then it says, “After He had said this, He was lifted up and He was taken back into heaven.”
Those were the last words that He spoke as a man on earth. And the rest of the book of Acts is an outworking of those final words, that great final commission of Jesus.
They received power in Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit comes. They are witnesses in Jerusalem. And then it spreads out in Judea and into Samaria and then out to the ends of the earth. And the book of Acts ends in the city of Rome, the heart of the greatest empire in the world at the time.
But I wonder how many of us know the first words of Jesus to His disciples. Not the first words that Jesus spoke as a human being that are recorded for us (because He spoke at the age of 12 when He said to His mother and to Joseph, “Don’t you know I must be about my father’s business?”)
And then there is the general statement He made: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” That was His message.
But the first words Jesus spoke to His disciples are in the verses I read to you a few minutes ago, and this will be my text for this morning and for the next couple of weeks as well.
It is in Matthew 4:19:
“Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
He is talking to four men – Simon and Andrew initially – that is who this is particularly addressed to – two brothers. And then in the next verses: two other brothers, James and John. And they were fishermen. Galilee was their lake and so this was a very natural analogy to use with them.
“You know what it is to be fishing for fish. You’re good at fishing for fish. I am going to make you,” He says, “fishers of men, of people.”
Now there is an invitation and there is a promise in that statement.
The invitation is “Come, follow Me.”
“That’s your business,” He says to them. “You need to do that. Come, follow Me.”
And then there is a promise: “I will make you fishers of men. I am going to do something in you that makes you fishers of men.”
Now this may intimidate some of us. And I know the force of the intimidation of this verse because we think, “Oh, boy, oh man, I’m no good at that.”
But notice what He doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “I will make you all evangelists.” He doesn’t say, “I will make you all missionaries.” He doesn’t say, “I want you all to be in full-time Christian service and that’s your job.” He doesn’t say, “I am going to give you all the same spiritual gifts.” He says, “I will make you fishers of men.”
Now let me ask a question. How many people here this morning are fishermen or fisherwomen? That’s your hobby maybe, and you’re a fisherman. Just put your hand up if you are a fisherman or a fisherwoman. Put it up nice and high. There are a few over here – not many. There’s a few back here, there’s one down here. There’s a few here, one or two over here, two in the balcony. There’s probably less than a dozen altogether who are fishermen.
Okay, let me ask you another question now. How many of you here have ever caught a fish? Put your hand up. Wow, look at that! Keep your hand up a minute. Look around. This is fantastic!
Now Jesus is talking to those of us who don’t see ourselves as fishermen, but who actually know the fun of catching a fish.
I am not a fisherman. I don’t have the patience for it, or the skill. I have unexpectedly caught one or two decent fish. Some years ago I was up in the Northwest Territories and with a friend, we went to a little island on Great Slave Lake for a day to do some fishing.
And I couldn’t believe how eager the pike were up there to get caught. Now pike are a little bit boney, but you can eat them, but you have got to work hard with the bones.
But I had the most brilliant catch I have ever had at Great Slave Lake because I threw my line out, and we had spinners on it. And then you haul it in of course and it attracts the pike and they come for it. But I caught one that was especially difficult to haul in.
And when we hauled it in we discovered that the pike hadn’t actually taken the hook into its mouth. The hook had grabbed it just behind the gills, embedded in its flesh. And I was hauling this thing in sideways by a sheer fluke. But I got a nice one - it was that long… no…
I remember on one occasion being in British Columbia and we were on holiday on one of the beautiful Gulf Islands – Thetis Island. And Laura, who I think was probably about ten then, said she would like to go fishing.
And so we got hold of a boat and two other men and Laura and I went out to fish in the water there, the Pacific that flows through the Gulf Islands.
And Laura was the first to catch anything. We all had a rod each – a fishing pole – and suddenly Laura’s pole sort of doubled down and she just about fell into the – over the side of the boat.
And she said, “I got something!” We went and grabbed her pole, held onto it; and whatever it was, it was big.
And we slowly brought this thing in, little by little by little and we discovered she had caught a shark. This is absolutely true. It was a mud shark, about four feet long – not huge but about that long, but real shark nevertheless.
And when we got it up to the surface by the boat, one of the guys bludgeoned it over the head and that made Laura scream, “Don’t do that, don’t do that!” you know.
But we eventually got it up onto the boat, lay it down on the floor of this boat, and “Wow, Laura that is a catch for the first time you have ever been fishing!”
And then as the thing was dying, it suddenly gave birth to a little baby shark and then a second, then a third. It gave birth to eight baby sharks, which we kept in a bucket. They lived for more than 24 hours and they were absolutely, exactly a miniature version of the big shark.
So Laura caught nine sharks in one go, in one throw of the line. And she was so scared that we went back in and never went fishing again.
But the point is this: fishing, for those of us who are not fishermen, can be a very exciting business. And I trust that we will get hold of this vision and the excitement of this, that if we know what it is to “come, follow Me” (and I will talk about what that means), they will then experience what He promises: “I will make you fishers of men” in ways that may be completely unexpected, in ways you had never anticipated.
Let me talk first then about the invitation. The invitation is “Come, follow Me”. This is not an invitation to become a Christian; that is not an invitation to follow; that is an invitation to be born again. That is, to recognize our separation from God, to acknowledge and confess that, to know that Jesus Christ died and bore the consequences of our sin. And on the basis of forgiveness He then comes by His Holy Spirit to live within us. We become ‘regenerate’ is a good word for that; we discover new appetite, new desires, new motivation, new power.
Now sadly, there are thousands of people who will meet in a place of Christian worship today who are simply trying to follow Jesus without knowing anything of the indwelling presence of Jesus, and it’s very frustrating.
But having been made regenerate, the invitation then is to work with Him. You see, “follow Me” is a code for discipleship.
Discipleship is about working with Jesus, being in step with Him. Let me read you a verse in John 12:26. It says,
“Whoever serves me must follow me.”
(So serving Me is going to mean following Me.)
“…and where I am, my servant also will be.”
So He says, “Serving Me means following Me. Following means that you are so in step with Me that where I am, you are there where I am working.”
So the question is: “What is it that Jesus is doing? Where is He working?
Now many of you will know Henry Blackaby’s book “Experiencing God”, and in that book he talks about find out where God is working and join Him. He doesn’t mean by that, see that God is working in somewhere like South Korea, so get in a plane and fly there.
No, he is saying, keep your eyes and your ears open in such a way that where God is at work, you be working with Him, be available to Him in order that the work that He does there, He can be doing through you, you can be part of what He is doing.
Now this requires being prayerful and being sensitive about this. It’s how Jesus Himself lived as a man. In John 5:17 it says,
“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.’”
So, “My Father is working and I am working.” And then two verses later in John 5:19 He says,
“I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can only do what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.”
“I am only effective,” says Jesus “when I am working with My Father.” As we are only effective when we are working together with Christ. “The Father has been working,” said Jesus “so I am working. I do nothing Myself. I am not acting in independence of My Father. But where My Father is doing His work, I am available to Him so that I can be a means by which He is doing it. So I am working too.”
And as Jesus said on another occasion,
“As my Father sent me, so I am sending you.”
So you live in fellowship with Me that where I am at work, I have in you, My disciple, My people, a means by which I can work in other people’s lives.
Notice, you see, that the invitation He gives is “Come, follow Me.” Not “Come, follow a program.” That would be a lot easier. We would know exactly what to do.
No, it’s not “come, follow a program”, not “come follow a method”, not “come, follow a system”, but “come, follow Me.”
“That is, this is borne not out of learning techniques but out of your relationship with Me that causes you to be sensitive to Me and sensitive to what I am doing – learning to be in step with Me, that where I am My servant also will be. Because if you serve Me, you must follow Me; you must be where I am.”
Now we have to learn how to keep in step with Jesus in this way. Remember when Jesus was going from Judea to Galilee? He passed through Samaria in John Chapter 4 and He encountered the Samaritan woman.
Jesus was tired and weary. He sat down on a well outside the city as His disciples went into the city to buy food. While they were in the city, this woman came to draw water. It was in the heat of the day. Jesus engaged her in conversation and said, “If you drank what I offer, you will never thirst again.”
And eventually she realized that this was the Messiah, went back into the city and said, “Come see a man who told me everything I ever did.” And it says many Samaritans believed on Him because of the woman’s testimony.
But when this was all over, the disciples came back with the food. The woman was still there with Jesus and it says they were surprised to see Him talking to a woman.
And then when she left, Jesus said to them this in John 4:35:
“Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest.
“I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you are to reap the benefits of their labor.”
In other words He said this (when the woman had gone): He said, “Do you know why I stayed here on this well and let you go by yourselves into the city? Because I wanted to see if you have got eyes that are open to where God is at work in people’s hearts. And you passed this woman on the road and you totally failed to see her.
Now of course they would have seen a woman. They may even have had discussion about her. They may have recognized she was a Samaritan woman. And they may have thought, well we have nothing for Samaritans; our message is only for the Jews. Samaritans, of course, were half Jewish, half Assyrian in their background.
They saw she was a woman. They may have adopted the stereotypical view of the day where the Pharisee would begin his morning by praying, “God, I thank You I am not a Gentile, I thank You I am not a slave, and I thank You I am not a woman.”
And they may have looked down on her in the way that was common amongst the culture, even though they had been with Jesus and seen that He treated women totally differently to the way they were treated in the culture.
They probably passed and said, “She’s just a woman.” They may have even discussed the fact she was going in the heat of the day to get the water. Well that probably means she’s an outcast. Why doesn’t she go in the cool of the day like everybody else? Well, probably because nobody else likes her.
They didn’t know her story that she had been married five times and was now living with a man she was not married to. We learn that because she told Jesus – or He told her that about herself.
But they probably guessed it was something like that and probably said, “You know, that woman going in the middle of the day. I bet she is an outcast. I bet she is sleeping around. I bet she has got a reputation.”
They probably discussed her but they never saw her, they never saw her as ripe. But the truth is where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.
And Jesus said to the priests and elders something which would have shocked them in Matthew 21:31:
“I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did.”
This was a slap in their face to their self-righteousness. They were used to the idea that there are certain types, you know, that are – well, they were the Jewish leaders.
But you know, it’s easy to have this view – there are certain types that are Christian – he’s not the type, she’s not the type.
You know, when we are willing to say, “Lord, I want to be in step with You”, sometimes we bump into people who we would never have expected to have hearts that are open.
Now sometimes it takes awhile. I talked to a lady this morning after the first service who has been in conversation with a neighbor about the gospel. And suddenly there has become a lot of opposition against her, not only from the neighbor’s family but from others in the community.
And she explained why, what united this community together and they come and they honk their horns outside her place and they ring her telephone all of the time, day and night, and they are just giving her awful turmoil. Even this morning she had somebody shouting after her as she went to the bus to come to the service.
Well, I said, “Whatever is going on, I’ll tell you this: something is going on that these folks have to fight against. God is doing something. Surely. Why else would they fight?”
But you know, it’s very easy to miss people. I have missed a lot of people. I say that to my shame.
We have a near neighbor – had a near neighbor – not on the same street, but actually his garden just touched a corner of ours, so across the other side behind us, the yard outside the back of the house.
I had never had a conversation with him, ever. But we knew a little bit about him. He had been in hospital for a while after an awful accident in which his sister had been killed – a road accident – and he had survived, but was in hospital for many months.
And we had prayed for him – Hilary and I. I did see him once on the street outside the front of my house. I was in the house and I remember thinking, “maybe I should go out and greet him but I thought, well, that would be a bit strange going out of the house to greet him.”
But I never had a conversation with him and then just not very long ago he was in hospital again and he died, relatively young. And the day he died, the chaplain (I think she was a chaplain from the hospital) telephoned me to tell me he had died. And I said, “Well, thank you for letting me know that. I didn’t really know him myself.
And she said, “Oh really, I thought you did. That’s why I called you, because he often talked about you.”
I said, “In what way?”
She said, “He used to watch Living Truth on Sunday mornings. And in hospital he talked to me a number of times when I would be in as a chaplain to his bed, found out I was a Christian and he talked to me about the fact that you lived near him and that he talked about some of the things you had said on the program.”
And I felt such a deep sense of shame that here’s a man who, certainly ripe, who I had never said, “Lord, should I go and meet with this person?”
It has caused Hilary and I to pray about people on our street in particular and to be actively proactive in building the relationships that we need to build in order to be able to share where it’s appropriate and when it’s appropriate, something of Christ with them.
When we open our eyes – and of course it’s a different method for her – the fields are ripe unto harvest, there’s a different method compared to fishing, but the same idea; we have to bury our natural prejudices.
You know, the places where God is at work is often not in the great cathedrals of Christendom but sometimes it is in the Samaritan community amongst a woman ostracized by most of the others.
“And I want you to come,” said Jesus “and follow Me. And he who serves Me follows Me so that where I am there My servant will be.”
It’s a day-by-day saying “Lord, I trust You in the right place at the right time to put me with eyes open to the right opportunities.” It won’t be everybody. There were many people who lived in Samaria. Those disciples were not supposed to reach the whole of Samaria – there was one person He had in mind for them, to meet that morning, and they failed.
And so this involves a daily relationship with God, a relationship of communion with Him, communication with Him, of learning to sense His leading. “In all your ways acknowledge Him. He will direct your paths.” Is a promise in the book of Proverbs.
And out of that invitation, which is our business, “Come follow Me” is a promise that is His business, “I will make you fishers of men.”
This is a work that Jesus will do. “You do the coming, you do the following; I will do the making.”
You can’t make yourself a fisherman. Some of us, you see, won’t even get started because we think “I’ve got to somehow make myself into this.” No, no. We cannot make ourselves fishers of men. That is the work of Jesus in the person who is in step with Him. And it will probably take you by surprise.
He uses this fishing analogy because of course Simon and Andrew and James and John are fishermen. This is the trade in which they grew up, their fathers before them, likely their grandfathers before them.
Jesus Himself was from Nazareth, an inland town, and His trade was carpentry. But the interesting thing is that Jesus takes the natural interests and natural gifts and natural skills that we have and He gives them a spiritual dimension and a spiritual function.
See, if I ask you what was Paul’s trade, he of course was trained as a Pharisee. But when he came to Christ, he turned away from that, went back to his home in Tarsus and he learned the trade of a tentmaker. It wasn’t that he went into camping as a business. These tents were these big things that people would make their homes in.
But isn’t it interesting that Paul, a tentmaker, becomes primarily in his ministry a church builder. I am not talking about buildings - stone and wood; I am talking about building churches, understanding the need for structure, for undergirding, for clarity about foundations, for mutual inter-support. That was Paul’s natural background. And those same interests and abilities and skills are turned into the ministry he was given as a church planter.
Peter’s trade was a fisherman. Now Peter was a great evangelist but you actually have no record of Peter founding churches. He was the preacher on the Day of Pentecost and 3,000 came to Christ. He led the first Gentile to Christ, a man called Cornelius. He was a great fisherman spiritually as well as what was his natural interest. But he didn’t have the structural skills that Paul had.
In fact, although Peter was a great personality in the church in Jerusalem, when in Acts 15 they all met together to discuss reception of Gentiles, the leader, the chairman of that meeting was a guy called James, a brother of Jesus.
What do you think James’ trade was? Well it doesn’t tell us but almost certainly he was a carpenter. His father Joseph was a carpenter. He had grown up and as Jesus was a carpenter, so His brother James is likely to have been a carpenter. And James is a man who knows how to construct and consolidate and build. So his skills are used there.
Go back into the Old Testament. Moses was a shepherd for 40 years in the Midian desert and then he becomes for 40 years a shepherd of the people of Israel as they go through the desert.
Joshua, when he first appears as a young man in his twenty’s, is a soldier, a very good soldier, put in charge of his own battalion. Joshua becomes the leader, the military man, who leads Israel in the conquest of Canaan. His natural skills and natural abilities are used by God to further spiritual ends.
You see sometimes we fear that God wants us to be people that we are not. He doesn’t. If you are an introvert, He does not want you to be an extrovert. Don’t pretend to be.
If you are an extrovert, He doesn’t want you to be an introvert. If you are quiet, He doesn’t want you to suddenly become loud. If you are loud, well, it might be good if you quietened down a bit but it’s your personality, it’s who you already are, it’s who you are.
And although we are taking this analogy as a fisherman and fishing for men, we want to apply it generally. Nevertheless we must understand that it has unique application and the principle behind it is that what you are and where you are gifted and where you are energized, these are the areas that God is going to take and work through.
You know there is a verse in Proverbs 22:6,
“Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
Now the meaning of that verse is train a child along the way he is wired, the way he should go. Train him in the area that he is gifted. Train him in the pursuit of his natural gifts and his natural interests. Train him in the things that energize him, not the things that exhaust him.
This is not about disciplining your child to behave. The meaning of that verse is find out how your child is wired and train him in that area.
But often we fear that getting involved in serving God in any way is sort of, it’s not me. But spiritual gifts are very often – not exclusively – but very often spiritual gifts are natural gifts, energized by the Holy Spirit for spiritual ends.
So Paul can write, when he wrote to the Galatians, he talks about how “God set me apart from birth to be an apostle.”
Well that’s very interesting because before he was an apostle, Paul was the archenemy of the church. He was a motivator of others to arrest Christians, throw them into prison, threaten them with murder.
And those very skills of mobilizing and leading and organizing were actually skills given him by God at his birth to enable him to become the great apostle that he was.
He is not a different person skill-wise after he becomes a Christian; he is a different person character-wise of course. But the very skills by which he opposed the church become the very skills by which he mobilizes the church.
Jeremiah, who shrank back from being a prophet and God said to him in Jeremiah 1:4,
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
“That when in the womb you were being put together, Jeremiah, I put into you, into your mind, into your natural skill set the ability to be what I want you to be. I set you apart to be a prophet.”
If Jesus said to these fishermen, “Come, follow Me and I will make you builders of the kingdom of God”, it wouldn’t have been very appealing to them.
“Builders? Oh boy, I don’t know anything about building.”
No, “I am going to make you fishermen – fishers of men rather. I am going to take your interests, your personality, your gifts.”
And you see, understanding this and seeking to develop this way is what makes a missional church. Now that’s a fairly recent word. But I like it the more I explore what it means to be missional.
Tim Keller, who is the minister of the Church of the Redeemer in New York City, a great church that is planting churches not just in New York City but now in some of the great metropolitan cities of the world.
He points out there is a difference between an evangelistic church and a missional church. He says an evangelistic church normally has an evangelism department; possibly it has a pastor of evangelism and it has evangelism programs. Now all of that is good – nothing wrong with that at all – something very good about that.
But he says a missional church is one where its whole reason for being, its whole structure and ministry is for the purpose of reaching people with the gospel and turning them into genuine disciples who in turn are reaching others.
So it’s not there’s a department over here with a label on the door that says “Evangelism”, if you are interested, go and work with that department; it’s the very heartbeat of the church.
This means recognizing and taking seriously the fact that all of us are called by God and therefore equipped by God in the unique way that we are equipped by God to be part of that missional process, to be outward looking.
A missional church will always be an evangelistic church but an evangelistic church may not be a missional church. It may just be a church with evangelistic programs.
We have a great legacy here at the Peoples Church, founded in 1928 by Oswald J. Smith. And it began as an outward looking church. Its emphasis from the beginning was on global mission.
Oswald Smith himself had been turned down by several missionary societies on the grounds of his poor health. In one of his books he says he’s hardly known a week in his life when he wasn’t sick at some point during that week. He had frail health.
And the mission leaders considered it wasn’t worth investing and training, equipping and sending a man to the mission field who was going to not survive and drop dead because his health is poor.
And so he coined a phrase, “If you can’t go, send a substitute” and he began the Peoples Church with the mission and vision of not only reaching into this city but sending missionaries across the world.
And we have a wonderful history and a wonderful legacy. And the DNA of this church has been what it has been right from the very beginning.
By the way, for those of you who don’t know, Oswald Smith died when he was 96 years of age. So the mission leaders weren’t too great on the gift of discernment other than God wanted him here in Toronto.
But you know, if we are a missions church, a missions church can fail to be a missional church because a missional [missions] church can be content with a missions department and a missions program and a missions committee and sending and supporting missionaries.
But a missional church will still do all of that but will live missionally in the community and in the place where God has placed it.
And this is one of our big questions. If this church were to disappear into thin air, would the neighbors actually notice?
A missional church will and should be a missions church. But a missions church can fail to be a missional church. It may just have a missions program.
And therefore what we need to do is to be asking and sharpening how is it that we as a community – we’re not talking about what those in leadership do – we’re talking about what we as a community are and do as true disciples of the Lord Jesus.
And you know, nothing deepens our walk with God more than serving Him. I talked to a young lady yesterday. She is in her early twenty’s. She is married to a young man, similar age, 22 or something like that.
And they were camp counsellors this summer for a week I think it was. And the young man had never done anything like this. And I saw the young lady yesterday and I said, “How did your husband – how did he get on?”
She said, “It was an absolutely fantastic week for him. He had his own group of boys. And he said at the end, ‘I didn’t know that God could use me until this week.’”
And she said, “He has come home a different person.” She said, “God is fresh in his life in a new way. It’s fantastic.”
Well I know that in my own experience. I know as a young man in my teens, with some friends, we decided we would try and reach some of the young people in our area.
And we went into the places that young people hung out in and we had a questionnaire, which got us into conversation with them. And I tell you, before that, I read my Bible because I knew I was supposed to. It was kind of, if I read my Bible today I will keep the devil away, all that kind of stuff.
But now people were asking me question – I haven’t any idea what the answers are; I’m reading the Bible to find answers for people’s real questions. And whereas my praying used to be a very quick, “Lord please look after me, you know, and bless all the people I know and look after all the missionaries and save everybody, Amen.” My praying was as vague as that.
Now I was saying, “Lord, I am going to meet Pete on Saturday night, I am going to meet Dave next Tuesday. And we have got things that they are asking and I pray that You will show Yourself to them and come into their lives.”
And you know suddenly your praying comes alive and has an urgency to it. It’s opening our eyes to seeing that we are called to be fishers of men, not by some technique, but here’s your business: “Come, follow Me. He who serves Me must follow Me. Where I am there My servant must be. Get in step with Me. Be sensitive to where I am working. And if you do that, leave the rest to Me. I will make you fishers of men.”
You will start hooking pike in the side and hauling them in. You will start catching sharks who give you eight babies – nine fish in one go. You have no idea what’s going to happen.
And Matthew 4:20 says “At once” (speaking of Simon Peter and Andrew),
“At once they left their nets and followed him.”
Matthew 4:22, speaking of James and John, immediately they left their nets, their boat and their father and followed Him.
And when you read the rest of the story of course, it wasn’t suddenly everything wonderfully snapped into place. No, it was a long process for Peter and Andrew and James and John. A process whereby sometimes they made progress and other times they seemed to slip back.
Peter was in trouble half the time – you know all of that. It’s not going to be slick and smooth; it’s going to be a journey of growth. But when your eyes are open, “I am going to follow You, be in step with You. Where You are, I, Your servant, want to be.” God will give you opportunities.
If you accept the invitation, “Come, follow Me” (that’s your daily response), He will fulfill the promise, “I will make you fishers of men. I will, in you, through you, touch other people’s lives and will hook them in.”
Let me finish by offering you a little bit of bait – fish bait – to catch a few fish. It was announced earlier that Alpha begins a week tomorrow. One series will take place here in the church; another series is taking place in a venue outside of the church – same time, same dates.
And when you leave this morning, out on the grass area outside the front, there is a table and there will be folks there with this little card. This is a little brochure that generally talks about what Alpha is, just very general, but no details. This gives details of Alpha beginning here a week on Monday.
I want you to go by that table and pick up one, two, three, four of this and you have no idea that you might meet somebody to whom you can give this and it will be the right thing at the right moment because of where they are. Say, “Lord, who do I give this to? Who can I invite to this?”
Maybe you can invite somebody to come with you. It actually gives the two locations on here, the two addresses on here – here and another place. So you can invite people.
And if you normally exit out to the back doors because you are parking out there, just make it a point of going around that way, if you are interested and think that this is something that you could do and just pick up some of these.
And we are praying that God will do two things: one, excite each of us with the fact God can use me, you, me; not just them but me. And that we see a great harvest of people who this morning at this time wouldn’t have given a second thought to being in a place like this but their hearts are ripening through circumstances, through events.
And you and I can be the privileged people to be in the right place at the right time with the right word with the right whatever it is, the right gesture of kindness and love that enables their hearts to open. And we can help them on their journey to find Christ.
I am going to come back to this passage next week. I am going to talk about mending the nets. You have got to have decent nets.
I am going to talk the week after that about fishing in the right place because you know, the disciples were fishing one day and catching nothing and Jesus said, “Hey, put your net…” and gave them another place to drop their net and then they caught fish.
And then lastly, I am going to talk on the fourth Sunday from a parable Jesus told of some people fishing and they got a whole big net full of fish. And when they landed it, there was everything in that net – good fish, bad fish, edible fish, inedible fish, old boots – and they said to Jesus, “What in the world do we do with this net? It’s got all this junk in here as well as the fish we are looking for.”
Jesus said, “That’s fine, that’s fine, you’ll land some junk as well.” And then He told them what was going to happen to the net. We’ll talk about that. It’ll help us not to get discouraged when we see discouraging things (as we do), when we meet discouraging people (as we do), when we see things that show signs of hope and then seem to just go away.
It’ll tell us how to respond and how to live with that because the intention of Jesus for His people is still as it was, “Come, follow Me and I will make you – I will make you - fishers of men.”
Let’s pray. Father, we thank You this morning that You are still active in our world and thank You for the huge privilege of knowing You are active through Your people. You speak with our lips, You work with our hands, You walk with our feet, You love with our hearts. And we are Your agents in this world. And I pray You will raise in our hearts and minds an expectancy of those people in whose hearts You are already at work and as we are workers with You, in step with You, we may be Your agents in helping them come to know Christ, and in Him, to find life and life eternal. We pray it in Jesus’ name, Amen.