They Left Their Nets

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

We’ve had a lot of conversations about priorities in my house here lately. Priorities and prioritizing. As a matter of fact, one of those conversations, Charla, her biggest fear over these last few months would be that she would go into labor while Carly Jo was still in the hospital. She was panicked about that.

And I remember telling her, you’ve never gone into labor. You’ve never given any indication of going into labor before your C-section. You’re not showing any signs now.

Yes, have a plan, but it’s not something you need to worry about. But she still was worried about it, and I guess I understand, because that’s a big thing to worry about. But she was really worried about it, and namely because who’s going to be where?

If Carly Jo was in OU Children’s, and she’s going to be having a C-section at Ada. She sells seashells by the sea shore. That’s kind of a tongue twister.

She’s going to have a C-section at Ada. How is everybody, who’s going to be where? She said, and I don’t know how you’re going to decide where to be.

I mean, you’re going to want to be with me. You’re going to be with Carly Jo, and you’re going to be torn. You’re going to want to be here and there, and I just don’t know where you’re going to be.

And I looked at her and said, I’m going to stay with Carly Jo. I think she was surprised, and I think she was a little hurt. Not that I made that decision, but that I was so quick about it.

And I said, it’s very simple. you just, you prioritize this. Because if you go to Ada and I don’t, your mother can be with you.

And Abigail’s mother can be with her. But if you go to Ada, Carly Jo’s mother can’t be with her, she’s going to need a parent. She said, oh, that’s true.

And then she felt better about it. I said, it’s just a matter of prioritizing because it’s not about where I want to be. It’s priorities.

And we’ve sat down and had numerous conversations with the kids through this whole debacle with Carly Jo being in the hospital and then Abigail coming. Don’t want the others to feel left out or neglected or like they don’t matter. And so we’ve sat down and had conversations about priorities.

And, you know, you are not more or less important than Carly Jo. You are not more or less important than Abigail. It’s just that sometimes needs, particular needs, are more important in the moment.

And so yes, we are spending all this time up at the hospital because she’s just had open heart surgery. By the way, if any of the rest of you had an urgent need like that, we would drop everything and be case in point. Charlie gashed his eye open, you know, while we were in there.

Mama stepped away from what she needed to do to go to the ER with him. I said, Benjamin and Madeline, you were both in the NICU when you were born. Daddy dropped everything and was there with you too.

It’s just a matter of what the needs are at the moment. And sometimes we have to do that in life, even with things that are less important. We have to do that with mundane things every day.

We have to prioritize. If you don’t, life gets to be a mess even more than usual. You have to prioritize because some things are more important in that moment, and some things are just more important at any moment. Some things at any moment in time matter more than other things, And we have to figure out what those things are.

Jesus had a conversation with some men where they were called on very quickly to have to prioritize and figure out what was the most important thing that they could spend their time on. And that’s where we’re going to pick up tonight in Mark chapter 1, was with Jesus calling these men and they had a decision to make very quickly. Mark chapter 1.

It’ll be on your screen for you if you don’t have a copy of the Bible in front of you or if you have your bulletin, there’s a link right there to find it. Mark chapter 1, and we are going to start this evening in verse 16. If you would stand with me, if you’re able to stand without too much difficulty, as we read from God’s Word together.

Mark chapter 1, starting in verse 16, it says, and as he walked by the Sea of Galilee, that’s Jesus, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. Then Jesus said to them, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. They immediately left nets and followed him.

When he had gone a little farther from there, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who also were in the boat mending their nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and went after him. You may be seated.

Now these men already knew of Jesus. They already had some familiarity with who he was, what he was about. They’d heard him teach.

Some of them were followers of John the Baptist, it appears, and if that’s the case, then they would have been familiar with Jesus through that because John the Baptist pointed his followers toward Jesus. So they were acquainted with him to some degree. They were interested in his teaching.

It would be hard not to be. Even the people that hated him in his ministry kind of wanted to hear what he was going to say next, right? It’s sort of like the love-hate relationship a lot of us have with social media.

We don’t want to hear it, and yet we’ve just got to hear what somebody’s going to say next on there, right? Even the people that didn’t like Jesus were interested to see what he was going to say next. And so we know these men were somewhat familiar with him.

They were interested in his teaching. But here, Jesus takes the relationship a step further. See, it wasn’t going to be enough for them to just stand on the periphery of Jesus’ his ministry and look in and just kind of be vaguely interested in what he had to say and click like and follow him, see what he’s doing.

That wasn’t going to be enough. Jesus here asked them for a serious commitment. For them to follow him was going to be a serious commitment.

He said in verse 17, Follow me. Now for us, that seems like such an unimportant thing. Follow me.

You know, somebody at the store, I ask somebody at the store where I can find something. So I go into Walmart or Lowe’s, I try to look it up on the app, and it’s never where it says it’s going to be, ever. So you ask somebody, where can I find such, if you can find an employee in a store nowadays.

Do they still have those? You ask them, where is such and such? And they’ll say, follow me, if they’re good.

When I was working at Homeland, we were taught, don’t ever tell the customer that it’s on aisle 17. You take them and you show them where it is. You’d say, follow me.

I might follow the worker to wherever the item is that I’m looking for, but it’s not a major life decision where I’m going to drop everything and pattern my life after that employee. We use the word follow in a very flippant sense. You know, we’ll follow somebody.

I follow all these restaurants on Facebook that I went to one time, and now I see all these posts pop up about they’ve got specials, and they’re out of state, so it does me no good. It makes no difference in my life. I’ll follow somebody to a destination.

I’ll follow my GPS and half the time I’ll ignore what it tells me. When Jesus said, follow me, it meant something different. They would have understood it in a completely different fashion from what we understand the term, follow me to mean.

What he was doing was inviting them to become his disciples and him become their rabbi. to study under a rabbi in that day and age was to uproot your entire life elsewhere in the scriptures we see them call him master and call him teacher both of those are reasonable translations of the word rabbi because you were studying under somebody you were learning their thoughts on everything, on the scriptures and how they applied to daily life and everything in the world outside. You were learning to think like your master.

You were learning to approach life the way he does. In many cases, you would live where he lived, you would sleep where he slept, you would eat what he ate, and you would go with him where he went. It was not a casual..

. you know, we took Benjamin to soccer lessons years ago. That didn’t go real well for me or for him.

But we’d take him to these lessons, and once or twice a week, he’d spend 45 minutes out there learning. I don’t know what he actually learned for the money we paid. But he’d learn something, and then we’d go home.

Jesus was not offering to be that kind of teacher. He was saying, you come and spend your entire life with me, learning to do the things I do. We’re talking a serious commitment, a serious investment of time here.

It was more than an invitation just to join him on a journey. It was an invitation that he was going to become their teacher. So he was calling them to come and be with me and come be like me.

We would look at it, the closest approximation we would have would be a mentorship relationship. You know, I didn’t attend Bible college or seminary until I’d been in ministry already for several years. My initial training in the pastorate was in the local church.

And there were men that I studied with, men that I respected. It wasn’t any kind of formal program, I’ve told you before. the pastor and the youth pastor at the church where I was when I surrendered to ministry, I just really didn’t even give them an option.

I said, hey, I’m going to come follow you around and learn what you do. And they said, okay. And I irritated the living daylights out of them until I graduated high school.

Because if I wasn’t at school or work, I was usually following them around. But as a result of following them around, there are things that I learned, positions that they held that I’ve studied out for myself and they make sense to me and I still hold to those positions. There are approaches and attitudes that I still hold because I learned them from them.

In some ways, my ministry is patterned after theirs because we spent that time together. And that’s what Jesus was calling them to do only in a deeper way. Come be with me and come be like me.

He was calling them for a whole life commitment. For their entire lives to be devoted to the cause of following Jesus Christ. By the way, that wasn’t unique to these men when he said to them, come follow me. That’s the same call that each of us have today still.

To follow Jesus Christ, not just to do it half-heartedly, not to do it haphazardly, but to get to the place where it is a whole life commitment. To take up our cross and deny ourselves and follow after him and to do that daily. Discipleship has always been a whole life commitment.

These men would have been puzzled by the idea that Christians often have today in the 21st century in the West that we can fit discipleship into our lives when for them discipleship became their entire lives. And so Jesus here is asking them for a serious commitment. And these men, they willingly incurred a great cost to follow him.

It wasn’t just a simple decision. It was a quick decision. Because they were well acquainted enough with Jesus by this point that they realized he was somebody that they wanted to follow.

But it wasn’t just a simple decision that you could pop in and out of. You know, we have things today where you can buy expensive products, and if you don’t like it, you can still return it for your money back. My goodness, I was at Lowe’s the other day.

They have a 90-day return policy with your receipt. I saw a guy ahead of me in line. I was there to return some flagstone that was way smaller than what I’d ordered.

There was a man in front of me in line that I’m pretty sure was returning something that had been used before. And they took it back. See, you can spend hundreds of dollars on home improvement equipment and still return it.

No questions asked. There’s no cost. And we’re used to doing that. We will anticipate doing that with life decisions.

in Hollywood people pop in and out of marriage in 45 minutes sometimes and then act like it never happened because there was no cost but this was a decision that was going to cost them something see they weren’t willing to follow Jesus like so many are today when it’s easy when it’s convenient when there’s no cost they were willing to pay at this point whatever cost they incurred in order to follow him. You see this in verse 18. Peter and Andrew immediately left their nets and followed him.

Now it’s impressive enough to me that they left their nets and followed him, but it says they immediately left their nets and followed him. I think a major lifestyle change like this, I would at least need a little bit of time to think about it, but it says here they immediately, they dropped everything they were doing and followed Jesus. And then in verses 19 and 20, James and John did the same thing.

James and John were in the boat mending their nets, and he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and went after him. Now, Luke tells us that these men were partners. They were on separate boats, but they were evidently partners in a big fishing enterprise.

And we can kind of piece that together by the story in Luke where they’re in separate boats and they called out to their partners, so we know they work together. And you can see where it talks about leaving Zebedee with the hired servants. They could afford to hire people to help them.

So this was the first century equivalent of big business. This wasn’t just a rinky-dink fishing operation. This wasn’t me out there with one pole at Medicine Creek trying to get a fish out just for entertainment.

This was a big business, and these men were partners, and they left this large, thriving enterprise. They had this big business, and they just walked away from it. And they did it immediately because Jesus said, follow me.

Follow me, leave all of it behind. Okay. We don’t have any record here that they even asked questions.

They just did it. It’s incredible to me. It says that they were mending their nets.

So they were sitting there working on some projects that were urgent for the fishing to continue the next day or even later that day they needed to mend the nets where they’d gotten torn in that day’s catch. Somebody had to do that. How many times do we tell ourselves, I’ll get serious about following Jesus later, but I’ve got this thing going on that’s urgent.

they were in the middle of mending their nets it doesn’t say they stopped they waited to finish they stopped what they were doing and they left and they followed jesus and like I said this wasn’t just me out casting a pole in the water this was their livelihood this wasn’t a hobby this was their livelihood this was their skill set this was their career this is how they fed themselves this is everything they knew and had studied probably from the time that they were young boys to do. This was everything they knew, and they left their skills and their career. Notice James and John left their father Zebedee on the boat.

They were willing to walk away from family and friends, because when Jesus called, nothing else mattered. They did it immediately. It cost them all those things, but they went and did it immediately.

Now, this is not telling us we have to be irresponsible. It’s not telling us we have to treat our family and friends like garbage to follow Jesus. But their reaction to his call shows us, reminds us, that there’s nothing that matters as much as his call.

And to the extent that those relationships and to the extent that those financial entanglements and everything else they had going on to the extent that all of those things were going to hold them back from serving Jesus, they no longer mattered. Put the nets down, climb off the ship, and walk away was their response. As I said, this is not a blanket call for every believer just to abandon everything in their lives.

This is not even a statement that nothing else matters at all. just looking at one of these things I love my family and it would break my heart to walk away from them this is not to say that nothing else matters but for the believer, for the disciple nothing else matters as much as Jesus and what he’s called us to do and so we should be willing to incur any cost willingly there should be nothing in our lives that we hold back when jesus says give give that up that we hold it back and say no lord we do that sometimes though don’t we we like to compartmentalize things in our lives and when he calls us to follow him when he calls us to obey him sometimes we’ll have one or two Departments over here where we say yes to him and everything else, but we kind of keep the door locked over here and pray he won’t notice.

This is a call to unlock all the doors and throw them all open and tell him to have his way. And they were willing to incur any cost. And what Jesus offered to do here was to turn their lives upside down. Many times in modern Western Christianity, we have this hope that He’ll make our lives better.

And I think to an extent, He will make our lives better, depending on how we define better. He’ll bring joy and He’ll bring peace to your life. That doesn’t mean that there won’t ever be trouble.

But He’ll bring joy and peace in the midst of all that trouble that passes understanding. He’ll be with you through all of it. Depending on how you look at it, He will make your life better.

But a lot of times we will treat, if we’re not careful, we will treat God, we will treat Jesus as means to an end. So if we follow them and we say the right things and we get just enough Christianity, then He’ll bless us and we’ll have the nice car and the house with the picket fence and 2. 4 children or whatever the average is today, we’ll have the perfect American dream life.

Folks, Jesus didn’t come to make our lives better. He came to turn our lives upside down. In discipleship, he’s not offering just to be the icing on the cake.

He’s offering to throw the cake out and bake a new one. He says to him here, verse 17, follow me and I will make you become fishers of men. See, they’d been fishers of fish up to this point.

He says, I’m going to change the entire direction, change the entire course here. You’re no longer going to be fishers of fish, you’re going to be fishers of men. If they followed him, there was going to be a change in the whole direction of what they were doing.

And notice too there in verse 17, it says become. It’s not just I will make you fishers of men, I will make you become fishers of men. There’s a process involved here.

And sometimes as we’re following Jesus, we can get discouraged because we look at where somebody else is in their spiritual walk. And we recognize sometimes wrongly and sometimes rightly, that we recognize they’re way ahead of where I am. They’re way ahead of where I should be.

and we get discouraged because we’re not there yet. We get discouraged when we see rough edges that He has yet to sand off of us. We get discouraged because we’re not everything we know we ought to be.

Folks, sanctification is a process. Now, we’ll talk about this probably more with the Holy Spirit in coming weeks. Sanctification does happen in an instant where God says, they’re mine and I’ve set them apart and declared them holy.

But sanctification in the sense of acting like it takes time. He says, follow me and I will make you become fishers of men. There’s a process here.

All throughout our discipleship journey we are becoming fishers of men. We should continue to grow and become more what he wants us to be. and for them especially as being disciples who were studying under Jesus as a rabbi this was not this was not just a mere human rabbi and if the idea was to conform to the image of the rabbi to be more like the rabbi becoming more like Jesus is going to take time and it’s going to take the work of the holy spirit so he says follow me and I’ll make you become fishers of men.

This idea of fishers of men, I’ve always just thought it was a play on their job, that they were fishers of men, that they were fishermen. And so he’s telling them instead of catching fish, I’ll have you catch men. But this was not, I’ve discovered as I’ve studied more on this here lately, that this is not a phrase that he just pulled out of thin air.

Apparently the Greeks and Romans, as they got into their philosophies and things, they would use similar terminology for philosophers and teachers who would try to lure people to particular ideas. They would say they were fishing for people. They were luring people.

But on top of that, it’s also filled with Old Testament significance. There’s a couple references in the Old Testament to this idea of fishing for people. One of them’s in Jeremiah 16, 16.

It says, behold, I will send for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall fish them. And when he says that, when you read the full chapter, when he says that, he’s describing, God is describing how the prophets are going to be like fishermen who are assembling the people of Israel together for judgment. He’s talking about how, through the prophet Jeremiah, how he intends to judge Israel in the near future.

And he says he’s going to send the prophets out with this message of judgment, and they’re going to gather Israel together for that judgment. There’s this idea of collecting men together for God’s purposes. And then in Amos 4.

2, also dealing with the northern kingdom of Israel and God’s judgment, it says, The Lord God has sworn by His holiness, Behold, the days shall come upon you when He shall take you away with fishhooks and your posterity with fishhooks. Now here he’s describing how God is going to gather together the leadership of the northern kingdom for judgment like fish. Because when you look at the Old Testament after the kingdom of Israel split, after Solomon died, kind of had a little civil war going on, the ten northern tribes that we often call the lost tribes now, and the two southern tribes.

The southern kingdom lasted longer because from time to time they would have godly kings who would lead them to repent. The northern kingdom never had a good king. From that time on, they never had a king who followed God.

and so their party was over a lot sooner the prophet amos was sent out of the wilderness out of his farm to go right into the into the royal court with his fingers stained from the figs that he was picking and he was sent into the court of the king to pronounce the judgment of god on this country and he said there is coming a day when you and your children speaking to the political and religious elites of the country who had ignored God and had led the people astray, looking at them, said, there’s coming a day when God will gather you and your children with fish hooks for the judgment. Now, it doesn’t mean literal fish hooks, but it was an idea that they could understand that just as when a fish gets hooked, when the fisherman’s fishing, the fish is helpless, there was going to come a day when they were caught and they were hooked, and there was going to be no escape.

So Jesus uses this phrase that these men would have understood living in this Greco-Roman culture, but also being students of the Old Testament. And they would have understood that they were supposed to go out there with their lures and draw people in, but at the same time there’s a divine element here of being used for God’s purpose of gathering His people. They were called to join Jesus in his mission here.

The only difference is where the Old Testament prophets were said to gather the people for the judgment, these disciples were supposed to go out and gather them from the judgment. Because the judgment of God was coming, but what Jesus offered was a way out. He offered the hope of the gospel if they would trust in him.

And that’s the message that they were supposed to take out and hook men, not to gather them for judgment, but to gather them away from the judgment, as God had sent them. And as he tells them that, I don’t think they understood all of that to begin with. They would have been familiar with the term.

They would have had some idea of what he was talking about. I don’t think they understood their full mission at that point. But they understood that Jesus was somebody they needed to follow.

Jesus was somebody worth following. And eventually they came to realize that this mission that he was calling them to join him on, this mission that was going to turn their lives upside down, they would realize that there was no work that could ever be as important as what he was calling them to do. And so Jesus, because he’s worth following, and because the work that he’s doing is worth joining, he called them for total commitment.

leave it all behind and follow me but he also said become I’ll make you become fishers of men because we are still sinners we sometimes fall short still of that total commitment and he leaves room for growth there but there was no more important work for them than joining Jesus in his mission to gather fish and his disciples today calls us to total commitment because there’s nobody who’s more worth following than Jesus, and there’s no work more worth joining than this mission of gathering fish from the judgment.