to our theme in these morning services, From
Simon to Peter.
And we come now to the episodes which
we find in the three synoptic Gospels, Matthew,
Mark and Luke, that refer to the summons
of our Lord to Simon and his fellows
to become fishers of men.
You will find the relative material in Matthew
4, verses 18-22, Mark 1, verses 16
-20, and in Luke 5, verses 1-11.
Now let's get the setting.
You remember that Simon, the subject of our
present study, was included among a small nucleus
of people who were introduced to our Lord
Jesus Christ as the Messiah very early on
in his public ministry, whilst he was still
down in the south of the country in
Judea.
Jesus spoke to Simon and promised not only
to change his name, but to make him
a man that would be stable, Petros the
Rock.
And then in the subsequent chapters in John's
Gospel, chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, we
see how our Lord appears to be confirming
the emerging faith in Simon's heart and in
the hearts of others, showing that he really
did know the human heart.
He had not let go an arrow at
a venture.
When he said to Simon, look you'll be
a different man, he knew Simon.
He knew his heart, he knew his life,
he knew his needs, he knew all about
the man.
And we also see how John 1-4
proves likewise that our Lord is able to
change men and change women too.
Now the scene changes.
We move up to the north of the
country to Galilee.
As a matter of fact, when we were
last meditating upon this theme in John 4,
we saw that our Lord Jesus was then
on his way north, leaving Judea in the
south, going towards Galilee in the north, passing
through Samaria, and it was en route that
that very lovely incident took place at Sychar's
well.
Now, we have already indicated that three of
the Gospel writers refer to this theme in
our Lord's teaching or training of the Twelve.
It is necessary, however, to see that the
incident referred to in Matthew and in Mark,
on the one hand, is different from the
one to which Luke refers to in chapter
5.
May I just, in a few words, indicate
the differences?
I think it is necessary to see this
for an understanding of the Gospels.
But you have the same unifying theme in
both.
The theme is becoming fishers of men.
Now, in Matthew and in Mark, on the
one hand, you will notice that our Lord
is recorded as having called four disciples, called
them in pairs.
In Luke chapter 5, he does not call
two pairs of people, two couples, two brothers,
two sets of brothers, but on the contrary,
he calls a larger multitude of people all
at once.
Matthew describes one of the pairs as casting
their net into the sea, and the other,
mending their nets.
Whilst in Luke, both occupants of two empty
boats were, to quote, washing their nets at
the beginning of the episode, and both boats
are involved in landing a whole of supernaturally
caught fishes at the end of the episode.
It is a different thing altogether.
In the one case, recorded by Matthew and
Mark, Jesus is alone, walking on the Sea
of Galilee, along the side of it.
In the other, there is a whole crowd
of people pressing in upon him, so that
he requires a boat to preach from.
They are two different incidents.
And again, whereas Matthew and Mark record a
summons to follow Jesus, in order to become
fishers of men, Luke says something which is
distinct and different from that.
Luke records our Lord as telling the disciples,
don't be afraid, henceforth you shall catch men.
In Matthew and Mark, then, it's an invitation
to become fishers of men.
In Luke, it is the assurance that having
come, they shall.
Now, because of the obvious unity of theme,
we have to see the whole as one
picture.
We shall not be able to cover both
this morning, but I will give you now
the outline that we propose to take this
morning, and in the will of God, next
Lord's Day morning.
There are three main things here concerning this
theme before us.
First of all, we note the task to
which Simon and his followers were called, then
the training that is envisaged, and then especially
in Luke chapter 5, the token of success.
Indeed, one might almost go further, the guarantee
of success, which our Lord gave them, even
at that early stage in his ministry.
He said in effect, you can't be failures,
henceforth you will catch men.
Though Simon had to wait some time, on
the day of Pentecost, by the grace of
God and the provisions of that same Savior,
we see something of the fulfillment of that
great promise.
Now, all this, of course, applies to a
larger group, but we are focusing our attention
especially upon Simon.
Having said that, now let's come to consider,
first of all this morning, the task to
which Simon, as well as the others, was
called.
Matthew and Mark record our Lord summons us
one, quote, to become fishers of men.
Fishers of men.
Luke's terminology is a little different.
Catching men, he speaks of henceforth you shall
catch men.
But that again, given in a fishing context,
means that he has the same thing in
mind, though there is a very real difference
to which we shall refer a little later
on.
Now, let us start here.
What does this image suggest?
I think that the image of men as
fish in the sea is most vocal and
most suggestive.
Our Lord sees men as enveloped in an
element that is strangling them and killing them,
out of which they need to be extricated
and introduced into an entirely different element, out
of the sea, into another element.
And that is the picture.
This world is a fallen world.
This world is a sea of death.
Satan rules.
Death rules.
Sin rules in this world, apart from the
grace of God.
And mankind is caught like fish in the
sea, and there is no way out.
Someone has got to come to fish us
out of the sea of this world and
transfer us and transform us into an entirely
different element, if we are to be redeemed.
Now, you come across this kind of imagery
in many places in the New Testament.
We are to be taken out of the
kingdom of Satan and transferred into the kingdom
of God's dear Son.
We are called out of darkness into light,
and so forth.
It's the same basic principle that underlies all
these various images or metaphors.
I wonder whether there is someone here today
who is a fish in the sea of
sin, poisoned and perniciously influenced by Satan and
sin, and you can't get out of it
if you're left to yourself.
The only thing you can do like a
fish is to go round and round in
circles.
You may discover something new today, but it's
always been there.
You're in the same old pool, and the
pernicious influences of Satan are all brought to
bear, and you can't get out of it.
You're enclosed, you're confined, you're doomed.
Now that's the picture of this world that
the Bible gives us.
And so our Lord ordained that His people
should be fishers of men, moving along the
side of the pool of human life and
extricating men, gathering them out, bringing them out
and transferring them by His Spirit and His
Word into an entirely different element where life
and light and love prevail, and where eternal
joys are experienced even in this world.
Now look at the definite intention specified by
our Lord.
Come after me, He says, and I will
make you to become fishers of men.
I find this quite challenging.
We need to mark the precise, the definite
terms of our Lord.
We are always prone to clothe our Lord's
clear and unambiguous terms with some qualifications of
our own, so that we denude them of
their thrust, or we make them vague and
indefinite.
And my friends, there is nothing in life
that so militates against the glory of God
than our vagueness in spiritual things.
The Bible is never vague.
Even when it speaks in terms of general
principles, it is never vague.
It is always precise.
Our Lord's terms here are clear and decisive.
He has positive goals in mind.
He knows exactly what He wants His disciples
to do.
He's got a plan for Simon, and it's
a fishing plan.
We must match our Lord's definite call with
our own equally definite response.
Because the call to Simon is equally a
call to you and to me if we
are followers of Jesus Christ this morning.
The pool is larger than in Simon's day,
and there are more fish in it.
The population explosion means that there are more
people to reach for Jesus Christ.
There are more people dying in sin than
without the Savior.
And therefore the call comes to the Christian
church this morning as never before.
Come after me, says the Savior, and I
will make you to become fishers of men.
Unless we get this definite concept of our
duty firmly established in our minds, my friends,
we are not going to be about our
Father's business.
If you don't aim at catching men, you
will rarely catch one.
If you and I simply move lackadaisically hoping
for the best through life without positively aiming
at this, I'll tell you, the powers of
hell will see to it that you'll not
win the soul for Jesus Christ.
Taking our Lord's word seriously then, we ought
so to organize our lives that the task
of fishing men should assume a place that
corresponds in its importance to the word and
the work of God in the world.
Insofar as the salvation of men is central
to the divine plan, it should also be
central in the plan and in the program
of His people.
Now you see, this makes sense.
If it is true to say that all
the purposes of God crystallize down to one—the
gathering in of the lost out of a
fallen world and building them up in grace—so,
my friend, should your purpose and mine be
synchronized to that.
You see, you can't have fellowship with God
unless you're one with Him in purpose.
So then we notice the definite intention.
Is it heretical for a minister to ask
people in the twentieth century, look, men and
women, be definite in your quest for souls,
in your evident purpose for living, with an
end in view that you should extricate sinners
from the element of death and of sin
and transfer them into a new element, the
kingdom of God.
Definite.
But now notice the discriminating designation here.
I think our Lord's approach to Simon and
his friends was wonderful.
Oh, how He knew men.
And you see, He wanted to be clear.
He wanted to be definite.
And so He speaks to them very specially
in a language that they understood.
There is no communicator like our Lord.
He had no problem of communication.
The speak of the disciples calling under the
metaphor of fishers of men was essentially the
most significant and eloquent of them.
Now, they were fishermen, as you know.
They were called from their fishes and from
their boats and so forth.
They were fishermen.
The Bible uses other metaphors in relation to
this very duty.
It speaks of farming and of building and
of reaping and of shepherding and of stewarding
and rendering slave service.
All these are Biblical metaphors speaking of one
facet or other of Christian duty.
But when Jesus is speaking to fishermen, He
says, look, you come after me and I
will make you to become not farmers, but
fishers.
Fishers of men.
You see, He wants the truth to get
across in a language they understood.
In so far as it related to the
fisherman's role, as distinct from the experience of
the fish, I mean, this metaphor stressed at
least two important points.
Jesus would have these people realize that there
would be a measure of continuity between their
old life and the new.
They had been fishermen.
They are to be fishermen still.
There is a continuity between the natural and
the spiritual.
Now, here is again something which I find
most encouraging and most comforting.
The God of grace is also the God
of nature.
The God who calls us today is the
God that made us yesterday.
And He made us yesterday with natural abilities
and propensities that today He wants to call
into play.
He made us with a purpose.
He made us with a view.
He knew what He wanted us to be.
I was an officiating chaplain in the army
when I was ministering in my first charge.
And this was toward the close of the
Second World War.
And I remember how some of the folk
who used to come into this particular barracks,
coming for the first six weeks of their
training as they had enlisted in Her Majesty's
army, how many of them were absolutely flabbergasted.
That was the world.
Very rarely did they find a niche in
the army that corresponded with what they were
in civilian life.
If you were a baker in civilian life,
you were sure to be asked to be
a nurse or a typewriter or something.
So they said.
Now it was their allegation.
You know, you never find that with God.
He made you with a view.
He knew what He was after.
God does not put square pegs in round
holes.
He knew what He wanted of you when
you were conceived in the womb.
And He gave you natural capacities and propensities
and so forth.
Now when He calls you into service, He
doesn't want to make a farmer into a
fisherman or a fisherman into a farmer.
He says, come with all the latent skills
and all the things you've learned as you've
been exercising your natural abilities.
Come and bring them.
Exercise them for me.
There's a continuity.
And so much of the old skills of
fishing were to be used in the new
realm.
The courage.
Have you ever thought of the courage that
was necessary to go fishing on the Sea
of Galilee, that boisterous little lake, that could,
in a flash, in the twinkling of an
eye, as it were, boil into a cauldron,
because of its location being over six hundred
feet below sea level.
Oh, the courage of these men.
They went out into the teeth of the
storm once and twice and over and over
again because they were ready to face any
difficulty.
And the patience of the fisherman and the
perseverance of the fisherman and the monotony of
life that they have to face and so
much else.
All these things will be required in the
new realm, in the new life.
Fishingmen.
There's an element of continuity, but there is
also positively an element of discontinuity in this
respect.
When we consider the elevation of the new
over the old, henceforth they are to catch
not fish, but men.
Fishers of men.
What an inestimable gulf there is between men
and fish.
Now I know there are those in the
world who would have us see men as
but grown-up fish.
A little bit of slime developed over a
period.
But in the Word of God there is
a chasm that separates fish from men.
Man is the most glorious of God's creatures,
the highest of all, made after God's image.
And man is in danger and man is
to be fished out of the pond.
Man is to be rescued.
I know it's a different thing altogether to
fishmen because of the value of the fish.
Each fish bearing the image of God, albeit
lost, albeit spoilt, albeit marred, but it's there.
That's the task.
My friend it is the task to which
God called Peter, and God calls you and
calls me today.
Sometimes, sometimes all the lines of providence converge,
and you know I feel we're at such
a point just now.
I had planned way back last October that
starting in January we should, in our Wednesday
evenings, we should be meditating upon a theme
of being equipped to do the Lord's service.
And I had planned to take something of
this kind.
Then I felt equally strongly that we should
be studying this life of Peter, from Simon
to Peter.
And equally so that we should be involved
in starting our series of guest services.
And all the lines converge today.
Isn't this a call to you and to
me?
Either I am totally out of the will
of God, either your minister in Knox today
is completely out of the way, or, if
he's in the will of God, then God
is calling us, my dear people, to really
get involved in this, the task.
Now just a few words about the training
that is necessitated for the fulfillment of this
calling.
Listen to how Mark puts it.
Follow me, so he reports the words of
Jesus, follow me and I will make you
to become fishers of men.
Now you may say that's a rather cumbersome
English sentence.
Well it is.
But it's very difficult to know how else
to transcribe or translate what our Lord actually
said.
He said it just like that.
You follow me and then I, for my
part, I will make you to become.
You will become, but I will do the
making.
You will be involved, you will be becoming,
you will be changed into the image more
and more, you will be the one becoming,
but I will be the one who is
making you to become.
Now there is no way of becoming fishers
of men other than by following the Lord
Jesus Christ.
We shall come back to this again as
we close, but let me just say it
now.
He makes his followers become fishers of men,
so that right here I find something exceedingly
challenging.
You see, if this passage is right and
is to be taken at its face value,
then unless you and I have already become
fishers of men, we could not have been
following very well.
Jesus said you follow me, nothing more, just
follow me.
I'll make you to become fishers of men.
All right, do you claim to be following?
Then in all honesty, you and I should
already be in some measure fishers of men.
In so far as we are not actively
involved in this business, I say to you
quite openly, and perhaps daringly, there is something
wrong with your following and mine.
Follow me, says our Lord, nothing else, that's
all.
Follow me, and I will make you to
become, very well, we say we're following, but
we've not become fishers of men.
Something surely has gone wrong.
Can I say a word here about the
evident need of training for this work?
Whereas every believer should feel responsible to seek
the lost, and indeed in so far as
the Spirit of God is working in us,
we should have a sympathy and a concern
for lost men and women.
This is one of the tragedies of the
hour.
We have very few concerned hearts in the
church.
When last did you lose a tear because
men were lost?
When last, my dear Christian friend, you may
have been on the road for a very
long time, when last did you lose an
hour's sleep because of the plight of the
lost?
Every believer should sense something in his heart,
a concern for men in their plight and
their sin.
If the Spirit of the Christ is in
me, now if you have another spirit, well,
we can understand it.
But you see, if the Spirit of Jesus
of Nazareth is breathed into you and is
living in you and in me, surely we
should show some of his concern.
Of course.
But we are men of another spirit all
too often.
Now, to have that concern is one thing.
To know how to fish men is quite
another.
Now there are those who don't believe that
we need much training in this.
Let me therefore just say one or two
things concerning it.
I think that training is essential.
We need training in man fishing, and that
is obvious first of all by comparison.
Let me put it like this.
If, as all agree, those who attend to
our physical needs need to be trained and
certified as competent to practice, by what process
of reasoning can we conclude that physicians of
the soul need no such training?
Is the soul of man less intricate or
valuable than the body?
Or if those who educate the mind in
secular things must themselves be taught and certificated
as capable of doing so, by what process
of reasoning can we possibly conclude that men
who are to give their time in fishing
men, souls immortal, need no training?
The thing doesn't make sense.
The soul is of greater value than the
body.
The soul is greater than the mere mind.
It includes the mind.
And if we are to be involved in
taking men alive, we need to be trained.
But of course, the whole point is this.
The training to which we are called is
nothing other than the training of following our
Lord Jesus Christ.
Unfortunately there are few colleges in this world
that know much about this art.
It is possible to pass nowadays through a
theological course in some of our best theological
colleges otherwise considered, and yet to come out
and learn nothing at all about the art
of fishing men.
But there is one school, and only one.
The school where we learn how to fish
men, it is the school of Jesus Christ.
There is no other.
Now in every other sphere of life, you
want to be a scientist or a historian
or what have you, well you can generally
choose your college and choose your tutor, choose
your professor.
And maybe one is almost as good as
the other.
But in this school there is only one
teacher.
In the life of Simon Peter it was
the physical Son of God, the Son of
God in human form, Jesus Christ, the Lord
of glory among men.
In our day it is the same Lord,
by His Word and by His Spirit, perfecting
in us that which concerns Himself.
And unless we are prepared to sit at
His feet and see again how in the
days of His flesh He exercised this ministry,
and inculcate and apply to ourselves the principles
that He employs, and hear Him tell us
how we ought to behave and how we
ought to act, then my friends, we've not
gone very far in the school of Christ.
This is the essence of Christian living.
And this is the call of the gospel.
Now this is specialized fishing, this.
You need training, necessarily.
We can speak of that comparatively, but now
you need training also because of the nature
of the task involved.
And it is with this that I have
to close this morning.
Whereas Matthew and Mark use a very ordinary
word about fishing men, Luke, as we've already
indicated, uses different terminology.
And that can be translated, catching men or
taking men, literally taking men alive.
There is a book that was published some
years ago by an American author, Taking Men
Alive.
Now, he really got the secret of it.
That is the word that Luke used.
And it is very significant, and I'll tell
you why.
There were three modes of fishing in New
Testament times.
First of all, there was fishing with a
line and a hook.
Sometimes you would find children, very much as
you find children today, just getting their own
homemade hook and putting a bait on it
and casting it into the sea, and they
could fish with a line and a hook.
Then you had another mode of fishing.
You used a net which you cast into
the sea.
It had a cone-shaped net which would
assume its form in the water, and you
just dragged it towards you.
Then you had what the New Testament speaks
of as a drag net.
The drag net was passed into two boats,
and they would be moving along in the
same direction, and the boat stretched—the net stretched
from one boat to the other, and as
the two boats went in a given direction,
they would drag the sea and drag the
fish into the net.
Now, there are three forms of fishing.
Luke implies that our Lord wanted us to
be clear about this.
We are not meant to be involved in
hook fishing, line fishing.
Why?
For this reason, when you fish with a
hook, you damage the fish in catching it.
You fish with a hook, and it catches
the jaw or the throat or the stomach
of the fish, and the fish can be
slain before it has landed.
This is one reason why men need to
be trained in the art of fishing, men.
It is possible in fishing, men, to slay
them in landing them.
There are personalities that are spoilt.
They are overrun.
They are overrun, and they are mastered, and
they are bullied into a position from which,
psychologically, they rarely recover.
Now, there is a mode of fishing which
does despite and damage to the soul God
made, and our very employment of such methods
is contrary to the glory of God and
to the good of those whom we seek
to serve.
We are not to fish in that way.
We must be very careful lest we damage
the fish in catching them.
Our fishing has to be of an entirely
different nature.
It was probably with this in mind that
Jesus used this other qualifying term in this
later episode, which Luke records.
What he means is this.
He is not simply interested, may I change
the metaphor, in scalps, but he is interested
in lives netted for his glory.
There is a word in the Psalms which
speaks of, He redeemeth thy life from destruction.
Not just catching a soul disembodied in the
net of the gospel, but a life intact,
a man with all his capacities for thought
and his conscience and his heart and the
whole of his being intact, so that unspoilt
and unsullied, psychologically whole, not bullied or battered
by the gospel, he is one and may
serve his God with all that he is
and all that he ever can be.
This is why, you see, we need to
be trained in this noble art of winning
men for Jesus Christ.
May I then conclude this morning in this
way.
Here is the call addressed to Simon.
Most of us are very much like Simon.
Perhaps at the moment of the call we
say to ourselves, what, what, what really can
we make of this?
When you think of the glory of a
soul and the complexity of a soul, what
can we do to win a man and
bring him over from one realm into another,
so that he is usable in the kingdom
of God?
And when he comes there, everything that he
was by nature comes to fulfillment.
How can we do this?
Well now, hear my text, follow me, and
I will make you to become.
But you say, that is simply the call
to be a good Christian.
Precisely, precisely.
Following Jesus Christ is just another way of
saying, walk in fellowship with him.
Go where he goes, be where he is
and as he is.
Simply walk through life in fellowship, in harmony,
close at his heels.
You see the point is, as far as
the Bible is concerned, Christian character and Christian
service are two sides of the same thing.
You can never assume the kind of character
to which we are called in the Bible.
You can never arrive there and be inactive
in the service of our Lord.
There is no such thing as sanctity and
Christian maturity, sitting in your own armchair, judging
other people and seeing how very far short
they fall, whilst you, mature man and woman
of God, are folding your arms and you're
at ease in Zion and you think you've
arrived.
That's a dreamland.
Maturity means pleasures of men as well.
Character is wedded to service.
And the man who is following Jesus Christ
and is thereby changed and transformed in terms
of character, will be a man who also
will become a fisher of men.
Where are we this morning?
Does the concept of it discourage you?
I shouldn't be at all surprised if it
does.
Satan wants it to be so.
And unless we see that he who calls
us, who calls you and calls me, is
able to make us fishers of men, well,
we shan't get very far.
Simply focus on the duty, and we've fallen
already, but focus on the one who calls
us to the duty and who promises, I
will make you to become.
You may be a very rough man like
Simon was when he was called.
Impetuous, quick-tempered, quick-moving, always spoken out
of turn.
Could there be someone like that here?
And you say, I can never fit into
this category.
I tell you, Simon's Lord and Savior is
alive from the dead and is able to
make all grace abound toward you and toward
me.
His grace is sufficient and that's our hope.
Very well then, it is here that we
close.
Are you prepared to start following with this
in mind, with this deliberate intention in mind
this morning?
And go out into this week as God
enables us, looking, waiting, for the opportunity of
casting a net, not a hook, but a
net, with prayer and with grace and independence
upon Him, and see what He will make
us become.
May God grant it.
His glory is at stake and the good
of many.
Let us pray.
Oh Lord, our Father, we come before Thee
with gratitude that we are privileged to have
Thine infallible word to guide us, for we
are fallible and very, very frail.
And we have to confess that we have
failed a multitude of times, even when we
have had the intention to do what is
right and pleasing.
In action we have failed.
Come Thou perfecter of all Thou dost begin.
Come and perfect in us what concerneth Thee.
Fulfill in us Thy promise and make us,
some of us early in our lives, others
of us perhaps not quite as young as
once we were, but make us also to
become fishers of men, that we may fish
our loved ones, and neighbors, and friends, and
associates, and maybe some whom we call our
enemies, out of the sea and slime of
sin into the kingdom of our God.
We ask it in Jesus' name.
Amen.