CHURCH IMPROVEMENT: BUILDING A CHURCHTHAT HONORS GOD AND LOVES PEOPLE THROUGH
CASTING THE NET OF GOD’S WORD INTO THE WORLD

Luke 5: 1-11

INTRODUCTION

As many of you know, I worked with Campus Crusade for Christ for twenty years.  It was our stated purpose to win college students to Christ, to build them in their faith and then to send them to do the same.  All of our energy was given to the task of “winning the campus and then the world for Christ.”  I regularly sought to motivate and train Christian students to share the gospel with other students so that we could reach the campus for Christ.  I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a freshman named Lesen.  The evening of our conversation we had paired all of our students up and sent them out into the dorms and classroom buildings to find other students with whom we could share the gospel as contained in the Four Spiritual Laws.  Lesen, being a freshman, had never done anything like this before and so I, as one experienced in doing this, went with her.  We found a graduate student studying in the student union that kindly let us share the gospel with him.  He was polite but not interested in the gospel.  On our way back to the classroom where we met she said something like this to me: “If heaven and hell are real and Jesus is the only Savior and God has commanded us as Christians to tell others about Jesus, then why shouldn’t every Christian drop out of school, quit their jobs, sell their houses and spend all their time sharing the gospel with lost people?  How can anything else matter?  If we saw our neighbor’s house on fire and knew they were still in it but they didn’t know it was on fire, we surely wouldn’t continue washing our car in the driveway while the house burned down, killing our neighbor.  We would go and do everything in our power to get our neighbor out of the house.  So, shouldn’t I just go be a missionary right now?”

I understood very well Lesen’s logic, as it was that logic that influenced my decision to join the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ.  The logic seems so airtight and I used it for many years to recruit students to join me in sharing the gospel on campus and to recruit students to go into full time Christian work.  However, over the years, as I continued reading my Bible, I discovered that the Scriptures never used this kind of logic.  In fact, one of the things that confronted me was that I spent far more time telling Christians to share their faith than did either Jesus or the apostles.  In addition, I found that this kind of motivation did not enable me or anyone else to persist in sharing the gospel with others.  This kind of man-centered, simplistic motivation either creates self-righteous zealots, hypocritical professional evangelists, guilt ridden, non-involved Christians, or superficial, misleading salesmen for Christ.  It goes wrong by making something that is a subordinate purpose of the church the ultimate purpose of the church.  It goes wrong by prescribing a one size fits all view of Christian living.

The biblical view of evangelism, of the process of sharing the gospel with the non-believing world for the purpose of bringing about their conversion to Christ is a God-centered, whole life, community focused view.  Jesus and his apostles are far more concerned that Christians live like Christians among the non-believing world than they are that every Christian takes every opportunity to “say a word for Jesus”.  The NT view of evangelism sees non-Christians being converted to Christ as the church lives like the church.  Some of us will be very directly involved in taking the initiative to communicate the gospel to the non-believing world.  All of us will be concerned with the progress of the gospel in the world at large but we will all contribute to its progress in varying ways.  It is not God’s will that every Christian do door to door evangelism.  It is not God’s will that every Christian host a neighborhood Bible study.  It is God’s will that some Christians do door to door evangelism.  It is God’s will that some Christians host a neighborhood Bible Study.  It is God’s will that every Christian love their neighbor as they love themselves.  It is God’s will that every Christian use whatever gifts they have received from God to serve others.

It seems to me that one of the reasons that the Bible believing, evangelical church has gone wrong on the question of evangelism is due to a misreading and a misapplication of the first five books of the Bible.  The four gospels and the book of Acts have too often been used as though they were manuals on how to do evangelism, how to disciple others, how to lead, how to be a pastor, etc.  In other words, they are read to find out what techniques we should use in our work of spreading the gospel.  This is a completely wrong way to read and use these books.  The stories contained in the gospels and in the book of Acts are first of all theological.  That is, they tell us about who God is and what God is doing in the world.  They are about the Triune God and his saving work.  The work that Jesus does as a person is now being done by his church for we, collectively, are the body of Christ in the world.  We have revealed in these pages who Jesus is and how it is that he saves his people.  Then we have a picture of how Jesus continues to live and work in the world through the church, which is his body.  What Jesus did while he lived on earth is what Jesus is now doing through his church in and through the diversity of the members in the church.

I want to examine a passage out of the gospel of Luke that I think gives us, as a church some direction on how it is that Jesus intends to save us and to save others through us.  Luke 5: 1-11 is an awesome picture of how Jesus reveals himself to lost sinners so that they abandon sin and embrace him as the object of their love.  It is also a description of how it is that Jesus continues to save sinners through his church.

MAIN POINT

The church catches men by casting the net of God’s word into the world because

Jesus commands us to do so

I want to begin by reviewing chapter four.  In the first half of chapter 4, the people in his hometown, Nazareth, reject Jesus.  He then moves to Capernaum, a fishing village on the coast of the Sea of Galilee.  When he arrives there he makes a big impression by casting out a demon during the worship service in the synagogue on the Sabbath day.  He remains in Capernaum for a period of time, living with Simon Peter.  He performs lots of miracles while he is there.  One morning he gets up early and goes out to pray by himself.  When Jesus doesn’t show up as usual, the residents of Capernaum go looking for him and he tells them that he has to leave them.  They protest and try to get him to stay but he says, “I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.”  Then notice, chapter four ends by saying that “he kept on preaching in the synagogues of Judea.”

Then chapter 5 begins with a description of a very common scene in the life of Jesus.  He is standing by the Sea of Galilee, which is also called the Lake of Gennesaret.  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have come out to him in order to hear the word of God.  There are too many people for him to effectively preach to all of them and so he has Simon Peter row his boat out a short way from shore so that he can preach from the boat and use the amplifying effects of the water to make himself heard to the entire multitude.  The point I want you to note here is that the end of chapter four and the beginning of chapter five emphasizes that Jesus is proclaiming the word of God, the good news about the kingdom of God to crowds of people.  After Jesus finishes speaking to the people he commands Peter to go out into deeper water in order to catch some fish.  Peter does so and they catch so many fish that the nets begin to break and they have to get a second boat in order to collect all the fish.  Both boats are so full of fish that the gunwales are only inches from the surface of the water.

In verse 10, when Jesus tells Peter, “Do not be afraid, from now on you will be catching men”, he is telling Peter and us that what just happened with the fish is a parable of what he has been doing in preaching.  It is a parable of what Peter, the other apostles and the church that is founded upon he and the other apostles are going to do.  The fishing expedition is a symbol of the manner in which the apostles and the church for which the apostles are the foundation stones will gather in lost people.  When we examine this story in the context of Jesus preaching the gospel to the masses we see that the command to Peter to go out into the deeper water and to put down the nets is a command for he and the church to be about the business of casting the net of God’ word into the sea, which is the world of men.

Please note that Peter is the one who is told that he will be catching men through the proclamation of God’s word.  But then, in the next verse, Peter, John, and James all leave everything to follow Jesus.  What we are seeing is that Jesus’ word to Peter is his word to all the apostles.  These twelve men are the foundation stones of the church.  Paul expresses the relationship between the apostles and the church like this in Ephesians 2: 19-22, “Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.  In him, the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.  And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”  There is a very real sense in which every person who has ever become a Christian has done so through the work of Peter and the other apostles.  In Acts chapter two, after Peter casts the net of God’s word out among the thousands of Jewish people in Jerusalem, 3000 are “caught” all at once.  Acts 2 is the beginning of the fulfillment of Luke 5:10.  Every person who has ever trusted Christ has done so because of the word that the apostles preached and recorded in the NT.  Humanly speaking, if it were not for the apostles, there would be no Christians because no one would know about Jesus.

When Jesus and the apostles talk about the task of evangelism they always talk about the task of getting the truth of God’s good news to the non-believing world.  There is only one way for men and women to become part of Christ’s body and that is through hearing the message of the gospel.  There will be no one in heaven that did not hear and believe the gospel of Christ.  The command of Jesus to go out and cast the nets into the deep water in order to catch fish is a command to the apostles and then to the entire church to cast the net of God’s word into the world of men so that a great multitude of men can be caught up into the kingdom of heaven.  Jesus and the apostles are not concerned with technique.  They are concerned with truth.  Is the truth of God’s word central to our life as a church?  Is the truth of God’s word central to our families’ lives, our individual lives?  Are we doing all we should do to cast the truth of God’s word into the world of men?

The church catches men by casting the net of God’s word into the world because

Ø      Jesus commands us to do so

Ø      And because…

II.  Jesus promises that his word will catch men and lots of them (vv. 4 & 10)

I want you to notice the relationship between Jesus’ commands and his promises in this passage.  In verse 4 Jesus commands Peter to put out into deep water and to cast out his nets.  Then notice he doesn’t say, so we can go fishing and see if we might catch something.  Rather he makes a promise.  Cast out your nets for a catch.  Jesus knew that if Peter would cast out the nets, there was no doubt that he would catch fish.  Then notice in v. 10, he commands Peter to not be afraid and then he promises him that he is going to catch men.  Again, there is no question.  Peter, if he will not be afraid will catch men.  All of God’s commands are like this.  Every command that God gives to you contains a promise.  If you obey the command the promise will come true, without exception.  The ultimate promise contained in every command is the joy of knowing God.  The power to obey one of God’s commands is to believe the promise that is contained in the command.  Being a Christian is not a duty filled life but a delight filled life.  The gospel of Jesus Christ simply stated is that you must stop pursuing such puny pleasures as that which comes from TV or drunkenness or sex or work or vacations or pleasing others or making others pay for the wrong they’ve done to you and pursue with all your might the eternal, overwhelming happiness of belonging to Jesus Christ through obeying his commands.

Do you see that in Jesus’ command to go fishing?  “Peter, I know you worked all night and got no fish.  You are looking forward to going home to sleep.  But I’m telling you, that if you will simply do what I say, go out into the deep water now and put down your nets, you will make a catch that will blow your mind.  What do you say Peter?  Will you take the pleasure of going home to bed or trust that I am able to do immeasurably more than you could ever imagine?”  Peter’s explanation that he just went fishing all night reveals the choice before him.  Will he believe that what he needs is to go home to bed or to obey Jesus and drop the nets?  Peter believes that Jesus will more surely provide than what his own work and plans can provide.  Obedience isn’t for the purpose of earning the favor of God but the means to experiencing the favor of God.  If Peter refuses to cast out the net, then he will not make the catch.  This is how the Christian life works.  God gives us commands that contain promises of eternal joy.  We must decide if we believe the promises held out by sin and the world or the promises held out by Jesus.

Did Peter’s casting the nets put the fish in the nets?  Absolutely not.  Jesus is the one who, by his word of command and promise gave to Peter this amazing catch of fish by means of the net.  Peter’s casting of the nets was simply the expression of his faith in Christ.  Peter did what Jesus said because he believed what Jesus said.  This is always what faith does.  On Pentecost, in Acts 2, did Peter’s preaching create 3000 Christians?  Absolutely not.  Jesus’ word of command and promise created the Christians through Peter’s preaching.  He preached in faith that Jesus would do what he promised him, i.e., he would catch men when he cast out the net of God’s word. 

One thing that is clear in this story is that God is going to “catch” multitudes of men and women through churches that faithfully throw out the net of God’s word into the world.  If you are a parent, you should take great heart at the promise in this passage.  God delights to make his word effective when it is freely shared with your children.  All of us ought to be greatly encouraged by what happens with the fish and then by what we see happening in the book of Acts as the fulfillment of the promise made to the apostles.  If we will make the truth of God’s word available to masses of people, then we can expect many to respond.  That is our task as a church.  How can we get the truth of God’s word around people so God can draw them into Christ’s church?

The church catches men by casting the net of God’s word into the world because

Ø      Jesus commands us to do so

Ø      Jesus promises that his word will catch men and lots of them

Ø      And because…

III.  Jesus is at the center of the church’s affections and attention (vv. 8-11)

Look at how Peter responded when he saw the super-abundant catch of fish.  He falls on his knees before Jesus and says to him, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!”  Verse 9 says that the reason he said this was because he was astonished at the catch of fish.  He and the men with him knew that this was no ordinary catch.  Peter knew that Jesus had by his word of command and promise caused these fish to be brought into his nets.  Only God can command fish to swim into nets.  He recognizes the work of divine grace when he sees it.  Look at what happens to him when he realizes he is standing in presence of God.  He is afraid.  He is in despair.  He is aware of his own sinfulness.  He is aware of how unworthy he is to be in the presence of such infinite power and grace.  He cannot imagine it would be possible for him to live in the presence of such holiness.  Don’t you hear Isaiah crying out when he sees the Lord in the temple, “Woe to me, for I am undone; for I am a man of unclean lips”?

We sing a song here at RHCC that says in part, “Open my eyes Lord, I want to see Jesus.”  Have you ever thought what would happen if God actually granted that request?  If I am reading my Bible correctly, every time humans get a glimpse of divine glory, they fall on their faces in terror, overwhelmed with a great sense of their own sinfulness and shame and cry out for mercy.  Like Peter, like Isaiah in Isaiah 6, sinners who are exposed to the divine presence cannot take it and want it to end.  The emotion that Peter expresses here is the experience of every Christian.  The intensity of the experience fluctuates in our lives but always we know that we do not deserve to be in the presence of this holy and gracious God.  Always we are confronted with how unworthy we are.  Every Christian says with the apostle Paul, “This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance.  Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.”

In the moment of Peter’s deepest despair, Peter has come upon the key to his greatest hope.  When he confesses that he is a sinner, he immediately places himself in a position to receive the greatest possible benefit.  Look at vv. 27-32 of Luke 5.  This is the story of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector to be his disciple.  After Matthew follows Jesus, he throws a party at his house for Jesus and invites all his friends, who are the non-religious folks in town.  Notice what the religious people, the Pharisees say when they see Jesus and his disciples hanging out with all this riff-raff.  They want to know, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”  Jesus’ response is full of hope for Peter and everyone like Peter who is overcome with despair over their sinfulness, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  When Peter confesses that he is a sinner, he becomes one of those for whom Jesus came.  The only people Jesus came to save are those who recognize and feel how desperate is their condition.  The only people who Jesus calls to follow him are those who know that their greatest problem is their own sin.

When Jesus tells Peter, “Do not fear”, he is telling Peter that his sins have been forgiven.  Jesus is not telling Peter, “what are you talking about, why are you afraid?  Don’t you know that God loves you?  You’re not all that bad Peter.”  He is assuring him that sinner though he is, God has accepted him.  He need not fear the wrath of God because he, the Son of God, has come to save sinners just like him.  After assuring Peter of God’s gracious forgiveness he tells him that he is going to do with men, through the word of God, what he has just done with fish, through his net.  Peter, James and John, his partners in fishing, bring their boats to shore.  Presumably, they make arrangements for the catch of fish to be taken care of and then they join themselves to Jesus.  They leave everything and follow him.

Why did they leave everything and follow Jesus?  Did they do so because they knew Jesus needed help in reaching the world and so they followed to help Jesus out?  Did they follow because they were looking for adventure; they wanted to be where the action was?  Did they follow because they wanted more free fish?  Did they follow because they were looking for a purpose in life and Jesus had now given them a purpose, to catch men?  I hope you know it was none of these reasons.  There is only one reason they left their entire life behind and followed Jesus, it was because they saw in Jesus a person of such greatness and power and love that they could not imagine living apart from him.  Jesus became to them the source of all their happiness and joy.  He was what they loved.  They didn’t leave their old life behind reluctantly.  They left their life behind gladly.  They did a cost-benefit analysis.  They asked, what’s better, 80 years of life lived in the pleasures of sin and then an eternity of hell or 80 years of denying myself the pleasures of sin, embracing the suffering that loving people entails while enjoying the company of Jesus and then spending an eternity with him in heaven?

The wrong way to read Peter’s leaving behind his life to follow Jesus is to think that everyone who wants to be a Christian is to quit their jobs and be itinerant evangelists.  There is a unique call here to Peter, James and John who are apostles of Jesus Christ.  They are the foundation of the church.  Every single one of us that is a Christian is a Christian because of these men.  We were all “caught” through their testimony about Jesus.  However, while each of us has a different role, a different life to live with Jesus, all of us have a life to live with Jesus.  As Paul says in Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  Everyone who is a Christian joins himself or herself to Jesus and abandons a life lived in pursuit of the pleasures of sin and of this life because they have seen that Jesus is the greatest and best of all beings.  Then we live a life that is full of good works.  We do not all do the same good works but we all are eager to do good.  We’ve seen ourselves as sinners and known the terror of being under the great anger of God against us for our sins.  But we’ve seen this perfect man who is God and we’ve heard him say to us, “Do not fear.  Follow me for I’ve come to call sinners to repentance and forgiveness.”  So we leave everything behind in order to be with him forever.  This is what we do every day.  Each day we prefer the pleasure of being with Jesus Christ to the pleasure of having life go our way.  We seek to deny ourselves and love others out of our joy at being in the company of Jesus.

When a group of people, a church joins itself to Jesus Christ and then to each other in a life of forsaking the pleasures of sin for pursuing the pleasure of being with Jesus, the world will take notice.  I came to faith in Christ at the end of my junior year of college.  Shortly after my conversion, I met a group of Christian students and began to hang out with them.  We spent the summer in Stevens Point and met each week in a Bible Study.  We went to church together.  We went on bike rides and picnics together.  Over the course of the summer, we invited other students we worked with or were in class with us to join us when we were together.  One of my coworkers was another student named Mike Doxtater, we called him “Doc” for short.  He regularly came to work with a hangover.  We talked several times about Jesus and I invited him to hang out with our group.  He came to the bible study.  Before the summer was over, he placed his faith in Christ, abandoning his partying life.  Two years later, Doc was the best man at my wedding. 

When the school year began, most of us got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ.  Some of us led bible studies in our dorms.  Some of us took the initiative to share the gospel with other students.  All of us loved to be together and to invite others to be with us.  We loved Jesus, we loved each other, and we loved to bring others into the embrace of our fellowship, which was full of talk and teaching about Jesus.  Scores of our fellow students became Christians during the next two years simply through this process.  We planned evangelistic events, we organized activities, but the power of what happened among us and through us was simply this, we loved Jesus and so we forsook our lives of sin, pursued a life of loving one another for the sake of Jeus, and invited others to join us. 

This is what we see happening in the NT.  This is what Christ wants us to be.  We are to live our lives with Jesus Christ at the center of our attention while forsaking the pleasures of sin, loving one another and inviting those who do not yet know Jesus to be among us.  Because Jesus is at the center of our lives, the truth about Jesus is at the center of our fellowship.  We are not recruiting people to a cause but to a person.  We are not out to clean up the world but to invite the world to follow Christ. We do this in and through our life together following Jesus.  If we will be the church, a group of diverse people bound together by our common affection for Jesus Christ, we will be the instrument of God in “catching” men and women for Christ.

The church catches men by casting the net of God’s word into the world because

Ø      Jesus commands us to do so

Ø      Jesus promises that his word will catch men and lots of them

Ø      Jesus is magnificent to God’s people, the church