Fishing For People or Profit?

Luke 4:1-7 (ESV)

1 On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4 And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch." 5 And Simon answered, "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." 6 And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink.

There is so much here; the fact that Jesus was preaching/teaching, fulfilling His central purpose of communicating the gospel, as indicated in the preceding verses; the eagerness of people to hear, and the power of His preaching; the flow of events in a natural way, but a way that served the predeterminate counsels of God, and which itself established facts and symbols that would encourage the saints in generations to come.

A couple of things stand out above the others. One is the fact that when the Lord uses the vessel that has been willingly provided at His behest, He will bless superabundantly. The other is that He is the blessing, and whenever there is the obedience of faith displayed in me, what I am doing is yielding the vessel of my being to the expression of the glories of His righteousness.

At this point there may be a temptation to jump right on this and to try to offer something to the Lord for the purpose of getting a blessing. And He will often honour that. But if the blessing that I am anticipating is really a veiled appeal to my flesh I miss the point entirely. In Christ God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 1:3) It’s not about me and my desires, though God is intimately careful of my needs. (Matthew 6:24-33) My focus is not to be on anything that I want, except insofar as it is the desire to see Christ glorified through the obedience of my faith.

In this case the blessing is twofold, as it often is. First, they were real fish that were caught. They were beneficial to the livelihood of Peter, who got his income by fishing. But they were a blessing that came unbidden from the Lord in His sovereign response to a simple act of Peter yielding his vessel for the Lord’s use. Peter had no other purpose than the obedience of the moment. He had no blessing in mind.

The simple purity of this truth is humbling and breathtaking at the same time. At one stroke it undercuts the blasphemies of the word/faith and prosperity teachers who exhort millions to sow a faith seed by giving money in order to get a blessing from God. It exposes that sort of chicanery as the fruit of the pit in which it was spawned.

The second part of the blessing is quite apart from any physical considerations. It seen is in the acted parable, or the symbolism of the event. When I yield to Christ He will make me fruitful though my own labours alone can produce nothing. When He is the one working in my vessel the results will be substantial. These are fruits unrelated to my own perceived earthly wants and desires. By yielding my vessel my purpose has become His purpose, and His purpose is to save and to keep souls from the misery of hell. It is while He is doing some part of that through me that my earthly needs are met - until that time when He calls me home.

Peter and and his partners didn’t go on from this event thinking of Jesus as the One Who would continue to make their fishing enterprise profitable. They didn’t add two and two to get five. It was never about the business of fishing, but about the purposes of the God of heaven. It was about fishing for men. And they got the point. Do I?