You are more deeply flawed than you realized, and you are more deeply loved than you ever dreamed.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Introduction:

This is our Summer Bible Series—we are working our way through Luke, the gospel for everyone. Today we come to one of my favorite stories, the calling of the first disciples in Luke 5. I’m going to read the story with some explanatory comments, and then we’ll see what we can learn about our own calling. Here’s the story.

Luke 5:1–11

1 One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God. 2 He saw at the water’s edge two boats, left there by the fishermen, who were washing their nets. 3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little from shore. Then he sat down and taught the people from the boat. This takes place at the Lake of Gennesaret—also known as the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias—different names for the same place.

Even today, it’s not unusual for places to have more than one name. For example, a creek flows into the Spokane River just a mile south of here. It’s called…Latah Creek. It’s also called Hangman Creek. This lake—Galilee or Gennesaret—was 13 miles long, 7 miles wide and almost 700 feet below sea level. During Jesus’ time, there were nine towns around it’s shores, all of them 15,000 people or more. Jesus spent a lot of time in this area.

On this day, Jesus was teaching on the lakeshore, but the people were crowding him, so he asked Simon if he could borrow his boat. Simon was a fisherman, who after a fruitless night of fishing, was cleaning his nets and getting ready to go home and get some sleep. Anybody here ever worked the graveyard shift? You know how Simon is feeling. He’d met Jesus before. In fact, we read last week that Jesus had been to Simon’s home and healed his mother in law. So this isn’t Jesus and Simon’s first encounter. Jesus climbs aboard and Simon pushes out a little from shore, and Jesus sat down and continued to teach. The lakeshore setting would have been a natural amphitheater, making it easy for the crowd to hear Jesus. We don’t know for sure where this was, but there is a bay near Capernaum (Simon’s hometown) where Israeli scientists have verified that the bay can transmit a human voice effortlessly to several thousand people on shore. This is why Jesus asked to borrow Simon’s boat.

4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets fo