Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught
Out of the deep
I. RECALL THE HISTORIC EVENT.
1. It is not work that tries men and women, half as much as it is the disappointment which unsuccess brings.
2. The best and only real recreation which any soul can find is that which comes from resting in the Lord, and in abiding patiently upon Him, in the faith that He doeth all things well, even when He asks us to labour on without finding any immediate reward.
II. CHRIST TAKES HIS PEOPLE INTO THE DEEP. There was in the crisis hour of St. Peter’s personal history a striking coincidence between his outward and his inward experience--a parable of all Divine dealings with men.
1. Think of the present attitude of the world towards revealed truth. It shrinks from launching out into the deep. The prevailing tendency is towards the superficial rather than the substantial. We aim at greatness instead of thoroughness. Men have pushed their investigations in every direction; but they are disposed to stop just where the problem deepens into anything like mystery, and where faith must take the place of sight. Whenever I meet with one of these flippant retailers of modern objections to Holy Scripture, and hear him making light of revealed truth, and ventilating with imperiousness his opinion that the Bible is largely a myth, I always feel like asking such a man: “My friend, have you ever pushed out from the shallow into the depth of these questions? Have ever your knees touched the waters of God’s mighty sea? Have you ever gone, alone with Christ, away from the shore and its noisy multitude, to where His waves are mountains?”
2. In the workings and leadings of His providence, God sometimes takes us out of the region of shallow, everyday experiences, into those which are very deep and solemn. There are depths of sorrow, of affliction, and doubt and depression, of poverty and bodily sickness, of temptation, of penitence and shame, and of spiritual weakness; and some of them are mysterious, unfathomable. There is, in such cases, no use in trying to see bottom. Now and then the soul is tempted to think that chance, or accident, or lack of foresight, or an enemy of some kind, has lured him out there, just to drown him or to fill him with terror, Nay, it was a loving Guide who led you thither. (E. E. Johnson, M. A.)
Advancement in prayer
Prayer has small beginnings; but it should be progressive, never stationary. It is a science needing practice, and practice in it, as in other sciences, will make perfect. Our Lord bade St. Peter thrust out a little from the land; then He made him launch out into the deep. Our first prayers are a thrusting out a little from the land, a little disengagement of the thoughts, of the affections, from earth. But if we would gain anything, we must not rest satisfied with this, but must, at Christ’s word, launch forth into the deep of spiritual communion with God.
I. Prayer, to be efficacious, must be RECOLLECTED. All the powers of the mind must be drawn off from other matters, and concentrated on Him whom you are addressing. The wandering imagination has to be recalled from those objects about which it plays, like a butterfly round garden flowers, that it may rest on God. The memory is called away from the affairs of ourselves, that it may be used to supply food for the meditation in which we are engaged. The understanding is withdrawn from musing and irrelevant objects, that it may reason and reflect on the matter of our prayer and on the nature of Him to whom we pray. Finally, the will, which runs after a thousand objects which it desires, loves, and takes pleasure in, is fixed on God, and strives to conform itself to the Divine will, producing affections and forming resolutions such as the subject of meditation and devotion exacts.
II. Prayer should be DISENGAGED. After St. Peter had received Jesus into his vessel, he thrust out a little from the land. So, in prayer, the thoughts which are attached to earth, like the moorings of a boat, must be flung loose, or the vessel cannot put to sea.
III. Prayer must be EARNEST. While disengagement resembles a sportsman raising his gun to his shoulder, and recollection represents him sighting his object, earnestness is the charge of powder with which his gun is loaded.
IV. Prayer must be DEFINITE. Vague prayer without a purpose is never very earnest, nor can it be effectual. A good plan is to take one grace at a time, and ask for that, then another, and so on. Definiteness is the bullet to hit the mark.
V. Prayer must be PERSEVERING. This proves that we are in earnest, that we really desire that for which we ask. (S. Baring. Gould, M. A.)
Launching out into the deep
We have toiled in the narrows too long, and have taken little by our toil. Look round you in this nineteenth century of Christendom, and survey what ought to be a kingdom of heaven. We must launch out into the deep, the great human deep, which is in Christ’s dominion, and not in the devil’s, and let down our nets for a draught. We have learnt wisdom perhaps from our faults, our follies, our failures. The Church has toiled in the shallows surrounding her coasts among the souls she could get within her pale. But rarely has man, in his simple human relations and activities, been suffered to feel that as man he was dear to Christ, and a subject of His kingdom. The great evangelical movement began with a noble attempt to fulfil this command. The evangelists saved our State. Voltaire wrote to d’Alembert, when the revolutionary yeast was beginning to work: “We have never pretended to enlighten the cobblers and the maid-servants; we leave that to the apostles.” In a few years those cobblers and maid-servants were flooding the gutters of Paris with the best blood of France; while in England the apostles had tamed them. But the evangelical movement, as the years passed on, shut itself up more and more to its Churches, and treated the great human world, the world of secular thought, activity, and interest, as quite outside its pale. Christ points us to the broad ocean, the great human deep--the relations, the energies, the industries, and the interests, the thoughts, and the sympathies of men, in their physical, intellectual, social, and political life; these we claim for His kingdom, these be it ours to win to His love. Instead of saving souls out of the world, let us save the world with the souls in it. (J. Baldwin Brown, B. A.)
Encouragement to work for God, though unsuccessful
1. Have we to contend in our work with a feeling of its having been fruitless? In the case of sensible labour, there always is some result. How different, on the contrary, is the case of the labourer in the world of mind! Does the feeling of the fruitlessness of our spiritual work oppress and summon us to conflict, or do we bear it lightly? There arc men who know this feeling very well, but, in a certain measure, feel comfortable in it.
2. If the feeling of dejection is now threatening to overcome us, let us not indulge it; let us ask rather how to change it into the joyful confidence of success! And whither shall we go? Where Peter went; with Jesus we find help. The same Peter who now complains, “Lord, we have toiled,” &c., how differently he had, a few moments after, to judge! But still more. Had he not laboured in vain, the Lord had not found him, nor he the Lord. We see here, in a very evident example, how deceitful the feeling of fruitlessness is, and how we should not let ourselves be taken in by it. But not only that--we have also a security for it that labour for spiritual purposes can never be in vain. (Professor Rothe.)
Fishing too near shore
“Launch out into the deep.”
I. This Divine counsel comes, first, to all those who are paddling in THE MARGIN OF BIBLE RESEARCH. My father read the Bible through three times after he was eighty years of age, and without spectacles; not for the mere purpose of saying he had been through it so often, but for his eternal profit. John Colby, the brother-in-law of Daniel Webster, learned to read after he was eighty-four years of age, in order that he might become acquainted with the Scriptures. There is no book in the world that demands so much of our attention as the Bible. Yet nine-tenths of Christian men get no more than ankle-deep. Walk all up and down this Bible domain! Try every path. Plunge in at the prophecies, and come out at the epistles. Go with the patriarchs, until you meet the evangelists. Rummage and ransack, as children who are not satisfied when they come to a new house, until they know what is in every room, and into what every door opens. Open every jewel-casket. Examine the sky-lights. For ever be asking questions. Put to a higher use than was intended the Oriental proverb, “Hold all the skirts of thy mantle extended when Heaven is raining gold.” The sea of God’s Word is not like Gennesaret, twelve miles by six, but boundless; and in any one direction you can sail on for ever. Why, then, confine yourself to a short psalm, or to a few verses of an epistle? The largest fish are not near the shore. Sail away, oh ye mariners, for eternity! Launch out into the deep.
II. The text is appropriate to all CHRISTIANS OF SHALLOW EXPERIENCE. Doubts and fears have in our day been almost elected to the Parliament of Christian graces. Doubts and fears are not signs of health, but festers and carbuncles. You have a valuable house or farm. It is suggested that the title is not good. You employ counsel. You have the deeds examined. You search the record for mortgages, judgments, and liens. You are not satisfied until you have a certificate, signed by the great Seal of the State, assuring you that the title is good. Yet how many leave their title to heaven an undecided matter! Christian character is to come up to higher standards. We have now to hunt through our library to find one Robert M’Cheyne, or one Edward Payson, or one Harlan Page. The time will come when we will find half a dozen of them sitting in the same seat with us. The grace of God can make a great deal better men than those I have mentioned. Christians seem afraid they will get heterodox by going too far.
III. The text is appropriate to all who ARE ENGAGED IN CHRISTIAN WORK. The Church of God has been fishing along the shore. We set our net in a good, calm place, and in sight of a fine chapel, and we go down every Sunday to see if the fish have been wise enough to come into our net. We might learn something from that boy with his hook and line. He throws his line from the bridge: no fish. He sits down on a log: no fish. He stands in the sunlight and casts the line: but no fish. He goes up by the mill-dam, and stands behind the bank, where the fish cannot see him, and he has hardly dropped the hook before the cork goes under. The fish come to him as fast as he can throw them ashore. In other words, in our Christian work, why do we not go where the fish are? It is not so easy to catch souls in church, for they know that we are trying to take them. With the Bible in one pocket, and the hymn-book in another pocket, and a loaf of bread under your arm, launch out into the great deep of this world’s wretchedness.
IV. The text is appropriate TO ALL THE UNFORGIVEN. Every sinner in this house would come to God if he thought that he might come just as he is. People talk as though the pardon of God were a narrow river, like the Kennebec or the Thames, and that their sin draws too much water to enter it. No; it is not a river, nor a bay, but a sea. I should like to persuade you to launch out into the great deep of God’s mercy. I am a merchant. I have bought a cargo of spices in India. I have, through a bill of exchange, paid for the whole cargo. You are a ship-captain. I give you the orders, and say,” Bring me those spices.” You land in India. You go to the trader and say, “Here are the orders”; and you find everything all right. You do not stop to pay the money yourself. It is not your business to pay it. The arrangements were made before you started. So Christ purchases your pardon. He puts the papers, or the promises, into your hand. Is it wise to stop and say, “ I cannot pay for my redemption”? God does not ask you to pay. Relying on what has been done, launch out into the deep. (Dr. Talmage.)