Catch Obedience
5 min read
4 Early in the morning, Jesus stood on the shore, but the disciples did not realize that it was Jesus.
5 He called out to them, “Friends, haven’t you any fish?”
“No,” they answered.
6 He said, “Throw your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.” When they did, they were unable to haul the net in because of the large number of fish.
John 21:4-6
Jesus could have just as easily made all the fish go into the net wherever it was at. But He made the disciples go to the trouble of hauling the net to the right side of the boat in order to get the large catch of fish.
The disciples were supposed to be waiting for Jesus, but they decided to go fishing instead. One of the hardest things for a servant of God to do is to simply wait for Jesus. We live in a world that idolizes productivity and doing, doing, doing. And so the idea of simply waiting for Jesus seems completely pointless for most people.
Most Christians don’t know how to be still and just wait on the Lord.
When Christians become impatient and stray from waiting on the Lord, they typically will resort to their default life. For Peter and the fishermen, that was fishing.
Who knows what they were thinking or why they went out fishing. It seems like they just needed to feel like they were being useful, when in actuality, they were simply engaging in pointless busyness.
Waiting is not an idle activity. In waiting, we should continue to do the basic things that reflect our devotion to the Lord—worship, pray, meditate on His word, fellowship in His name. But when those basic things seem pointless to a believer, that believer’s heart becomes fertile soil for the devil’s playground.
So Jesus told the disciples to change the position of their net. In a sense, the position of their net represented their pointless busyness. But once the disciples changed the position of their net—once disciples obeyed the voice of Christ (they didn’t have to)—the catch came.
I asked someone what the point of discipleship is. And the person said that it was to increase spirituality. I guess that means to grow in our sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit so that we feel “spiritual” and are somehow compelled to worship, pray, meditate on God’s word, etc.
And so I told the person that spirituality is not the point of discipleship. Obedience is the point of discipleship. Obedience is the key to our spirituality, not the other way around.
Father, Your kindness knows no bounds. You are always so gentle with us when we so often stray from a simple life of devotion to You. We don’t even know how to do the simplest thing like waiting on You. But help us to “feel” Your eternal nature, so that our hearts would not be occupied by self-made busyness but occupied with a desire to hear and to obey Your word. In Jesus’s name. Amen.
