Jonny Heart: Bible Study 002

Friday, June 29, 2007

Bible Study 002 – fishers of men

Mark:1 16As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 17"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." 18At once they left their nets and followed him.

I enjoy fishing a great deal. This past weekend my father, brother-in-law, several friends, and I spent our time just off shore of Put-in-Bay. That’s right, for two whole days we spent fourteen hours out on the waters of Lake Erie fishing for walleye. The weekend proved profitable, a catch of 47 walleye and a few white bass. I always enjoy fishing because of the relaxation; it’s soothing.

In order to fish the person must know some certain information such as; what kind of bait the breed of fish feeds on, and what kind of lake habitat is best for them, in deep water or shallow, amongst fallen trees or in the center of the lake. One needs to know all this information in order to be a good fisherman. The idea behind fishing is to attract the fish to catch them. So you use bright lures, bait that smells, or maybe even bait that makes noise. You use anything to draw attention to the hook. So I know what it takes to be a good fisherman, yet what does it mean to be fishers of men? Jesus said to two of his disciples “come with me and I will make you fishers of men.” Other then the obvious answer that you go out and get people, I think there is something else. You see that ideology puts the focus on the men and people that Peter and Andrew were going to get during their ministries. The transformation happens to Peter and Andrew. Over the next three years Peter and Andrew will undergo a change in their lives that will lead them to reside as the leaders of church. It is a character change and growth in wisdom. To be a “fisher of men” is to undergo a self-change.

1 Thessalonians 5:23 May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.

I believe I have talked about sanctification before, well now I am brining it up again. Sanctify, according to my apple dictionary means, set apart as or declare holy. With out some change in our lives following our receiving Christ have we truly accepted him? If you answer no, then study and search out the phrase “God fearing Christian.” God loves us and will force us to undergo a change, a change of character, morality, and state of mind. Sanctification means to strive towards perfection because of a relationship one has with Jesus. For love, we change ourselves to live more like God.

“Fishers of Men” means to be a positive appeal for others to come to Christ. To live in such a way that those around us see an appeal to change and live as Christ did. Just as the spinner bait reflects the light from the sun in dark and murky waters to attract fish we also reflect the light of the Son to attract the lost. So follow him and become fishers of men.

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Quotes from my Senior Patron

-Clive Staples Lewis-

"The Love of knowledge is a kind of madness."

The Problem of Pain

"We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which he will not be satisfied until it has a certain character."

Mere Christianity - (Pg. 31)

"This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies."

The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis (Pg. 31)

"What would really satisfy us would be a God who said anything we happened to like doing, what does it matter so long as they are contented? We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, a good time was had by all."

"If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the fit of faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth of reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 139-140)

"It is not reason that takes away my faith: on the contrary, my faith is based on reason. It is my imagination and emotions. The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other... Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your ganging moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know by experience..."

A Grief Observed - (P.g. 9-10)

"I once read the sentence 'I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.' That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 7)

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 32)

"In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over the pre-war wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did the same about religion."

Mere Christianity - (P.g. 56-57)

"Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something mush harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person-and he would not need it."