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The Invitation "Follow me"
Refuge City Atlanta
English - April 26, 2021 16:00 - 38 minutes - 26.2 MBChristianity Religion & Spirituality Spirituality refuge city stone mountain atlanta sermon biblical teaching revival jesus house of prayer unity bible Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Matthew 4:19 He said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Follow me:
I will make you:
When we follow Jesus it is he that will make us. Not we must make ourselves. When we follow Jesus the outcome is that we are changed. You cannot follow Jesus and remain the same. His path will transform your way of thinking, living, feeling, seeing, hearing, and everything in between.Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men. So when they had brought their boats to land, they forsook all and followed him.” Luke 5:10.Jesus told Peter not to be afraid. Why? When you hear this invitation to follow Jesus, it means release your control, your plans, your ideas, and follow Him. This is a scary thing to our flesh, our mind, our instincts of self preservation and probably scariest of all, our reputation! But when the Lord says, “Do not be afraid.” He gives grace and the peace that surpasses understanding.
Fishers of men:
What is a fisher of men?! Did they have a picture of throwing nets on people and catching them? Jesus is obviously using a word play on what they were doing in that moment, “casting their nets”.
Jesus didn’t and still doesn’t vision cast like we do. He usually speaks somewhat ambiguous. Fishers of men?
I don’t know what Peter and Andrew thought it would look like to be “fishers of men”. But I guarantee that they didn’t think it would be three and half years of having their understanding turned upside down, often confused, with tons of misunderstanding of what Jesus was saying and doing, denials before servant girls, redemption and going through life altering dramatic events, to get there. I’m sure they didn’t have in their minds that being fishers of men was being baptized in the Holy Spirit and fire on the day of Pentecost, speaking in foreign languages the glories of God and spontaneously preaching to thousands of people who saw and heard the commotion. Nor did they know it would be going to Cornelius house, a Gentile, and preaching to a family and the same experience happen to them as it did to Peter and the rest of the disciples on Pentecost. Nor did they imagine it would look like pastoring young Jewish and gentile churches and then ultimately being martyred.
They probably thought they had some sort of idea on what Jesus meant when he invited them to follow him and become fishers of men.
Jesus’ invitation to us as we begin Refuge City is the same invitation that he gave his disciples. Follow me....I will make you....fishers of men. What the “fishers of men” means for us, I do not know, nor do I want to try to define it cause I know it is beyond anything that I could possibly understand at this stage in the process. But we will follow him and we will allow him to make us and we will eventually understand what “fishers of men” looks like for us.