Cross thoughts: Christian ideas seen in Sudanese every day life.
“Come follow me, and I will make you fishers of men”, Matthew 4:19.
After Jesus had risen from the dead He met His disciples on several occasions.
One event can be read in John 21:1-14.
From reading this I notice that:
The disciples were fishing to earn their living – fish to eat and to sell. Being a follower of Jesus does not excuse a person from working in the workaday world! Verses 1-3.
Jesus’ own disciples did not recognise that the Man they could see on the shore was the person they had lived to follow for the last three years! Being a disciple does not automatically mean that we understand events correctly. Verse 4.
It was by following advice from a stranger, advice about their everyday work, that the disciples discovered Jesus was alive and was still with them. Verses 5-7. We Christians need to be willing to go and find Jesus at work amongst our non-Christian neighbours and colleagues.
This miraculous sign – a large catch of fish precisely where Jesus told his disciples to throw their net – is one of the stories written in order that readers “may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name”,
John 20:31. Are you sure you believe?
These same men went on to give their own lives to the service of the Lord Jesus. Read their accounts in the New Testament book of Acts. They went to their own people. Then they went to people of a different race and different religion. They lived God-honouring lives in an Empire that worshipped its own power and its ruling Emperor. They dared to be different from other people. Many of them paid the ultimate price. They lived, and they died, for Jesus – who had first lived and died for them.
As we Christians “fish” for men, that is, as we seek to see men and women converted to being 21st century followers of Jesus, remember that it is Jesus’ own words which promise: “I will make you fishers of men”.
September 2010.