And he revealed himself in this
way. Simon Peter called the twin,
Nathanael of Cana and Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two
other of his disciples were together. And Simon Peter said to them,
I am going fishing. And they said to him, we will
go with you. And they went out and got into the boat, but that
night they caught nothing. Just as day was breaking, Jesus
stood on the shore, yet the disciples did not know that it was Jesus.
And he said to them, Children, do you have any fish? They answered
him, No. He said, Cast the net on the
right side of the boat, and you will find some. So they cast
it, and now they were not able to haul it in because of the
quantity of fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved
therefore said to Peter, It is the Lord. And when Simon Peter
heard that it was the Lord, he put on his outer garment, for
he was stripped for the work, and threw himself into the sea.
The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of
fish, for they were not far from land, but about 100 yards off. When they got out on land, they
saw a charcoal fire in place, and fish laid out on it and bred.
And Jesus said to them, bring some of the fish that you have
caught. So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full
of large fish, 153 of them. And although there were so many,
the net was not torn. Jesus says to them, come and
have breakfast. Now none of the disciples dared
ask him, who are you? They knew it was the Lord. Jesus
came and took the bread that he gave to them and so with the
fish. And this was now the third time that Jesus was revealed
to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. A few things
to think about as we continue in this text. Remember that John
is not about the business of chronology. He's telling this
happened, he's saying and also this happened, and then also
this happened. We don't get from the Gospel
of John a detailed calendar, but what we do is we get detailed
experiences. So keep that in mind. Why is
it important? Because as you've seen over the
last few years, criticism of the text and analyzing it to
the nth degree has caused many people to even say that the Gospel
of John is pitted against the Synoptics, there's problems,
there's transmission errors, there's translation errors. and
the like. Another thing that I'll go ahead
and deal with now to get it off the table so it doesn't bog us
down is the idea that the number 153 has any significance whatsoever. I don't think it has any significance
at all, any spiritual significance or mathematical significance
because John is not in the business of allowing his readers to dictate
what they think he means. John is very clear in saying
what he means and so we don't have to deal with that. Another
thing, too, is that we don't have to deal with some of the
nuances that a lot of people say the purpose of this narrative
was to prove. And I'll deal with those as the
text unfolds. But as we started our service
this morning, I read to you the prologue of John, from which
we get the outline of the entire gospel. and inside this gospel,
out of that outline, we have seen all these things take place. We have seen the glory of Jesus
Christ as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. From that fullness, we have seen
in the narrative of this gospel, grace upon grace and only grace
as the operative and effectual means through which anyone can
see Jesus. In the beginning was the Word,
the Word was with God, the Word was God, the Word became flesh,
the Word is Jesus Christ. I find it interesting that as
I'm going through Hebrews on midweek, when we see that reality
that no one can hide from the Word. And then we see the pronoun
him after Paul writes that. The word of God is living and
breathing and sharper than any two-edged sword. And it does
all the work that it was meant to do. No one can hide themselves
from him. We need to be very careful that
we don't subject the written text of this cowhide or goatskin
or whatever it might be, goatskin and paper as the divine essence
of God. For Jesus is God. He in himself is the fullness
of God and he has revealed himself through his word who he is. And so if we are to see Christ,
we must look at the pages of scripture. And when we see the
pages of scripture, we are seeing Christ. Do not confuse it. The point of this, as we get
started here, is that the point of the gospel we saw last week,
these things are written that you may believe that Jesus is
the Christ, who is the Son of God, and that by believing you
may have life in His name. And when we think about believing,
we need to remember that believing is not just saying, yep, Jesus
is real, he really did this stuff. Believing is trusting in the
testimony of Jesus, the living word of God, who proclaims God's
work of redemption for his people. To believe the witness of scripture
is not to believe man-made traditions. To believe the witness of scripture
is not to believe the systematized truths of Jesus in a categorical
way to say if you can assent to these particular facts then
beloved you have life. No, you must believe in the person
and the work of Jesus. And if we take John's Gospel
and we look at everything that is revealed to us therein, we
can see everything that's necessary. There is nothing else necessary
for you to have eternal life that's not found in John's Gospel. You don't need Romans. You don't
need James, you don't need John's epistles, you don't need Acts,
but yet all those things also contain Christ and the teachings
of Christ and the work of Christ. But all of those things come
from the narrative of these Gospels which proclaim Christ. The point
I'm saying there is not that we can discard scripture but
that we don't have to in order to understand John and in order
to believe we don't have to go to Paul when John's writing is
sufficient. Paul's writing is sufficient
and so on and so forth. So we don't need evangelism that
is so dissected that we can't get the context of a particular
teaching. But inside John's Gospel we see
the divine nature of Jesus. We see even Jesus saying in his
own mouth, and unless you believe that I am, unless you believe
that I am God, and I am God would be a weakening of that statement.
Because the idea of God and gods would be used even for people
who were mighty, people who were superlative, people who were
in authority. But only the God of heaven called
himself I Am. So when Jesus says, before Abraham
was, I am, he called himself the God of scripture. When Jesus
tells the Pharisees, unless you believe that I am, you will die
in your sins. He's calling himself the God
of scripture. That is why every time he used that phrase, they
wanted to kill him because it made him God. We also see that
Jesus is human. He is the God creator of all
things. He is I am, the first, the last,
the beginning, the end, who became human. He incarnated. He became
a human being while not emptying himself of his divine essence. But yet he took on a new nature,
another nature. He didn't blend his divine nature
with the human nature, becoming a real superman. He was completely,
truly God and then He took on completely, truly humanity. This is taught to us in John's
Gospel. It's taught to us that He's God through His omniscience.
Even in his humanity, he has a sense of omnipresence in his
divine way. We see that in his humanity,
he learned and he grew, he understood what God the Father would teach
him in his humanity. This is complex, but it's not
necessary to grasp. So when he's 12 years old, he
doesn't know the fullness of all things as he may know at
his baptism. And we don't know what he knew,
but we know that the scripture teaches that he learned. He was
not a fetus talking. He was not a fetus walking. He
was not an infant sign-languaging and speaking Greek and Aramaic
and Hebrew. He learned how to talk. He learned
how to eat. He learned how to dress himself
and wipe his own backside. He was completely and truly human
in every respect and at the same time he was completely and truly
God in every respect. And when He was glorified, then
we see in some way, still bearing the marks of His humanity, we
still see, we see what He was before the world began. We also see that without Christ,
without the grace of God, grace upon grace, that no man can see
who he is. We see in Nicodemus in chapter
three, we see in the cleansing of the temple in chapter two,
they couldn't understand that he was the temple, that he was
the mercy seat, he was the place where we would meet God, and
without Christ, there is no intimacy with God whatsoever except justice
and wrath. And everywhere you go, You see
the exact same thing. This is about God the Son revealing
himself to his people as he feels and as he wishes after the counsel
of his will by the person of the Holy Spirit. That's the point. so that we
can evangelize, we could sit in a perpetual 90-minute cycle
of reading the gospel of John out over all the airwaves and
take over every cell phone in the entire world and have automatic
translation in every language that's ever been known in those
places that don't have technology we could beam some satellite
thing down on the ground and have it audibly given to them
and we could do this for a thousand years every 90 minutes reading
the gospel of John over and over and over again, and only the
elect of God, only as God sees fit, only when God wishes, will
come to believe it. But they will. They will. There is no pressure or persuasion.
There is no argument or evidence. And the Gospel of John teaches
us that in all the pictures of evidence throughout antiquity. I mean if there is any more evidence
of God's divine sovereign rule and the promises of God in a
fresh state when Adam was in the garden walking with the sun and yet Adam willfully rebelled
against the Lord. There's no other place in that
sense. where there was a pure way of
witnessing God, yet we still fail. What hope does anybody
else have? A divine work of God himself.
That's the hope. We have relegated evangelism
to debate, to proof, to fear, and those things work humanistically. Emotion, experience, intellect. And they work humanistically. And what I mean by that is that
we can come to a conclusion in our flesh based on whatever's
driving us, but that conclusion is not eternal life. That conclusion
is not regeneration. That conclusion is not the gift
of faith. The gift of faith is simply seeing Christ for who
He says He is. And seeing Christ for what He
says He's done. And seeing yourself counted in
that number by faith. If you have to have proof that
you're elect, you don't see. The very nature of the work of
Christ is to reveal Himself to His people. That they hear His
voice and they know it. That they see His face and they
recognize it. that they know his love for them, that they
can see his promises. And nothing's different here
in this last narrative. We've got this catching a fish
and we've got Peter's restoration. And then we're done. And you
might think to yourself, well this is sort of odd to have such
a glorious book, a glorious letter written with so much stuff and
so much great teaching and such glorious things. Jesus eats some
fish and then Peter's told to fish for people. Why close it
with this? Because this is the pinnacle.
This is the point. We've seen the primer. We've
seen the good guys getting to the end of the scene where victory
is done. And now we've just got to see
it play out. But we're seeing it play out, not as in a place
where everybody lives happily ever after. This is how it all
is supposed to be seen. This is how it's supposed to
be looked upon. Now, I don't know about all of you, but I
don't fish anymore. It's too much work. But in my
youth, I fished all the time. And my family fished, and my
mother's brother, he loved to fish. He was Bill Dance Jr.,
I think, or the third. He loved to fish, and we would
go fishing often. And we were always after, not
the large catch, we were after the large one. And I've told
this story many times throughout the years and I won't bore you
with the details because it is a fish tale. But we did catch
a monster largemouth bass one day and I left the net on the
bank and we worked for a long time to get this fish up and
his eyeballs were that big. Let me just tell you. And my
uncle said, get rich in his mouth and grab it. I'm not putting
my hand in that. I'm not putting, man, this fish is, you know,
spinning around, and the line snaps, and that fish swims off,
lots to tip the boat over. That's how big it was. I mean,
you know, we're just, it was a good fish. Nobody believed
us. Didn't have cell phones back in those days. Didn't have cameras
that you could take out into a boat. Nobody believed us. But
we've all had a fishtail, right? You should have seen that snake.
It was this big. Next week, you should have seen that snake.
It was this big. Next week, that snake pulled the boat under the
water. We swam away from our lives. We got swallowed by the
snake, cut our way out, rescued the baby that was already in
there from the day before, and we survived it. I mean, it's
just the way it is. We exaggerate things. Some people
look at this text as a way of a fishtail. And in some way it
is, because when we tell the story of our adventures in fishing,
or hunting, or parenting. Parenting is the largest fishtails
of the world. These, you know, these sweet children become the
spawn of evil. And then when they grow up, they're
awesome because we want to see the grandkids. And then the grandkids
are never evil, but our children are always evil. That's the way
I've been told it's supposed to look. My parents treat my
children the way they should have treated me. Does that work? But the fishtails of how horrible
you are, or how great or terrible the experience might be, it's
always suspect. And I think that's why so many
people take this text and butcher it and don't see it for exactly
what it says. But when we tell stories, the
reason we tell stories is to help people understand what we've
seen. As I was teaching last week on poetry, and I like to
explain poetry this way, it's not my original idea, I was taught
this somewhere along the way, but poetry is the language of
experience. When I write poetry, I'm writing about what I've seen.
heard, witnessed, felt, thought about where I've been or what
I wish I had done. It's an experience of the adventure
of the mind. So poetry is a language of experience. Narrative is a language of experience
as it took place and then from there I become poetic. I reach
down into putting myself into the place of Peter. And this
is why I think that my teaching of Scripture is vivid because
I live it out. I put myself there. This is not
intellectual for me. It never has been. This is sitting
in the lap of Christ and hearing Him tell the story of revealing Himself to His disciples
after His resurrection. Now, they've seen Jesus. He's
already appeared to Peter, as we see in Luke's Gospel. He's
come to the upper room and appeared to the rest of them again and
Thomas, of course he appeared to Mary Magdalene in the garden. And yet this is the third time
he's appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the
dead. Don't bog yourself down in that. But do bog yourself
down in this. In chapter 21 verse 1, After
this, Jesus revealed himself again to the disciples by the
Sea of Tiberias, and he revealed himself in this way. Sermon's
over. You get it? That's the point. Jesus, just as John could see
the clothes and could believe that Jesus was alive, Just as
Mary could see Jesus and couldn't believe who He was, didn't know
who He was, He had to call her name, and through that, the Spirit,
at that occasion, the Spirit calls her to see Him, to believe
that He was alive. Thomas would not believe, no
way possible. He wasn't going to believe. Jesus
appears to Thomas and just says, Behold, my hands, my side. And Thomas says, The God of me
and the Lord of me, And Jesus commands him, believe,
don't unbelieve. Don't not believe. Be a believer. Then he says, blessed are those
who don't see and believe. Because this is the point of
where we are. We have the narrative of the
gospel because we're never going to have these experiences. We're
never going to have our own fishtail of how Jesus revealed himself
to us. We have to tell the tale of the apostles. We have to tell
the tale of Thomas. We have to tell the tale of John.
We have to tell the tale of John the Baptist who said, before
me he was. We have to tell the tale of Paul.
Christ met me on the road to Damascus with zeal for the Lord
and his law and righteousness. I hated the way. as if blasphemed
God, but Christ took my sight and gave me sight. You see, we
cannot have our own tale like that. We can expressly repeat
the tales of these apostles, but yet in the same power and
in the same measure, God opens the eyes of the blind. He causes
the doubt to become strong in faith. so on and so forth we
see the same work of Christ through the simple proclamation of the
tales of the Apostles and their writings yet in our culture we
would rather have the experience thinking that our experience
be it new fresh and supernatural would have more or have a greater
impact on the possible faith of another when Jesus says it's
not so. This is no different. Jesus has
already met his disciples. Where is that? Mark 5? I don't
know where it is. Jesus has already met his disciples
out on a fishing trip. He called them while they were
fishing. And they had not caught fish,
and they had not caught fish, and they had not caught fish,
and Jesus tells them to do something simple. And they catch so many
fish, the nets tear. That's why John expressly deals
with the fact that the cast, the nets, do not tear. This is a different experience. This is the post-resurrection
Christ. And we see this list. I haven't
heard of Nathanael since he was called. Remember what Jesus says
about Nathanael? Hey, Nathanael, in whom there
is no guile. Oh, you heard about me. I saw
you under the fig tree." And what was Nathanael thinking about
under the fig tree? Himself. His life. His purpose. What he
was going to do. What all these other men were
saying about this guy who was being talked about in Galilee. And Nathanael's like, yeah, you
really are. Great! Master, Lord, God, Savior,
whatever. All these things that he does.
And Jesus says, you believe that because of the signs that I give
you? Because I say I saw you when you were under the tree?
Greater things than these you will see when you see the heavens
open and angels descending and ascending on the Son of Man. And I haven't heard of Nathaniel
for three and a half years now. in this narrative, and all of
a sudden he's there. Why? As a way of reminder. I
find sometimes when people tell me they haven't learned anything
concerning scripture in a long, long time, I find it very troubling.
Now, we've all had that conversation with ourselves. Well, I already
know that. You know how long I've been studying and teaching
the Gospel of John? Perpetually for 15 years. John's
epistles and revelation perpetually for 11 or for 13 years. Every day of my life, I'm in
John's writing every day. And for a season to the neglect
of the entire Bible. But the more I see, the more
I see. And the more I gaze, the more I see. And the more I experience
what this writer is teaching, the more I see Christ. And then I go from there, and
in a pastoral way, I have to get into the letters. I have
to, it's required of me. You have to, it's required of
you. We have to learn living life in Christ. We have to learn
submission to the Word of God. We have to learn submission to
one another. We have to learn these things.
We can't just go, Oh Lordy, sit at the side of the sea and look
at Jesus eat fish. Praise God he's alive! No, Jesus
met with these men and then ascended into heaven and left us something
to do. And we are to do it in the Lord's
timing and we are to do it together. This is nothing more than God
the Son revealing himself to his disciples in a way that can
be written down so that through this revelation others can also
believe. So let's look. Verse 2. Here
are these disciples. If you add them all up, there's
seven there. It doesn't matter. Okay? I bring that to your attention
because if you Google John and you Google commentaries, you're
probably going to find some of the numerology folks out there.
Well, it's a list of seven disciples. Oh, my. Must be perfection. These are the most perfect disciples.
John doesn't write like that. The apostles don't write. God
doesn't reveal himself that way. If you've got to do math to see
Jesus, you're going to go to hell. Okay? At least I am. There's seven of them. How do
I know that? Because I just counted. Who's
missing? I don't know who's missing. I
just know there is a number of them missing. Because I don't
have a list of them over here. The point is that Jesus revealed
Himself to these seven. And in that revelation, all these
seven, they have seen the Lord Jesus. They have seen Him manifest
Himself, reveal Himself in the flesh, glorified in the upper
room. They have seen Him save Thomas
from doubt and unbelief. They know that he's alive, but
at this point in time, they need to go fishing. Why? Brothers and sisters, I have
butchered this and implicated this text in so many ways through
the years in my younger days. And still in my youth, I will
do it. And maybe 40 years from now,
the Lord may grant me great wisdom to stay within the text and quit
being such a poet so often and so quickly. But you know what's
not at stake here. And I've said this. Well, they
didn't know what else to do, so they just went fishing. They
already knew the Lord was alive. I mean, it sort of hit me Thursday,
after 15 years of really focusing on the Gospel of John, that these
men did not go fishing because they didn't have anything else
to do. They were probably hungry. And that was their trade. Like
if Paul, in his missionary journey, found himself in the wilderness,
dying from heat stroke, he could have built a tent. And I think
simply speaking, the writer just wants us to know that he and
these other six disciples were going fishing. That's why he
says, hey, I don't think I'm going to go fishing. You guys
want to go? Isn't that as natural as it comes?
Isn't that a good reading of the text of Scripture? Do we
have to find a theological implication of why Peter went fishing? Do
we have to assume? And when we do these things,
we put ourselves as the arbiter of revelation. We make ourselves
God Himself and say, well, this is what's really happening here.
Can we speculate? Can we have fun with the idea
of an unspoken narrative? Absolutely, but when we say it
as if it is true, we make God say what he's not saying. Be
careful. And if that's the case in a narrative point of view,
then why in the world is it so, I mean, how difficult would it
be, or better word, how horrific would it be to say God say something
theologically wrong? But when we play games with that,
it's easy for other people to play games with the doctrine.
So what's happened? The disciples went to the upper
room. Jesus told them, what did he tell them? We see this in
the Synoptics. I'm going to go ahead of you to Galilee. It's
like he told them in John 6. He just vanishes. I'll see you
guys in Capernaum. All night long, Jesus doesn't
come to go to Capernaum. So they're like, well, we'll
just go to Capernaum. Jesus meets them three and a half miles in
the middle of the trip, teleports the boat over to Capernaum, sends
a storm so that all the people that are looking for him can
go find him, and then he rebukes them very badly and tells them
that they are laboring for the bread that perishes. So here
is a simple narrative. Simon and the rest of the men,
they're together. Peter and all these guys, most of them are
fishermen by trade. Guys, we need to eat. We got
nothing else to do. We're already here in Galilee.
We're waiting for Jesus. Let's just go fishing. Any of
you boys want to go? So they go fishing. Now why would
they do that? Why would they do that? Because
they didn't know what else to do. And they weren't bored, but
they weren't going to sit on their hands like the Thessalonians
who were told that the Lord had already come and they were just
waiting to be beamed up. So frustrating to Paul that he says if anybody's
sitting on his hands and he's able to work, let him starve
until he gets up off his butt. Don't feed a man who's not gonna
work. In other words, eat in front
of him and until he picks up his load over here with the assembly
and helps, don't let him eat. Nope, you didn't work today.
Get away. I mean, that's literally what
Paul says. If you don't work, you don't eat. If you can't work,
we have an obligation to feed you. It's a difference. There's
a difference. So these men are just going fishing.
And they worked all night long. Now, I've been reading the book
of James over and over and over and over again for the last month.
Not every day, but just about every day. And the Lord has really
burdened me lately, especially during this pandemic, to make
sure that I'm not arrogant before him. Well, after this is over,
I'm going to do this, and then I'm going to do this, and then
we're going to do this, and we're going to do that, and the church is going to do this, and we're going
to have this, and we're going to do all that. And that's what I said when I came
here. We're going to plant this, and it's going to look like that,
and we're going to do like this, and God's like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. I mean, he just
sort of laughs. You'd think you'd go, if the Lord wills, we'll
go here, there, this, and do that. If the Lord wills. Otherwise, we boast in front
of the Lord as though we have control of our lives. As though
we have control of His plans. As though we're going to tell
Him what to do and He's just going to follow us along because He belongs to
us. And these disciples, we don't
know what to do but we got to eat, let's just go fishing. We
still got some nets, let's go fishing. We're going to catch
a mess of fish and we'll sit here on the beach and have a
good time, sing Kumbaya, light a fire, eat. And when Jesus shows
up, we'll be fed and rested. If the Lord wills. And the Lord
didn't will it. The Lord didn't will for them
to get food. The Lord didn't will for them to catch fish.
The Lord didn't will for them to have any success whatsoever
because He was going to show Himself to them through their
failings. He showed Himself to Thomas through
Thomas' failing. He showed Himself to the woman
of Sychar through her failing. something Brother Guillo placed
on internet yesterday, was incredibly simple and biblically sound.
The reason Jesus hung out with sinners, not because he embraced
their lifestyle, but because they had no righteousness of
their own to talk about. Beautiful. The simplicity of
how that man can put things just blows my mind. Lifestyle had nothing to do with
it. Self-righteousness also looks
like this is what we're doing in ministry. This is how we're
going to see it play out. You know, I've found men who
are truly called by God. We all have a plan and we know
what it's supposed to look like and what we want to see accomplished
in our mission and vision and all this stuff. We even have
a budget sometimes, don't we? Because everything costs something.
And we're going, OK, this is how it's going to work. And we
share it with people. They get excited about it. All right. And it never
goes that way. It never goes that way. When
people can put all that together and it goes that way, I think
the prince of the power of the air is at work. I think God shows us very clearly
that our ways are nothing. His ways are all things. and that what He has purposed
to do with us is His business. So we trust in Him. We trust
in Him. And we trust in Him, and we can
trust in Him because He's revealed Himself to be trustworthy. He's
revealed Himself to be faithful. If He can save us from death,
save us from His wrath, He can sustain us in any circumstance.
He can bring us through the fire. We need to count the beans, but
we don't need to let the outcome of those beans determine the
call of God. As one of my mentors said years
ago, when my 22-year-old daughter was an infant, a man ain't worth
paying what he won't do for free. And that is so true. It's like
children, I need to make some money. They'll do chores for a dollar,
but they won't do chores because it's their responsibility. You're
not going to get paid to do your chores in my house. But you might
get paid because you do them well, just because I want to
pay you. A responsibility is not a wage
to be earned. So here these men are going fishing
so that Jesus could reveal himself to them once again. just as the
day was breaking. They fished all night and they
caught nothing. Verse 4, just as the day was breaking. You
might think, why do they fish at night? That's what they did.
Fish in the first century and I don't
know anything about fishing except the bass fishing that I've done
in my life. Historically, and you see archaeologists
say that they all fished at night. Don't know why. But they fished
all night and caught nothing. So as the sun was coming up,
Jesus stood on the shore. Yet the disciples did not know
that it was Jesus. They didn't know. There was nothing
weird about a man being on the shore. It's sun up. It's time
for the world to get to work. It's time for things to get moving.
And so here we are, this man on the seashore. It's not strange. They were anticipating Jesus'
arrival, but they had no idea that it was Him. They had no
reason to believe that it was Him. To the point that I was
making before I got sidetracked. Sometimes we think zeal, we think
of these disciples, well why would they go fishing? Why would
they go fishing? Shouldn't they be all about preaching?
Shouldn't they be all excited about it? Shouldn't they be getting
things together and going out and proclaiming the gospel? Shouldn't
they put away everything and just go do it all? They will
eventually. And you keep in mind when you
read the book of Acts, that's decades of history. We can read
it in 60 minutes. But it's decades of history.
It's 30 and 40 years of work. I haven't even been in the ministry
that long. 40 years. But we see it and we think, okay,
for 365 straight days these men preached every day. No, they
didn't. They preached one day a month maybe. Or it took them
12 years to get where they were going. And then they would preach.
And they would preach for a season. And then it would stop. And then
they would go someplace else and they would preach. And they'd
stay nine years in a place or they'd stay nine months in a
place. Whatever God deemed necessary. And as the church was established
through saving faith, then they would appoint elders in every
city to oversee the health and the oversight of the church.
And where there was not an elder, there was not a church. Be careful. One of my brothers in the Lord
texted me this week and showed me a link of somebody who he
knows who is now a pastor and he's online with some kind of
radio show doing pastoral teaching. And not only is his teaching
not pastoral, it's not biblical. And the first thing I looked
Where did this man come from? What Christian community affirmed
him in the faith? He's not an apostle, so he didn't
get called by Jesus directly. Friends, that's garbage. If the local body doesn't affirm
the call of a man, he ain't a pastor. Ever. There's no such thing as
an apostle today. We got that right here. Now that
don't mean we can't be evangelistic. We're supposed to be. It also
doesn't mean that we can't teach the Bible. I've got some dear
brothers who get online every week and they teach the Bible
from their home on the internet. Great! Do it! And I think all of you should
work to the point where you could teach the Bible in some capacity.
We should be able to teach the truth of Scripture. But not all
of us are called to shepherd God's people with great tenderness
and oversight. It is the death nail of your
societal dreams. And it rings loudly. And it is
not going to be the way that we think it is. So, these people aren't usurping
the call of Christ. They haven't really been given
all the directions yet. And more importantly, they haven't
been given the direct guidance of the paraclete. They haven't
been given the direct working of God the Spirit in a way that
shows them exactly what they need. Do you realize that the
Holy Spirit of God told Paul where to go? God would speak to the inner
being of the apostles. And as he spoke, and they wrote
it down, they never contradicted themselves. Why? Because God
is not a liar. But yet, in our day, we would
rebuke people for going fishing the day after Jesus was raised.
What's wrong with you people? Why aren't you about the Lord's
business? Why do you have time to go fishing? We've got to eat, that's why. All night long throwing nets
in the ocean doesn't sound like a joy ride to me. You know, give
me a cooler full of Gatorade and sweet tea and let me sit
out there and if I catch anything I don't have to have a good time.
But these people were looking to eat. Jesus is going to reveal
himself to them. Peter is still dealing with the
guilt. The elephant in the room for
Peter when Jesus shows up is like, I denied him. I mean, he's
happy to see him as we'll see in a minute. But have you ever talked trash
about somebody and then they show up? I mean, let's just be
honest. Even if it's in your heart. You
can't stand that and go, oh, there he is. Hey, John, I was
just thinking about you. You know, we've done it. We have
done it. Even if it's not in person, we've
done it online, and that guy drives me nuts. Bing! Hey, Pastor. Oh, how you doing, bro? Your
phone ain't on, is it? I was just praying for you. I
mean, blessings. And I'm not making light of it.
But I mean, we do. It's this elephant in the room,
this issue that Peter, how do I deal with the failing? God,
Christ, He will reveal Himself to Peter because of his failings.
If Peter had it together, Christ would throw him away. If the disciples had everything
under their control and were organized clerics moving in a
fashion, I'm not saying we shouldn't be organized, but they had it
all together when Jesus showed up, what would we do? Look at
these men. We need to emulate their leadership
acumen. Tell you what, I'm gonna give
you a Doctor of Divinity program in leadership acumen. And your board of directors will
look like this. Peter, since you think you're in charge, we'll
just let you be. And the list goes on down. Nathaniel, we haven't
said your name in three and a half years, we'll just put you on
the list. Don't feel like we don't love you, but you're really
nobody. But there's no guile in you.
I mean, could you imagine what the narrative of Scripture would
sound like? What the world would be like in the context of gospel
church, of gospel assembly, of gospel ministry, if Jesus showed
up, if the narrative of the Scripture showed the apostles getting fired
up at the death of Jesus? They probably would have had
masks, and they are 15. They'd have taken him out of the tomb
before he even died. It would have been a heroic story of the
men who saved the world. Yet it's not a story of heroism,
it's a story of divine redemption, sovereignly, done by the counsel
of His will, using the creatures that He made to bring about His
purposes, without anybody's permission, against all free will of all
creatures, of all time. Period. This is God we're talking
about, standing on the ocean banks. This isn't James Tippins
or some cool guy or some fancy woman. This is Jesus, the God
of heaven, the creator of the sand running between His toes. And Jesus yells out, children,
and I hope your Bible says children. It should say children. Do you have any fish? See they're
a hundred yards away. Here to the center of the highway
outside, across railroad tracks. Got any fish? Now did Jesus want
to know how many fish they had? Did he need to know? No, but
we can't relate without language. And when Jesus asked questions
as we've already seen, who are you seeking? When they came to
arrest him, he said these things in the context of the circumstances
that it may be recorded by the people that he gave perfect utterance
and remembrance to, so that they would write it down for us. You
know why? Because we're not here to learn
something as much as we're here to be reminded of something.
And that's why the Bible is the way it is. And when we learn the truth of
Christ, when we learn a new thing about the Lord Jesus, it can
overwhelm us and we run with that newness and we love it and
we're so happy and thrilled and the Spirit of God within us as
we continue to dine on that newness rejuvenates us and renews us
daily in our hope. And so When we come to the same
truth over and over again, we should not look at it in this
way of saying, well, I already know that. We should look at
that and say, what a beautiful reminder. I mean, on the day of our weddings
where we say, I do, I will, you betcha, whatever it is that we
say, and we confess our love in a way of covenant with witnesses,
and then we stamp all these signatures down there, and then we gotta
go to a judge to get rid of it? Have our face put in the newspaper?
It's a big deal. But I mean, we did all that.
This is a serious thing. We got married. We exchanged
vows. We said, I will love you until the breath in my body stops. 24 years tomorrow, I'll be married
to my bride. And I will tell you this, I don't
want to go a day without telling her that I love her, and I don't
want to go a day without hearing it. Am I supposed to? Oh, I know
she loves me because she married me 24 years ago. Oh, yeah, yeah,
yeah. I don't care. Oh, I know you
love me, honey. Shut up, please. No! The same thing is when we read
Scripture. We're not learning theological things. We're intimate
with the Lord Jesus. We're being reminded of His love.
We're being reminded of His power. We're being reminded of His promises.
This narrative is no different. Just as the disciples who sort
of scattered everywhere, now He has brought them back together.
He has overcome their lack of faith. He has revealed Himself
to be faithful. To be the High Priest, to be
the Lamb of God, to be their Lord and their Master and their
Savior, whether they know it or not, whether they want it
or not, He's revealed Himself to them and now they have it. It's amazing as children how
so many times they'll ask to read the same book over and over
and over. Can't even read. But they can
finish the book. And you're thinking, I hate this
story. I don't want to hear anything else about this story. I don't
want to. Let's do another book. No, let's
do this book. And the one night you can't find that book, it's
on. Tears, tantrums, terror. Amazon had the same hour delivery
for an extra hundred bucks. It'd come, wouldn't it? We'd
do it. But yet somewhere in our adult life, we find that Scripture
can become monotonous. Beloved, don't let the Scripture
become monotonous. Be reminded of the glory of Christ. Children,
do you have any fish? He knew they did it because he
was going to show himself to them in a way that he'd already
done. And he's going to show his promises
are true. Watch. No. And he says, and you're talking
about a vessel about as wide as this stage, you know. Big
catch of fish over here, big catch of fish over here. Throw
your nets on the right side of the boat. You'll find some over
there. You'll find some over there and
they did it. Let's see where we can get theological
here. We can say what the text doesn't say. Don't read into
that. You're out in the lake, you're
fishing, you haven't gotten anything. Somebody comes along and says,
hey, got anything? Man, I've been fishing all day,
nothing. You know what? Go along that bank over there and cast
toward that tree. Levi can tell you. And you might go down. Oh,
look at that! Because he had experience with
that. That's as simple as it is. But we know different. They
didn't catch three or four fish. We know differently that Jesus
not only knew where the fish were, Jesus put them there. And they weren't here, they were
there. So they cast these nets out on this side. And you know
how it is with net casting. Maybe you do, maybe you don't.
It's not like you're just dipping in the water. I mean, it's throwing
them out, running and dragging them in. You're dragging over
a long period. So they get so many fish, They couldn't haul it in. And
this has happened before and John all of a sudden goes, this
is Jesus. He's done this before. This is
Jesus. You see how simple that is? That's
how you read this text. This is Jesus. He's done this
before. We already know his divine ability. We already know And Jesus, and
John says, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Remember, he never
put his name here. That's why he put the sons of Zebedee. He
didn't list his own name. That's James and John. He didn't
list it. He never lists his name here because he was renowned
for being Jesus, basically his greatest mentee, protege. And he says, it is the Lord.
It is the Lord. And the cool thing about Peter
and Peter's personality is that Peter comes to a place where
he's no different, is he? Peter's no different. Yeah, he
denied the Lord, that's hanging on his heart, but when he found
out it was the Lord Jesus, he just takes his outer garment,
wraps it around himself real good so he don't drown, and jumps
out into the ocean. Beats the boat there. He jumps out there, just like
he walked on the water, just like he cut off the ear of the
priest. So he throws himself into the
sea, and the other disciples come in the boat, dragging the
net full of fish. They were about 100 yards off. And when they
get there, this is what they see. They see Jesus where the
fire started. And he's cooking for them. I see some people, well this
is to show his humanity, he ate. He's already shown his humanity.
He didn't need to prove that. That's not the theological purpose
here is in the practical purpose. I will never leave you nor forsake
you. I provided for you, I served you in my life. I gave, I washed
your feet. I served you at the table. I
served you in my prayers, I'm going to give you something to
eat." It's a basic expression of hospitable love as a way of
provision. Remember, was it Wednesday or
was it last Sunday, I talked about how we'd visit my great-grandmother
and she'd cook no matter what time it was. If she didn't have
anything cooked, she'd start grinding wheat and making angel
biscuits. We'd eat our weight in those
things. Because she loved us and that's
how she gave to us, how she provided. In a simple way, Jesus is just
feeding. These people are out there fishing
all night. He is the Lord and the Master
of the cosmos. And when they should be serving
Him in all respects, He's serving them. He's risen from the dead
and His first act in a public way with these disciples is to
feed them. And I think there's a simplicity
in that that we need to learn, and it's not just here. If it
was just here, we would be doing something that might not be in
the text. But if we look and see, when
Peter says, you cannot wash my feet, I should wash yours. And
he says, if I do not wash you, you have no place with me. Then wash my head, wash my hands,
wash me all. Jesus is serving. I think that's
the instrumental reality of most of what ministry is. We should
serve each other. How can we do that? We all have
gifts. We all have treasures. We all have certain things that
we can give and offer and none of us have all of them. So we
must be willing and able to give. Consider one another greater
than yourself. The humility of Jesus Christ
in his humanity is that he considered the disciples that he died for
greater than himself. He did not take equality with
God, something to be grasped, but made himself obedient, a
slave unto death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted
him and gave him the name that is above all names. In the name
of Jesus, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that
he is Lord. But yet he is greater than all
things. We've been learning the preeminence of Christ when we
went through Colossians. Now that we're going through
Hebrews, we see the preeminence of Christ. He is worthy of all praise
and all glory and all honor, yet he disrobes himself and washes
the feet of sinners who have no righteousness of their own. And it's exemplified in the fact
here he is glorified and resurrected. What would you imagine if Hollywood
took the resurrection of Jesus? into an account without any scriptural
evidence. They would make it this grand,
international, worldwide, cosmic experience. Like a mushroom cloud coming
up, the seas drying up, birds falling down and bowing, cats
and cows and snakes and snails coming from everywhere, like
the Noah's Ark type movies. I mean, it would just be all
sorts of things. It would be like the Lion King in the Sea of Galilee.
Somebody pick Jesus up, oh my God, you know. It would just
be this grant, but this is how the risen God, man, spends his
time with his people. And in those intimate moments
is when we have the greatest opportunity to what? To teach
and to care and to love. I say this a lot, this pulpit
is a very minute portion of our intimacy, though it is a grave
importance. If it does not press us to understand
these things and the implications of these things, it's worthless. So they got there, there's a
fire, Jesus had some bread on it and some fish, and he said,
bring some of the fish that you caught. So Simon Peter went and
hauled the net. to the sand. Now that's a strong
fella right there. You know he swam the hundred.
I'm thinking, row faster! I mean, you know. He swam, he
hauls a net of 153 fish. And although there were so many,
the net was not torn. I've already said don't put stock
in that number. It's just they counted them.
Probably something like this. Can you believe that number of
fish? It must not have been as many fish as the first time he
did this. Because it didn't tear the nets. One, two, three. There he is, my man. Oh, he's
turned away. Four, five. I mean, it could have been something
as simple as that. That's the easiest explanation. The net was not torn. And Jesus
says to them, he invites them, come and have breakfast. Now you notice what's not happened
here, and the text plays it out. What's not happened is, you are
the Lord, right? You are Jesus. They knew that
He was, but they dared not ask Him. You heard that before? John
4. Here's some food. I have food that you know not
of. Who gave Him something to eat? They wanted to know, but
they dared not ask Him. They didn't say, who are you?
They didn't say, are you really the Lord? Are you really? They
knew, but they wanted to be sure. They wanted to be sure. So he
came, and he took the bread, and he served them food. He served
them the food, and they ate together. Now it doesn't even say that
Jesus ate together, but let's just assume that he did. And
then John closes this narrative portion here, and that was the
third time that Jesus was revealed to the disciples after he was
raised from the dead. How was Jesus revealed to you this day? Has Jesus revealed Himself to
you as the faithful Savior, the faithful High Priest, the faithful
Lamb of God, the faithful Lord, the faithful Master, the faithful
Servant? Has Jesus revealed Himself to you through the hearing of
this text that He promised them He would show up, He promised
them He would give them instruction, He promised them He would not
leave them alone, He promised them that He would give provision?
Yet in John 6 we see that people wanted more food, but he told
them that they'd have to just starve because they wanted food
that would perish. But he was the food that endured to eternal
life. Eat of his flesh and drink of his blood. Rest in the assurance
of his finished work of redemption. But for his own, it doesn't mean
that we starve people. And it's not a text about feeding
people. It's just a text to show what
Jesus did. And in all of that grand, amazing,
majestic, troubling time when this man who was dead is now
alive, this is what they do. They spend time eating a little
tiny dinner with a whole lot of fish, a breakfast on the seashore. And beloved, I believe that the
greatest thing that you could do with the majority of your
time is spend that little breakfast with the Lord Jesus. being reminded
of His perfect work and His sovereign rule. Jesus is not sweating. Oh, I've got 39 days and 3 hours. He's not sweating. Beloved, we
are so far in the future with our worries and burdens, and
when they get there, we're going to forget what they are. And we need to be at the feet
of Christ And we need to be resting. And we need to see that as Jesus
operated in his ministry, so should we operate in our ministry.
And our ministry is our daily lives. Because he's the faithful
one. He's the faithful one. So trust
in him. Let's pray. We thank you again, Father, for
your word. And Lord, for this simple story. A simple story to remind us of
your patience and your promises. Lord, as we see Jesus throughout
the narrative of John's gospel, talking to the one, talking to
the one out of many. Seeking out the little blind
man and the lame man and the fallen woman. Father, Jesus did not take His
ministry to be this public, grand thing. He came to seek and save
His own. He came to seek and save the
lost of His elect. And in His time, He did your
will. As you saw fit, you put Christ
forth to be our wrath payment. To be our propitiation. to be
our righteousness and our sanctification. And in Christ this morning, Father,
we know that he is our wisdom. And we thank you for this treasure,
to be reminded of this treasure, the kingdom of heaven, who is
our Savior, Jesus the Christ. Help us to rejoice. In his name
we pray. Amen.