Luke 5:1-11
February 7, 2009
Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon answered, ‘Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.’ When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink. But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, ‘Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.’ When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.
At some point during my senior year in high school I became a big believer in the power of belief. My girlfriend’s mother, for some reason, thought that I would be interested in the writings of a pastor named Norman Vincent Peale, who had written the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. She was right. This book, and the spiritual attitude it advocated, dramatically changed my life.
The most dramatic change came when I went to college. Most of you would probably be surprised that I was a terrible student in school. I finished 12th to the bottom of my high school class, and for me a C was a good grade. Ds were okay because they weren’t Fs. I managed to mostly avoid Fs by shooting for Ds. For most of my life I had felt trapped in the identity of being a class clown and poor student. I was trapped not only by my history but by others’ expectations. People thought I was a bad student and a cut-up, and so they treated me that way. I was criticized a lot, which only served to keep me in that identity. I remember several times during junior and senior high thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I do, people are always down on me and just don’t like me. So why bother trying to change. I’m going to be criticized anyway because I won’t be able to change the way they want me to. So I might as well be what I want, not what they want.” My whole attitude was that I was a failure, so why try changing.
That all changed when I read parts of Peale’s book. I realized that I could change, and that I could change especially if I learned to ignore people’s criticisms. When I went to college I decided that I was going to change. So I slowly became transformed. I had to teach myself how to study, and I had to learn how to learn. My grades were mediocre at the beginning, but by the time I graduated I was on the Dean’s List. I went onto graduate school and my grades got increasingly better, to the point that when I graduated with my Ph.D., I graduated with a cumulative 4.0 gpa.
My change as a student happened because I changed my belief. By believing I could be better, I became better. This also had an impact on me in sports. When I graduated from high school I was a pretty good lacrosse player—at least good enough to be recruited by Dennison University and Ohio State University. But when it came to a college choice I let the weather determine it. I wanted to go south so that I could get away from grey skies and snow. So I went to Roanoke College in Virginia. They had a lacrosse team and I figured I could try out for it. What I didn’t know was how good they were. I didn’t know much about college lacrosse, but what I found out very quickly upon going to Roanoke was that at the time they were one of the best college teams in the country.
Back then there was not much difference between Division 1 and Division 3 schools. They all played each other, so that our little school of 1200 students had a lacrosse schedule that included schools such as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, North Carolina State University, the University of Virginia, Ohio State University, as well as many smaller colleges. And Roanoke beat most of those schools at the time.
In the fall of my freshman year I tried out for the team, and quickly discovered that the other players were really good, and I wasn’t. I played defense, and was told by one of the offensive players that fall that in practice everyone wanted to go against me because they knew that they would score. I was terrible, but the power of positive thinking had taken hold. I believed that I could become a good player. So I kept working at it. I didn’t make the team initially, but halfway through the spring season I made it, which was really fun because we won a Division 2/3 national championship that year.
Over the next three years I kept improving. There were players who were better than me at the time, but I kept trying. Many of them eventually quit the team for a lack of playing time, but I kept at it. By the time I graduated as a senior I was a starter on one of the better teams in the country, and I was the defenseman who covered the best offensive player on the other team. I had gone from being the player everyone wanted to play against to one who was able to shut down the All-American offensive players. And it was all because of the positive attitude that I had shifted to four years before.
It was out of those two experiences that I began, spiritually, to really understand our passage. Our passage is one of belief, not only in oneself, but in God’s power. Jesus is with some of the disciples, specifically Peter, who work as fishermen. They are fishing in the Sea of Galilee for a small type of fish, a lake variety of tilapia, with very little meat on them. For a fisherman to be even moderately successful, the nets need to be full because to make a meal out of these fish requires at least three or four per person. Unfortunately, Peter and his crew are catching nothing. Jesus tells them to put their nets on the other side of the boat, and that they will catch a boatload, but they are skeptical. They haven’t caught anything all day. Why would switching to the other side of the boat work? They are full of doubt, but they do it anyway. And to their surprise their nets come up bursting with fish. They catch enough to fill two boats. It is an incredible catch. And all it took was a little belief in God’s power.
It’s amazing what a change of belief can do. So often if we believe something isn’t possible, it becomes impossible. If we believe something can happen, often it will happen. This is a foundation of much of Christian belief. Too many people today are skeptical and cynical, thinking, “I won’t believe it till I see it. I won’t believe it can be done until it is done.” In contrast, Jesus often emphasized a very simple idea: If we believe, then we’ll see. If we believe, then we’ll achieve.
The thing about Christian belief is that it isn’t belief like what our culture teaches, which is that we have to believe in ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with believing in ourselves. Certainly that is part of Norman Vincent Peale’s message. But Christian belief is in something greater. It’s a belief in the power of God not only to be in the world, but a belief that if we are open to God’s grace, it can work miracles big and small in our lives. It’s a belief that even though we may go through really tough times, if we are open to God’s power, our lives can be better. Our lives can be blessed.
What I’ve learned over the years is that so many people struggle in life because they don’t believe. It’s not just that they don’t believe in Christ or in God. They just don’t believe that their lives can be better. There are so many people whose lives are stuck in ruts, stuck in a cycle of disappointment, stuck in a belief that good isn’t possible for them, and it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I know from experience that if we are willing just to change the way we look at life and at God, it changes everything.
I’ve recently seen, in a book that we are presently reading and discussing in our men’s group that meets on Thursday mornings, how changing perceptions can change life. The book is Soul Survivor by Philip Yancey, in which he writes about thirteen people who have changed his life. Some are well-known, such at Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, and Leo Tolstoy, but others are not known, such as Dr. Paul Brand.
Brand is a medical doctor who has specialized in treating lepers, or, more specifically, people with Hansen’s disease, which is the form of leprosy that often causes severe disfigurement. People with this disease often lose their fingers, toes, and other extremities. Brand has served as a doctor specializing in this disease in England, India, and Mississippi. He is considered one of the foremost experts of the disease, having developed surgical techniques to restore the use of the hand to people’s who’s hands have been crippled by this disease.
One of Brand’s most important discoveries was that people with this disease don’t lose their extremities because of the disease itself. He discovered that instead the disease kills the nerve endings in fingers, toes, and other extremities. Thus, people get infections from blisters, cuts, or splinters, and because they can’t feel the pain they let them fester. They lose their extremities because of unfelt infections. As a result of this discovery, he also began to think about pain in a different way.
We see pain as bad, whether it is physical or emotional pain. We tend to complain that when we are in pain, God must be absent. Brand says that our pain shows that God is present. For example, he says, “I thank God for pain,… I cannot think of a greater gift I could give my leprosy patients…. Most people view pain as an enemy. Yet, as my leprosy patients prove, it forces us to pay attention to threats against our bodies. Without it, heart attacks, strokes, ruptured appendixes, and stomach ulcers would all occur without any warning. Who would ever visit a doctor apart from pain’s warnings?
“I notice that the symptoms of illness my patients complained about were actually a display of bodily healing at work. Virtually every response of our bodies that we view with irritation or disgust—blister, callus, swelling, fever, sneeze, cough, vomiting, and especially pain—demonstrates a reflex toward health. In all these things normally considered enemies, we can find a reason to be grateful.”
So often we see our pain as a sign that God doesn’t care. The truth is that pain is evidence that God does care. God gives us pain to keep us safe. We think that a good God would keep us from pain, but think about the causes of our pain. Why do we feel such grief at the death of a loved one? The answer is that the pain we feel is from the love we are able to have shared with the loved one? The pain we feel at being unemployed or having a difficult life is the pain of something inside of us seeking something better. To fully comprehend this means shifting our perspective so that we can see life and God in different ways.
What we believe about God and life determines what we experience about God and life. If we are able to believe it’s amazing what we can see and achieve.
So, where’s your life in terms of belief? Do you believe in God’s goodness and power in your life? If not, perhaps that’s why your life is the way it is? If so, maybe that’s why your life is the way it is.
Amen.
