Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Whats up friends!

Welcome back to NXT High School.

My name is Matt Velasco, if we have not met I want you to know that I am so glad that you are here and would love to meet you before you leave tonight!

You’ll hear and see that we say something around these parts, we say that Wednesday night, tonight, is the best night of the week.

And we firmly believe it.

Not just because you get to hangout with friends and have free dinner and a ton of fun, but also because God has a funny way of showing up in special ways on Wednesday nights here at NXT.

So, if you’re new, thanks for being here!

We hope you love it and I want to personally invite you to come back next week.

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Growing up my grandma lived and still lives on Lake Minnetonka, but my experience on the lake was a little different than most of the people I know who grew up on the lake.

Most of them have memories of learning how to ski or wakeboard or wake surf, or even if you’re cooler than everyone else, wake skate.

But my memories didn’t involve any of that.

In fact, we rarely even tubed on the lake growing up.

We didn’t have a ski boat until recently, and even still its not what we frequent the most.

And yet, our dock has always had 3-4 boats attached to it.

Well then Matt, what did you do?

We fished.

And not just go on the dock and cast a bobber off fish, like legit fishing.

5am in the morning, get in the boat, go find some tall weeds, fishing.

But, can I be candid with you?

I never enjoyed it.

To be honest I still don’t enjoy it and I probably won’t ever, but not without my trying.

My little brother on the other hand is the opposite.

In fact, my parents just moved last week to Lake Minnetonka and built a shed sort of room attached to their house where rods and such will be stored and we’re calling it “Jack’s room” like the dude loves fishing and hunting and all of the outdoors stuff.

I just don’t.

But, nevertheless, every year on fathers day we would have a family fishing competition where the biggest fish caught during a certain window of time would net you (ha…) the trophy.

Yes, a legit trophy with a big fish on the top.

And you know what…even though I never liked fishing I still won it one year.

I thought to myself, “maybe this is what I need to fall in love with the fish,” but I was wrong.

Want to know why I never have liked fishing?

I think its boring.

It takes too much time for not enough reward.

And I was never successful enough at catching fish.

Big Idea

Tonight we’re going to talk about a story where Jesus goes fishing with some of His friends, and how it changes the way we view success today.

In fact, I’m going to give you 3 things that it takes to actually be successful in life.

We’re gonna call them the 3 F’s to success.

FAITH.

FORSAKE.

FOLLOW.

Text Address

If you have your Bibles, why don’t you open up to Luke 5:1-11,

Content

Lets pray.

Peter (who was known as Simon, or Simon Peter), and his partners James and John were professional fisherman.

Not professional in the sense that they were sponsored fishing athletes, but professional because its how they made their living.

They would have lived and worked in a town much like this one in Ghana.

The whole entire economy was built around fisherman and what they were able to catch each night.

So them going out and having an unsuccessful night is much more significant than me or you failing to catch a fish off the dock.

They had spent the night fishing with what were known as dragnets.

It was back breaking work because it involved laying out a great net in a semicircle, which would encompass over 100 feet, drawing it in hand-over-hand, then repeating the procedure again and again..

It was hard hard work.

The group had sweat through the night without as much as a single fish.

So, when the sun was rising they went back to shore and beached their boats.

They ate breakfast under the warming sun and began to wrap up for the day by cleaning their nets, washing their boats, mending their equipment, and arranging those same nets for drying.

Once they were finally dried they would fold them back up and place them near the boats for the coming night, and then head on home to sleep for the day.

But on this particular day something strange was happening around the boat.

As the three were wrapping up their duties a crowd had formed around them with a man named Jesus at the center.

Verse 1 tells us,

Jesus was preaching.

It was a teaching that held authority and power that drew in a great crowd.

A crowd so great that Jesus had to ask if He could use Simon Peter’s boat as a floating stage.

Peter obliged, and after drifting his freshly cleaned boat back out the waters only a few yards Jesus began to teach once more.

His voice would have carried across the waters to all gathered on the beach.

I like to imagine Simon Peter wasn’t paying too much attention.

He was probably spacing out because of the long night’s work and was sitting motionless in the warm sun while this stranger and soon to be savior was preaching next to him.

But then something changed,

1. Called to FAITH

This brings us to our first point for the night, we are called to faith.

In this moment Jesus starts to change the way that success is defined.

Jesus’ request was demanding, “Hey, undo all of the work you just did and go do the very thing you failed at doing last night.”

Its how I feel every time my brother asks me to fish… “Hey, I know you are bad this, you know you are bad at this, but come do it with me anyways.”

But this time Jesus was asking a man who hadn’t slept all night to go back to the shore and load his boat with all of the equipment he had just cleaned and go back out into the waters to do the very thing he had just failed to do the night before.

I love how R.C. Sproul talks about this, he says,

When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, ‘Put out into the deep water and let down you nets for a catch’ (5:1–4, NASB).

If there is ever a time when Simon Peter, the rock of the church, exhibits impatience or annoyance at his Master, it is here.

He says to him, ‘Master, we worked hard and caught nothing!’

It is almost as if Simon Peter is looking at Jesus and saying, ‘Jesus, when you speak to us about the things of God we hang on your every word.

But give us a little bit of credit!

Maybe we are not great rabbis, but we know about fishing.

We’ve let down those nets a hundred times and we can’t even catch a minnow!’

But Peter reluctantly acquiesced to the command of Jesus, ‘But, at your bidding I will let down the nets.’

It is as though Simon Peter is humouring Jesus.

I don’t now how you respond at times like this, but when someone who’s seemingly not as knowledgeable as me tries to tell me something about something I know much about, I tend to get pretty annoyed and sometimes even frustrated.

For instance, you may or may not know this about me, but I love golf.

And there is a certain type of golfer that most people (if you golf) have played with.

I like to call them The Instructor.

They are, of course, not actually an instructor.

But they think they are.

They give you tips on how to swing the club and what club to use and everything that has to do with your game while showing no actual talent themselves.

I think this is how Peter felt about Jesus in this moment... but Jesus turned out to be the best fishing guide Peter will ever encounter.

The catch was huge!

Enough for Peter to think, “can I monetize this?!

This Jesus dude could make me some MONEY!” but the business is never built, and the boat is left behind.

Peter’s success was not in the fish he caught, but the fishing guide who he would follow.

And it started with Peter simply humoring Jesus.

How often do you humor Jesus?

And I don’t mean that in an offensive way towards our God.

I mean that in its practical sense.