Oh boy do I have a Word from the Lord for you!
In Mark 1:18 it says, “and straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him.”
The Holy Spirit wouldn’t leave me alone and wouldn’t allow me to interpret it in any other way. I was trying to be one of those super deep theologians that got like a million revelations from one-half of a scripture… but nope!
Forsook.
That’s all that kept crying out to me. So I thought, and then the Holy Spirit began to bring back to my remembrance a lot of things. The first concept was that they forsook everything.
The way they made their living, the way they knew how to live, their families. They saw it was better to follow the Lord than to continue doing life OUTSIDE of him. One reason why this event is so paramount is because it talks in Joshua 24:15 about a decision he made for him and his house to serve the Lord. Back in our text, Jesus didn’t even ask them to follow him, he gave them their purpose straightway, “Come ye after me and I will make you to become fishers of men”.
I want to emphasize that he called them by their purpose. He called them by their very destiny. This is what separates the called from the chosen.
Earlier in Mark 1, The author declares it as the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ and he begins telling about the office of John the Baptist. “…Prepare ye the way of the Lord:, it says in verse three, and then my brain started to churn again.
God wants his path to you to be STRAIGHT.
Although he is the one that makes crooked paths straight, there is something that you CHOOSING to be obedient to God than him FORCING you to follow him won’t do.
When you CHOOSE God, that means all of the faculties of your tripartite being, weighed the pros and cons of following God, and you decided to “forsake your net” and follow him. When you CHOOSE God there is a component of Love that cannot be recreated by him making you to follow him by overriding your will. But preparation requires diligence.
I mean. diligent over every single thing that the Lord has ever taught, revealed, or spoken unto you. Everything concerning God has take priority over everything that you think needs, or how it is to be done. No, I am not saying leave to everything by the wayside that God has given you to be steward over. I’m saying the attitude behind following Jesus needs to be one of making him the CENTER of your life, diligent over “the rain cometh oft upon it” (Heb. 6:7, “it” being the earth that is your soul), and the discipline of being a SPIRITUAL person.
I have just went through a moment yall.
When I tell you God got the belt on me, he REALLY did. And those things are difficult to explain for me as I’m sure it is for many of you. But I shared that to say that the call to discipline is hand in hand with your diligence and your destiny.
God will most certainly restrain you from things if those things are not benefiting you spiritually or if it interferes with your spiritual growth. God will sometimes allow you to make the mistake so you earn the belt so you can truly learn the lesson.
Lashes will teach what lectures will not.
He is the one that wrote “Chasten thy son while there is still hope”, and “For the Lord disciplines whom he loves, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth”.
So how do you handle a life of destiny, diligence, and discipline, when it is something that you are constantly adjusting, or straight-up sacrificing to…
The SOLUTION: Is to TRUST in the LORD.
He called them by purpose. Not saying that they’d have way a to make their business keep going while following him. No. He called THEM to be about their FATHER’s business.
They had so many moments with Jesus that they should’ve really understood that in following Jesus they had everything that they needed. Jesus told Peter to get the coin for taxes, told two disciples to get the donkey for the celebration, told them to gather the leftovers after feeding the masses.
These things were not only done for their purpose in the moment, but it was to get his disciples to the point of full assurance, knowing that their “life is hid in God in Christ Jesus”, (Col. 3), and that he was all that they would need in this life. So after he develops your faith in him, and it begins to turn into trust, we realize now that…
They forsook their nets because they had something better.
Jesus, Leland, and Reason 