June 24, 2014
Catch and Release
As a child I remember fishing for mud catfish at
my grandma’s pond, and we cooked everything we caught. I can’t imagine grandma buying
into the catch and release practices of today’s recreational fishermen. It
strikes me that when Jesus turned the disciples into “fishers of men,” He intended
to keep everyone that was caught. Unfortunately in today’s church many of us
are into the catch and release mind set. We watch new believers swim in the
waters of baptism and mentally release them into the waters of the world. “‘Come,
follow me,’ Jesus said, ‘and I will make you fishers of men.’ At once they left their nets and followed him’” (Matt 4:18-19 NIV).
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----I think this might depend a bit on perspective. Certainly it is not a bright idea to release your catch into the training waters of the world. But when Jesus was preparing to leave for Heaven He was quite clear that we were to remain in the world. Of course we were not left to be of the world, like being released into its influence, but to influence the world like being salted upon it.
-----Then there is this interesting dual nature about relationship. Within the community of us who know the Lord there is meant to be rather intimate participation in one another. We have needs and help for needs and joys and delighting each other as a flowing stream to live within. Together we make His body complete. But the Word is not without a solitude for each of us as well. As much as we participate in a community of expressions, we each stand alone with the Lord in a universe of intimate seclusion. Christ might be brought to one by others, or others might bring one to Christ. But when Christ and a person accept one another an universe of individually unique understanding, perspective, and being begins development. Nothing is quite the same as inside any other.
-----It isn’t that nobody’s lives are nearly the same. We live in a world of generality wherein we can see multitudes leading generally the same lives, doing generally the same kind of things to succeed in surviving by the use of generally the same kind of supplies and assets. But the particular specifics of what each person does and has and the meanings to him or her about why and how and what and when and where things are done and supplies are had are completely unique. For we are not mere collections of a small variety of atoms into mobile masses careening around other collections of atoms like one like the other like them all. Though we are housed in such temporarily, each of us is a collection of thoughts and feelings interrelated in such a manner as to develop a central meaning about its self and place branching in many different and unique ways into multitudes of various limbs of countless twigs and leaves of specifically directed and meant meanings interrelating with the unique combinations of many of the same things others interrelate with. But never the same are they because of the uniqueness of the combinations of experiences that otherwise would trick us into presuming the sameness about every life.
-----We each present a vast assortment of differences for the Lord to enjoy in deeply intimate participation. And we see in I Corinthians 12 that we must be turned loose to be what we are to the Lord amongst the body, such that we are both kept as a part of the body yet released to be what emerges from our uniqueness for the body.
-----Then, as if stamping this condition with the same type seal of approval that God pronounced upon creation, “It is good,” Christ gives to each who conquers “… a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it.” (Rev 2:17) We are promised an uniqueness and place of inner solitude and collection of inner meanings and characteristics which will eternally grow in rarity as much as in likeness. The goodness of it is in its being the same for Christ, who also was once a temporal man, and is also now a raised man having “…a name inscribed which no one knows but Himself.” (Rev 19:12b)
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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