James Nisbet Commentary - Luke 5:5 - 5:5

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James Nisbet Commentary - Luke 5:5 - 5:5


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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:

AT THY WORD’

“Nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net.’

Luk_5:5

There are few things in common life so illustrative of the actings of faith—as ‘a net cast into the sea.’

I. The net an emblem of faith.—But if the net be always the emblem of faith, there are points about that ‘net’ which St. Peter cast which give an especial aptitude to the image. St. Peter had not yet forgotten the weary night; yet it was in no unbelief, but rather in the simplicity of his own honest, outspoken heart, that he said, ‘Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net.’ Already, that man had learnt to draw the grandest distinction of life—the difference between doing a thing with God, and doing it without God; at His word, or not at His word. Already, that mind discriminated between nature’s working and the working of grace. Already, his faith was sufficient to make him do that hopefully, as an act of obedience, which he had done fruitlessly at his own suggestion.

II. There is always a promise within a command, and an ordered thing is a thing undertaken for. St. Peter’s mind—or rather his heart—went through all this in an instant; and the disappointing night passed away out of his thoughts into ‘Nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net.’ You remember the result. The success was overwhelming! The net was broken, and the ships were well-nigh crushed under a load of blessing. To teach us always that true lesson, that what we want is not so much the mercy and the gift—for they are there, they are sure to come—but the room and the strength to receive them when they come.

III. ‘At Thy word.’—The hardest thing in the whole world is to do an old thing in a new way; to repeat what we have done before, and done uselessly, with a fresh motive, and a fresh energy, hopefully and believingly. But this is just what most of us have to do. You have sought right things, and sought them earnestly; but you have not yet succeeded. Why? It was not ‘At thy word.’ Lay these master-thoughts well to your heart. ‘At Thy word.’ I will go with the promises. Not my arm; not my counsel; not my prayer; not my faith—but ‘Thy word’—only ‘Thy word.’ Take care that you begin with some distinct word of God that you may place underneath you. For where did St. Peter put his ‘net’? Not so much into the water—that would not be the uppermost thought in his mind—but deeper things, the word, the word Christ had spoken. He put down his ‘net’ into the faithfulness of God! Let the word be everything, and you will soon find yourself one who casts into full waters.

Rev. James Vaughan.

(SECOND OUTLINE)

‘NEVERTHELESS’

I. A picture of ourselves.—‘Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing.’ Do not many of us feel this to be sadly true of our individual lives and characters? How much we might have done! How noble our characters might have been! What poor, shrivelled, unsatisfactory things they are! Only think of the golden, the unbounded possibilities of childhood and of youth. What small advantage we took of them! We are but stupid changelings of ourselves, mere wrecks and ghosts of what God designed us to be.

II. However low we sink we must never cease the effort to struggle up.—That is a lesson supremely necessary, but it is another only of the many aspects in which this text might be regarded, which is also full of encouragement for all of us. If it should awaken the despondent, it should also inspire the toiling. We think far too much, every one of us, of our little work. We forget that God is patient because He is eternal. All true work which we do is precious to God, not in so far as it is successful, for that does not depend upon us, but in so far as it is true. We have nothing to do with its results. The efforts are ours, the results belong to God. Could anything have been more disastrously forlorn than the work of St. Paul, or more expressive than the result of it, when, deserted by all his converts, forgotten by all them of Asia, and none so poor as not to be ashamed of his religion, he was led out to his lonely death. Yet we know that he wrote in his dungeon and almost in his last words, ‘I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown,’ not ‘a crown of glory’ as you so often put it, but something much better, ‘henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord the righteous Judge will give me in that day.’

III. Among the many thoughts of help which that brave ‘nevertheless’ of St. Peter may bring to us, let us, above all, learn these two things:

(a) First, never to despair of ourselves, because unless we abandon ourselves, so long as there is any effort in us after better things, God will not leave us nor forsake us; and

(b) Secondly, never to despair of work, however fruitless, however complete a failure it may seem to be. ‘Commit thy way unto the Lord, put thy trust in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.’ ‘Master, we have toiled all the night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net.’

Dean Farrar.

Illustration

‘If you look into St. Peter’s words you will find in them two predominant feelings. One is that of weariness: “We have toiled all the night; must we begin again?” The other is discouragement: “Must we, after failing all these hours, most favourable for fishing, now start again in the full glare of the noontide sun? Nevertheless”—here is the correction of the two feelings—“nevertheless, if Thou biddest me, there is that in Thy voice which constrains my obedience, and, notwithstanding weariness and notwithstanding discouragement, nevertheless at Thy word I will let down the net.” St. Peter’s reply, then, teaches us that the word nevertheless, like its great sonorous synonym, notwithstanding, has in it two things, a “though” and a “yet.” “This or that is against it, yet it shall be done.” In the particular instance weariness was against it, and discouragement was against it, but there was a constraining something for it. That something was Christ’s word, and that settled the question of doing it or not doing it. It may be said, that life, as a whole, is a great nevertheless, and that each act of life is a little nevertheless; and we may say further that a noble life is characterised by a preponderance of the “yet” in it, and that a poor life is characterised by a preponderance of the “though.” The poor life says, “I have toiled all the night, and nothing has come of it; I will give it up.” The noble life says, “True, I have toiled all these days, all these years, and I seem to myself to be a complete and utter failure; but Jesus Christ says, Let down the net; and at His word, and simply because of His word, I will do it.” ’