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“Teacher, through all night we have toiled to take nothing. But at Your word I will let down the nets.” (Luke 5:5, my translation).
Then let us follow Christ, our Lord, and take the cross appointed
And firmly clinging to His Word, in suffering be undaunted.
For those who bear the battle's strain the crown of heavenly life obtain.(Lutheran Service Book #688, stanza 4)
Firmly clinging to His Word. To take Jesus at His Word. To submit humbly to the voice of Christ.
To submit to anyone else — that's not the American Way, is it? Today being “Independence Day” — marking that time when the founders of this country stood up and said no to the tryrannical voice of a despot king and his parliament — one is especially congnizant of following one's own path. Our culture has taken freedom from tyranny to the extreme on the other side. Now, Americans believe they have the right to have freedom from the rule of law, to have freedom from decency and morality if they so choose.
How many Americans believe they have the freedom to do as they please, when they please, no matter what the consequences are to themselves or to those around them? How many Americans believe they have the freedom to choose to end the life of the unborn child at their whim or for their convenience? How many believe they are free to take liberties with marriage, engaging in all manner of sexual immorality outside of the bounds of marriage as God has instituted it?
How many? The uncountable masses. Many of you get caught up in these attitudes as well: to be free to do as you please, and never mind the consequences of your actions. You and I are so easily deceived into this “American Way” sort of thinking — that living in this country equates to a freedom from conscience and morality; a freedom from accountability to the neighbor and the greater community around us; a freedom from even God's Word. That everything is my decision to make, and how dare anyone, including God and His sent preachers, try to tell me how to live my life, how to spend my money, how to use my time.
The irony is that this so called “freedom” is no freedom at all. It is a tyranny of its own. It is the slavery to sin. It is slavery to the power of the devil. It is slavery to death and the grave, a grim submission to the voice of Satan that first slithered out to our first parents in the Garden of Eden:
Our fatal will to equal Thee, our rebel will wrought death and night.
We seized and used in prideful spite Thy wondrous gift of liberty.(Lutheran Service Book #834, stanza 2)
True liberty, true freedom, is a gift and inheritance from the living God who created this world. We had liberty and freedom in living only under the benevolence of God's gracious love and protection. This meant submitting to His Word, accepting by faith His will for our life; and that meant exercising dominion over the earth and its creatures, being fruitful and multiplying and so receiving from God more children, and living in perfect fellowship with God in His presence. It also meant not eating from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This knowledge was reserved for God, we were only to know of God's goodness and nothing else.
But our fatal and rebelious will was to listen to another voice, and to reject freedom in the light and life of God for the death and darkness of Satan. And that fatal and rebelious will has been inherited from that moment on and still resides in you and in me to this day in the sinful flesh that even now clings to us and holds us back in sin and shame.
And so, we toil through the night of sin and death, out on the sea of time in the boat of life, hoping for the best with every cast of the net.
But it is time to declare independence from sin, death, and the power of the devil. Today, now, before it is too late and night of death becomes eternal and permanent.
But how? How, when all we see is the night of death and decay all around us? How, when we see the nets only come up empty all of the time? How do you forsake the world's ways, declare independence from sin, when the way of sin and this world is the super–majority viewpoint? How do you get rid of the bad feelings, the depressed mind, the beaten down conscience thanks to all of the times in life when you have failed God, yourself, and your neighbors, especially when all too often we have to live with the consequences for our failures? There seems to be no escape.
This is true, if it is only us out there in the boat throwing out the net according to the wisdom of this world and our flesh. If we try to declare our own independence from the sin and shame that ails us, we will fail. The sinful flesh that we have inherited will see to it that we revert back to the darkness and the emptiness.
There is a declaration of independence that really means something, that really truly gets rid of the problem of sin. It is the dawn of the bright and shining Morning Star, when God invades back into our dark night with the light of His life and love. It is the entrance of Jesus Christ into our lives, bearing forth His saving work on the cross.
Jesus was simply repeating in different words what His Father had first told Him before eternity: Go into this world and save my children. “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Jesus did what this world and its evil prince considered to be foolish and weak: to save the world by dying for it on a cross, by dying the most shameful, humiliating death ever, an innocent man with the holy, precious Spirit and Blood of the eternal God coursing through Him, bearing freely the punishment for your sin in your place, the Divine sacrificing Himself for the undeserving sinner.
Jesus has put out into the deep water of this sinful, deadly world, and cast down the net of His own body and blood in order to catch you back from the clutches of Satan. The world says, “weak” and “foolish”. But the world and its ruler are wrong.
Jesus has declared your independence from Satan. “It is finished!” You are declared “not guilty” on account of Jesus' saving act for you. He has risen from the dead. The Father has accepted this new verdict. Now, it pleases God, through the folly of preaching this Good News, to save those who believe.
True freedom, true independence is to be alive to God in Christ Jesus, to repent of the darkness and shame and turn in simple faith to the light of life in Christ Jesus. To trust in Jesus' hard–won salvation alone. To submit to being caught up in the net of His Gospel, to submit to His living voice and receive freely His gift of salvation. True freedom is to live the life of faith that submits itself only to Christ and His Word for our lives. Only there do we have true and eternal life.
True freedom is to drop the ways of this world and to say in faithful submission to God's Word, “Nevertheless, Lord, at Your Word, I will let down the nets.”
Like Peter, faith in Christ wants to drop the mending of the nets and all of the earthly pursuits and carefully listen to Jesus. Faith in Christ seeks first the kingdom of God and His righteousness above all else. Submitting to the voice of Christ is the freedom to not let our daily vocations, our temporal interests, our idol gods sometimes, be a hindrance in caring for our soul. The heavenly calling of freedom in the Kingdom of Christ, by faith in Jesus is to be placed above all earthly callings.
Faith in Christ wants to give all that we have to support the preaching of the Gospel for our neighbor — just as Peter lent his boat to Jesus as a pulpit when the people on the shore crowded Jesus from all sides.
Faith in Christ recognizes that all that we have and are is at the living Word of the resurrected Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He says we are His children in the washing of Holy Baptism, and we are. He says our sins are forgiven, and they are. He says He is feeding us His body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins, and it is done. All this is at His Word. With repentant faith, we merely receive His gift of life and light, from His voice.
When Peter saw the great catch of fish, the one that came at the Word of Jesus, the one that came despite all earthly fishing wisdom — no one catches fish during the day and in the deep end of the lake, mind you — Peter did not say, “Hey, I was brilliant for listening to that advice!” Instead, He falls down at Jesus' feet and says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord.” Peter recognized the hand and voice of God acting in his life. He recognized his own sinfulness and repented.
By faith, Peter and the other disciples signed their names, so to speak, onto Jesus' declaration of independence from sin and death. By faith, submitting once again to the voice of life and to Jesus' saving work for them, they were truly free. They believed, they were captured alive from Satan. So, what else was there for them to do, but to leave behind everything that belonged to the night of sin and death, and follow Jesus, taking up their cross, the victorious cross of Christ that saves them?
What else is there for you to do, O Christians, children of God who have been given the gift of freedom from sin, who live in the light of Jesus' declaration of independence from sin and death and Satan? What else is there for you to do? Nothing. Leave sin and death behind, and follow Jesus to whom you belong. In Him, you are truly alive, truly free.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
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