361. Mending Nets

Mending Nets

Mat_4:21 : ’93James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets.’94

’93I go a-fishing,’94 cried Simon Peter to his comrades, and the most of the Apostles had hands hard from the fishing tackle. The fisheries of the world have always attracted attention. In the third century the Queen of Egypt had for pin-money four hundred and seventy thousand dollars received from the fisheries of Lake Moeris. And if the time should ever come when the immensity of the world’92s population could not be fed by the vegetables and meats of the land, the sea has an amount of animal life that would feed all the populations of the earth and fatten them with a food that by its phosphorus would make a generation brainy and intellectual beyond anything that the world has ever imagined. My text takes us among the Galilean fishermen. One day Walter Scott, while hunting in an old drawer, found among some old fishing tackle the manuscript of his immortal book ’93Waverley,’94 which he had put away there as of no worth, and who knows but that today we may find some unknown wealth of thought while looking at the fishing tackle in the text.

It is not a good day for fishing and three men are in the boat repairing the broken fishing nets. If you are fishing with a hook and line and the fish will not bite, it is a good time to put the angler’92s apparatus into better condition. Perhaps the last fish you hauled in was so large that something snapped. Or if you were fishing with a net, there was a mighty floundering of the scales, or an exposed nail on the side of the boat which broke some of the threads and let part or all of the captives of the deep escape into their natural element. And hardly anything is more provoking than to nearly land a score or a hundred of trophies from the deep, and when you are in the full glee of hauling in the spotted treasures, through some imperfection of the net they splash back into the wave. That is too much of a trial of patience for most fishermen to endure, and many a man ordinarily correct of speech in such circumstances comes to an intensity of utterance unjustifiable. Therefore no good fisherman considers the time wasted that is spent in mending his net. Now the Bible again and again represents Christian workers as fishers of men, and we are all sweeping through the sea of humanity some kind of a net. Indeed, there have been enough nets out and enough fishermen busy to have landed the whole human race in the kingdom of God long before this. What is the matter? The Gospel is all right, and it has been a good time for catching souls for thousands of years. Why, then, the failures? The trouble is with the nets, and most of them need to be mended. I propose to show you what is the matter with most of the nets and how to mend them. In the text, old Zebedee and his two boys, James and John, were doing a good thing when they sat in the boat mending their nets.

The trouble with many of our nets is that the meshes are too large. If a fish can get his gills and half his body through the network, he tears and rends and works his way out and leaves the place through which he squirmed a tangle of broken threads. The Bible weaves faith and works tight together, the law and the Gospel, righteousness, and forgiveness. Some of our nets have meshes so wide that the sinner floats in and out and is not at any moment caught for the heavenly landing. In our desire to make everything so easy we relax, we loosen, we widen. We let men after they are once in the Gospel net escape into the world, and go into indulgences, and swim all around Galilee from north side to south side and from east side to west side, expecting that they will come back again. We ought to make it easy for them to get into the kingdom of God and, as far as we can, make it impossible for them to get out. The dangerous advice now-a-days to many is: ’93Go and do just as you did before you were captured for God and heaven. The net was not intended to be any restraint or any hindrance. What you did before you were a Christian, do now. Go to all forms of amusement, read all kinds of books, engage in all styles of behavior as before you were converted.’94 And so through these meshes of permission and laxity they wriggle out, through this opening and that opening, tearing the net as they go and soon all the souls that we expected to land in heaven, before we know it are back in the deep sea of the world. Oh, when we go a-gospel-fishing let us make it as easy as possible for souls to get in, and as hard as possible to get out.

Is the Bible language an unmeaning verbiage when it talks about self-denial, and keeping the body under, and about walking the narrow way, and entering the strait gate, and about carrying the cross? Is there to be no way of telling whether a man is a Christian except by his taking the communion chalice on sacramental day? May a man be as reckless about his thoughts, about his words, about his temper, about his amusements, about his dealings, after conversion as before conversion? One-half the Gospel nets with which we have been scooping the sea have had such wide meshes that they have been all torn to pieces by the rushing out into the world of those whom a tighter net would have kept in. The only use of a net is to keep the fish from going back to where they were before, and taking them where they could not have been taken by any other means.

Alas, that the words of Christ are so little heeded when he said: ’93Whosoever doth not bear his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.’94 The Church is fast becoming as bad as the world, and when it gets as bad as the world, it will be worse than the world, by so much as it will add hypocrisy of a most appalling kind to its other defects.

Furthermore, many of our nets are torn to pieces by being entangled with other nets. It is a sad sight to see fishermen fighting about sea-room, and pulling in opposite directions each to get his net, both nets damaged by the struggle and losing all the fish. In a city like this of more than eight hundred thousand, there are at least five hundred thousand not in Sabbath schools or churches. And in this land where there are more than sixty-four million people, there are at least thirty million not in the Sabbath schools and churches. And in this world of more than fourteen hundred million people, there are at least eight hundred millions not in schools or churches. In such an Atlantic ocean of opportunity, there is room for all the nets and all the boats and all the fishermen and for millions more. There should be no rivalry between churches. Each one does a work peculiar to itself. There should be no rivalry between ministers. God never repeats himself, and he never makes two ministers alike, and each has a work that no other man in the universe can accomplish. If fishermen are wise, they will not allow their nets to get entangled, or if they do accidentally get intertwisted the work of extrication should be kindly and quietly conducted.

What a glad spectacle for men and angels when on our recent dedication day ministers of all denominations stood on this platform and wished for each other widest prosperity and usefulness. But there are cities in this country where there is now going on an awful ripping and rending and tearing of fishing nets. Indeed, all over Christendom at this time there is a great war going on between fishermen, ministers against ministers.

Now I have noticed a man cannot fish and fight at the same time. He either neglects his net or his musket. It is amazing how much time some of the fishermen have to look after other fishermen. It is more than I can do to take care of my own net. You see the wind is just right and it is such a good time for fishing and the fish are coming in so rapidly that I have to keep my eye and hand busy. There are about two hundred million souls wanting to get into the kingdom of God and it will require all the nets and all the boats and all the fishermen of Christendom to safely land them.

At East Hampton, Long Island, where I go in the summer, out on the bluffs some mornings we see the flags up, and that is the signal for launching out into the deep. For a mile, the water is tinged with that peculiar color that indicates whole schools of piscatorial revelry, and the beach swarms with men with their coats off, and their sea-caps on, and those of us who do not go out on the waves stand on the beach ready to rejoice when the boats come back, and in the excitement we rush into the water with our shoes on to help get the boats up the beach, and we lay hold of the lines and pull till we are red in the face, and as the living things of the deep come tumbling in on the sand we cry out, ’93Captain, how many?’94 and he answers, ’93About fifty thousand,’94 and we shout to the late-comers, ’93Hurrah, fifty thousand.’94 We must have an enthusiasm something like this if we are ever to take the human race for God and heaven. Aye, we ought to have that enthusiasm of the beach multiplied a hundred-fold and by so much as an immortal soul is worth more than a blue-fish. Brethren of the ministry! Let us spend our time in fishing instead of fighting. But if I angrily jerk my net across your net, and you jerk your net angrily across mine, we will soon have two broken nets and no fish. The French revolution nearly destroyed the French fisheries, and ecclesiastical war is the worst thing possible while hauling souls into the kingdom. I had hoped that the millennium was about to dawn, but the lion is yet too fond of lamb.

I notice in the text that James the son of Zebedee and John his brother were busy not mending somebody else’92s nets but mending their own nets, and I rather think that we who are engaged in Christian work in this latter part of the nineteenth century will require all our spare time to mend our own nets. God help us in the important duty! In this work of reparation we need to put into the nets more threads of common sense. When we can present religion as a great practicality we will catch a hundred souls where now we catch one. Present religion as an intellectuality and we will fail. Out in the fisheries there are set across the waters what are called gill nets, and the fish put their heads through the meshes and then cannot withdraw them before they are caught by the gills. But gill nets cannot be of any service in religious work. Men are never caught for the truth by their heads; it is by the heart or not at all. No argument ever saved a man and no keen analysis ever brought a man into the kingdom of God. Heart work, not head work. Away with your gill nets! Sympathy, helpfulness, consolation, love, are the names of some of the threads that we need to weave in our Gospel nets when we are mending them.

Do you know that the world’92s heart is bursting with trouble and if you could make that world believe that the religion of Jesus Christ is a soothing omnipotence, the whole world would surrender to-morrow, yea, would surrender this hour? The day before James A. Garfield was inaugurated as President, I was in the cars going from Richmond to Washington. A gentleman seated near to me in the cars knew me, and we were soon in familiar conversation. It was just after a bereavement and I was speaking to him from an overburdened heart about the sorrow I was suffering. Looking at his cheerful face, I said: ’93I guess you have escaped all trouble. I should judge from your countenance that you have come through free from all misfortune.’94 Then he looked at me with a look I shall never forget and whispered in my ear: ’93Sir, you know nothing about trouble. My wife has been in an insane asylum for fifteen years.’94 And then he turned and looked out of the window and into the night with a silence I was too overpowered to break. That was another illustration of the fact that no one escapes trouble. Why, that man seated next to you in church has on his soul a weight compared with which a mountain is a feather. That woman seated next to you in church has a grief the recital of which would make your body, mind, and soul shudder.

When you are mending your net for this wide, deep sea of humanity, take out that wire thread of criticism and that horse-hair thread of harshness and put in a soft silken thread of Christian sympathy. Yea, when you are mending your nets tear out those old threads of gruffness and weave in a few threads of politeness and geniality. In the house of God let all Christian faces beam with a look that means welcome. Say ’93good morning’94 to the stranger as he enters your pew and at the close shake hands with him and say, ’93How did you like the music?’94 Why, you would be to that man a panel of the door of heaven; you would be to him a note of the doxology that seraphs sing when a new soul enters heaven. That man is a thousand miles from home, and he has just heard by telegraph that his child is sick with diphtheria and his boy at college has got into disgrace, and he has business trouble, and is so homesick he can hardly keep from crying. Just one word of brotherly kindness from you would lift him into a small heaven. I have in other days entered a pew in church and the woman at the other end of the pew looked at me as much as to say: ’93How dare you? This is my pew and I pay the rent for it!’94 Well, I crouched in the other corner and made myself as small as possible and felt as though I had been stealing something. So there are people who have a sharp edge to their religion and they act as though they thought most people had been elected to be damned and they were glad of it. Let us brighten up our manner and appear in gentlemanliness or ladyhood.

The object in fly-fishing is to throw the fly far out, and then let it drop gently down and keep it gently rising and falling with the waters and not plunge it like a man-of-war’92s anchor; and abruptness and harshness of manner must be avoided in our attempt at usefulness. I know a man in New York who is more sunshiny and genial when he has dyspepsia than when he is not suffering from that depressing trouble. I have found out his secret. When he starts out in the morning with such depression he asks for special grace to keep from snapping up anybody that day, and puts forth additional determination to be kindly and genial, and by the help of God, he accomplishes it. Many of our nets need to be mended in these respects, the black threads and the rough threads taken out, and the bright threads and the golden threads of Christian geniality woven in. In addition to this, we need to mend our nets with more threads of patience. It is no rare thing for a fisherman to spend one whole day before he can take a St. Lawrence pike, or an Ohio salmon, or a Long Island pickerel, or a Cayuga black bass, or a Delaware cat-fish, and he does that day after day without particular discouragement. But what a lack of patience if we do not immediately succeed in soul-catching. We are apt to give it up and say: ’93I will never try again.’94 Into all our nets we need to weave along the edge, and all through the centre, great, long, stout threads of Christian patience. How patient God has been with us! Can we not be patient with our fellows?

I received from a friend in Scotland an ornamented inkstand, the wooden parts of which were made from a piece of tree cut down by Mr. Gladstone, at Hawarden, and sent by him to Scotland by request. The incident reminded me of the fact that a woman who had long been on Mr. Gladstone’92s estate had a wayward boy, and in her despair she asked Mr. Gladstone to take the boy in hand. While prime minister of England, with all the mighty affairs of the kingdom in his hand, he took that boy into his study and counseled him, and then knelt down and prayed with him, and the boy was saved. If we all had hearts of sympathy like that, what would be to us impossible? ’93Is it not delightful that I can sing so well?’94 said Jenny Lind, in a burst of joy at the fact that she could help others. ’93Is it not delightful that I can sing so well?’94 And might we not all say in thankfulness to God, ’93Is it not delightful that we can sympathize with others, and encourage others, and help others, and save others?’94

Again, in mending our nets we need, also, to put in the threads of faith and tear out all the tangled meshes of unbelief. Our work is successful according to our faith. The man who believes in only half a Bible, or the Bible in spots, the man who thinks he cannot persuade others, the man who halts, doubting about this and doubting about that, will be a failure in Christian work. Show me the man who rather thinks that the garden of Eden may have been an allegory, and is not quite certain that there may not be another chance after death, and does not know whether or not the Bible is inspired, and I tell you that man for soul-saving is a poor stick. Faith in God and in Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, and the absolute necessity of a regenerated heart, in order to see God in peace, is one thread you must have in your mended net, or you will never be a successful fisher for men. Why, how can you doubt? The rottennest thread to tear out of your net is unbelief, and the most important thread that you are to put in it is faith. Faith in God, triumphant faith, everlasting faith. The hundreds of millions of men and women now standing in the church on the earth and the hundreds of millions in heaven, attest the power of this Gospel to save. With more than a certainty of a mathematical demonstration let us start out to redeem all nations. If you cannot trust the infinite, the holy, the omnipotent Jehovah, whom can you trust? Oh, this important work of mending our nets! If we could get our nets right we would accomplish more in soul-saving in the next year than we have in the last twenty years. But where shall we get them mended? Just where old Zebedee and his two boys mended their nets’97right where you are. James, why don’92t you put your oar in Lake Galilee, or hoist your sail and land at Capernaum or Tiberias or Gadara and, seated on the bank, mend your net? John, why don’92t you go ashore and mend your net? No, they sat on the guards of the boat or at the prow of the boat, or in the stern of the boat, and they took up the thread and needles and the ropes and wooden blocks and went to work, sewing, sewing, tying, tying, weaving, weaving, pounding, pounding, until, the net mended, they push it off into the sea and drop paddle and hoist sail and the cut-water went through amid the shoals of fish, some of the descendants of which we had for breakfast one morning while we were encamped on the beach of beautiful Galilee. James and John had no time to go ashore. They were not fishing for fun, as you and I do in summer time. It was their livelihood and that of their families. They mended their nets where they were, in the ship. ’93Oh,’94 says someone, ’93I mean to get my net mended, and I will go down to the public library, and I will see what the scientists say about evolution and about ’91the survival of the fittest,’92 and I will read up what the theologians say about ’91advanced thought.’92 I will leave the ship awhile, and I will go ashore and stay there till my net is mended.’94 Do that, my brother, and you will have no net left. Instead of their helping you mend your net, they will steal the pieces that remain. Better stay in the Gospel boat, where you have all the means for mending your net. What are those means, do you ask? I answer all you need you have where you are; namely, a Bible and a place to pray. The more you study evolution, and adopt what is called advanced thought, the further on you will find yourself in a comfortless Great Sahara desert. Stay in the ship and mend your net. That is where James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, stayed. That is where all who get their nets mended stay.

I notice that all who leave the Gospel boat and go ashore to mend their nets stay there. Or if they try again to fish, they do not catch anything. Get out of the Gospel boat and go up into the world to get your net mended, and you will live to see the day when you will feel like the man who, having forsaken Christianity, sighed, ’93I would give a thousand dollars to feel as I did in 1820.’94 The time will come when you would be willing to give a thousand dollars to feel as you did ten years ago. These men who have given up their religion cannot help you a bit. It is my opinion that the most of those ministers who gave up the old religion are in search of notoriety. They do not succeed in attracting much attention. They are tired of obscurity. They must do something to attract attention, so they sit down on the beach and go to tearing to pieces the fishing nets, instead of mending them. The staid old denominations to which they belong do not pay them enough attention, so they try to make themselves notorious by striking their grandmothers. They do not get enough attention by standing in the pulpits, so they go to work and break the church windows. These dear brethren of all denominations, afflicted with the theological fidgets, had better go to mending nets instead of breaking them. Before they break up the old religion and try to foist on us a new religion, let them go through some great sacrifice for God that will prove them worthy for such a work, taking the advice of Talleyrand to a man who wanted to upset the religion of Jesus Christ and start a new one, when he said: ’93Go and be crucified and then raise yourself from the grave the third day!’94 Those who propose to mend their nets by secular and skeptical books are like a man who has just one week for fishing, and six of the days he spends in reading ’93Isaak Walton’92s Complete Angler,’94 and ’93Wheatley’92s Rod and Line,’94 and ’93Scott’92s Fishing in Northern Waters,’94 and ’93Pullman’92s Vade Mecum of Fly Fishing for Trout,’94 and then on Saturday morning, his last day out, goes to the river to ply his art, but that day the fish will not bite, and late on Saturday night he goes to his home with empty basket and a disappointed heart. Meanwhile a man who never saw a big library in all his life, that week caught with an old fishing tackle, enough to supply his own table and the tables of all his neighbors, and enough to salt down in barrels for the long winter that will soon come in. Alas! alas! If when the Saturday night of our life drops on us, it shall be found that we have spent our time in the libraries of worldly philosophy, trying to mend our nets, and we have only a few souls to report as brought to God through our instrumentality, while some humble Gospel fisherman, his library made up of a Bible and an almanac, shall come home laden with the results, his trophies all the souls within fifteen miles of his log cabin meeting-house.

In the time of great disturbance in Naples, in 1649, Massaniello, a barefooted, fishing-boy, dropped his fishing-rod, and by strange magnetism took command of that city of six hundred thousand souls. He took off his fishing-jacket and put on a robe of gold in the presence of howling mobs. He put his hand on his lip as a signal and they were silent. He waved his hand away from him and they retired to their homes. Armies passed in review before him. He became the nation’92s idol. The rapid rise and complete supremacy of that young fisherman, Massaniello, has no parallel in all history. But something equal to that and better than that is an everyday occurrence in heaven. God takes some of those, who in this world were fishers of men, and who toiled very humbly, but because of the way they mended their nets and employed their nets after they were mended, he suddenly hoists them and robes them and sceptres them and crowns them, and makes them rulers over many cities, and he marches armies of saved ones before them in review, Massaniellos unhonored on earth, but radiant in heaven. The fisher boy of Naples soon lost his power, but those people of God who have kept their nets mended and rightly swung them shall never lose their exalted place, but shall reign forever and ever and ever. Keep that reward in sight.

But do not spend your time fishing with hook and line. Why did not James, the son of Zebedee, sit on the wharf at Cana, his feet hanging over the lake, and with a long pole and a worm on the hook dipped into the wave, wait for some mullet to swim up and be caught. Why did not Zebedee spend his afternoon trying to catch one eel? No, that work was too slow. These men were not mending a hook and line, they were mending their nets. So let the church of God not be content with having here one soul and next month another soul brought into the kingdom. Sweep all the seas with nets, scoop nets, seine nets, drag nets, all-encompassing nets, and take the treasures in by hundreds and thousands and millions, and nations will then be born in a day, and the hemispheres quake with the tread of a ransoming God. Do you know what will be the two most tremendous hours in our heavenly existence? Among the quadrillions of ages which shall roll on, what two occasions will be to us the greatest? The day of our arrival there will be to us, one of the two greatest. The second greatest, I think, will be the day when we shall have put in parallel lines before us what Christ did for us, and what we did for Christ, the one so great, the other so little. That will be the only embarrassment in heaven. My Lord and my God! What will we do and what will we say when, on one side, are placed the Saviour’92s great sacrifices for us, and our small sacrifices for him; his exile, his humiliation, his agonies on one hand, and our poor weak, insufficient sacrifices on the other. To make the contrast less overwhelming let us quickly mend our nets, and like the Galilean fisherman may we be divinely helped to cast them on the right side of the ship.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage