Luke 5

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Read Luke 5.

Anyone who watches us closely enough and critically enough will be able to detect at least some of our sins. We don’t spend all our time sinning but the desire to sin never goes away fully and, with the right circumstances and stimulus, our corrupted human nature is ready to pounce like a cat on the red dot of a laser pointer.

Yet, despite how thoroughly sin inhabits us, we live our lives mostly oblivious to our own sins, failures, and weaknesses. If you’ve ever had someone confront you for sinning against them and you didn’t realize or think about what you had done as sinful until they brought it up, you understand what I mean. We are well aware, usually, of the sins of others but often quite blind to our own.

It is interesting, isn’t it, the when Isaiah saw his vision of the Lord and his holiness in Isaiah 6, he became acutely aware of his own sinfulness. The same type of thing happened to Peter here in Luke 5:8. But neither Isaiah nor Peter was confronted directly by God about his sin. Isaiah saw the Lord on a throne highly exalted with angels calling “holy, holy, holy.” Peter saw Jesus miraculously fill his nets with fish. They did not hear a list of God’s moral attributes or a lecture about their own sins; they saw God’s power in action. That was enough to make them aware of their own sinfulness. Peter even begged Jesus to leave him alone (v. 8) because he recognized that the power of God was at work in Jesus (v. 9).

Fortunately for Peter, Jesus already knew how sinful Peter was and loved him anyway. Jesus even called Peter to follow him (v. 10b) and learn how to “fish for people.” Jesus did this not because Peter’s sins weren’t as bad as he said or that he was confident the Peter would grow out of them. Jesus did it because the same divine power that brought the fish to the net would redeem Peter from his sins and change him to become someone who could serve God well.

The same goes for you and me. Jesus came looking for sinners to redeem so that he could transform us into holy men and women of God. So, let’s follow him and let him transform our lives.